He professes not to be one for sentiment, but just as there were a few tears shed after his last match in charge of a team that he had dragged from the depths, so Vern Cotter was feeling the love as he returned to Scotland for the first time.
This being Glasgow the best of the compliments was appropriately unsentimentally delivered too.
“Going through customs, they didn’t want to let me through. Two blokes said ‘you’re not coming in’ which gave me a bit of a fright, but I turned around and they were laughing,” he revealed, happy to have been the butt of the joke.
In Glasgow, though? This is a city where, not so long ago, only a handful of doctors and lawyers might have recognised a rugby coach. However, in helping re-generate some respect for Scottish rugby, Cotter has earned for himself a special place in the affections of many who know he deserved much better treatment than he received for that contribution.
The healthy disrespect continued when he arrived at Scotstoun to be reunited with Jason O’Halloran and Jonathan Humphreys, his former Scotland assistant coaches who are now working with the Warriors under Cotter’s old rival from New Zealand, Dave Rennie.
“They leg-tripped me as I was walking down the corridor,” he protested, countenance once again lighting up, as he added: “It’s good to be back and get some fresh Scottish air and see some old faces.”
So much so that the TV cameras had caught him posing for selfies with an over-eager fan midway through the first half.
Whatever happened to ‘Stern Vern’? To be fair, anyone who has visited his lovely new home city will have some idea why there seems to be a new spring in Cotter’s stride.
He insists that he enjoyed his Scotland, developing an emotional attachment and there was no doubting the pleasure he took from the way the national side performed last month, for all that he only saw highlights of the matches. However, there is nothing like a bit of sunshine to make the world seem a better place and he is clearly revelling in the environment that already exists and which, in rugby terms, he is seeking to improve.
“It is a nice place to live,” he said. “It’s a big University town, one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. It’s dynamic, it’s moving..This team’s only been in place for 30 years, it’s not an old, established club, it’s a young club and we’ve doing a lot of work on the identity, the way we play, what does the jersey represent, a lot of those things developing culture and our style of play.
“So it’s been busy, really busy developing the academy as well, because we feel a lot of good players have left. So it’s a medium to long-term project to try to get everything functioning.”
Most coaches will tell you that for all the buzz of international rugby it can be more satisfying to have the year-round, day-to-day involvement with players at a club and Cotter has re-adjusted to that.
“It took me a while to get used to getting up at five o’clock in the morning every day, but it’s good to be able to work with a group and have that project in place,” he said, again grinning broadly. “Like I say, the big picture is developing the team, the wider part of the club which is the academy and trying to give the city something to be proud of. “There are a number of other professional sports in Montpellier so it’s nice to be able to get a group of people together and nice to see supporters from Montpellier coming over to Glasgow. If we can start getting results perhaps it’ll grow and we’ll get a real following. That’s the key to it all.”
As to how they will be achieved, progress is being made, but as with suffering a Six Nations ‘whitewash’ with Scotland before fortunes started to improve, he knows Montpellier will not be built in a day or even a season.
“I’m happy to see some things we’re working on coming off,” he said. “Our game’s coming together. It’s not quite there as much as we’d like, but it’s certainly developing, so we can take the positive things and keep working on them.”
With an increasing emphasis in France on development of homegrown players he is paying particular attention to their academy which he describes as having previously been ‘neglected’. However his team has so many South Africans in it that they have facetiously been dubbed ‘the Languedoc Boks’ and Scottish supporters will testify to his capacity to both get the best out of local talent and bring together those developed in different cultures.
“What I like about this team is that they are honest and hard-working and you can see some character coming through, which is about binding cultures,” he said. “You’ve got South African culture, French culture, you’ve got Georgians and that’s the fascinating part of this job at the moment is getting everyone to play and be part of one jersey, one idea.”
As he spoke it seemed ever more evident that Scottish rugby’s loss has been Montpellier’s gain. Maybe not this season, but soon, they will be real contenders in the Champions Cup.
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