In the first of a
two-part exclusive interview Brive CEO Simon Gillham
explains how the former European champions have turned
themselves from a team struggling to retain Top 14 status
into a League of Nations collective now pushing once more
for major honours. Gillham who, remarkably in this day and
age, performs his CEO duties unpaid, takes us behind the
scenes to help explain one of the stories of the season as
the 2008/9 Championship draws to a thrilling climax.
Sport, like politics,
is a fickle environment with little room for sentiment as
fortunes oscillate between success and failure. Lose and
you’re out; win and you’re a hero.
Five games into this
season’s Top 14 campaign ‘big spending’ Brive were being
barracked for cobbling together a motley crew of ageing
internationals seemingly intent on enjoying a final pay day
in the sleepy surrounds of a once mighty fallen giant. They
were win-less, bottom of the league and had just four points
to their name.
Yet with five games to
go until the end of the regular season that same club, and
those same players, are now being lauded as a visionary,
tight-knit and progressive outfit, hunting down the twin
goals of a play-off place and European glory on the back of
a run that has seen them lose just once in their last 16
matches - dating back to November 1st.
It is, by any
standards, an incredible turnaround, but one which Brive’s
English CEO Simon Gillham is at pains to explain hasn’t
brought anything solid to the trophy cabinet just yet.
Their next three games
are absolutely crucial to the club’s end of season
prospectus: Leaders Stade Toulousain at home on Saturday,
Worcester Warriors away the following week in the ECC
quarter-finals and then a trip to Clermont Auvergne (who
currently lie fourth in the final play-off berth, just four
points ahead of Brive).
Top 14 Table
/ Top 14 Fixtures
It is, as sports
pundits are keen to point out, make or break time for Les
Corrèziens,
and the tension is mounting. Their last three victories have
been by the relatively slender margins of two, two and seven
points – against Dax, Mont-de-Marsan and Bayonne
respectively – but wins they have been, and that’s all that
matters right now.
Three more results like
that in their forthcoming fixtures and this season will be
considered a massive success. Three defeats, however, and
the pre-season goal of Heineken Cup qualification will be
seriously under threat.
Not many ‘experts’ had
Brive down as possible play-off contenders back in
September, and the torrid opening weeks appeared to confirm
that scepticism. ‘Too many foreigners and too old’, they
cried. Yes, the team needed time to bed down after a busy
summer in the transfer market, but a cruel fixture list
played its part too with six of their first nine games on
the road – including trips to Perpignan, Biarritz, Stade
Francais, Bayonne and Stade Toulousain.
It was a shockingly
lop-sided opening, but they kept themselves going with the
knowledge that everything after that would be so much
easier. And so it has proved. Since that Stade Toulousain
away match on November 1st – which they only lost
21-15 – Brive have been downed just once, and that 15-18 at
home to a Dan Carter inspired Perpignan.
Coaches Christophe
Laussucq and Ugo Mola – together with director of rugby
Laurent Seigne - must of course take much of the credit,
along with the club’s ever-tightening squad, but Gillham
pinpoints a pre-season bonding trip to Limerick, in Ireland,
as the root of the Brive success now blossoming into
Springtime flower.
“We did an awful lot of
work in pre-season in Limerick. We did a pre-season
management seminar where we made the players into small
groups of all different nationalities and they defined their
own objectives for the season and their code of conduct –
and that was a seminal moment in our short life because it
then became their objectives and their code of conduct, not
something imposed by the management.
'Our objective is to
qualify for the Heineken Cup'
“And whenever you
interview a Brive player today they always talk about
‘their’ objectives for the season. It was very interesting
in the last three to four weeks when a lot of journalists
have been saying you might get a top four place, but you
will not get a Brive player to say ‘We’re aiming for the top
four’. They say ‘Our objective is to qualify for the
Heineken Cup’. That’s the objective they fixed themselves,”
says Gillham, with almost paternal pride.
“The other day there
was a very interesting discussion internally because someone
said perhaps now that we are in fifth place we should let go
of the European Challenge Cup and not compromise our
position in the Championship – and there was a huge reaction
from the players who said ‘Hang on, that was our second
objective that we fixed in Limerick, there’s no way we are
abandoning the European Challenge Cup’.
