Mike Cron

In a town of one coffee shop and one pub in the South Island of New Zealand, the man with the greatest scrum brain on the planet is giving out advice to the rugby world. He used biomechanics, ballet dancers, and cage fighters to perfect the All Black scrum and now, at the request of forwards coaches the world over, Mike Cron is on Zoom. Listen up.

Mike Cron really missed his ‘bloody coffee’ during the pandemic. He’d been in proper ‘hard-nosed lockdown’ in his small town of Governor’s Bay, as New Zealand showed the world how to properly ‘shut-up shop’. But now, all of the amenities are open and at his disposal. “They didn’t even do takeaway at the start, nothing,” he says, “now it’s opened up a bit and we can get coffee again. 

“Governor’s Bay is right on the ocean,” he continues, pointing out his window to the neighbouring Pacific ocean, “we have 870 people, one pub, and one café, nothing else, but they got it right for me.”

There isn’t a more renowned and respected forwards coach on the planet than Mike. Up until last year, for fifteen official years, he built and rebuilt generation-after-generation of All Blacks packs. But it wasn’t just the All Blacks, it was pretty much every elite forward in the New Zealand game, as he was tasked with spreading his scrum gospel to every union, from grassroots age-grade amateurs up through every step of the player pathway to the men in Black. And that’s just on the official New Zealand Rugby clock, in total he’s got 38 years of coaching all levels under his belt. 

When he ‘retired’ from the All Blacks last year, aged 64, Steve Tew described ‘Crono’ as a ‘national treasure’ and ‘one of the best rugby coaches in the world’. Aside from the endless plaudits, there’s also the two Rugby World Cups, Rugby Championships and Grand Slams to officially prove the point. 

His opinion has, and still is, sought by an endless stream of coaches from across the globe, and the general acceptance of Zoom as a genuine, worthwhile means of communication, has seen him in even greater demand. 

As he continues to fly and drive his way around New Zealand coaching amateurs, he’s also sharing advice with people in all four corners of the world, something even he’s impressed with. “I’m so called retired, I’m 65,” he says, “but since Covid a lot of coaches and some players have got hold of me to see if I can assist over Zoom, so I’ve been doing a shit-load of work on that. 

“My wife said, ‘why don’t you bloody set-up your own little website?’ So I set that up a week ago. I said to my wife this morning, ‘isn’t this a funny old world, this Covid world? I’m a fucking dinosaur as far as technology is concerned but I’m speaking to a gentleman from England this morning, then I’ve got Zooms from Argentina, France, South Africa and America with coaches, isn’t it amazing?’ 

“I can sit here in Governor’s Bay and talk to a coach anywhere in the world and he’ll talk to me about a kick-off option or whatever, and I can have a clip on that. The only thing they don’t get, is to see you coach.”

Those coaches are eager to gain just a slice of wisdom from the man Steve Hansen describes as one of the most influential of his career. “One coach got in touch with me the other day – he was from America,” he adds, giving Zoom another plug, “And he said ‘if you’re in my shoes, what’s the one thing you think you’d ask you?’ And I said, I’d ask, ‘how do you coach? What things have you learned? How have you changed in 38 years of coaching from school kids to international and back again? Because, I reckon I’ve changed 80 per cent as a coach since I started. But how you coach, and the way you coach, they’re the most important things.

“You can go to a bloody coaching clinic and learn a new drill, anyone can do that, but the art of coaching is the art of coaching – that would be the thing that I would be trying to drain out of me, to help you.”

And how have you changed in four decades? “I started in about ‘82, and I’d say back then I was more instructive, it was more ‘now listen to me, I’m going to take you through some drills and activities’. Back then, a club might say ‘can you come out for a couple of hours and coach on lineouts and scrum or something’ and I’d go along and do my show until one night I was driving home and thought, ‘I wonder if that’s what they wanted or required?’ 

“So now, instead of me going in and teaching stuff, I go in and go ‘how many games you had? How’s your lineout been?’ So, you’re getting far more interactive, bigger ears, and you’re adjusting on the hop. 

