At this time of year the action on the field cannot begin quickly enough. The word is that the coming season will be slicker, shinier and in higher definition than the last – more vibrant, more exciting, more competitive than ever – new sponsors, same spiel but, as Pat Lam prepares to begin his Premiership coaching career with Bristol against Bath on Friday, words that had once lost all meaning tend to resonate again.
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For Lam has a vision and he is happy to shout it from the rooftops. Eleventh tends to be the sum of the newly promoted side’s ambitions but Bristol, he believes, belong in the top six. “[Bristol] made it very clear what they wanted,” says Lam. “I heard community, I heard inspiration for the people of Bristol and I heard success on the field. There are three very clear objectives – number one, be a Champions Cup team; number two, to have Bristol players playing for England; and number three, we want Bristolians from our own community coming through and playing for the club.”
As a player Lam made his name as a swashbuckling No 8 and was part of the Western Samoa side that stunned Wales at the 1991 World Cup. Six years later he made the move to Newcastle, with whom he won the Premiership in his first season and in 2000 he was integral to the Northampton team that won the Heineken Cup. So was it always a dream to coach in England? “My dream was to be a schoolteacher,” he says. “I have a real passion for trying to make a difference. I really enjoyed school teaching. Rugby was what I did on the side until it went professional but my passion for teaching never died.”
The path from schoolteacher to rugby coach is well-trodden but it does not take long in Lam’s company to see how much his previous calling has influenced his current career. He makes no apology for Bristol’s big-spending – by bringing Charles Piutau in for a reported £1m a year “we’ve done the Premiership a favour” – but the 49-year-old is under no illusions as to where the buck stops. “All I need from players is coachability but what I need from my staff is to make sure that these guys can improve and step up. If they can do that, then I can sit back as a conductor and say: ‘Let’s do that’ or ‘Can we do that?’ I don’t want to say: ‘We can’t do that because the players aren’t good enough to do that.’ If they can’t and they are coachable then it comes back to the coaches.”
Lam cut his coaching teeth in his home town of Auckland before an acrimonious departure from the Blues took him to Connacht in 2013. His time at the Sportsground – taking the province, until then the poor relation to Leinster, Munster and Ulster, to the 2016 Pro12 title – had Lam in the frame to be Joe Schmidt’s successor for Ireland until Bristol intervened. Joining a club in England’s second tier at the start of last season led to some accusations that his bumper pay packet was a driving force behind the move but Lam, who took Bristol to the Championship title with 21 wins from 22 matches, is keen to put the record straight.
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“I’ll go to where the vision is right,” he adds. “People asked me why would I go to Connacht but I asked them what their vision was and it was in line with my coaching philosophy. Then they ask why I came to Bristol and, yeah, they have got money and so forth but I’ve turned down other jobs where there is money because I don’t agree with the vision. That’s what I learned when I got sacked by the Blues. It was the only job I wasn’t interviewed for; I didn’t ask them what their vision was. I love history and that’s why I love it [at Bristol] but it only tells you where you come from. Vision tells you where you’re headed.”
Clarity of thought is one of Lam’s key messages but that is not to be conflated with an authoritarian streak. If anyone needed reminding of his Midas touch, it came at Twickenham in May when Lam’s Barbarians blazed a trail of destruction against England after just three training sessions together, all the while maintaining the invitational side’s off-field traditions. Then it was a 70s night out, in pre-season with “Bristol an Island” theme complete with hula skirts, and it is clear Lam does not always do things by the book.
“People talk to me about Exeter [as a blueprint] but, if you go back to when I was playing in the Premiership 20 years ago and said which English team is a Champions Cup team, if anyone said Saracens back then … but they had clarity of vision. People laughed at them and everything they did outside the box. But we have that clarity and our goal is to go that way.”