Uncertain Times

Replacing a guy like Coetzee is more complicated than it seems.

By Tom Savage9 min read

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]F[/su_dropcap]or years, all I knew in my life is that nothing was certain. Where would I be sleeping that night? Some days I didn’t know. It depended on whether the hostel had space booked in advance and whether or not I could convince the guy at the desk to hold something for me while I scraped money together.

What would I be eating? I didn’t know. It depended on what was in the clearance aisle of Tesco or Lidl, which depended on where I was sleeping that night because if I was far away from those places, I would have to walk over there to get the food which might be further away than it was worth it to walk. Some days I knew that it would be hostel rent or food but not both. Some nights it would easier to go to sleep early before I got really hungry so I wouldn’t spend hostel money I needed for the day after.

It was unsettling, to put it mildly. It put a knot in my stomach. A Croatian guy I shared a communal kitchen with once said: “uncertainty is the enemy of… good vibes” while we were trying to talk about his gig delivering takeaway food through a site called Marvin (which is closed now, strangely enough) and while he meant to say something else – English was an issue for him – I think he put it better than I could while I’m sat here looking at this laptop now.

Uncertainty is the enemy of good vibes. 

I mean, it is, right? I speak about depth charts and contracts on this site quite regularly but every name on a depth chart is a person, not just a collection of role sets and attributes. They have a family, people rooting for them, a mortgage, kids in school that might have to be moved if they don’t get the deal they need this time around and they’re all just a footstep away from an injury that could end their career if they aren’t careful.

Where will I be playing next year? Will it be here? Or will I have to move? What will I do with the kids? Will my partner have to quit their job? 

Peter McCabe spoke about this uncertainty in an excellent article in the 42 written by Gavan Casey and one part stood out to me.

“But when you’re out of contract or you’re only getting short-term deals, and you literally don’t know if you’re going to have a job in two months or six months, the stress of it is actually horrific. How could you enjoy that? Not knowing if you’re going to have a paycheck coming in in two months? It’s a constant struggle. And even going back to my previous relationship, a lot of the issues that my ex-girlfriend and I had come down to contracts. I didn’t know if I was going to be even living in the same county as her in two months’ time, or in six months’ time, you know?”

The entire article is really worth your time but that little passage hammers home the uncertainty that comes in the one/two/three-year cycle that professional rugby players live with. So when I read today that Marcell Coetzee chose to ask Ulster for an early release from the three-year deal he signed in February 2019, I got it. I get why he wanted to go home to sign up with the Bulls after getting a pretty hefty payday for what will be five seasons and, at the time of writing, 53 caps at Ulster.

As the announcement on the Ulster site puts it;

Having returned home during the first lockdown period in the summer, the 29-year-old expressed a strong desire to remain in South Africa amidst the ongoing uncertainty around the Coronavirus pandemic. On return to Belfast, the back-row remained committed to finding a route home at the conclusion of his fifth season at Kingspan Stadium.

Life is short. A rugby career is even shorter. So I get completely why Marcell Coetzee chose to find a way to break his contract with Ulster so that he and his wife could go home. It’s completely understandable.

At the same time, I get why Ulster would let Coetzee go through gritted teeth. There’s no point keeping a player that doesn’t want to be there. There just isn’t. The same was true with Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber. Their heads and hearts were in South Africa so forcing them to finish out their contract beyond would have been an exercise in self-defeat for Munster. The same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, for Ulster in this case. They could probably have forced Coetzee to finish out his deal until 2022 but do you really want your star #8 wishing he was half a world away the entire time with an unhappy wife at home?

I mean, probably not.

And yet, I also get why Ulster’s CEO, Johnny Petrie, was so publically frustrated in the aftermath of Ulster’s announcement on Saturday.

Not only does he lose his star backrower and arguably his best player to a team who have been openly talking about how they’ve been talking to him behind Ulster’s back but he also has to try to replace him. Even with the funds that we can infer are available to Ulster due to the terms of the release agreed with the Bulls – a transfer fee, essentially – signing a player of a sufficient calibre to replace Marcell Coetzee’s proven quality is way easier said than done. Ball carrying forwards of Coetzee’s quality are not easily found because every team that doesn’t have one wants one and even then, you are probably going to have to wait to see who is actually available to sign.

It’s unlikely that Ulster can find someone looking to agitate out of their contract at this stage of the season. Finding a club looking to cut costs is more likely but, even then, you’d have to be in dire straights to get rid of a player with Marcell Coetzee’s ball carrying profile.