“Back when I started, I had a camera with a two-inch screen, and they’d do an activity and huddle around the screen. So that’s been the biggest development for me – I don’t coach without video and many coaches film video but don’t use it very well.”

How so? “What they do is video training and then go back to the office and eventually they might put in on for the boys to look at it. Now, if required, we can show a bit of video out on the field, so for a young coach that might be a phone or pad whatever they can afford, for me, I ended up with a bloody marquee with two flatscreens, four iPads, and a big zoom camera. 

“So, if the boys ask if they can look at something again, we walk ten metres and play it back on a big screen. To me, that advancement is huge.”

It’s little surprise to learn that, as a player, Mike was a prop, playing for Canterbury and as an age-grade international. “I was in the New Zealand Colts side as captain,” he says, “and we had one management with the team and that was it. It was Jack Gleeson, who’d later become the All Blacks coach, and he said to me ‘you run the forwards and I’ll run the backs and the team’. 

“I was a year young, so the following year I was named captain again, and Hack was head coach again and they gave us a manager/baggageman. 

“I’m lucky that I came through the amateur era,” he says, “it’s helping me in my professional era. They used to put in $2 a week so they could buy some tape to strap you up and a bit of Vaseline, but, anything else you bought yourself. I think that’s great, that’s the old days.”

Such was Mike’s status in any changing room, either for the colts of his local side, he’d always end up ‘running something in training’. “I remember Steve Hansen’s father Des coaching another senior team here [Marist] and he rang me to see if I could help them,” explains Mike. “I’d go over and he’d say ‘he had a scrum that wasn’t going too well, a couple of props that needed some help’, so I coached them two or three times. I was playing for Christchurch at the time, but, yeah, I’ve just always coached.”

Working in the police force, it was an era where he’d always be given time off to play rugby and they even suggest ideas for development. “I was a detective and my boss said, ‘I want you to go and do a course up in Wellington on how to be a presenter, how to talk to new recruits and all that’. ‘What the hell do you want me to do that for? I’m a detective’. They said, ‘it would be bloody good for your coaching’ – it was probably the best course I’d ever been on to help me with my coaching.”

As a player, he was on the fringes. “I didn’t get on, but I was in the New Zealand under-23 squad when we played the British Lions in Wellington in ’77,” he says. “We all went and had dinner that night with them and met Bill Beaumont – for a young man, meeting some great world players, that was pretty good.”

He looked at the scrum, and the coaching of it, unlike anyone of his time. “When I was young, I looked at things differently, particularly the scrum, more analytically, I asked ‘just by doing another 50 scrums, will that make us better?’ 

“I always liken a coach to a golfer, I’m not hitting the ball well, so by hitting another 50 will that make me better? I don’t think so. All you’ve done is cement a bad habit. And to be fair some people thought you had two heads because you coached a bit different. I’d talk to players and ask for feedback.”

How he developed his skill for unpicking the scrum was simple, sort of. “Well, you look,” he says. “And that seems pretty simple, but people can see something, and not look. 

“You’ve got to look in deep and analyse what are they doing different to us? What works for us? In the end, I managed to stumble across a biomechanist who resonated with me – I understood what the boffin was talking about. He’d played rugby, he was a coach in track and field and gymnastics. I knew that I needed more knowledge and I always had a thirst for knowledge but didn’t know where to find it from. And that day – and you’re going back to the early 90s – I could ask questions about the body, and how to use your body better.”

The new partnership culminated in the two working on a piece of work called the Total Impact Method about how to produce forces in scrummaging. “All the way through I’ve been interested in biomechanics,” says Mike. “You know, things like ‘what’s the quickest method for a human being to jump off the ground?’ – they’re the questions you want to ask if you’re a lineout coach.”

Working with biomechanics proved to be a ‘eureka’ moment for Mike. “It sounds bloody stupid,” he admits, “but you’re coaching scrummaging and you don’t know the strongest pushing position biomechanically, so the eureka moment for me was when I found out the strongest position the human body can be in in a horizontal position. That’s winning the lotto for a coach. 

