Canada Maple Leaf

Kieran Crowley, the maple leaf maverick

There will be seven Kiwi head coaches and numerous assistants at the upcoming Rugby World Cup. Marc Hinton meets one and finds him enjoying his own special challenges.

When Kieran Crowley landed in Canada to coach the perennial World Cup minnows, he was directed to check out a prospect in action across country. It was an eight-hour flight for 80 minutes of, well, decidedly grass-roots rugby.

But that's rugby in Canada for you. It's a vast land, and there are vast challenges covering the territory in the name of a national programme. Nobody said it would be easy, and it certainly hasn't been.

Not that Crowley is complaining. Before he left a solid provincial coaching career in New Zealand, the now 49-year-old Taranaki legend was told he needed to step outside of his comfort zone.

It's fair to say Canada ticks that box, and some. And that after three years of furthering the cause of Canucks rugby, he has become used not just to stepping outside of his comfort zone, but taking up occupancy in that knee-knocking territory.

"Canada got left behind when the game went professional," concludes Crowley as he chats on the line from his home in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia. "We have been a bit slow getting into gym work and that sort of thing, and just haven't had that professional competition that gets players to the levels they need to.

"The US is exactly the same. If you look at high-performance games, we only play seven to 10 a year, whereas players from places like Tonga get free access to Europe, and they're playing 30-plus games a year. It's a challenge from that respect."

Canada's top-level competition has only four regional teams and it's from that competition, the three Churchill Cup games each year and the three tests afforded in the November window that Crowley must essentially build his national programme.

It's not a lot. He has one player in the French Top 14 (lock Jamie Cudmore), three plying their trade in the Celtic League and a similar number in England's second-tier Championship. The rest are distinctly home-brewed.

"They're some of the best pros I've ever met in terms of their training ethic, but they just don't get paid," says Crowley.

"This is such a vast country. When I first got here I was expected to fly eight hours to watch a club game. That made me realise what I was dealing with.

"If you're a coach in New Zealand at the top level you only have to worry about coaching. We've had to meet politicians to try to get money, had to have strategic planning meetings with regions. You're forever multi-tasking here, and using a lot more skills than you would if you were a coach in New Zealand.

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