Byron McGuigan’s eyes were trained on the field like a sniper’s scope, pupils darting from one phase to the next, gum chewed to pulp and walkie-talkie held at the ready, as Bristol’s attacking thrusts met a wall of Mancunian malevolence. The match had long been won, Sale sticking 38 unanswered points on the Bears before a reeling Ashton Gate, but the big, beautiful zero on the scoreboard continued to transfix their new defence coach.
Sale hunted like wolves all evening. Clad in bright orange, they clogged the wide channels, hemming Bristol in the middle then smoked them over and over with their brutal hitmen. In the final, forlorn passage, the Bears bounced left and right and back again, before, hopelessly stymied, an aimless grubber ended their quest for points. McGuigan was mobbed by the Sharks on the touchline. This was as startling – and complete – a defensive performance as the Premiership has seen in an age.
McGuigan arrived home late that night. Once a rugged Scotland wing, he thought about the emotions he’d felt watching his boys obliterate England’s sharpest attack; how the two-man shots and the unrelenting snarl tugged at his soul.
🧠 An incredible chat with @SaleSharksRugby defence coach Byron McGuigan!
💪 An immense effort from the Sharks side saw them shut-out an opponent for the first time in four years!#BRIvSAL | #GallagherPrem pic.twitter.com/6lZhffgnDd
— Rugby on TNT Sports (@rugbyontnt) December 27, 2024
“I said to my family, ‘that moment at full-time is up there with playing for Scotland’. I honestly didn’t expect it. I didn’t know it was happening or that the boys on the field were saying, ‘let’s nil them, let’s nil them’. The feeling I had, with that group I care about so much, was special. It’s very hard to replicate.
“I am always chasing that high. It’s the high I got when I scored a try or I sang Flower of Scotland. I still get that same feeling when the opposition don’t score because I’m so competitive. I get more of it in a game. We just need three or four good sequences – I had four of those highs against Bristol. That high at full-time was a high I haven’t experienced.”
McGuigan has only been in post officially for six weeks, since Jamie Langley’s return to rugby league. He’d spent time building his craft at numerous clubs around the Northwest so that, when he retired at the Sharks in 2023, he was ready to become part of Alex Sanderson’s coaching staff. The players buy in to his mindset as much as his considered defensive strategy. Ben Curry, player of the match on Friday night, spoke of “putting our heads in dark places” and “lads wanting to hit for Byron”.
“They have to believe in the plan and execute the plan,” McGuigan says. “If the team loses, that falls on the coach. Players win games and coaches lose them.
“I know there’s a lot of care amongst the group. I really value that – we are all human beings, and a lot of those boys jumping on me at full-time are quite young, guys who people don’t really know. That shot shows the level of respect I will give the youngest guy in our squad. I like to give them all the same respect.
“When I have that relationship with these guys, I can be really honest with them. Away in Glasgow we weren’t playing well, I went in at half-time and told them, ‘this is not the plan, you said one thing and are doing another’. Because of the relationship I have with them, they are able to take that. Outside of that everyday stuff, we have a laugh and a coffee, a drink together – we have real friendships.”
It’s worth lingering on that West Country shellacking a moment longer, for nobody has declawed the Bears so spectacularly this season. Bristol averaged six tries, 18 line breaks and 32 tackle breaks per Premiership match. They sacked Welford Road six days earlier with a bamboozling array of innovation and accuracy and an extraordinary 54 points. They had the best red-zone conversion rate in the league, a devastating 44% of their 22 visits ending in tries. Ashton Gate was sold out and baying for more Pat Lam pizzazz.
What the locals witnessed was a massacre. Those absurd Bears numbers fell off a cliff. They made five fewer breaks and beat 10 fewer defenders than normal, and were shut out for the first time in a league match for more than eight years. They averaged just two metres per carry – half of Sale’s respective yardage from almost twice as many runs and the lion’s share of possession. They made a dozen jaunts to the Sale 22 yet took nothing from them. There were close to fifty phases of Bristolian attack at the Sharks front doorstep and McGuigan’s beastly warriors did not buckle. Gilded, celebrated and exalted all season, Bristol were crushed.
“The type of defence we are trying to use is a line speed defence which is very efficient,” McGuigan says. “Our timing off the line together is really important. A blitz is very much one-on-one tackles, we are flying, trying to make reads. That system works really well, I just think attacks are that much better at being that much deeper, moving the ball really early and beating the defence around the outside.
When someone is running at you, no matter how big he is, it’s ‘I’m f***ing coming for you, I’m going to hit you’.
“We are trying to take as much space while the ball is in the air. Our timing off that line from that first pass is key. We’ve got to have the ability to swim out the back of plays. I thought we did that really well at the weekend.
“Al is very good at creating a theme. We know Bristol are at their most creative in the wide channels. He talked about ‘caging the bears’ which meant our line speed being really effective on the outside, stopping them getting there, and forcing them to play between the 15s where they become like every other team and a lot easier to manage.
“And that’s where we can hit in twos, be the Sale Sharks we want to be – super-physical, pride ourselves on our work ethic.”
Coaches often talk about the unique psychology of defence. You have to want to suffer. You have to welcome the fight and embrace the pain of steaming off the line and colliding with a 120kg monster. Without that edge, no system, however brilliant, can succeed.
