Picture Fiji coach Vern Cotter two minutes into last week’s match against the team he used to coach, Scotland, head in hands. On the Murrayfield pitch debutant secondrow Ratu Rotuisolia is sheepishly walking from the field.
Sent to the sin-bin for foul play, the lock’s walk of shame was the tip of the iceberg. After 18 penalties and Vinaya Habosi and Livai Natave also picking up yellow cards, Fiji played for half an hour a man down as the new era of discipline went up in smoke.
Still, two tries in 10 minutes rattled the Scots’ cage with Rotuisolia heroically returning to the game with a touchdown before Fiji went on to lose the match 28-12.
Inconsistency and ill-discipline, two of the Islanders’ biggest problems, were again side by side. That and the trademark attacking threat, as sharp and threatening to trouble even the top nations.
Given the nature of Cotter’s exit as Scotland boss in 2017 – many believed prematurely - to make way for incumbent Gregor Townsend, masterminding a shock victory would have been sweet. But it just seemed like every ingredient good and bad that Fiji ever had was baked into the weekend performance.
Cotter’s strategy to build structure and self-control around Fiji and retain the dazzling, running game that won them the first Sevens Olympic gold medal in Rio 2016, worked with some success. But the Fijian failings were in the plain numbers and after the match the Kiwi coach stated the obvious.
“It’s very hard to win a Test match with three yellow cards,” said Cotter. “I thought the guys defended well and there were great moments in our play. But we couldn’t string them all together and those patches where we were down to 14 were difficult for everybody.”
Seven years ago, the highly regarded Cotter was being touted as the new Leinster coach. He left his position at Scotland with a 53 per cent win rate (19 wins from 36 games), then the most successful Scottish coach of the professional era and the most successful since Ian McGeechan between 1988 and 1993. He also took Scotland to the quarter-finals of the 2015 Rugby World Cup.
But despite a peripatetic career he avoided Ireland, taking in Bay of Plenty, Crusaders, Clermont Auvergne, Scotland, Barbarians, Montpellier and Fiji in 2020. His appointment then was seen as an astute signing with Fiji Rugby chairman, Francis Kean, labelling the Cotter signature as a coup for the union.
“Following an extensive recruitment process with many outstanding applications, the board is pleased to have secured such an exceptional candidate in Vern Cotter for the top job of Flying Fijians head coach,” he said. “We were impressed by his vision and expectations of what can be achieved by the programme. We believe he will drive a culture of high-performance, fitness and discipline standards that are necessary to achieve success on the global stage.”
This summer Fiji won one of three matches in the Pacific Nations Cup, losing 23-20 to Samoa and 32-18 to an Australia A side. They were rampant in a five-try, 36-0 victory over Tonga. But Tonga have fallen back as a rugby nation and are 15th in world rankings, below Georgia and Italy.
Set pieces, especially the scrum and lineout, have improved under the 60-year-old but remain along with defence an ongoing work in progress. Cotter has never been in doubt about the cultural shift he hopes to engineer in the hearts and minds of the players.
But he faces the same hurdles Fijian coaches always have had to contend with - access to his overseas-based players (more than half the squad) for only very short periods of time on an occasional basis during the year.
“It is incredibly frustrating when you want to drive a high-performance environment and you don’t have enough time together to get to the standard we want,” said Cotter referring to the general challenge of coaching Fiji. “We have to be very patient as we have the World Cup next year when we will have time. It’s the way it is. How we maximise our time at the moment to get the most out of it is the key.”
Players are involved with European clubs and in Super Rugby where the Fijian Drua franchise made its debut in February of this year. It is now 51 per cent owned by the Fijian government.
Against Ireland today, Cotter is pragmatic in his outlook. He surmises that for Andy Farrell’s home side the match will “just be a training run.”
“We want a performance where we can say we got the ball to the outside channels, beat defenders, and scored points. We don’t want to walk off the paddock saying we didn’t really do that,” Cotter told The Offside Line website last week.
“The theme is easy: you’ve got to dominate the structure to play unstructured rugby. We like unstructured rugby, it comes naturally. But you can’t do that if you don’t dominate the structure.
“You can’t hide from having a decent set-piece, being able to be effective at ruck, and being able to keep the ball for multiple phases. So that is what we are focusing on.”
