Dave Alred

When Jonny Wilkinson was at his zenith in 2003, sessions with his kicking coach Dave Alred quite often turned to farce. Literally. As well as sketch comedy, satire and one-liners from Naked Gun, Dave knew how to keep Jonny in the zone. Just as he knew how to improve Stuart Barnes’ spiral bombs, Jonny Sexton’s drop goals and Beauden Barrett’s restarts. For rugby’s kicking coach to the stars, every day’s a school day.

Dave Alred’s journey from Bristol PE teacher to a quasi-deity in how to kick a rugby ball all started with Alistair Hignell. 

Hignell, or ‘Higgy’ as he was known, was a full-back for England in the 1970s, a pursuit he combined with playing professional cricket for Gloucestershire. One of the last all-round sporting talents able to play both rugby and cricket to a first-class level.

One summer in the late 1970s, Higgy was selected to tour Japan with England and felt the need to brush up on his goal kicking first. Word had reached him about someone who could help, although how it had, and what Higgy had heard, are a mystery to Dave to this day. “I honestly can’t remember how he came to hear about me, or why he called me, not a clue,” recounts Dave. “But he contacted me and I said ‘oh alright then’. 

“I was a teacher, I was trained to be quite analytical and having being able to kick as a player, I actually found it [coaching Higgy] quite easy.

“We just had a kick around and I said, ‘okay, let’s have a look’ and we made a few changes. Because he was a professional cricketer it was easy to relate to batting about body position and impact. He kicked well on the tour, although I can’t remember exactly how well. He was very pleased when he came back.”

From this chance first coaching job, Dave would go on to work with the biggest names in the game, such as Jonny Wilkinson, Jonny Sexton and Beauden Barrett. And with some of the game’s most fabled teams: Clive Woodward’s World Cup-winning England team, the victorious 1997 British and Irish Lions, Rob Andrew’s Premiership-winning Newcastle side, and Jack Rowell’s swashbuckling, all-conquering Bath team of the 1990s.

Dave’s hitlist strays outside of rugby too. In golf, he helped Luke Donald become the world’s No.1-ranked player, and Italy’s Francesco Molinari to win his first major. He’s worked with the English and Wales Cricket Board on a pioneering programme with the fast-bowling unit, helped British judo athletes prepare for the Olympic Games, worked with England goalkeepers such as David James on their kicking (although not their actual goalkeeping), and even worked in sailing, helping foster communication under pressure among Japan’s multi-national crew in the America’s Cup.

Dave’s popularity across sports points at his prowess, and the success he has helped others achieve, confirms it. But what elevates him from simply a successful coach, to borderline sporting genius are the relationships he’s been able to build – over both the long and short term – with those under his tutelage. 

Take Jonny Wilkinson, Dave’s most famous client. The great man simply couldn’t do without Dave. From his early days as an emerging Newcastle player, when he would travel down to Bristol from his parents’ home in Crawley, to his rockstar years in Toulon, he had Dave by his side – or rather just a few feet beside him – cajoling, reviewing, advising.

Nowadays there’s Jonny Sexton – possibly the most admired fly-half in the northern hemisphere since Wilkinson – who can’t do with without Dave either. After eight years of working together, the relationship is as strong as ever and Jonny is keen for Dave to be part of Ireland’s pre-World Cup training camp next year.

Then there’s the case of Australian fly-half James O’Connor. At the outbreak of the pandemic, Dave was working for the Queensland Reds, and had his contract broken off. A kicking coach being a luxury too far for a rugby team without an income. But O’Connor was so desperate to keep working with Dave that he attempted to persuade his team-mates that they should cover Dave’s wages from their own pockets. So that’s what they did.

These aren’t the behaviours of players who simply see value in someone, they are the behaviours of evangelical followers to someone’s advice and support. The man himself would reach for the sick bucket if this was put to him, but Dave Alred is messianic.

So what are his methods? And how did he become one rugby’s most quietly influential coaches of the past 30 years? 

The best window into Dave’s brand of rugby alchemy comes by looking at his work with Jonny Wilkinson, which at its most successful moments seemed more like a comedy club with humour used not just as light relief, but as a coaching state of mind.

