It began with a phone call from a South African to an Ulsterman in France, and it took in the most spectacular success ever known at an English rugby club, with six Premiership titles and three European Cups. On Saturday, Saracens’ defeat by Exeter was the final act in the 15-year reign of their director of rugby, Mark McCall, and brought an end to an era.
“I knew my time was up,” McCall says. “I knew the energy that you need to do the job here, and I think they need a different kind of energy.”
He has overseen a story with every ingredient of modern, professional rugby.
Stellar international names in Maro Itoje, Owen Farrell and Jamie George, the last two of whom are now on the final lap of their playing careers.
McCall has nurtured a golden generation of homegrown stars like Maro Itoje (Photo: Getty)A wealthy benefactor-owner in Nigel Wray, who before McCall turned up as a coach in 2009, becoming director of rugby in January 2011, was great at signing world-class players like Francois Pienaar and Philippe Sella, and big-name coaches, but terrible at turning them into a winning team.
And the horrible hubris when Wray’s belief in caring for players on and off the field led to Saracens being investigated for salary-cap breaches in 2019, and punished with a £5m fine and forced relegation from the Premiership.
It was a scandal from which the quietly-spoken, blond former Ireland centre McCall somehow escaped with his personal reputation intact. His training as a lawyer in Belfast maybe helped him dodge the figurative bullets. Wray was obliged to stand down from the Saracens board, though he retains a minority stake in the club.
With a feeling of us-against-the-world belligerence during what McCall now describes a “chaotic” time, salaries were rearranged, and players sent out on loans or let go. Itoje, Farrell, George and others stayed to carry the fight, and Saracens were promoted back to the Premiership and won it again in 2023.
But let’s go back to that beginning.
‘Brendan had a plan for me’
McCall will hand the Sarries reins back to Brendan Venter – the man who recruited him (Photo: Getty)You cannot tell the story of Saracens and McCall without mentioning Brendan Venter. The South African – another former Test centre, and a qualified doctor – had succeeded Eddie Jones as boss at Saracens and in 2009 identified a missing ingredient in his staff of ambitious young coaches.McCall had been burnt by a torrid spell coaching his native Ulster, and was working for his old pal Jeremy Davidson at Castres in France.
“I could have stayed there, but then Brendan phoned,” McCall recalls now. “He was clear that he was in it for the short term. Like, ‘I’m not hanging around, I’m going to do a ‘pow’ and get this club running the way I think a good rugby club should run’. And he had a plan it was going to be me [to take it on].”
A new policy of planned rotation in selection gave every player a chance, in a different way from the previous chopping and changing. “And Brendan’s idea of ‘we care about you as a person’ smacked me in the face as soon as I arrived,” says McCall.
At the same time, Saracens’ traditional breeding ground was finding generational talents such as Itoje in north London, George in Hertfordshire, the brilliant full-back Alex Goode in Cambridgeshire – and the outlier Farrell, a wonderful plus-one to the party when his dad Andy signed as a player in 2005.
‘I wasn’t sure where I fitted in’
McCall joined a coaching staff full of big personalities like Andy Farrell (Photo: Getty)Still McCall was wavering. In his first summer, aged 39 and away from his wife and two kids, he “wasn’t sure where I fitted in”, alongside “a lot of big personalities” in fellow coaches Farrell Sr, Paul Gustard and Alex Sanderson. But wife Kerry persuaded him to “hang in there”.
Riding criticism over a one-track kicking game, and with the club pushing boundaries off-field with matches at Wembley, and moving home stadium from Watford to Mill Hill, a first Premiership title in 2011 was mixed with the lessons of defeat in big European matches.
With Brad Barritt installed as captain and defensive linchpin, Saracens cracked Europe in 2016, beating Racing 92 in the final in Lyon.
They won Europe again in 2017 and 2019, and the Premiership in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. Now McCall needed different skills, dealing with expectation.
As Barritt tells The i Paper: “The consistency of the man was beyond measure. He learnt to understand there was a knife-edge in sport, where it might not always go your way, and it was not about finding reasons to fault a player – instead you praise the 90 per cent of why you have confidence in them. He distinguished between errors of effort and of skill, and took away the anxiety. A skewed throw or a dropped pass was less important than that person making the effort to get off the ground or keep making a tackle.”
‘Saracens have gone back to their roots’
Friends at Melbourne Storm, a salary cap buster in Aussie rugby league, helped McCall surf the wave that hit Saracens in the late summer of 2019. He says he is most proud of the win at Gloucester straight after the news broke. Did the punishment take away his pleasure at the trophies? McCall says now: “I haven’t thought about the achievements too much. I’m really proud that the club survived it, the way they did. I feel optimistic about where we’re at.”
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Where they are at is McCall stepping down to “probably a day or two a week” as an advisor, and Venter back in charge for an unspecified period. There was a rumour of Andy Farrell eventually returning, but he has re-signed with Ireland until 2031. Youngsters Noah Caluori, Charlie and Jack Bracken, and Nathan Michelow underpin the likes of Ben Earl in a new-look front line. England lock George Martin, Bath No 8 Alfie Barbeary and Wales scrum-half Tomos Williams have signed for next season.
But the long-time figurehead is no more. “An incredible tenure,” says Phil Dowson, a rival director of rugby at Northampton Saints. “They won everything, multiple times. ‘Smally’ was always softly spoken, but he resonated with what he said in our DoRs meetings.
“It’ll be interesting. They’ve gone back to their roots with Brendan Venter, and they still have Joe Shaw and Ian Peel. So there’s some familiarity there, that they can continue and take those lessons they’ve learned from ‘Smally’ and move forward.”
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