“We might go to
Worcester and lose – you never know, that’s life – but we’re
definitely trying to go all the way. We are three games away
from a trophy,” he reiterated.
Gillham is sharply aware that nothing has been banked so
far. There’s no silverware in the trophy cabinet – apart
from the ghost of past success – and you don’t get medals
for a mid-season run that takes you from one end of the
table to the other. But Brive are a club in transition,
awoken at last from their post-Heineken Cup triumphs –
winners in 1997, runners-up in 1998 – and heading towards
the Goode times again on the back of some shrewd signings
and a team spirit built on respect and honesty.
Much has been made of
the increasing numbers of “Étrangers”
(Foreigners) in France this season, with many pointing the
finger at Brive and Toulon as the worst ‘culprits’. But
whereas the Toulon experiment has definitely floundered -
although Gillham expects Philippe Saint-Andre to overcome
that – Brive’s band of brothers have gelled. It’s not easy
bringing together a disparate group that includes
Argentines, Romanians, Fijians, Tongans, South Africans,
French, Irish, Georgians, Italians, Welsh, English and
Australians, but Brive appear to have managed it with
spectacular success.
“In our club there’s
never any discussion about foreigners or not foreigners,
it’s everyone else that enjoys that. It never bothers us, we
just get on with our stuff. Everyone is a Briviste,” notes
Gillham.
'We don’t want any
mercenaries here'
“There was a moment
when we were playing Biarritz the other week and there was
one Frenchman in the starting pack, and when they did the
warm-up you had seven English speakers and a Frenchman. Yet
they did the whole warm-up in French amongst themselves. You
had Damien Browne [Irish] talking to Alex Popham [Welsh] in
French! I wouldn’t say it was
Molière, but because they want that Brive identity
they have all bought into it. And they are terribly jealous.
The players give me such s**t when they hear on the
grapevine that we might be recruiting such and such a
player. They all get on to me saying ‘Make sure he buys into
it, we don’t want any mercenaries here’. It’s really funny,
it’s great.”
Gillham has very much
brought his own business and management background to the
fore at Brive, qualities he’s honed while dealing with the
tricky world of post-mergers and acquisitions, or as he put
it: “Pulling people together who were before programmed to
hate each other”.
It’s a skill he has
successfully applied at Brive. “It’s exactly the same in
rugby,” he says. “You’ve been playing rugby for England and
you’ve been beating the s**t out of a Welshman who you’ve
been programmed to hate all your life, and now suddenly
you’re playing in the same team. It’s very funny watching.
The French are the same with the English
“There was a moment in
Limerick when I got them all to talk about where the
problems had gone on last year and a lot of people said some
honest things. A French guy stood up and ‘It was really
weird when everyone started speaking English in the changing
room and I was at Brive, and I thought what’s going on
here?’ There were lots of things like that and as a result
of that particular remark we now have compulsory French
lessons for all the English speakers, and they get fined if
they don’t go. We also have voluntary English lessons for
the French boys, and they all appreciate it.
“Then we had this
wonderful moment and everyone was going on about all these
problems and Alex Popham said ‘I don’t understand it, we’re
all rugby players. We go on the field and we play, and we
win, and then we go out and try and f**k’. He said that’s
what being a rugby player is all about, and everyone sort of
went ‘Yeah, that’s right’. Embarrassingly, it was me, the
chief executive standing there in my suit, who had to
translate into French what he’d just said! But there were
lots of things like that. It’s all the things that are the
invisible part of the iceberg. Really, it’s the little
things,” he said.
Get the details right
and the rest will follow. But ignore minor problems and
major consequences will arise. It’s a standard business
lesson, but one that Brive’s emerging squad is happy to take
on board – and with startling success.
Part II –
Simon Gillham explains why he was so riled by BBC
commentator Ian Robertson, Brive’s unique take on transfer
policy, his relationship with Rob Andrew, the club’s future
plans and why Steve Thompson should be playing for England
again.
Related articles:
Interview:
Steve Thompson - 'I want to stay in France
after I finish playing'
Interview:
Ben Cohen - Time to
Brive