“Humour is a really important part of coaching,” says Dave. “Humour is way more important than saying ‘you look a bit tense, just relax for a minute’. I mean, you can forget that. 

“You can be in a really tense situation and somehow a humour spark happens and it will lead to another comment, which leads to another more obscure and more fanciful comment.”

The difference with Dave and Jonny, was that they extended those fanciful conversations beyond the usual, so much so that Dave reckons if people were to be casually listening in they would think “these two should probably be locked up”.

There is of course the story of Doris, the imaginary old lady that Dave introduced when Jonny was struggling for consistency one day. Jonny was to aim his place kicks at Doris (without hurting her) rather than aim simply for the posts. As the session went on Dave and Jonny added to Doris’s life story – she’s reading Hello magazine, she’s not really a rugby fan she’s just been dragged there by her husband, she’s eating an ice cream, with a flake in, and so on – that had Doris been sat in front of you at Twickenham you would insist on her removal at half-time. 

But after 40 minutes of embellishing Doris, Jonny hadn’t missed a kick on goal. These Alice-in-Wonderland excursions could get sillier still, and included a re-imagining of the Marty Feldman comedy sketch from the 1970s where a village cricketer prepares his bowling run-up by stepping beyond the boundary, out of the stadium, through a taxi, down a man hole, across a building site, eventually ending up at the beach before running all the way back to bowl his ball.

“We would embellish that sketch with our own version [of Jonny’s run up] and we reckoned our version was way better than Marty Feldman,” laughs Dave, “we added so much into it!”

“I don’t know how many times that we’ve been in a session and would embellish comic sketches or quip one liners, like the classic ‘don’t call me Shirley’.”

It’s hard to imagine the famously diligent and intense Jonny Wilkinson lightening up to the extent that he’s quoting Naked Gun back to his kicking coach. 

‘Surely you can hit Doris’s flake off again a few more times Jonny?’ 

‘I can, just don’t call me Shirley.’

It doesn’t fit the image we have of Jonny does it?

But such was Dave’s ability to create a comfortable environment within the ultra-competitive world of elite sport, and what’s more, harness it to make gains, it’s no wonder Dave has so many fans.

It wasn’t all music hall repartee of course. When Dave started working with Bath in the late 1990s, he innovated in a different way by taking the club’s kickers Jonathan Webb and Stuart Barnes to the cricket nets at Bristol Grammar School.

“We used to go down there at six o’clock in the morning and kick down an indoor cricket net: drop kicks, punting, place kicks” Dave tells us. “I wanted an implicit channel for them to kick down, where there was no wind, it wasn’t wet or cold. And it had a dramatic impact, it really did. Plus in the nets we were able to get 60-70 kicks done in a morning. Then Stuart would go to work, I would go to school to teach and Webby would go back into surgery, as he was a doctor. We’d also do this as a warm-up session on the morning of a match but into football goals on the Downs. Just to get ‘strike and line’ which is something I’m still advocating now, that gives you the feel of a kick on the morning of a game.

“Both of them [Webb and Barnes] were very good kickers and Jerry Guscott became an outstanding  punter of the ball and they made Bath enormously difficult to predict because a kick could come from anywhere. I also introduced Stuart to how to kick a spiral bomb and he worked really hard at it. Add the Puma ball that Bath played with at home, and the spiral bomb became a fullback’s nightmare.”

After working with Bath, things started to kick-off big time for Dave. England fly-half Rob Andrew came calling next, then England themselves, taking Dave to the 1995 World Cup in South Africa, where his work with Rob bore fruit as England’s fly-half landed a mammoth drop-goal in the quarter-final against Australia to down the world champions. 

As rugby was still an amateur sport, Dave was teaching in Bristol throughout this period, while working as a consultant for Adidas as they began to develop a rugby-version of their ‘predator’ boot.

