John Eales: half CEO, half legend, 100 per cent guru on art of captaincy

Times

5 days ago

Let's start with the nickname because, as everyone seems to know, John Eales's nickname is 'Nobody'. As most people also seem to know, it came about because of the saying that nobody is perfect. Eales laughs and protests: 'Nobody ever calls me that.' Not strictly true, but here's how it started.
It's at the end of Australia's tour in November 1996. Eales, by that stage, had a World Cup winners' medal from 1991 and had been captain for a year. He was already a long way to establishing himself as one of the all-time greats.
At the end of the tour, the players had a tradition where they would buy one other player a joke gift. Eales was given a book from the Mr Men series; it was Mr Perfect.
'No one had ever called me that,' Eales, 55, says. 'But then Campo [David Campese] says, 'Oh, that's ridiculous, nobody's perfect' and he must have thought it was funny and said it to a journalist, who interpreted it as what my team-mates called me. The reality was that nobody ever called me that, but once that had happened, it just had a life of its own.'
Only very occasionally thereafter did any team-mates call him 'Nobody' and that, he says, was just 'to annoy me'. Meanwhile, here in Sydney, passers-by still sometimes call him it. 'What's funny,' he says, 'is that over in the UK, I get it all the time.'
If it has somehow stuck, though, it does not feel inappropriate. We are in his offices near the harbour talking about the state of the game, the state of the British & Irish Lions series and the challenges of captaincy. It is fascinating to see how his mind works. He is half rugby legend, half chief executive, 100 per cent cerebral.
I ask him about the psychology of the third Test, with the Lions already 2-0 up. 'People overrate emotion as a defining difference between winning and losing,' he says. 'When you're playing at this level in big Test matches, it's going to be very similar across the board. No one wants it more than someone else.
'Look, I played in a lot of great teams and also in other teams where people said, 'They lack passion' — but in reality what we lacked was skill. I have a strong view that there's often very little difference between the best teams in the world at their best. The biggest difference is when they're at their worst. And it's not being bad for minutes, it's being bad for moments.'
Eales cites the lineout the Wallabies lost straight after half-time in the first Test in Brisbane that led to a Lions try: 'It's just having those lapses for moments. It is what costs you momentum.'
So if he was Harry Wilson, the Australia captain, he wouldn't be focusing on emotion for this final Test? 'Going into a big game like this, your number one, two and three focus has to be: what skills do we need? What are the tactics we're taking into this game? And what are the skills we need to execute expertly to be able to deliver on those tactics and strategy?' Eales says.
'There might be ten different ways you can win a rugby game. So then you've got to say: OK, what is our best chance to beat this Lions team this weekend, and what are we going to focus on to be able to do that?'
I ask him how different the task would be for a captain today; it is 24 years since he left the fray and leading young people is now a different challenge. He says two things. One: he's glad that he didn't have to deal with social media, and two: the standards of competition across leading nations are higher, which makes it harder to get to the top.
Yet he's not persuaded that the way teams work now is really so different. He goes back to when he joined the Australia senior set-up in 1991: 'For a new guy coming in, I hope it's not a lot different to when I first walked into a Wallabies camp and [the captain] Nick Farr-Jones shook my hand and said: 'Great, it's so good to have you as part of this team. We expect you're going to be a part of this for a long time to come,' ' Eales says. 'When I was captain, I always used to think: I want someone to feel like I did that day.
'I also remember before playing my first Test, Tim Gavin [the No8] came up and said: 'Mate, don't worry, whenever you're out there, we're there with you. If you need us, we're there.' '
He sees no reason why that shouldn't be the message today, too. Don't forget that leadership and high-performance is pretty much Eales's specialist subject.
The captain he loved watching as a boy was the Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Rives. 'I found him an inspirational guy,' he says, 'and I later became very friendly with him.' In his playing career, he enjoyed jousting with Martin Johnson — 'a guy I had the highest regard for'.
Eales is the man who retired as a World Cup-winning captain and then looked to see how to apply his understanding of leadership to business. In the process, he wrote two books called Learning From Legends — one where he interviewed 41 sportspeople, the other a business version with 34 commerce leaders.
He recalls the chapter with the tennis player, Pat Rafter: 'I remember him talking about when he was unsuccessful in the early stages of his grand-slam career and the pressure he was under and struggling with that pressure,' Eales says. 'His brother, who was his coach, said to him: 'Pat, what you have to understand is that no one performs well under pressure. It's the people who can remove the pressure from that environment that are actually able to perform well.' That to me was a great insight.'
He then gives his own experience of the same issue: 'When I first started [place] kicking, I struggled. John Connolly [the Queensland coach] was the one who said: 'Mate, you're kicking.' I said: 'No I'm not.' I tried to get out of it but couldn't. Then I'd go to bed the night before the game thinking: I hope I don't get a kick to win or lose a game. That is a horrible thing and the wrong thing to be thinking.'
Eales did two things to help himself: he ingrained a set-kicking routine and persuaded himself that if this process was right, then he could forgive himself whatever the result.
'When I spoke to Pat probably 15 years later, I looked back and saw that it's exactly what I did when I was in my early 20s to remove that pressure of the moment,' he says. 'There's no magic in that. But it's liberating.'
Eales on the learning stages of a captain is brilliant. You start off, he says, 'being unconsciously incompetent, like you don't know what you're not good at. And then you're consciously incompetent: you know what you're not good at and you work at it.
'You've got to be consciously incompetent before you can actually be consciously competent, which is when you know what you're not good at — you still work at it but now you're actually competent at it. The last step is unconsciously competent, where you're just doing things naturally.'
Where he was unconsciously incompetent, he says, was not realising he wasn't having 'the tough conversations' — 'You had to really work at them, and then you became more natural at them.'
The coach, Rod Macqueen, was his problem. 'I don't think we started off on the right foot,' he says. 'Initially I didn't have the confidence to confront him directly.'
This came to a head in 1997. 'He was challenging me saying, 'You're not supporting me enough in my decisions.' And I said: 'Well, actually, you're not including me enough in your decisions.' It was a longer and more colourful conversation than that.'
Yet it was the turning point that forged one of the great coach-captain duos. Together they won the 1999 World Cup. Two years later, Eales captained the most recent Wallabies team to win a Lions series. By then, he had been captain for six years.
It makes you wonder, then, where Saturday's two captains have got to in the learning process. Wilson has only led Australia since last autumn. The Lions' Maro Itoje started as England captain six months ago. Both are presumably still learning fast because, as we know, nobody is perfect.