Be thankful that Les Kiss will remain within Irish rugby, but be wary of the vacuum that will be left within the national team as the assistant coach heads north to Ulster after seven years defending the wall.
In the professional era, only Eddie O’Sullivan, the former Ireland head coach, can claim more hours of service on the training pitch than Kiss and that speaks volumes about the Australian’s commitment to his adopted country.
The 50-year-old’s allegiance was tested early on after he had already accepted Declan Kidney’s invitation to be a part of his new coaching team in 2008. Having worked previously with the Blue Bulls in South Africa, Kiss was offered a role with Leicester Tigers by Heyneke Meyer, the former Bulls coach. However, he had already pledged himself to Ireland without knowing where the job would take him.
Now he departs to become director of rugby with Ulster, a position awarded to him a year ago after a short secondment spell in the role in the summer of 2014 and it is a challenge that matches his ambition to be the main man.
Kiss heads for Kingspan Stadium having won three Six Nations championships, including a Grand Slam, and claiming the patent rights on the choke tackle that became Ireland’s greatest defensive weapon.
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The choke tackle, the tactic that sees a ball carrier held up rather than brought to ground, is a product of Kiss’s appetite for innovation.
“You’re always exploring ways to get an advantage. It evolved over a period of time into a formative strategy. You have to take your hat off to the players first and foremost because they understood it and they took hold of it,” he said last year.
“The real genesis of it came in a conversation with Mark Lawrence, the referee against England at Twickenham [in 2010]. We asked him, ‘If we hold the ball up and it goes into a maul, what happens?’ He said that if it’s a maul and it’s held up and goes to ground and can’t be played, then it’s our scrum. So it sort of morphed from there.”
The philosophy at the centre of Kiss’s coaching approach has always been to cross-pollinate. As a young academy coach in rugby league, Kiss studied other sports, such as swimming, Australian Rules football and cricket to establish his core values.
He also looked abroad to immerse himself in new cultures and spent time coaching in South Africa, Japan and London and throughout all of these experiences, Kiss discovered what methods were transferable and which were not.
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“I just became a student, trying to learn how to think beyond the conventional,” Kiss said in 2012. “I’ve always thought you can approach things from a different angle and how you see if there’s another way you can approach it. That’s one thing that’s always kept me refreshed in terms of my coaching approach without losing sight of the basics.”
Kiss may be quietly spoken but his conversations are endless. He engages and searches for other opinions, theories and arguments no matter who offers them up and you can see why he has gotten so much out of the Irish players for so long.
On the training pitch, however, he is direct and distinctive. Players are left in no doubt as to what his defensive system demands. He does not confine his statistical feedback to just pure hits and misses in the tackle; he identifies what types of tackles his players miss and how to correct him. A good coach always thinks critically, drills down and produces the vital gem of information that can improve a player’s performance. It is that clarity of message that makes him the excellent leader that Ireland will do well to replace.
The performance of the Irish team in defeat by Argentina on Sunday did no justice to his legacy and despite the ever-increasing ferocity of Test rugby, the players should always aim to achieve the incredible defensive feats of the past.
Under Kiss, two of the headiest days for Ireland’s defensive wall came in 2009, when the side missed just two tackles out of 79 against England at Croke Park, and in 2011, when all but six Irish hits missed their target against Australia at the World Cup.
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The iconic image from that day in New Zealand is of Stephen Ferris and the Irish pack hauling Will Genia, the Australian scrum half, backwards in a choke tackle. Kiss never made a tackle for Ireland in seven years, but he was behind every single hit.