Steve Meehan interview: backs coach defends the Toulon template

The coach, whose brilliant French side face his old club Bath on Sunday, tells Chris Hewett that it is disrespectful to call the European champions’line-up of world-class performers mercenaries

Steve Meehan works with the Toulon backs with the aim of making it hot for Bath at the Stade Mayol (Getty Images)

Two long-established clubs from the heartlands of the union game; two free-market fundamentalist owners who hit the headlines almost as often as their leading players; two squads drawn from all points of the rugby compass; two teams who do not always go out of their way to court popularity. Toulon and Bath could be peas from a pod, but for the fact that only one of them is in the habit of winning titles.

As the trophyless men from the banks of the River Avon prepare for tomorrow’s profoundly testing match on the shores of the Mediterranean, where defeat against the three-times European champions will leave their chances of making the knockout stage of the elite cross-border tournament hanging by the slenderest of threads, another link springs to mind. His name? Steve Meehan.

The Australian coach is back in northern hemisphere union for the first time since 2011, when he found himself marginalised at Bath and decided to head for home. Tours of Super Rugby duty with the Perth-based Western Force and the Brisbane-based Reds followed, but when an agent called him out of the blue with a potential offer from “a top-six French team in search of a backs coach”, he registered an interest. When that club turned out to be Toulon, who are generally to be found in the top one, the words “send me the contract now” came tumbling forth.

“I had to pick myself up off the floor,” Meehan recalls. “Given the right circumstances, I might have been tempted to stay in Australia. But the circumstances weren’t right and, as I’d already spent nine years coaching in Europe, some of them in France, the positives of returning completely outweighed the negatives. Super Rugby has a lot of attractions, but the travelling isn’t one of them. When I was working with the Force, the nearest away game was a four-and-a-half-hour plane ride out of Perth. Frequent flyer air miles are all very well, but they’re not everything.”

Meehan’s final season at Bath was uncomfortable in the extreme. Having succeeded Brian Ashton as head coach in 2006 – he had joined from the Parisian club Stade Français as a backs specialist, but was promoted when Ashton answered the England call – he delivered three successive top-four Premiership finishes while restoring the club’s reputation as an innovative and dynamic attacking outfit. Yet Bruce Craig, master of all he surveys at the Recreation Ground, saw fit to bring in Sir Ian McGeechan as director of rugby – a decision that put the squeeze on Meehan and hastened his departure. It was not one of the financier-in-chief’s cleverer brainwaves, to say the very least.

Not that Meehan holds a grudge, life being too short and all that. “I was back in Bath about 14 months ago – I still have a number of friends in the area,” he says. “During my stay I ran into Bruce at the Rec and we had a chat about various bits and pieces. The long and short of it? Things are fine. There are no dramas, no problems.”

If anything gets Meehan’s goat these days, it is the perception of Toulon as a club full of highly paid mercenaries, lured by the open chequebook of the flamboyantly outspoken president, Mourad Boudjellal. The sheer volume of big-name internationals on the roster – James O’Connor, Drew Mitchell, Matt Giteau and Quade Cooper of the Wallaby persuasion; Bryan Habana, Juan Smith and Duane Vermeulen from Springbok country; Ma’a Nonu from the land of the All Blacks; the mighty Mamuka Gorgodze of Georgia; the wondrous Juan Martin Fernandez Lobbe of Argentina – has led many to draw what they consider to be an obvious conclusion. According to the Queenslander, “obvious” and “accurate” are not necessarily one and the same thing.

Given that Guy Novès, the wizened old greybeard from Toulouse who has succeeded Philippe Saint-André as head coach of the French national team, has included only one Toulon player – the outstanding hooker Guilhem Guirado – in his latest training squad for the Six Nations, the club’s internationalist position is not particularly easy for Meehan to defend. (There are larger contingents in the Test party from Clermont Auvergne, Racing, Stade Français, La Rochelle, Montpellier and Bordeaux-Bègles, as well as from Novès’ old club). What is more, well over half the 29 full internationals included in Toulon’s 42-strong party for the Champions Cup were foreign caps.

For all that, Meehan fights his corner with considerable ferocity. “It’s such a simplistic argument and I’m keen to challenge it,” he says. “Apart from anything else, it’s incredibly disrespectful to those who play their hearts out for this club to suggest that they’re only in it for the money.

“It’s not the first time I’ve heard people accuse players of not doing things for the right reasons: when we had a lean time during my years at Bath, people were quick to accuse the players of not caring. If they could have walked into the changing room and seen the things I was seeing…

“You don’t win rugby matches if you don’t care – and you certainly don’t win championships in the way Toulon have been winning them in recent seasons. What has struck me most about our so-called ‘mercenaries’ is their commitment and their generosity – the emphasis they place on passing things on to the younger players in the squad.

“When I was back in Australia and Sonny Bill Williams [the All Black centre] joined the Sydney Roosters for a spell of rugby league, he was so influential in setting standards that the players said to themselves, ‘So that’s what it means to be a professional’. As a result, the Roosters went from being good to being brilliant. I see the same thing with the top players here.

“On the financial side, it may be the case that Mourad had to dig into his pocket to get this thing up and running, but it’s a self-sustaining operation now – he doesn’t have to spend his own money any more. So rather than criticising the Toulon model, maybe people should give it a second look. There is more than one success story here.”

Boudjellal and the other high-profile figures at the heart of the club – the director of rugby Bernard Laporte, the newly arrived head coach Diego Dominguez – are hell-bent on maintaining their grip on European club affairs. Indeed, it is far from ridiculous to imagine Toulon dominating for a decade, just as Bath did towards the end of the amateur era.

“Mourad built this club to win things,” Meehan says. “He has a ruthless streak, sure, but what owner-investor doesn’t? He enjoys our victories, he’s disappointed when we lose. The hands can fly in the air when things go wrong, but that’s one of the beauties of working in a place where rugby really matters – not just to the club but to the whole region.

“There’s a madness for rugby here: we get thousands turning up at our open training sessions. There’s something electric about knowing that if we go to Clermont Auvergne and win, as we did the other week, we bring so much happiness to so many people.

“Bernard’s a ‘just get on with it’ type of guy. And that’s what I’m doing. The World Cup took a lot out of some of our players and we’ve been struggling with injuries for a while, but when we get everyone fit and hit the right level of cohesion, we’ll be able to play whatever style of rugby is required on any particular day. And that’s what excites me: the idea that we can put any kind of plan in place in the knowledge that we have the players to execute it.”

Along with almost every other rugby virtue, execution was conspicuous by its absence when Toulon suffered a near-record defeat at Wasps in the opening round of this season’s Champions Cup. Laporte was so angered by what he had witnessed, he ordered the players to bypass the after-match convivialities and get straight back on the bus.

Since then, the holders have beaten the former holders Leinster home and away in Europe and won three of their four domestic fixtures, two by a landslide. Meehan is beginning to sense some even bigger performances just around the corner. If his former employers find themselves on the wrong end of one this weekend, he may just allow himself a smile of satisfaction.