Rough Diamond taking Saracens back to basics in pursuit of glorious future

Steve Diamond is a persuasive character, and his methods of persuasion might be said to range from an encouraging word in the ear to a horse's head in the bed. Over the last few months, he has sweet-talked Andy Farrell, one of the finest rugby league exponents of his generation, into trying his luck with Saracens rather than Leicester, and convinced Tevita Vaikona, his Tongan wing, to postpone a decision to start a new life as a church minister. Against these triumphs of diplomacy can be set the more forthright side of his man-management style, based squarely on the assumption that if a coach grabs his players by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

During the summer, the 39-year-old former hooker informed his squad in no uncertain terms that as his mortgage depended on their performances, he would take an extremely dim view of anything that smacked of a lack of professionalism - defeat by anyone but the very best, for instance. In addition, he ordered his pared-down support staff to paint and decorate Saracens' magnificent - not to say extremely large - new training base on the University of Hertfordshire campus in Hatfield. "It was a team-building exercise," he explained. "We had a great crack, chucking paint at each other and knocking back cans of beer at 10 o'clock at night."

Then, after receiving a royal seeing-to from Cardiff in the Powergen Cup a fortnight ago, he made 12 of the starting line-up pay for their dereliction of duty by ordering them to play again, 48 hours later, in a second-string match against Wasps. "It isn't the sort of thing you can do more than once," he admitted, "but it definitely worked. Our pack was right back on track against London Irish last weekend."

Diamond, who expects a similar improvement in tomorrow's awkward match at Bristol, is the precise opposite of the schoolmasterly career coach frequently found operating at the top end of the club game. He is not one of life's natural theorists - "Everything I've ever said about strategy and tactics is contained in here," he said proudly, tapping a slim file tucked away in the top drawer of his desk - and has no truck with dissemblers, fence-sitters, frauds or pettifoggers. He does what it says on the can, so to speak. "I try to tell it how it is: reality, not morality," he acknowledged. "I say to the younger players: 'What are your priorities? Rugby, sex, a few drinks and a decent pay packet. Get the first one right, and I promise you the other things will look after themselves'."

When he took over the head coaching role 10 months ago, Saracens were very definitely not looking after themselves. Under the stewardship of the one-time Wallaby midfielder Rod Kafer, who might reasonably be described as the anti-Diamond with his super-smart ideas and the veritable library of tactical philosophy he kept in his office, they lost six of their nine Premiership games between mid-September and late November. When Diamond, who had arrived from Sale as Kafer's assistant the previous March, assumed the principal role at no extra charge on the understanding that he would revert to his initial job as forwards coach if it failed to work out, there was something of a sea change: a mere four defeats in the 17 competitive matches to the end of the season.

"At the time I agreed to join Saracens, my preconceived idea was of a club who had a history of signing people with big reputations, but had failed to create an identity for themselves," he said. "We might not have had much money to play with at Sale, but we'd certainly forged an identity. Along with Jim Mallinder [the former England full-back who coached alongside Diamond at Sale before taking up a job with the national academy], I'd worked in an environment where making the most of the resources available meant developing your own players, not buying them in at vast expense. As a good northern lad, I had a pretty straightforward view of Saracens. It wasn't a team that needed building. It was a club.

"To that end, it was a big bonus for me that several outstanding Sale players - Alex Sanderson, Hugh Vyvyan, Kevin Yates, Dan Scarbrough - made the same move. One of the reasons I left Sale was what I considered to be a lack of loyalty shown to Jim by the management, who were keen to move things in a different direction. Some of the players didn't like what was happening either, and reached a similar decision." He demands a degree of commitment from his players that mirrors his own as a coach, which some believe borders on the fanatical and others see as something far more militant. He is free with his criticism, describing the recent defensive performance against Sale and as "disgraceful", yet at the same time, he has little time for what other coaches would consider perfectly legitimate mitigating circumstances. Diamond will not, under any circumstances, attempt to explain away a poor display by harping on about injuries.

"One of the priorities has been to hammer out the excuse mentality," he explained, "and you do that by ensuring that the coaching staff play by the same rules and don't make excuses when they get it wrong. I'm happy to accept that I dropped a bollock at the start of the season by pushing the team too far, too fast in terms of moving the ball and playing all-out attacking rugby. We scored tries, but we leaked more. Now, we've cut out the extravagance and gone back to a much more basic style of play driven by our strong set-pieces. But we've done it in the knowledge that when put some results together, we can slowly reincorporate the expansive stuff.

"I want the players to take the same responsibility. They have everything they could possibly want here - the best facilities, strong administrative support, the whole lot. Today, they started training at 10am and were finished before noon. It's not a sweatshop. They're treated like the adult professionals they are, and that's the way it will stay as long as they continue to behave and contribute in an adult, professional manner. But I don't like people who take liberties, and I'm not willing to get fried because someone isn't trying. That sort of take it or leave it attitude could get me the sack, so I don't put up with it.

"Don't portray me as a hard man - it's not what I'm about. I'm more interested in honesty and clarity than being tough for the sake of it. If you have those qualities, you need never be scared of sacking someone. And let's face it, there is a kind of sacking every day in professional sport because you're always telling someone he's out of the team. If you know in your own mind that you're making the decision for the right reasons, what is there to be frightened about?

"Yes, it can be difficult. When I was coaching at Sale, I found myself taking charge of people I'd played alongside. These were my mates, the blokes I'd gone into battle with every weekend. I hated that side of it, because it involved compromise. Here at Saracens, it's different; I have some distance between myself and the players. After we beat London Irish, I pulled up outside a pub where some of the lads were celebrating and thought: 'Right, I'll leave the car overnight and get stuck in.' Then I thought better of it, and pushed off round the corner for a quiet drink with some people I knew. It seemed a better idea, somehow. It didn't work out as planned, of course. Within a few minutes, I'd been spotted and everyone piled in. Still, I tried."