“I now had knowledge,” he says. “I knew that this was the position that, biomechanically, was the strongest. And I could then equate that. So, say you’re on the squat rack and doing a deep squat. You know when you come up and find that sweet spot and then power out of it – well, if you pause there, that’s the angle I’m talking about. I could then equate the angle to something we do in the gym.”

Mike has always been self-aware, which is where his search for knowledge comes from, going back to his playing days. “I knew I didn’t have enough knowledge,” he says. “The only reason I knew I was doing something right was if coach had stopped yelling, y’know? I didn’t know if I could repeat that again tomorrow as I had no learning, so you just held your breath and hoped to Christ you did the same again.

“It’s nobody’s fault, because that was just the era, but I just looked at that, and thought, ‘that’s bloody stupid, surely we can teach an athlete a deeper learning?’.”

By the mid to late-90s, Mike’s reputation for his scrum know-how was spreading across New Zealand. “I used to fly up and down the country to talk to coaches, and help our provincial teams,” he recalls. “No team had a scrum coach at all, they just winged it. I was doing a heck of a lot of coaching and I also started going overseas to help a mate in Japan around 2000. 

“I was helping Steve Hansen at Canterbury, and then Crusaders, I helped him there, it was all voluntary in those days – you’d help in the background and then bugger off.

“It wasn’t until New Zealand rugby union got in touch and asked if I’d be a New Zealand resource coach and they asked ‘can you run scrums in New Zealand and set up something, because there’s nothing?’ 

“I said ‘right-o, we’ll run a two-day course here in Christchurch and anyone who wants to come can come and we’ll get started’. We had a pile of coaches fly in, Warren Gatland was one, and I ran a two-day clinic. 

“I’d brought in a biomechanic, I’d brought in a mental skills coach to break old habits, I brought in some athletes, I brought in a wrestling coach – all sorts of people. When you think about scrummaging, people think ‘bang, bang, bang’ but I was always thinking wider. And out of that we then had coaches at the other regions.”

Since leaving the police force in 1996, Mike had been making his money almost entirely from coaching. Well, coaching and pies. “A mate from the police won the New Zealand Best Pie Award, so me and three other mates, set him up with a pie company here,” he laughs, adding, “it’s good when you’re crook after a night on the piss, y’know?”

As well as building the network of scrum coaches across New Zealand, he then developed a 30-minute video with scrum drills and safety, and sent that out. “There used to be a Rugby Smart video conference, which every coach had to attend, but in those days they just had some guy say ‘well, here’s a perfect scrum and if you don’t do that you get a broken neck’. 

“I just thought, well 99.9 per cent of the coaches will look at that and say ‘that looks nothing like my bugger’, so I got on the Rugby Smart video for two years and started showing how to self-correct poor technique. Every coach in New Zealand had to watch it, and people were able to say, ‘yeah, that’s what my boy looks like…’.”

Teaching the safety aspect of scrummaging Mike labels as ‘the greatest thing I’ve done in my career, not winning World Cups – who knows how many young men and women have avoided injury?’.”

When he looks at the coaching landscape and what makes a good scrum coach, he insists it’s not all about experience. And the ‘mystique’ around the ‘dark arts’ of the scrum – and every other cliché you can throw at it – he puts down to one thing. “Lack of knowledge, originally,” he says. “You can think that someone’s been there for twenty years so they must know what they’re talking about, but you can get a builder that’s been a builder for twenty years to come and build your house and it’s shit. 

“That’s because he was a shit builder 20 years ago and he’s still shit now. So just being in a job for a long time doesn’t make you good at it.”

While some coaches might find ways to bend the rules, Mike insists his coaching has always been about the pursuit of perfection. “The scrum law changes every two to three years to catch up with the cheats really,” he says. “As soon as you change the law, people look to break it.

“It does my head in, I don’t understand it, I don’t understand the mentality. I’ve never coached illegal stuff, I just get really good at what you’re doing. 