The easiest solution for Ulster would be to bring on someone from within. The obvious choice there is David McCann, who looks to be Marcell Coetzee’s long term successor from a role set perspective but I would argue that McCann is two years away from being physically capable of being the player that Ulster needs him to be. You could probably throw him in at the deep end next season but that could be risking the long term viability of a guy who has the ability to be a cornerstone player for Ulster for the sake of plugging a hole today.

To me, a two year deal for an established ball carrier would be a sensible fit for Ulster but then we enter a few different equations.

Does it make sense to replace Coetzee like for like with all the cost that entails?

Or is replacing parts of his role set with two other players more sensible?

If you’re going like for like, you’re going to be dealing with a very choked marketplace at the moment.

There aren’t a whole load of ready-made replacements if you’re looking at guys in the 30 test cap range who are also looking to move on from their national side status quo AND who happens to be on an expiring contract. There’s not a whole lot of value in chasing All Blacks these days for a number of reasons, none more pressing than COVID and the “All Black Cap Premium” that you have to play to tempt a player in the All Blacks test sphere.

Akira Ioane is a possible get for Ulster – his deal expires in 2021 – and he would be a pretty close fit to what Coetzee brings. It would be a tough, if doable, sell to get Ioane to turn his back on adding to his two Test caps for a two year spin in Belfast on handy money but that’s before dealing with the equally handy offers he’ll have from other New Zealand franchises, Japanese clubs or big French sides.

By the time Ioane was expiring on his proposed Ulster deal, you’d expect McCann to be ready to step into a cornerstone road by 2023. That would make sense for Ulster – Akira Ioane is enough of a name to be a big sell to fans (who you’ll want to come back to the stadium in droves as soon as it’s safe to do so) and you could justify the spend as a somewhat like for like replacement for Coetzee.

But is there a smarter option?

Would it make more sense to rebuild your ball carrying rotation with two other players? Ulster have made a lot of progress with the Coetzee/McCloskey one-two punch combo but would it be possible to reshape their back row by signing a component player like Max Deegan? Deegan isn’t a like for like replacement for Coetzee by any stretch. They both play #8 but they are incredibly different players from a role set perspective but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. Deegan is coming off an ACL injury – an element of risk there – but he’s playing in a heavily contested position in Leinster with three or four players with international caps who are currently steaming ahead of him in the depth chart.

Would a move north to Belfast make sense for a young player with 65 Leinster caps at 24 years of age but who seems to be fighting for a spot against Caelan Doris? I think it would because unless something dramatic changes for Deegan, post-recovery he looks to be a role player at Leinster struggling to bring what Doris or Conan do at #8 while struggling to offer the set-piece work that I think Leinster will want from their heavy flanker if that heavy flanker isn’t Dan Leavy.

Deegan could be the centre-piece of a new Ulster back row but I think Ulster would need to add a physical presence alongside him who could fit that set-piece role but also bring a physical on-ball presence off #9 and further out.

Someone like Len Massyn at the Lions fits the bill perfectly.

Massyn is relatively young himself – he’ll be 24 this summer and would have been perfect project player material a few years ago – but he has everything you’d want in a set-piece back row with the size and physicality to be an on-ball hitter for Ulster in their ball carrying rotation.

I don’t know Massyn’s contract situation at the Lions but if he’s available, Ulster could do a lot worse than to get this guy on a two-year deal to sort out their heavy flanker role with Max Deegan as the centre-piece #8 while McCann develops in the background.

Jack Conan is also a possibility – instead of Deegan – but, for me, he’s less desirable one for Ulster even though Conan would be closer to Coetzee’s role set than Deegan is. Conan’s age profile would allow for David McCann to slot into Conan’s role pretty seamlessly at the end of a possible two-year contract as a physical centre-piece with little contract overlap between the two.

I think Deegan has a higher ceiling than Conan and even though I’m not sold on how McCann and Deegan could play in the same back row, I think it makes sense for Ulster to go for Deegan if possible and deal with any McCann issues later. Who knows, McCann might even develop as a heavy flanker role set and save everyone a rake of trouble.

Rhys Ruddock is also a possibility but I think his role set is a little overvalued as an #8 at the moment and would be signed instead of a guy like Massyn but he would, of course, be much more expensive per annum.

These next few months – and I presume Ulster have known of the need to replace Coetzee for a few months – will be important in nailing down their recruitment for next season but they are lucky, in one way, that they have a guy like McCann to plan around.