Right said Fred: Go back, do more 'arse knockers'

OPINION: Fred Allen, our greatest All Blacks coach, will soon turn 90, the occasion marked with a civic luncheon at the Auckland Town Hall.

He deserves every honour that can be heaped on him. Consider his All Blacks coaching record, of 14 tests played over three years, and 14 won. Add in tour matches, and it's 37 games without a loss, and just one draw. What made him so great a coach, first for Auckland, setting a record for Ranfurly Shield defences, and then for the All Blacks?

Being well drilled was certainly a part of it. Allen saw service in World War II, in the Pacific, in Egypt, and in Italy, and says now: "I think I brought some of that Army attitude with me. In my time I was strict on discipline, and the players' self discipline. It'll never prove wrong."

They called him "The Needle" because any player who crossed him lived to regret it.

His training sessions usually finished with what he and the team called arse-knockers. Auckland and All Blacks prop Snow White described them for me a couple of years ago. "You'd start on the goal-line, then jog to the 25, then half pace to the halfway, three-quarter pace to the 25, then sprint. You'd turn round and do it again, the same pattern between the quarters of the field. When you were ready to fall over he'd call them off." Allen still chuckles at the memory. "Jesus, the players used to hate them. But that's where it showed the players that they had the guts, and the will to pull together. So often it was in the last 20 minutes that we won the game. When you were in a tight corner you could get out of it." All Blacks flanker Kel Tremain made the bad mistake of shouting, as he staggered away at the end of one session, "You're a bastard Allen." The whole team was called back for another five minutes of aerobic torture. "You're here," Allen informed them, "because Tremain called me a bastard." Many coaches talk of seeking perfection. Allen lived by the idea.

In 1967, on the All Blacks tour of Britain and France, wing Tony Steel plunged over for a try out wide. "After the game," says Allen, "I said to him, `Look Tony, that was a good try. But if you bloody dive over with that flash stuff again, instead of going round behind the posts, you'll be on the bank next game'." But Fred Allen didn't post such an amazing record just by being hard-nosed. He could read people too. Free spirits like Alby Pryor, who as a lock for Auckland in the 1960s played like the brilliant loose forward he was, and the amazingly gifted flanker Waka Nathan, were verbally abused before almost every game.

Nathan, one of the sunniest-natured men to ever wear a rugby jersey, would then come steaming out of the shed, Rambo in studs, ready to strike down with terrible force anyone unlucky enough to be playing against him.

Until Nathan was himself a coach, shaping a great New Zealand Maori side in the 1980s, he couldn't understand why he was tongue lashed before a game while his great friend, the hugely talented, but highly-strung first-five, Mac Herewini, was eulogised, encouraged and cosseted by Allen.

"I'm no academic," says Allen, "but I'd had a bit of experience about how to manage men. The experience I had as a soldier certainly helped me to judge them." The other great element Allen offered to the world of rugby was his insistence the ball should be run whenever possible. "You don't want wingers freezing on the bloody sideline." In the grey, sodden, sideline hugging landscape of 1960s test rugby the play of his All Blacks was a flash of brilliant neon, the backs sweeping the ball across the field, with the forwards, lungs hardened and enlarged by the relentless training, tirelessly backing up.

The years have mellowed Allen, but he has never lost a keen ability to analyse players and tactics, and he never wallows in the past.

Early in Dan Carter's career he said, "He could become one of the greatest first-fives we've ever had. He's a natural footballer, one out of the top drawer. He's so cool, and he does everything so right." For my money Fred Allen would have been a great coach, regardless of the era.

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