“I was at Scotland’s last World Cup match,” says Gregor Townsend. “It was my stag weekend and my brother got us to collect coupons from the paper for cheap flights.”
Football is a thread that has run through Townsend’s life, whether it be playing for his primary school team and the renowned Hutchison Vale boys’ club; standing with the Tartan Army on the terraces in St Etienne in 1998 as the national team were chastened by Morocco; playing five-a-side against the staff of Scotland’s opponents before rugby Tests; or spending time with Pep Guardiola and Roberto Martínez to glean the sort of coaching minutiae in which he trades. “I loved playing it, I love watching it and I love learning from it,” he says.
Even now, as he masterminds the renaissance of the Scotland rugby union team, Townsend looks to football for lessons. He watches how Guardiola constructs a culture, how Jürgen Klopp interacts with the media and how the England team negotiate a World Cup campaign. A voracious reader, the 45-year-old has an appetite for improvement and football offers a rich buffet.
But the sport means more than that to Townsend. His father took him to watch Hearts and Hibs play the Glasgow teams regularly – “I kept that quiet when I was Warriors coach in case I upset half of the city” – and he was a regular visitor to Hampden in the early 1980s. At the same time, he was impressing sufficiently as a young striker in Galashiels to make a Borders select, then earn a trial with Hutchison Vale. “Until I was about 14, I had this naive view that I could play football one weekend day and rugby another until … forever. But football switched to a Saturday so I had to make a decision and rugby won out.”
The Dundee fan who skipped his own stag do to play for the club
And how. Townsend went on to make 82 appearances for Scotland in a career that took him from the Borders to France, England, South Africa and back home again, where he carved out his coaching reputation with Glasgow Warriors.
It was during that time at Scotstoun that his twin passions began to mesh. With the Warriors briefly based at Firhill, Townsend became familiar with Partick Thistle manager Alan Archibald. Celtic academy coaches would come and watch training, too. As did current Dundee United manager Robbie Neilson. Gordon Strachan and Craig Brown delivered talks to the players and Alex Ferguson recorded a video message before a big game.
“That stuff is like gold dust to me as a coach,” Townsend says. But as an avowed Liverpool fan, the visit of Kenny Dalglish was the most memorable. “The King came in and I was the one in the front row asking all the questions,” he says with a smile. There was also a surprising Portuguese visitor. “Did you know Pedro Caixinha was a big rugby fan?” Townsend asks of the manager who had a fleeting spell with Rangers. “After my last game at Warriors, he came up to my office. My family were waiting and I told them I’d be five minutes but I couldn’t get him out.”
In 2017, Townsend left Glasgow Warriors to take the Scotland job. With his base now at Oriam, the country’s high performance centre for sport on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Townsend and his staff have struck up a relationship with the football coaches. A game is even in the offing. “We’ve talked about it, but I think they’re a little bit worried because they are older than us… Faddy might be a problem, though.”
Facing James McFadden, the 35-year-old former Scotland icon who joined Alex McLeish’s coaching team last year, would be a step up for Townsend and his men. Although they are less frequent now as their joints stiffen, the rugby coaches regularly played their counterparts from other nations on the eve of Test matches. Townsend, who retreated from the attack to the base of midfield as he became a teenager, recalls beating the Australians with ease before being skelped by Argentina. “We couldn’t get anywhere near them,” he says ruefully, his competitive instincts still stung by the memory.
Another contest, 11-a-side this time, during the 2011 World Cup brought them up against a semi-professional side in New Zealand. “We turned up and saw these sponsored cars. That worried us,” Townsend recalls. “But we did pretty well for a while and held it at 2-2 before they got a couple of late goals.”
Townsend detours into a brief breakdown of the tactics from that game. It demonstrates not only his powers of recall, but also his fascination in how football is played. Indeed, the tactical appreciation of the sport is something he believes rugby can learn from – as is naming the team on the day of the game – so much so that certain concepts from football have been integrated into his rugby coaching. Barcelona’s famed rondos – more commonly known as boxes or piggy-in-the-middle on these shores – have been adapted into an oval-ball exercise after an inspiration trip to Camp Nou. Townsend also reveals that “the high press” has become a familiar phrase to his Scotland players.
The gentle pleasures of watching football in the Scottish Borders
Incorporating ideas from football into his coaching is one thing, but could he take his own methods in the opposite direction? “No, not as a head coach,” says Townsend, who addresses the Scottish FA’s pro licence coaches each year. “You might know the sport well as a supporter or an amateur but I don’t believe anybody could lead a team. You need intrinsic knowledge.”
But what if a football manager asked him to be an assistant or consultant? “Why not,” he says, his eyes widening at the prospect. “I’d love to be involved in another environment. It’s probably more from a selfish point of view, because I don’t know how much I’d help, but being there to maybe give leftfield advice on things away from tactics would be good. Who knows.” That thread of football which has run through Townsend’s life might not have fully unwound itself quite yet, then.
• This article is from Nutmeg magazine. Issue 10 is out now
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