“Don’t look for shortcuts, or ways to hoodwink the referee,” he says, “you’re going in the gutter, that’s what you’re doing as a coach, going to the gutter to try and win a game through hoodwinking a ref – to me, you’re lowering the standard of our game.”

Does that attitude threaten the future of the scrum? “I’ve said to a lot of coaches, use it or lose it,” he says, “if you abuse something so badly, World Rugby will say ‘ah righto, we’re going to do this – they’re the ones that will jump up and down complaining.

“We all have a responsibility to protect this sacred part of the game, it’s a game for all shapes and sizes that’s our mission, if you take away the scrum that would reduce all shapes and sizes – you wouldn’t need the big powerful guy anymore. We have a responsibility to the game to not go in the gutter.”

And at the highest level, any diminishing of the power of the scrum would be to potentially rob us of the greatest athletes. “I’m in awe of the top props around, they are athletes now, especially at international level,” says Mike. “We ask a lot of the frontrower, we want them to be generally the biggest and strongest in the team, we want them to put their head in a dark cave with one and a half tonne going through their spine and I want you to love it. Once that’s over I want you to get out and get around the paddock like a loose forward, I want you to catch and pass like a back and I need you to do that repeatedly.

“The stats now show the amount of cleanouts they do, the amount of running, the tackle, impact, ball-carrying, it’s just going skyward. They are completely all-round players. 

“Just their work-rate alone is incredible, I know for us, generally, the front row boys make a quarter to a fifth of the total team’s tackles. So if we have 200, the front row boys make 40-50, that’s including the reserve. First to the clean out, over the years in the All Blacks, the loose head props have been in the top three. And I had one tighthead prop against France – Carl Hayman it was – that made 26 tackles, I wouldn’t have made that in a year!”

When he trains these athletes, he ensures there’s always learning. “I was brought up in an era when the only reason you knew the difference between Tuesday and Thursday training at seniors, was because, on a Tuesday you’d do 100 hits on a scrum machine, and a Thursday you’d do 30! I never understood that. When you look back, it’s an easy way of coaching isn’t it? As a coach, you’ve just finished work, you’re thinking ‘Christ, what am I going to coach tonight – ah, let’s put them on the scrum machine for a hundred, there’s 40 minutes out of the way.

“For me, on a scrum machine, there’s got to be a reason for going on it, what are we trying to achieve,” he continues. “In a whole week with the All Blacks, we may hit a machine eight times, because there has to be a reason, there has to be some learning. 

“Because coaches have the knowledge now, there’s no excuse for us not to make the majority of props very good,” explains Mike. “That’s what annoys me about a collapsed scrum – it only happens through being off-balance, the pack or a front row haven’t got it quite right or, under pressure, he’s bailed out. A lot of that can be coached. We rarely have a collapsed scrum.

“I’ll do consequences for collapsed scrum in training games. We’ll count them, and then on the training paddock, I’ll move further down the pitch – ten metres for every collapsed scrum – and the whole forward pack will have to army crawl. And, when I first started, we had four collapsed scrums, so they had to army crawl 40 metres – that’s a long way. 

“There was a bit of grit and shit on the ground so they lost a bit of skin on the elbows and knees. The next training session: one collapsed scrum. 

“And from that moment on, I don’t think we’ve ever had any more than one collapsed scrum, because it pisses me off, and it either means poor technique, which means I’ve not taught them properly, or they’ve bailed out. Either way it’s not good enough.”

Talk moves on, we discuss the greatest battles he’s seen in the front row.  “Two massive men going against each other, Carl Hayman against Andy Sheridan – the complete opposite to the norm of a prop in the old days: 6’4” massive men, very powerful. That was a turning point to the new era, maybe you didn’t have to be 5’10” and, if you’ve got good technique, that was the turning point for the taller prop.”

