Ian McGeechan: Why saying yes to Doncaster took 'about five seconds'

Ian McGeechan says it took him five seconds to take Doncaster Knights chairman Steve Lloyd up on his offer to become the Championship club’s new consultant director of rugby.

While still heavily involved in the game through his media work, the Lions legend has not been actively involved at club level since he left Yorkshire Carnegie in May 2019.

The 77-year-old, though, jumped at the chance to not only mentor young head coach Joe Ford but also help Doncaster become the focal point for young talent in the county.

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Speaking to RugbyPass, the former Scotland and Lions player and coach said: “I enjoy Steve’s company. We have known each other now for over 10 years, and we have been on committees together and things, and at the moment we are looking at the best way we can set up the academy in Yorkshire.

“We were just talking about it and said, well did I fancy having a look at it and having an overview of the club as a consultant DoR. I’m pleased we had that conversation. I thought about it for about five seconds, and I thought, ‘I’d like to do that’.

𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 | A Knight for the Knights ⚔

Read here👇🏻https://t.co/kSJXFIgdjp pic.twitter.com/hiNwk3TmaV

— Doncaster Knights 🏉 (@DoncasterKnight) February 29, 2024

“It’s a good set-up. They have got young players, Joe is a good young coach and I’d just like to be able to think I can support and mentor him a little bit and help the next generation.

“I have always got on well with Joe and had good conversations with him (when together at Leeds) and he is turning into a very good coach, which is what the game wants and needs.

“For me, it’s nice. I can just try and use the experience and knowledge I have built up and share it with him, the staff and the players to make it as good and, hopefully, as happy a place as possible.”

Having won it all at Wasps, the most successful of his coaching spells in the Premiership, McGeechan last took charge of a team at Leeds in 2015 – for two games in a caretaker capacity after Gary Mercer and then Tommy McGhee lost their jobs in yet another turbulent year for the Headingley club.

However, McGeechan has made it clear that current head coach Joe Ford would be leading the rugby operation at Doncaster whose director of rugby, until he quit on February 19, was Steve Boden.

“We have agreed Joe is responsible for the rugby and I’m really a sounding board for him,” said McGeechan, who was made a knight of the realm in 2009.

“So yes, I will be involved in talking about the rugby, looking at things, analysing aspects of the games when the team is playing and just being there for any conversations he [Joe] wants to have, and to also help in some of the other wider aspects of the director of rugby role which are a bit more away directly from the team.”

Bringing the Yorkshire academy to Castle Park will be front and centre of his focus in this respect. Currently the RFU fund and run the Yorkshire academy, which has had no fixed abode since Carnegie lost the license in 2020.

As such, any Premiership-standard players are lost to the region between the ages of 18 and 23. Depending on the funding structure agreed in the new professional game partnership agreement, which is due to be signed off in a matter of weeks, Doncaster would be the perfect fit given its excellent training and playing facilities.

“I have been working in the background a little bit on the academy set-up since it came back into RFU hands and it is just part of the ongoing conversations at the moment with the new agreement between RFU and PRL,” he said.

“There is an agreement that there will be a Yorkshire academy and I certainly have ideas on the best template for it and how it can develop the best Yorkshire talent, and it makes a lot of sense for that to be directed through the top Championship club (Doncaster) or Premiership 2 if it comes that.

“There is no doubt there is a strong base of talent and numbers. The players have to go through somewhere at the top end of the academy and it should be a Yorkshire club. To do it properly it has to be through Doncaster. They are head and shoulders ahead of everyone else at the moment.

“If the talent stays, it keeps developing. The Yorkshire identity is kept and the players stay with their friends. At the moment they are having to go outside Yorkshire and they shouldn’t have to. There is no doubt we lose players because some don’t want to do that.

“If Doncaster are still in the Championship, Steve Lloyd has got a very good attitude about it all. If there is an obvious potential Premiership or potential England player there would be an arrangement to put them into a Premiership club, so it makes it a genuine pathway.”

McGeechan couldn’t have come back into the Championship at a more tumultuous time for the league with its relevance to the overall structure of English rugby being fiercely debated.

“There has been a lot of discussion about what the top end of the game looks like best so in the next 12 to 18 months there will probably be some significant developments. I shall await and see.”