As the ongoing Rugby Championship testifies, Munster and the other provinces have a pretty good strike rate when appointing coaches. Clayton McMillan, the former Chiefs coach who has evidently been making a very positive impression over the last six weeks of preseason at University of Limerick, looks like another prized capture.
The former policeman, who was a handy fast bowler as well as a number eight before embarking on a varied coaching career in New Zealand, has seemingly been full of fresh ideas. Those ideas have enthused the Munster squad ahead of their second preseason friendly against Johann van Graan’s Premiership champions Bath at Musgrave Park on Friday (kick-off 8pm).
“To be honest, I’ve never been a coach to sit down and say ‘what’s my coaching philosophy?’. My overarching philosophy, which I haven’t written down, is that I’m all about player empowerment and trying to promote people to the next level,” he said.
“I see a big part of my job is to try get as many Munster players in green jerseys. There’s a lot to go into that. If Munster want to be successful, there’s two ways you can do it. You can buy some talent in, and two, you can produce and develop it.
“There are some challenges around buying some talent, and I’m not suggesting that’s what we need to do. If you don’t have that ability or it’s not the approach you want to take, you need to develop it.
“Having robust pathways, talent ID, pathway systems and growing your game from the bottom up is really important. That’s my basic philosophy around rugby, how to get people to the next level.
“The high-performance piece, and something I’m happy to share, is that I believe leaders create culture. Culture is driven by behaviours and behaviours determine outcomes.
“What you see (in a game) is the easy part. That’s just the performance. Everything that goes into the performance is largely driven by what you do day-to-day. We’re driving hard standards and behaviours that will keep us in good stead when we’re under the blowtorch on game day. That has to be driven by myself.
“To be fair, these blokes want to be better. They don’t have any problems around understanding what’s important to us.”
He wants Munster to retain solidity up front and be a team “who will scrap for everything” – trademarks of the province’s heydays.
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“It’s about being ambitious when we have earned the right to do it, but also being smart enough to know when we need to go to a tactical kicking game and be a little bit more conservative in the way that we approach things.”
Helped by a week’s reconnaissance mission in March, McMillan recognises Munster’s ability to raise their game away to, say, Toulon or La Rochelle, if not so on less high-profile days.
“That’s something I talked about on day one,” he continues. “It almost seems to be ingrained in the Munster psyche that when our backs are against the wall or when we get into really big games that really matter, we have the ability to go to another level.
“And that’s admirable, but we can’t have those days and then the next week turn up and lose to a team that, for all intents and purposes, we should beat. It’s about not necessarily judging ourselves on the days when we’re at our best. It’s about judging ourselves when we’re at our worst.”
As head coach, McMillan clearly wants things done his way.
“I definitely have a preference around some things and I’ve been putting those suggestions forward. We debate and we don’t always agree but at some stage you’ve got to commit and move forward.
“There is a lot of good stuff being done here,” he added. “But one of the reasons why people brought me in is to be a little bit of a disrupter; to bring a different set of eyes and look at things a little bit differently and to challenge the way things are being done.
Munster head coach Clayton McMillan during the warm-up before last week’s friendly against Gloucester. Photograph: Billy Stickland/Inpho
“That doesn’t mean that we have to change. It just means that we may have to think about the opportunities that we may be missing.”
McMillan recalled that after guiding an All Blacks XV to a 38-24 win over Munster in November 2024, he presumed that would be the last time he’d ever see the Castletroy Hotel. “Now I live probably 500 metres up the road. But the world moves in mysterious ways.”
He was “pretty happy” at the Chiefs before being offered “an opportunity to come here to grow myself as a coach, to give an experience to my family”, he said, adding that he decided to take the plunge after consulting Rua Tipoki, Rob Penney and Joe Schmidt among others.
McMillan and his wife Natalia, son Ari (16) and daughter Peata (14) have had “a smooth transition”, he said, adding the structure is “very similar” to working with the Chiefs’ All Blacks players, although adapting to international breaks will be challenging.
He acknowledged the loss of Peter O’Mahony and Conor Murray, but countered: “Sometimes, when you have an absence of leaders who have been here for a long time, others emerge that you maybe didn’t think were leaders,” citing John Hodnett as an example.
McMillan also confirmed Tadhg Beirne will retain the captaincy.