LONG READ 'The hairdryer treatment is like caviar, you don't use it very often'

The half-time hairdryer lives on. Michael Cheika’s table-banging dressing room rant at Welford Road on Saturday night was fortunately only broadcast in vision rather than with sound otherwise the Premier Sports bleepometer might well have blown up but the message from the X-rated mime was crystal clear.

Up it, Tigers.

The fact Leicester then put 26 unanswered points on Ulster indicated the rev-up worked. So much for the theory modern youth and by extension the present generation of sportsmen cannot cope with direct verbal confrontation.

Michael Cheika in conversation with our studio panel after coaching his @LeicesterTigers side to the knockouts 🐅

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The former Wallabies coach would have preferred the outside world not to have seen his shock and awe tactics – he claimed he would put a towel over the dressing room camera next time – but he was unapologetic over his use of them.

“It was just honest talk,” he said. “It’s what I honestly felt and if I don’t say what I honestly feel with a target in mind what’s the point in having half-time. What’s the point in going through it if we’re not going to get something from it?

“I don’t want to just go through the motions. If I feel passionately about an issue then I want to make sure that point is heard by the players.

“I don’t like doing that but I like the fact they reacted to that and responded. Even in the changing room they spoke really well afterwards and got themselves moving straight away, ready to go out and make a few moves.”

I normally cover up the camera but I forgot and I had a bit of a tantrum pointing and gesticulating.

As a general rule coaches limit the number of tactical points they are trying to make at half-time to three. Any more and the players, in their heightened state, are unable to take them in. An emotional tirade – essentially a motivational jump lead – is much more straightforward to process.

The Leicester squad had a taste of it from Cheika back in October when they went in at half-time against Gloucester 11 points down at home in the Premiership. They turned the game around after the break to win. Cheika described the hairdryer setting that day as at its very lowest.

“There are a couple more in me,” he warned.

Now his players have found that out.

A coach needs the respect of his players to go where Cheika did. Shout your mouth off at a group who do not believe in you and you are signing a professional suicide note. If the thread tying a changing room together is fraying, nothing can be guaranteed to speed up the process of deterioration quicker.

Cheika, with his standing in the game and having guided Leicester into the Champions Cup knockout stages and the Premiership play-off spots in his six months at the club, has sufficient working capital to be able to do pretty much what he likes. The Tigers still blow too hot and cold – hence Cheika’s outburst – but desperately hope he will extend his 12-month contract.

Knowing the Australian as they do now, the Leicester players on the receiving end of his explosion will have regarded it as authentic, which is important. Players have to believe this sort of thing is not just an act.

Cheika is an animated personality. His emotions are never too far from the surface in the stands, never mind behind closed doors. So it was in character.

It is hard to picture some coaches ever losing their rag – the measured Phil Dowson at Premiership champions Northampton, say. But as viewers tuned into the Saints’ game against Saracens on TNT last month saw, he can go bang at half-time too when the mood takes him.

If you keep kicking the dog it never comes near you when you’re walking down the pathway and it’s the same in rugby.

“I normally cover up the camera but I forgot and I had a bit of a tantrum pointing and gesticulating,” said the Northampton director of rugby.

“My wife showed me that immediately when I got back in after the game. When you can’t hear the sound it looks even more ridiculous. It was pathetic.”

There is an argument the surprise detonation, coming from a normally calm coach, carries more impact. Dowson’s view is that as embarrassing as watching the performance back can be there is value in the occasional fireworks display.

“Sometimes that emotional stimuli is necessary but I think the less frequently you use it the more powerful it is,” said Dowson.

“You’ve got to choose your moments. If you do it every week it becomes very, very boring effectively and you don’t get the pull out of the players. The players become immune to it after a while.

“It’s a bit like caviar – you don’t use it very often.”

Steve Diamond, at Newcastle, agrees it is unwise to overdo the histrionics.

“You can’t keep kicking the dog,” he said. “If you keep kicking the dog it never comes near you when you’re walking down the pathway and it’s the same in rugby.”

Diamond, you might imagine, would be a director of rugby who likes to have the volume set at maximum. Not so apparently. Not at Newcastle anyway.

“It depends what gang of lads you’ve got,” he said. “Mike Cheika knows his lads now and thinks he can get a response and he obviously did at the weekend.

“Leicester are probably inconsistent in some people’s eyes; they win a game, lose a game, that type of thing.

“If it’s attitude, which generally it looks like it’s that way, or incompetence, then a good old bollocking doesn’t go amiss.

“When you’ve got a group of lads like I have here who are generally browbeaten, I don’t think that works.

“I’ve been reasonably strict with my lads this week, to be fair, over not believing in their own abilities but if you keep kicking players when they’re down it doesn’t work.”

The loudhailer option remains part of the coach’s playbook and in a game of controlled aggression that is only right, but it does have limits.

This weekend Leicester are in Toulouse. If Antoine Dupont and his silky sidekicks are in the mood, the Tigers will need more than just Cheika’s powderkeg oratory to be able to stop the European champions.