Richard Hill gets tough to prepare Worcester for Premiership
“Accountability was the big issue,” says Richard Hill. “There wasn’t any.
Changing attitudes: Richard Hill faces a huge challenge to get Worcester back into top flight Photo: GETTY IMAGES
By Paul Ackford 6:00PM BST 23 Apr 2011
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''There were no performance management systems in place for the medical guys, the strength and conditioning people, the academy staff or the administrative side. Nobody had any aims or objectives set for them. They used to come into work in their own little worlds.” For the man hired by owner Cecil Duckworth to return Worcester to the Premiership, it was all a bit baffling.
Hill’s response to Worcester’s predicament is fascinating. A week today they play Bedford for a place in the play-off final where victory will catapult them back into the top flight. There is no trepidation. “Do I feel under pressure? Honestly? No. Everyone’s in good spirits and that’s what we want. Back in July our aim was to bounce back up and nothing has changed. There was no way we weren’t getting to a semi-final so right from July we knew that May 1 was the only day which was going to be important. In that sense the pressure has been constant from the off.”
Arriving at Worcester from lowly French club Chalon-sur-Saône, where Hill had expected to spend another two years, he encountered wonderful facilities, fantastically loyal supporters and a mess. “Take the medical side as an example. We had an abnormally high rate of shoulder and calf injuries, but we didn’t know why that was the case. Was it because we used our indoor facility too much? Was it the way we trained? We simply didn’t know. So we set targets to reduce the incidence of those types of injuries through better medical screening, varying our training surfaces, changing the stretching and prehab programmes, and they’ve reduced considerably.”
That lack of focus was systemic throughout the club. Hill was staggered to discover there was no programme of nutrition in place, so he persuaded Worcester to hire Adam Carey, the nutritionist who was part of Sir Clive Woodward’s 2003 World Cup team and who regularly appears on TV shows like Celebrity Fit Club. “The average body fat of our squad was over 14 per cent a year ago. It’s now down to 10.8 per cent.”
Culturally, too, things have shifted. “One of the things I stressed was the importance of having fit players available. The Premiership average is around 75 per cent of the squad up and running on any given day. I wanted ours to hit 80 per cent, and because that target was put in place the medical staff bust a gut during the week to ensure that they got the players fit. Now, when someone says, ‘I’ve got a slight niggle’, they will say, ‘No, you haven’t. I’m going to tell Hilly you’re fit to play’. You know what players are like, whinging at the slightest twinge. That doesn’t happen any more, and it has changed mindsets. We joke about it, but I’ve said to the players, ‘If you go down in a game, make sure you are mortally wounded because the physios are not going to come on for you. Don’t go down if you’re tired and want a blow, or if someone’s given you a dead leg because you can lie there as long as you like but no one is going to look after you’. This weekend at the end of a long season we had 36 out of a squad of 37 up for selection.”
Hill smiles as he expands on Worcester’s transformation, but there is no disguising the seriousness of the situation in those early days. “It had got to the stage where the players came to me and said they wanted to move out of the dressing room we use on match days and for training because it was associated with failure. I said that once they’d won a few matches they’d associate it with success. But that was how it was for them in the Premiership. They used to put everything into games and lose by a point. That gets you down after a while.”
In a bid for greater integration and collective responsibility, Hill insisted that employees in all areas of the club got together regularly. “We’ve got this great guy, Lee Morrow, who cleans out our indoor training base and works as a steward on match days. He now comes in to chat to the players and the coaches, and that’s the way it should be. It’s all about respect. If you don’t know the cleaner, you can be a bit sloppy and messy, but if you’ve met him and understood that he’s responsible for sorting out your mess, you’re less likely to trash the place.”
And now comes the crucial test. For all the harmony, the accountability and the sense of fun which seems to pervade Worcester, Hill knows that his season, possibly his job, will come down to a game against Bedford a week today, followed by a two-leg final against the winner of the other semi-final between the Cornish Pirates and London Welsh. Everything has been planned for precisely this stage of the campaign. Three-week development windows, where groups of six players were given a week off and then beasted in the gym to get them in the best possible shape, have gone on since the start of the season. Hill has even stood down his first-choice team this weekend, the side that played Bedford yesterday in the British and Irish Cup bearing no relation to the one that will take on Bedford again in the Championship semi-final.
“We’ll be ready,” Hill says. He’d better be. One mistake and it’s wonky old Worcester all over again.
performance management systems, getty images, calf injuries, changing attitudes, medical side, administrative side, academy staff, loyal supporters, medical screening, french club, strength and conditioning, top flight, trepidation, predicament, may 1, accountability, spirits, rsquo, aims, surfaces
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