WHEN RUMOURS first surfaced two years ago that Andy Robinson, fresh from a monstering at the hands of Fleet Street's finest in the dog days of his two-year tenure as England coach, was to be the new Edinburgh coach, I rang his agent. It was clear that Robinson was mulling over the possibility. "But what about the English thing?" said his agent. "Would he really be accepted up there?"
The answer to that question was "yes", as the answer to whether he will be accepted as Scotland coach is also "yes".
The former England player and coach is one of the most fiercely patriotic and most English blokes I've ever met, but sport is ab
out winning and Robinson is, more than anything else, a winner. There are very occasional times when winning is not enough, as Gordon Strachan will tell you, but with Scottish rugby struggling on the field and toiling to fill the stands and its coffers, winning is everything.
I initially ran into Robinson 20 years ago, when I was the rugby correspondent for the Western Daily Press, covering Bath, Bristol and Gloucester. Robinson was then the Bath captain (and his uncle my boss) and with Bath dominating English rugby, I spoke to him a couple of times each week.
Back then he was a relentlessly ambitious and spiky character in an environment that suited him perfectly. Maverick Roger Spurrell was Bath's skipper when the young Robinson turned up at The Rec, where he found a culture of regular rammies in training – with Spurrell and Gareth Chilcott the key protagonists in each fistfight – underpinning a desperation to succeed. Bath were firmly in "no one likes us, we don't care" territory.
Robinson fitted right in. Team-mates spoke of his altercations with Spurrell, the blond flankers scrapping like two terriers fighting over a bone. Yet as soon as Robinson had displaced Spurrell, he was restlessly looking for his next adversary. He found it with the Lions in 1989, when despite being at the top of his game he couldn't displace skipper Fin Calder. Robinson admitted that he found his exclusion almost impossible to stomach.
His next disappointment came with England. Robinson was a revelation on his debut in 1988 as England demolished the Wallabies in Will Carling's first game. Throughout 1989 he was in coruscating form as the England team that would dominate the early nineties began to emerge.
Then it stopped. As quickly as he'd arrived the 5ft 9in flanker was out, displaced by the 6ft Peter Winterbottom. The last of Robinson's eight caps, the only one after 1989, came in 1995 and he never managed to suppress his outrage at being discarded. It drove him to performances of maniacal intensity, while in conversation his frustration at being overlooked was like an open sore.
Robinson poured his focus into Bath. He was in good company: for every Jerry Guscott and Richard Hill at The Rec, there was a Stuart Barnes, John Hall, Nigel Redman or Graham Dawe, a group of belligerent, opinionated players who were consistently overlooked and maddened by what they perceived as a lack of respect and recognition. Robinson carried that rage and focus into his coaching career. A rugby obsessive and PE teacher at Colston's Collegiate, he was already well-versed in communicating knowledge and worked one-on-one with players, improving their technique as he'd once improved his own.
His coaching ability saw Bath to an unexpected Heineken Cup title in 1998, and was the foundation of England's World Cup win in 2003 – Clive Woodward was the ringmaster, but any England player would tell you Robinson wore the tracksuit and cracked the whip.
Failure as England's head coach, winning just nine of 22 games, has coloured his whole career. With hindsight, he was on a hiding to nothing: he didn't get enough access to his overcooked players and the RFU's backing wasn't wholehearted, while the retirement of Martin Johnson and Jonny Wilkinson and the ageing of key squad members proved fatal. Robinson himself concedes that he was too loyal, by the time he plucked up the courage to drop the veterans it was too late, but former team-mates like Brian Moore concluded simply that he wasn't a big-picture man, that he couldn't pick a team.
Robinson was battered and bruised and angry. His whole career was driven by the need to prove that he was good enough, but when his name was over the door he'd failed. The need to hang on rather than resign in order to get a financial settlement from the RFU – Robinson rightly suspected that the job offers wouldn't flood in – just rubbed salt into the wounds.
Since moving to Edinburgh, Robinson has gained some of the redemption he craves. It's easy to forget just how callow the squad was that he took to a record fourth place in the Magners League last year, and which improved upon that this season with a remarkable second-placed finish (it's tempting to muse on what he might have done with Frank Hadden's stellar but underachieving sides of 2000-2005).
Yet perhaps most telling was his impact with Scotland A, who beat Ireland A by 60 points before stuffing Italy. Those unprecedented wins showed that Robinson can still pick a side: ten of the players he chose for the Italy game played in the Tests when Hadden's Scotland travelled to Argentina that summer. Robinson is now intensely media-shy, but privately he is said to have very surprising views on several players which promises some interesting selections.
Unlike his England disaster, Robinson will have access to most Scotland players whenever he wants; unlike England he won't be bound by a straitjacket of expectations or reputations. This time loyalty will only work if it helps bring wins.
Eddie O'Sullivan, a fellow coach on the 2005 Lions tour, said that he thought he was intense until he met Robinson, and the full glare of the Englishman's focus will be on winning, on restoring his own reputation by redeeming Scotland's. The blame-shifting comfort zone encouraged by Hadden has already been consigned to the dustbin of history. Scotland may still finish second best, but Robinson will never accept that state of affairs meekly or allow his players to.
Nor should we worry unduly, as Jim Telfer does, about Robinson's motivation in Calcutta Cups. Sport at the very top level is about pride. No one would ever suggest that former Scotland skipper Budge Pountney – who qualified because his granny was born in Jersey – wasn't fully committed against England, that Nathan Hines doesn't give his all against the Wallabies, or that the Leslie brothers or Sean Lineen didn't pull their weight against the All Blacks.
As Kiwis Graham Henry and Steve Hansen said when they coached Wales against New Zealand, games against your own kind mean even more and the motivation to put one over on your countrymen is more intense because to be involved in a victory against a side that either overlooked you or, in Robinson's case, discarded him, is the ultimate affirmation.
And Robinson, above all else, craves that affirmation, which is why the Englishman is the right man for the job.
The full article contains 1211 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
