The Ford brothers, Joe and George, have always valued each other as fraternal sounding boards. Over the past few years these exchanges have usually taken place over the phone on the drive home after training, Joe from his role as head coach with Doncaster Knights in the Championship, George from Sale Sharks.
“I’d watch as much of Doncaster as I could and he’d sometimes ask for ideas,” George says. “Joe would watch every Sale game and I’d ask for his thoughts. He’s a good brain to pick. Now we can just do it over coffee after training — it’ll be great.”
This season they will be sharing the same workplace, as Joe, the elder by three years, moved over the summer to join Sale’s coaching staff. His role as attack coach means he will be working in close co-operation with his younger brother, the fly half and leader of the Sharks’ attack on the field.
Joe, left, and George pose together in 2011 while representing Northampton and Leicester respectively
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“We speak about rugby all the time,” George, 32, says. “But this is the first time we’ll be doing it together as player and coach. We’re very like-minded in what we think we need here as a team, Joe’s leading it as the coach and we can come in behind and drive it as players. I’m really looking forward to it.”
Will they be driving in to work together? “No, we won’t,” Joe, 35, says. “My hours are a lot longer than his.”
The Fords have always been a close-knit rugby family and George has worked before with their father, Mike, who coached him at Bath and Leicester Tigers. Joe, himself a former fly half for Sale, Leeds Carnegie and Northampton, spent two years playing alongside George at Leicester, but they have spent most of their careers opposing each other.
They made their professional debuts in direct opposition, remarkably, in an Anglo-Welsh Cup tie between Leeds and Leicester in 2009, as opposing fly halves. Joe was 18, George was only 16, which was not an easy experience for their parents. Now, at last, Mike and his wife, Sally Anne, can be in the same place to support two of their three sons. The youngest of the three, Jacob, has also gone into coaching, most recently as director of rugby for Bury St Edmunds in National League Two East.
It has been quite a summer for the family. A couple of weeks after Joe’s move to Sale was announced in June, George won his 100th England cap in the first Test against Argentina. Mike and Jacob made it out to Buenos Aires for the occasion, the first of three England victories on tour, two against the Pumas followed by one over the United States in Washington DC.
Ford continued the sparkling form in which he finished last season, and his leadership — first as co-captain alongside Jamie George, then as captain when George was called up by the British & Irish Lions — was highly praised.
With so many leading lights away with the Lions, the England squad was packed with players hungry to seize their opportunities. “There were a lot of boys on that tour who’ve been on the fringes, and new lads as well,” George says. “Everybody just wanted to do their job and pull in the same direction.
“I know that sounds quite basic and simple, but it’s actually quite hard to come by. And when you’re part of a group like that, with everybody working for the team, more often than not you end up winning.”
George, lifting the trophy with Luke Northmore, helped England to two wins in Argentina in July and brought up a century of caps in the process
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Joe, meanwhile, brought an end to five years at Doncaster, first as attack coach, then as head coach, working with Sir Ian McGeechan, the consultant director of rugby. It is not an easy time in the Championship (rebranded Champ Rugby for the forthcoming season) a competition that has been badly underfunded by the RFU, but Joe valued the experience highly as an emerging coach.
“I couldn’t thank Doncaster enough, it’s a great club,” Joe says. “As head coach at that level, it can be tough, you end up dealing with a lot that’s away from the coaching, off-field stuff, dealing with [players’] agents. Stuff crops up every day that you don’t expect. I’ve got a lot of admiration for people in those jobs, because it’s not easy. So to come to Sale and to be able to focus just on rugby now is probably what I needed.”
Joe benefited from the experience and wisdom of McGeechan while head coach at Doncaster
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He takes his place in a revamped coaching set-up at Sale, who reached the Premiership semi-finals last season, and begin this year’s league campaign — rebranded as Prem Rugby — with a Thursday night fixture at home to Gloucester on September 25. He will be working under Alex Sanderson, the director of rugby, alongside a new recruit in Marco Bortolami, the head coach, and with Byron McGuigan, who came in as defence coach last season and went to Argentina on secondment with England over the summer.
The dynamic between defence and attack coaches is a crucial factor in making a management team tick and Joe has relished working with McGuigan. “When I first came in and watched Byron, I thought, ‘Jeez, that’s next level.’ The way he presents is brilliant,” Joe says. “We get on great, we’re basically competing against each other every day in training. One day I’ll be upset, the next he will be. That’s brilliant to drive the standards.”
The relationship between attack coach and fly half is also fundamental to a team’s success, and Sanderson, by appointing George’s older brother, is adding further to a tradition of strong family ties at Sale. The Curry brothers, Tom and Ben, have been the bedrock of their side in recent seasons, while there have often been three Du Preez brothers in the pack, with the James brothers, Sam and Luke, part of the back line.
George, clearly, has a fair idea of what the new attack coach will bring, taking to the training field with his brother, as they have been doing for much of their lives. “We were always outside, playing together, rugby, football, whatever,” George says. “We’d go up to Saddleworth Rangers with a bag of balls and kick every day, when it was sunny, when it was raining, as long as it was light.
“We were always competing and when you’re younger, you might have the odd tiff and the odd scrap. But we were always there for each other and when we got older, we were both desperate for each other to do well. That’s never changed.”
The brothers are relishing the chance to work with each other at Sale’s training ground in Carrington
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER BRADLEY ORMESHER
They also shared a love of analysing the game in great detail, fostered by their father, who was still playing rugby league in their younger days before becoming a defence coach in rugby union with Ireland, England and others.
“We were very fortunate to watch him, go to games with him and chat to him about the games,” George says. “We’d always be talking about what a good decision looks like, what a bad decision looks like, that all came from our dad. The introduction to all that gave us a great head start, especially for a fly half.”
Now the hundreds of decisions George makes during a game will be influenced by the input of an attack coach with the same surname looking on from the stands. They live a five-minute walk from each other in a village near Oldham, they own a coffee shop together and they went on holiday to Spain with their families in the summer.
“But Joe’s the boss now,” George says with a grin. “We’re player and coach when we come into work. But the better relationship you have with the coaches, if you see the game the same way and know how to deliver it on the field, it can be really effective. If you can get that alignment between player and coach, it can be a pretty powerful thing.”