After all, the last thing the cash-strapped Scottish Rugby Union needs at the moment is an outsider who wants to tinker with (or indeed make wholesale changes to) the new vision which has been pulled together at not inconsiderable cost.
Securing the services of Nucifora – the highly rated former IRFU performance director – was seen as a significant coup at the time, and on top of his own remuneration package, Scottish Rugby have now spent the summer hiring seven department heads to oversee ‘Athletic Performance and Sports Science’, ‘Physio and Rehab’ , ‘Performance Pathway’, ‘Nutrition’, ‘Analysis’, ‘Operations and Logistics’ and ‘Coach of Development and Match Officials’, with combined salaries in the ball park of £1m per year.
Meanwhile, the fact that hiring a ‘Head of Women Performance and Pathways’ has been put off until after the summer did not go down well with those who believe there is a disconnect between what Murrayfield preaches and what it practices when it comes to supporting and developing the women’s game. Recent unrest over player contracts and the departure of Bryan Easson as the women’s national team head coach has fanned these flames of discontent.
Nucifora’s decision to treat his appointment as a work from home project – jetting in from his native Australia during last season’s Autumn and Six Nations Test windows, then spending the summer as ‘General Manager for Performance’ with the Lions back in his homeland – means that the implementation stage of his programme is going to be a much harder sell to the Scottish rugby public than it needed to be.
It was argued that in the internet age he has only ever been a zoom call away, and that he was able to combine his Lions role with overseeing the restructuring going on at Murrayfield, but neither of those claims hold water.
Setting up something as delicately balanced as a national performance programme for a multi-faceted sport like rugby – hiring key staff, fine-tuning the missing detail, and selling the plan and goals to stakeholders – surely needs a human connection. He needed to be here to front up meetings, explain rationale and convince people that this is a leap of faith worth supporting.
And it is most definitely a full-time job – not something you can fit in between training sessions on the other side of the world – which is perhaps why so many stakeholders have been left feeling disenfranchised.
We hear of frustration among staff inside the performance department about the lack of consultation and clarity with regards to the restructuring.
Meanwhile, youngsters in the pathways (outside the small number on stage-three full-time contracts) have been left in a state of limbo.
Their JSAP [Junior Scottish Academy Player] contracts – which included medical cover – were cancelled at the end of June, and there has been no meaningful communication since then to explain whether they are going to remain part of the pathway programme in the season ahead.
This season’s pathway coaches have not yet been appointed (or at least not revealed), there has been some ad-hoc strength and conditioning sessions but no detail on a regular training schedule, there has been no update on whether there is going to be an under-19s programme at district or international level, and there appears to have been no formal feedback process following Scotland Under-18s’ Six Nations Festival campaign in Vichy, Italy, back in April.
Some stalwarts of the performance department have done a heroic job keeping things going as well as they can, but they must feel like they are operating with one hand behind their back.
Being a pathway player is a big commitment, with up to four extra training sessions per week. These young people should have been given an idea of what was going to be expected of them as they considered real life matters such as future work and study options over the summer. This simply isn’t good enough.
Implementing change in any business is tricky, especially when jobs are at stake, but there are ways of managing the process to make it easier for everyone involved. There needs to be some continuity in handling the core product – in this instance emerging players – and maintaining open lines of communication with those affected is crucial, so as to manage expectations and explain timescales. It is almost three months since Nucifora gave his last public briefing as Scottish Rugby performance director, when he provided a broad brush outline of what he has in mind for the performance department, and just an ongoing sense of drift since then.
Scottish Rugby needs to get a firm grip on the whole situation soon. And Nucifora needs to demonstrate that he is fully committed to getting it right.