The best props he’s seen? “Carl Hayman, for a tall man, exceptional. Then guys like Tony Woodcock who played 118 Tests at loosehead for All Blacks and never got beaten, was outstanding around the paddock.  Guys still trucking around your way, like John Afoa, a kid I coached at under-19, I’m still really proud of what he’s doing. 

“A lot of the boys I’ve coached have gone into coaching and I get really proud watching them coach: Ben Franks (Scarlets), Brad Thorn, he came from league to rugby and is now at Queensland Reds, Clarke Dermody, coaching the Highlanders, Jono Gibbs over your way at La Rochelle – there’s a lot of the boys that have come through and gone coaching [including his son Dan, scrum coach at Hurricanes for a decade] and they’re bloody good, they coach well.”

His greatest lesson? “The greatest thing you can teach your scrum is to be on the balls of their feet, keep the other team on their heels, keep a clear channel so the ball never gets trapped,” he says. “My KPI is, when the nine feeds the ball, it’s got to be back at the No.8’s feet in under two seconds. If you want to keep it there and push, that’s fine. My job is to make sure everything’s precise.”

Before we spoke to Mike, we asked coaches what they wanted to ask him, and one elite coach wanted to know why he was so free with his information – he’s renowned for being free with his time and knowledge. “I’ve always been about sharing knowledge,” he says, “if we both give our ideas to each other we’ve now got two ideas, so we’re far better off.

“That’s just information though, it’s what you do with it that matters. Take golf, I could have the best golf coach in the world tell me how to hit the ball, but does that make me hit it better? It just gives me information.

“When I was the New Zealand resource coach, I’d be doing the Crusaders scrum on a Tuesday, I’d fly and help the Chief’s scrum on a Wednesday and they’d play each other on the Saturday.”

Mike’s role with the All Blacks continually progressed, from scrum to lineouts to breakdown, and then kick-offs, a development which kept him in the game longer than he intended. “I was having to upskill again, and I really loved that, coming up with new ways, like ‘how can I make them jump faster?’

“I was always trying to get better every year, I’d go out to other sports: I spent a week at a sumo wrestling camp in Japan, a week at a judo camp, time with Melbourne Storm and league, the New York Yankees, Pittsburgh Penguins ice hockey, the S&C coach at Tampa, a local top netball team, basketball, wrestling... 

“I did Royal New Zealand ballet one week, then the following week I went to see cage fighting on the western coast of Australia – I found something in all of them, even if I may not have known it at the time.”

He actually quit the All Blacks after the 2011 win. “I told them ‘that’s me, I’m out’ and I signed a new contract with New Zealand rugby union to be a resource coach. 

“I thought, if we get a young athlete we do everything for him, wipe his arse basically’, but we don’t do that much for a young coach, so I found there was a void for helping coaches, hence what I’m doing now, coaching through Zoom.”

The reason he had such a delay was the call of Steve Hansen, who took over from Graham Henry. “I turned him down at first, but Steve rang again and I said, ‘if I bring my wife with me and you get it past her, I’ll give you two years’. I then did 2012 and 2013, but it was ‘you’re too close to the World Cup now, you can’t leave now’ so I went to 2015. And then it was ‘this next era is going to be the worst for any coach, they’re losing 21 players, you’ve got to stay’. The bottom line was, I got to 2019, and said this is definitely my last year and I was very privileged to be asked, and to have left under my own terms, because most coaches don’t get that luxury.”

Which means he now has time, to go back to his 2011 goal, and also talk to other coaches across the rugby diaspora. Including Adam Jones, whom he worked with during two five-week stints in Wales when Hansen was in charge. “He still texts me, and I did a Zoom with Duncan [Jones, Ospreys scrum coach] the other day too.”

Does he miss being involved with the All Blacks? “I miss it, but I’m glad matchday isn’t there anymore,” he says. “You get so nervous and uptight, but I’ll still miss all that. It’s hard to explain, but I remember with athletes – you love them at 2.30pm, when they go out on the paddock, then you don’t love them again until 4.30pm, when they come off again, win, lose or draw.”   

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Kevin Bills

This extract was taken from issue 12 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.