Retired Ireland midfielder Gordon D’Arcy has revealed the training ground warning from Joe Schmidt that has always stayed with him.
The ex-Leinster centre, who won three Champions Cups with the Irish province, also explained why he became a fan of Felipe Contepomi’s brutal honesty before the trophies started coming their way.
With Harlequins beaten in Dublin in Round One of this season’s Investec Champions Cup, D’Arcy had delved into his past life as a player in his latest Irish Times column ahead of Friday night’s match away to Leicester.
The object of D’Arcy’s latest piece on the direction of European rugby was to highlight how French teams like Toulouse and Bordeaux-Begles are leading the conversation as regards producing structured play laced with imagination.
Moment of clarity
He argued that while players such as Matthieu Jalibert, Thomas Ramos and Ange Capuozzo are all wonderful talents, it’s the collective understanding within their respective teams that frees up their play.
Before getting this point across, D’Arcy cast his mind back to the time when current Australia boss Schmidt took charge at Leinster in 2010 and quickly developed a stickler reputation that demanded his players took care of the smaller details.
Schmidt felt he couldn’t trust players on the pitch who were lackadaisical about how they went about their lives off the pitch – a mindset he revealed in no uncertain terms one day to the Leinster training group.
It was a moment of clarity that D’Arcy has never forgotten all these years later. “Michael Cheika had rewired Leinster’s mentality. Joe Schmidt focused on the style and substance of how we went about winning, a subtle shift at first but unmistakable.
“He embedded the phrase ‘attention to detail’ into the Irish rugby psyche and he did it without ever needing to raise his voice. Everything began and ended with winning the small moments, technical and the tactical: the passing, the running lines, the decision-making under fatigue and the clear-eyed option-taking, whether on phase four or 14…
“On the field, he changed very little at first. Off the field was where the subtle priming started. Punctuality was non-negotiable. Being late wasn’t an inconvenience; it was a breach of trust. Traffic wasn’t an excuse. You simply hadn’t left early enough.
“Everything within your control became part of the culture. Did you bring the correct gear? Did you clean up after yourself? Was your body composition where it needed to be? All those small habits, the ones easy to ignore, became a currency of conduct and attitude.
“One day, after repeated infringements, a player finally asked Joe why he was so relentless about the basics. His response was simple: if he couldn’t trust players to make the small, easy decisions every day, how could he trust them to make the big ones when it really mattered? That line has stayed with me ever since.”
D’Arcy thrived in this relentless culture. “When he announced out of nowhere that he wanted us to become the best passing team in Europe, none of us blinked. He committed to memory every catch, every pass and every transfer under pressure. Good passages were celebrated. Work-ons were delivered without sugar coating.
“And slowly, almost without realising it, our standards in passing became a badge of honour. We weren’t just a good passing side, we were the passing side – or at least we believed we were. It fed the culture and made the place a brilliant, if occasionally stressful, environment in which to play.”
Before Schmidt arrived in Ireland, Contepomi, the current Argentina boss, was a pillar of the Leinster squad that Cheika moulded from also-rans into European champions in 2009. D’Arcy went on to salute his no-nonsense approach to becoming successful.
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“Winning is all-consuming,” he continued. “Yet there is a balance to be negotiated on the field between structure and freedom, and off it between identity and conformity.
“Felipe Contepomi embodied that balance better than anyone I played with. Fiercely loyal, he was a leader with a brilliant rugby mind. He could see things a split second before others and when someone didn’t read the picture he saw, he let them know with brutal honesty. ‘Mate, if you can’t see this, why are you here?’
“It wasn’t to belittle anyone; he reminded us that even the best players look ordinary when they stop reading the cues in front of them. That ability, to blend systems with instinct, is what separates the top European sides.”
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