“When I took over, I told the players, what comes first? Is it the technical detail I give you, or is it the attitude to bang somebody,” McGuigan says. “I broke them up into small groups, and they all said ‘our desire has to come before the detail’. Awesome. To what percentage? The majority agreed it was 80:20 attitude to detail.
“When someone is running at you, no matter how big he is, it’s ‘I’m f***ing coming for you, I’m going to hit you’. That other 20% is crucial because you can’t just have an attitude with no system allowing you to do that. There’s a lot of detail in that 20%. So much that you might think ‘bloody hell’ but when you’re coaching, and you get that 20% aligned with 80% attitude, you get a really good performance.”
At 35, McGuigan is a rookie in pro coaching terms. Most defensive thought leaders – Jacques Nienaber, Shaun Edwards, Andy Farrell – have been at it for a decade and more. In a sense, so has McGuigan. He did not possess the same raw materials as the back-three showstoppers he battled. And so he learned to stifle them, to cut off plays, whack them ball-and-all, predict how a move would unfold. Defence became his USP.
“I was quick enough but never the quickest. I didn’t have the exciting pace of Duhan van der Merwe or Arron Reed. If everybody was top-end faster than me, I needed to be a faster thinker than them. I needed to stop them getting the ball. I had to be in the right position, so I could see what the attack was going to do. It’s like playing Under-12s rugby as a small child against a big child – you had to find other ways of staying in the game. It came through defence.
Over time playing on the wing, defence being my super-strength, I formulated a system in my head. I kept layering on top of it and found a massive love for it.
“I would defend really high on edges, I would find a system which would help me get high and be on the front foot. Sometimes I’d be found out and realise I needed, for example, those people inside me to do this. Over time playing on the wing, defence being my super-strength, I formulated a system in my head. I kept layering on top of it and found a massive love for it. I scored a lot of interception tries, putting myself in really good defensive positions. That’s where the passion came from. I needed that to make me a better player.”
As a young professional, McGuigan could be challenging to coach. He struggled to unseat the established Scotland wingers when he moved from South Africa to Glasgow in 2012 and grew frustrated at his lack of game time. His approach to training – all-out aggression – was not universally popular.
“I didn’t want to waste an opportunity to get better. You train like you play. I would train with an intensity not many people did – it’s just the way I am. Sometimes that gets looked at in a negative light. I like to watch our boys train with super intensity, I like to see that in their eyes.
“I’m a lot calmer in my mind and thinking now. My competitive level is still sky high. I’m a constant voice, I’ll talk to the boys all the time and because I run water, I have the ability to give any message I think is important – cool, calm and clear so the boys know what to hold on to.”
Going… Going… GONE!
Superb from Byron McGuigan, a massive try for @SaleSharksRugby!
He read Catrakilis like a book and turned on the afterburners 🔥 pic.twitter.com/FPW2XGTj1w
— Rugby on TNT Sports (@rugbyontnt) April 5, 2019
These days McGuigan is in the Sharks’ Carrington base for 6am and doesn’t get back into his car for another 12 hours. He spends the evening with his family, puts the kids to bed, and then cranks up the laptop until around 11. This is the lot of the modern-day coach but it’s also fuelled by a fear of failure, of spurning a chance which could have been seized with just a little more graft.
“I look back on my career with great pride, I maximised my potential but I still think, I wonder if there was more. That’s what drives me to get out of bed every day – how do I make people better? We won 38-0 on the weekend but we are scratching the surface, there has to be more. That’s how I live my life – how can I be better as a coach, as a person? You have to do the work. While people sleep, I am working, making sure I maximise the opportunity to give us the best chance. Belief and visualisation. I visualised playing for Scotland. I will visualise how I want to see my coaching journey going.”
In that respect, McGuigan’s skin tells the story of his life. He has Namibia, where he was born, South Africa and Cape Town, where he was raised, and Scotland, the nation of his mother, tattooed on his body. The names of his parents, dates of his children’s births and hospital coordinates, homages to his Christian faith and the clubs he’s played for all have their patch. There’s a stag for Rossendale RUFC, the local club he’d coached, and a lion with an Indigenous American chief’s feathers as its mane, to mark his time with Exeter.
“I like to map out my journey as a human. We are in the hunt for three trophies this year – the Prem Cup, Champions Cup and Prem. If we win one of the significant trophies, then I’ve gotta put that on as a memory. Maybe on the ribs. Depends if I can keep the stomach in check.”
Scottish Rugby will be eyeing his progress keenly. That howitzer performance hoisted Sale up to third. They have won their past three matches conceding zero, ten and seven points respectively. Only Bath have shipped fewer tries. They head for Gloucester on Saturday, the team closest in philosophy to Bristol, and scorned by a slapdash loss at hitherto winless Exeter.
“I’ve said to the boys we haven’t cracked it, we can’t possibly have cracked it – we’ve only been doing it together for two months. In football terms in the past Liverpool beat Manchester United 7-0 then lost 1-0 to Bournemouth.
“I spoke to the boys bout not being a flash in the pan and understanding a really good team backs up a really good performance. Gloucester will be desperate and stimulated; it’s about finding a way to make sure we are driven and mentally on it.
“We want to get to a point where we don’t have to think about, ‘this is my cue, I need to get off the line, I need to go up square, I have to hit in twos’. I’m trying to build habits where that stuff is instinctive. That’s where we will grow and get better.”
Do we really have to start using the term "shut-out" ? 🙁