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Saturday, October 12, 2024

The quiet mastermind behind Bath Rugby’s return to the big time

Bath’s Johann van Graan came across as cool and even phlegmatic about his team’s agonising loss in June’s Premiership final, that featured a damaging early red card to the prop Beno Obano.

Van Graan now predicts “we might have a brilliant season and finish fifth or sixth, that doesn’t mean it’s a failure. We might win it, we might get to a semi-final, who knows?” – and it is therefore important to add context.

The 44-year-old South African has been through a lot of near misses in his coaching career.

“That’s why I believe you go back to zero and enjoy the journey for what it is,” Van Graan says on the eve of his third season as head of rugby at Bath, which amazingly is his 22nd season as a coach, having started out as a technical advisor to the Bulls in Pretoria in November 2003.

As Van Graan holds court at Bath’s palatial Farleigh House training ground, wearing a wristband bearing the message #forGodsglory, he is well aware of the faith placed in him by the club’s owner, Bruce Craig, and the supporters to whom the glory days of Premiership and European titles in the 1980s and 90s are painfully distant; just two play-off finals since 2004.

He simply refuses to peg success and failure solely to cups and medals.

“I saw an opportunity at Bath,” says Van Graan, who is contracted here until 2030, “but also I believed that I could help, and I could be part of something special. That has never been promising trophies.

“Obviously, we want to win a trophy, but the very first thing I said is I want to put smiles on people’s faces, because I saw a city that’s so unique with a rugby pitch right in the middle.

“The semi-final [win at home to Sale last season], it’s one of my top five, top 10 rugby memories, to see what it meant to people, not only the players, not only their families, but the people of Bath.

“So what do I see my job as? It’s continually improving this group. What does success look like? It might mean winning the Premiership.

“It might take us five more years to win the Premiership, but we have the drive and hunger to get better and then attracting the right people to come and share the same passion, that’s the one thing we share currently as heads of department, coaches, players.”

LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 08: Beno Obano of Bath is consoled by team mates after being sent off by referee Christophe Ridley after a challenge on Juarno Augustus during the Gallagher Premiership Rugby Final match between Northampton Saints and Bath Rugby at Twickenham Stadium on June 08, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)
Beno Obano was given an early bath in the Premiership final (Photo: Getty)

Van Graan would like to see a different-coloured card and a temporary sending-off for the type of “unintentional” offence that did for Obano, with the dismissed player returning to the field or replaced by a substitute, reasoning: “If a player punches another player or stamps on his head or eye-gouges, I believe it should be an automatic red card. But where do you currently see that in the game?”

Ultimately, though, Van Graan says: “The final isn’t something that keeps me awake at night. With the last play of the game, we had the ball five yards from their line and it was ripped out.

“Potentially it’s a different decision and we win the game. But you have to take the day for what it was. I was very content after it – the players, the staff and the whole club did everything they could.

“It was an incredible journey for us last year, from where we came from [eighth the previous season, and bottom the season before] to what we got to.”

The iconic Loftus Versfeld stadium in Pretoria was where Van Graan came from, in his formative days. He was a ball-boy watching the likes of Jonah Lomu and Philippe Sella close up, he went to school across the road at Afrikaanse Hoer Seunskool – known as Affies – and his father Barend was the Bulls’ chief executive.

As a young coach, Van Graan assisted the Bulls to three Super Rugby titles including the “highlight” win over the Chiefs in 2009, 61-17 at Loftus, preceded by two semi-final losses.

He then became an assistant to the South Africa national team beaten narrowly by New Zealand in the 2015 World Cup semi-finals, before taking charge of Munster from 2017 to 2022, with no titles won and close-run things including one URC final and a European quarter-final loss to Toulouse on place kicks in Dublin.

This summer, Van Graan and his wife holidayed in a favourite destination of New York, taking their kids too for the first time, and in Barbados and for five days in South Arica’s Kruger National Park, camping round the fire with no mobile signal.

The calls and the work resumed soon enough, though – including vexatious stuff like the flanker Sam Underhill and centres Max Ojomoh and Cam Redpath out injured for this Friday’s start of the Premiership season in the final rematch at home to Northampton.

Straight after the final, Underhill namechecked the “brilliant” Ted Hill, Alfie Barbeary, Miles Reed and Josh Bayliss – and in turn it was a reminder that in some recent seasons Bath have been undone by injuries to forwards.

Fitness is ever more crucial in a league programme of just 18 matches and with thinner Premiership squads. This is another reason why Van Graan doesn’t put his head on the prediction block, although the bookies generally have Bath as 3-1 for the league, neck and neck with the Saints and Saracens.

With the highly-rated Guy Pepper boosting those back-row stocks, Bath look like a team on an upward curve. Tighthead prop is a position of strength, with Thomas du Toit, Will Stuart, Archie Griffin and Billy Sela. And fly-half Finn Russell mostly gave magnificent value for his highly-paid contract, last season.

Craig, the wealthy owner, visits the training ground roughly once a fortnight and is said to be less overbearing than with previous coaching regimes, having tried Steve Meehan, Sir Ian McGeechan, Gary Gold, Mike Ford, Todd Blackadder and Stuart Hooper as director of rugby.

As for Van Graan, he has a mantra of “trusting the process”. But what does that amount to, in practice?

“I believe successful teams go through memories together and you put something in the bank. The last game of season one when I was here, we needed to score more than 20 points in the last 10 minutes to get Champions Cup qualification and we did that.

“Bath hadn’t won an opening game of the Premiership for a significant amount of time and we did that last season so that’s another box ticked.

“You go into Europe and we hadn’t won a home game for a long time, but we did that last season. We were undefeated last season at home. We hadn’t won an away game in Europe for a number of years and we did that against Cardiff.

“We went up against the best team in Europe – Toulouse – and matched them for 70 minutes away from home. So now the players have got reference points.

“I’d like to think our biggest strength this year will be continuity. Continuity of the playing group, continuity in the coaching group and continuity in the staff – something Bath hasn’t had for 14 years.

“So yes, as long as I enjoy it, as long as my family’s happy, as long as the club moves in the right direction, and as long as I can add value, I’m going to love this journey.”

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