Durban — Former Sharks coaches Dick Muir and Grant Bashford are devastated after they became collateral damage from Russia’s conflict with Ukraine.
ALSO READ: World Rugby suspends Russia ’until further notice
The pair were coaching the Russian national rugby team until World Rugby yesterday suspended Russia and Belarus from international competition “in the interests rugby’s values of solidarity, integrity, and respect”.
While World Rugby has condemned Russian rugby to isolation, it has pledged renewed support from the Ukraine Rugby Federation.
In a jaw-dropping irony, the Ukraine and Russian rugby teams were sharing a training facility in Turkey when the war broke out and Muir, speaking from Antalya in Turkey, said the players got on just fine.
Muir, a former Springbok assistant coach, was two months ago tasked with transforming Russian Rugby, with Bashford his trusty lieutenant, and a week before their rejuvenated team was about to play arch-rivals Georgia, Russia invaded Ukraine...
“I’m devastated,” Muir told Independent Media. “We were about to play a string of matches in the Rugby Europe Championship (the second division behind the Six Nations).”We were holding out hope that some kind of agreement could keep us playing but that hasn’t happened. It is a massive disappointment for the Russian players as they have put so much effort into changing how they play. They responded really well to what we have been teaching them and there was a genuine belief that we could beat Georgia for the first time in 29 years.”
When the war began a week ago, the Russian players went home to their families while Muir and Bashford remained stranded in Turkey awaiting a decision from World Rugby.
That has now come and Bashford is returning to South Africa while Muir awaits a decision from his employers as to whether he should return to Moscow and assist in the domestic competition which will continue in Russia’s isolation.
Muir said Russia’s suspension is heart-breaking for the players because the war is not of their doing and the man in the street in both Ukraine and Russia have no beef with each other.
“A lot of people don’t understand what this war is about,” he stressed. “It is a political thing, it is not about ordinary people. There are families split across both countries,” the former Springbok centre said. “At our training facility in Turkey, we had Turkish, Ukrainian and Russian teams and there was no animosity between the countries — everybody got on. We shared a dining hall with the Ukraine players and it was just a hall full of rugby players enjoying themselves.”
On the rugby front, Muir says he is most disappointed that the game against Georgia is off because he sensed his team was going to upset the fancied Georgians.
“Georgia is our toughest opposition and we were in a special place ahead of the game,” he said. “Our guys had not beaten them for 29 years and we felt we had turned it around to cause an upset in front of 50 000 Georgians in Tbilisi, which would have been fantastic for Russian rugby.”
Muir says his players had responded very positively to changes he made in the few short months he was with them.
“A combination of things needed to change,” he explained. “They played at a very slow tempo. Their domestic competition — there are ten provinces/clubs —is a very slow, stop-start affair, so we needed to increase the tempo. Then we needed to identify athletes that could play at a higher tempo in a game plan that was suitable for the international level, and we had to train under those circumstances.
“This meant the conditioning had to improve significantly because it had not been good enough to be competitive.
“There is huge potential — that was the excitement of taking this job on. The Russian players are in the same mould as South Africans —they are physical and like contact.
“The big difference is they don’t play at a young age so their basics are poor, so you have to correct basics such as running straight and moving the ball to where the space is; offloading in contact, and avoiding contact rather than making contact.”
Muir said the willingness of the players to learn made his job exciting.
“The players are hungry for knowledge and they train really hard. You can’t believe how they will do whatever you ask them to do.
“The language barriers are huge so you have to be able to get your point across in other ways, using interpreters or other coaches, but where there is a will, there is a way, and if these Russian guys can just carry on playing rugby I am certain they will climb the international ladder.”
IOL Sport