Jeremy Davidson feels he needs 'more credibility' for job on home soil
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Jeremy Davidson nurses a plastic pint beaker of Guinness under the grandstand at Stade Pierre Fabre. It is the Castres head coach' reward for an indomitable Champions Cup pool performance completed just an hour earlier for a narrow victory over Munster and it is well deserved.
There were enough shortcomings in the Munster performance last Friday night to lay the blame for the 16-14 defeat squarely at the visitors’ dressing room door as they failed to repeat the win they had claimed here in January 2022. Yet Ian Costello’s side was also undone by the remorseless efforts of a Castres pack assembled by the long-exiled Irishman through a some shrewdly acquired imports and carefully selected core plucked from France's second tier, the Pro D2.
The former Ireland and 1997 Lions Test lock is a veteran of such modest team-building, a former Castres player forced to retire due to a knee injury at the age of 27 who after a spell at Dungannon was hired by the French club for his professional coaching role as an assistant in 2007. Yet his move back to his native Ulster on Mark McCall’s watch between 2009 and 2011 was his last employment at home, and his coaching career has continued uninterrupted and seemingly unnoticed by Irish rugby for the past 13 years, all of it in France.
Davidson spent six years maintaining Aurillac as a Pro D2 contender on a shoestring before the Top 14 came calling with the forwards coach post at Bordeaux-Bègles and onto the top job at Brive, whom he returned to the top flight in 2018-19 and kept there against the odds for three seasons.
When the former European champions luck finally ran out, early into the 2022-23 campaign, Davidson paid the price, and so would Brive, relegated at the end of that season, by which time the Ulsterman had returned to Castres and lifted them to ninth in the Top 14.
It is an impressive body of work yet curiously Davidson's name has never been linked with any vacancies at the Irish provinces and having beaten one of them on Friday night, the 50-year-old wondered aloud whether the opportunity to return home would ever arise.
“I’d love to eventually,” Davidson said. “I think I’ve been bouncing around doing a good job in many clubs that I’ve been to but I haven’t won any competitions.
“When I was at Aurillac we had the 16th budget out of 16 clubs in ProD2 and we got to a final and two semi-finals. That’s kind of what got me up to Bordeaux and then Brive, got them up from the second division to the first.
“I think if I do get a club with a bit more money I’ll be able to add a lot more to them and maybe add a bit more structure than some French coaches would but I think if I want to move home I need to have a bit more credibility and that will come from getting to the quarter-finals, semi-finals or winning something over here.
“I’m not getting any younger either so I need to start doing it quickly,” he added with a chuckle.
“But coaching on your own doorstep is probably the hardest as well because you really want to do well and the moment you don’t start doing well the knives will be out for you. It’s a tough old game, this. I’d prefer to be a journalist!”
Be careful what you wish for Jeremy, though Castres have already told him he will not be required next season when they will promote one of his assistants, Xavier Sadourny, to head coach.
For now, though, there is that Munster victory, a week on from a heavy defeat at Northampton, which keeps Castres on track for a first appearance in the Champions Cup knockout stages in 15 attempts.
“To stay alive in this competition, we needed to win tonight. Last week just really wasn't good enough. We came up against a Northampton side which was pretty slick even though the weather conditions were bad. They put us under pressure.
"I thought tonight, our energy, our enthusiasm, our keeping spirit, our work rate, kept us in the game. The first half, we pretty much dominated the first half even though we didn't score that many points. We kept Munster alive by letting them score a maul try just before half time and then the second half was difficult because we had yellow cards for Geoffrey Palis and our tighthead which put us in difficulty.
"Munster were behind so they started throwing the ball around, playing good shapes, they were actually playing quite well. I thought our scramble defence wasn't bad but I suppose our scrum kind of kept us in the game. We got four or five scrum penalties and the one which put us in front at the end of the game (kicked by Louis le Brun).
"So happy with the victory but it could have gone another way. It's not very often you see your winger jumping in, keeping the ball on the field, then kicking it out to win the game. That was positive as well. We needed a win tonight to get us ready for Bordeaux (this Saturday’s Top 14 opponents at Stade Pierre Fabre) and we'll take a lot of positives out of that."
Davidson did allow himself to take credit for Castres opening try after 13 minutes, when his side exposed some slow reactions from Munster at the front of a lineout, allowing former Connacht No.8 Abraham Papali’I to power through Craig Casey and Thaakir Abrahams. It was the second week in a row that the Reds had been opened up in such a fashion and a smiling Davidson said: "We had targeted that. We use that move quite often but more generally when they've got a scrum-half there.
“But we have been disappointed with our maul attack, we didn't get much go-forward in that area. We're very happy with our scrum tonight, the scrum was good. We knew that (Dave) Kilcoyne coming back from injury and Oli Jager coming back from injury would maybe be missing a bit of time in their legs, so we thought we could target them in that area.
"Obviously, the South African [Dian Bleuler] went off and Kilcoyne went off and Oli Jager went across to loosehead, so I think that was one of the reasons we got scrum dominance."