Nelson Mail end of season interview with Kieran Keane
The 2011 ITM Cup season wasn't a vintage one for the Tasman Makos, who won just two of their 10 matches. Head coach Kieran Keane spoke to Wayne Martin about Tasman's frustrating year.
Kieran Keane considers himself a rugby lifer.
He first played the game as a five-year-old and he's still going, now as an experienced coach, 52 years on.
So it's going to take more than a disappointing 2011 ITM Cup rugby season with the Tasman Makos to curb his enthusiasm for the job or his love of the game. He's in it for the long haul and has learned to take the often harsh realities of the New Zealand first-class rugby scene in his stride.
There have been good times – like kicking Auckland's big-city butts on Trafalgar Park. Mostly, though, this year's been particularly challenging for Keane and his assistant Leon MacDonald as they've had to endure Tasman's slide to the foot of the Championship table with just two wins from 10 games.
The Tasman union has been in existence for only six years. This season has been one of their most harrowing – an opening four-match losing streak halted by an upset win over Hawke's Bay in Napier and their only other win, against Auckland, sandwiched around four excruciatingly narrow losses.
As a player, Keane's first-class representative career stretched from 1977 to 1986 and included 64 games for Canterbury, appearances for New Zealand Universities, the South Island and six outings with the All Blacks in 1979.
His first coaching gig was with the Hornby High School first XV, also in 1977, as rugby looked to establish a foothold in the league-dominated Christchurch suburb. Further appointments followed with Marlborough, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand under-16s, Marlborough Boys' College and finally with Tasman as co-coach alongside Bevan Cadwallader in 2009. He became head coach last year, with MacDonald as his lieutenant, the pair completing their second term this season.
Now, Keane can't imagine life outside the game.
"If I'm not playing, I've got to be doing something, so coaching's just a natural progression," he says.
"Coming from a background of playing, you have a lot of empathy for the game and also for the people involved. It seemed pretty natural for me. I didn't find any difficulty in going from one side to the other at all. I started when I was five and I haven't stopped."
He acknowledges that this season has been tough for everyone associated with Tasman and says it has been "another year of growing pains" as part of the new union's continuing development process.
While Tasman continues to implement the all-action, attacking style for which they have become renowned, Keane hasn't enjoyed watching his team squander match-winning opportunities this season – the "coach killers" that most coaches inevitably experience during their careers. He has watched his team work its way into winning situations, only to have the opposition steal victory in the dying stages.
"There was an inability to put our foot on the throat and good teams learn how to do that," says Keane. "We haven't learned that yet. Some of our option-taking put us in bad positions, from all over really. We became a little bit frantic.
"We let teams off the hook. The two go hand in hand for me – the ability to put our foot on the throat and also our ability to be able to sustain pressure on the opposition.
"Some of the losses were galling, they didn't need to happen and, dare I say it, sometimes the officials didn't assist."
After plenty of consultation with the players, Keane is adamant the attacking game plan is still the right one.
"I don't think changing our game [is the answer]. Our game works for us. It's an entertaining game [and] it works for us because the players really enjoy it. We think it's the way forward and I can't see any issues, when you review our game, about us not being able to create [scoring opportunities].
"So our ability to create is fine and our game plans that we put forward appeared to be OK and the players have already said that they enjoy the way we do things.
"There's a balance that we need to learn and we haven't got that yet. We tend to put all our eggs in one basket. Normally it's high risk and it's fraught with danger and I think we need to become, not more conservative, but we need to look at different ways of getting out of trouble.
"Sustaining pressure was never a problem, but converting opportunities was a considerable problem this year. Possession stakes were good enough, positional opportunities were better than most, the creating of scoring chances – we had plenty. But our [11 per cent] conversion of line breaks and our conversion of opportunities went begging."
Earlier in the season, Keane was critical of the competition's condensed programme which ultimately had Tasman playing all 10 games in 41 days. While he admits that some players enjoyed the short turnarounds, it proved a much tougher proposition for the coaches.
"Some of the compressed nature of the competition was too tough – two to three days' turnaround with travel was too tough. But the compressed nature went down well with our young players.
"We were on the go, we didn't have time to lament too much, we moved forward and young people today are into that, that's the way they like to live. I think we have to get to more of a happy medium because as coaches, it was a bit of a nightmare.
"You had to do a preview, a review, you had to sit down with your strategy group, you had to formulate plans, analyse the opposition and you had to do all that in a day and a half. And it just became a bit crazy."
Clashes with the club season essentially meant just a week's preparation before their season-opening loss to Northland in Whangarei. Tasman's poor four-loss start, he says, knocked everyone's confidence. Adding to the frustration was his belief that the team was potentially much better than last season.
"Both players and coaches had to take a big deep breath and we had to get down to the nitty-gritty and we didn't have time to experiment.
"We had to do something in a hurry and that brings with it its own anxiety and the anxiety levels went up for both the players and the coaches. But to their eternal credit, and the leadership, which was outstanding, we were able to keep it together and we turned it around.
"Now, we didn't turn it around in terms of results, but we turned it around in terms of addressing our shortcomings and found a way forward. The players, and particularly the leadership, really deserve credit for that because things could really have fallen off the rails.
"We have a core group of senior players and everybody plays their part, but also the fact that we have a good culture here and we were able to take some of those galling losses on the chin and move forward and not dwell too much."
Like everyone, Keane is constantly searching for solutions and reckons a good start would be reassessing the club competition, improving its intensity and making it a more competitive environment to develop genuine representative talent.
"I think for young people and budding rep players, we need a much more intensive cauldron for our club rugby and for a number of seasons this union's tried to amalgamate Marlborough and Nelson and that will add greater variety.
"It's all so very familiar for the players. It's far too familiar and the familiarity of it breeds a little bit of complacency in my opinion.
"I'm in favour of the [Nelson Bays and Marlborough] club competitions amalgamating and I'm in favour of people testing themselves in any way thay can.
"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. We don't have huge depth, so we need to attract players to the region and it's such a wonderful region that most of the ones who come really enjoy it, enjoy the culture of the Makos, and they stay."
He says the team needs a quality lock and prop to boost the tight forwards and to restock their once abundant supply of talented outside backs. All Black prop Ben Franks' absence proved significant.
"We've got young, budding [tight forwards] with no experience trying out for the Makos with no background at the high level and throwing them to the wolves as a sink-or-swim affair. We've had to do that the last three years. Some have swum and others have sunk.
"And I think our [outside backs] have been depleted over the last three seasons. We've lost a lot of quality players in our outside backs and our turnover has been too great for us to handle."
He's wary of managing the region's young talent.
"We can't just take talented footballers out and push them into the cauldron of ITM Cup because the fact of the matter is, while they think they're ready, they're nowhere near ready."
He rejects suggestions that his other job as assistant Highlanders Super coach had any negative bearing on his Tasman role.
"I don't think it impacts on it. I think doing the Highlanders job is a good thing for Kieran Keane, but also a good thing for Tasman, otherwise I wouldn't try to do both.
"It has challenges, but I think more influential on our season that's just passed, is the situation with the club system and that lack of effective preparation before the rep season, because seven days is not enough to prepare."
He certainly doesn't consider it a wasted year.
"There are a lot of positive things that have come out and there's been some good honest dialogue about some of the things that have to change. I think it's been a testing, challenging time, but that's life and you've just got to address it make sure you never fall into the same trap again.
"The most positive aspect for me was leadership of the [core] group and the culture that pervades the team."
- The Nelson Mail