When the game went professional, it wasn’t long before Dave did too. Rob asked him to be involved in Newcastle’s rugby revolution, working with all the club’s kickers – including a teenage Jonny. Then in 1997 he went on the Lions tour, where the kicking of Neil Jenkins and Guscott played such a pivotal role in the Lions’ success. When Clive Woodward got the job as England head coach in 1997, Dave was the obvious choice to join his forward-thinking coaching staff. The England job doubled the amount of hours Dave got to spend coaching Jonny, and the relationship started to flourish. As a England coach, however, Dave also started to work with Paul Grayson,  Ben Cohen and Matt Dawson at Northampton, Mike Catt, Mike Tindall, Matt Perry and Iain Balshaw at Bath, and Will Greenwood at Harlequins. He was beginning to shape England’s national kicking identity, not the skills of a few individuals.

When Dave starts working with a new player, he snaps a few coaching preconceptions from the off.

“I was a teacher at inner city comprehensive schools and when you’re teaching students you kind of have to keep fashioning everything to fit the learning of the student. You can’t just go ‘this is how you kick: 1-2-3: boom, boom, boom. You’re not an instructor, you are a manager of learning. My starting point is always ‘how can I get this person to learn to do this?’, not ‘what do I need to tell them’, there is a massive difference.

“I am always looking for one or two things – although ideally one thing – that consciously gives them something to work on but sub-consciously they do three or four other things. I might just say ‘right, don’t worry, you’re a little bit quick through the ball, so just get bigger’. Just getting bigger keeps your shoulders back, slows you down, makes you more deliberate and more powerful, making it easier to accelerate through rather than snap at it.”

One thing Dave probably won’t do it is rush to point out your mistakes.

“Very often I get criticised because I don’t tell players when they’ve made a mistake. People go ‘how come you didn’t tell them?’ I say ‘do you think he knows [he’s wrong]?’ and they say ‘yeah’ -  so why would I reinforce it? I don’t make a big song and dance about a mistake, I make a song and dance when it’s right because I want to bookmark that which we want to repeat, not what we’re trying to avoid.” 

Dave also doesn’t profess to have all the answers, an approach which unions and governing bodies sometimes don’t appreciate.

“I think people are not used to people still learning,” says Dave. “They like people to arrive with the answer. There’s a golf coach in Australia who says ‘those who dare to teach, never cease to learn’ and that is so true. When things don’t go well, it tends not to be the people [Dave is coaching] it tends to be the governing body who query progress.”

Despite Dave’s success, things don’t always go well. In the aftermath of the 1995 World Cup, England felt they didn’t need the services of a kicking coach “or at least not me as their kicking coach”, a fate which repeated itself during England’s Andy Robinson era when the whole World Cup winning backroom staff was cleared out including Phil Larder, Phil Keith-Roach, and Dave.

The protracted post-World Cup comedown has Dave feeling glum. “It was almost like they [the RFU] were extending the celebration for a year rather than building on what we achieved and trying to do better. Our training time was cut back, our contact hours with players at their clubs was reduced. It was a shame really because I’m not saying we were dissatisfied but we didn’t play well in the [2003] final and just imagine what would happen if we had sat down and properly gone ‘what do we need to change to try and make that extra jump’.”

The six years in between those sackings were, however, a golden period for Dave, and for English rugby. He had the full backing of Clive Woodward and the resources to make a difference, and not just to England’s kicking game, but to their catching ability as well. Quietly Dave made England the best catching team in the world, making it possible to use the cross-field kick as a consistent and effective weapon, rather than the lottery of the up ‘n’ under.

“From 2000 to 2003, England were way ahead in terms of our overhead catching. People like Ben Cohen, Balshaw and Tindall became phenomenal overhead catchers of the ball and that gave us an added dimension of the game.

“Everyone else was doing two footed jumps at that point, whilst we were doing one-footed high knee-lift jumps and almost getting on top of players in the air. There is a clip of Mike Tindall from a restart against Scotland where he’s actually got his knee on to the No8’s shoulder and is tapping the ball back. I don’t think many people realised the height our players were getting because the media were looking down on the pitch from an angle so they just thought ‘gosh, he must be tall’ and didn’t really realise what was going on.”

Coupled with Jonny’s mastery of the direct dropped punt – a skill borrowed from Aussie Rules – England gained advantage over many of their rivals, but not as much as Northampton did at domestic level where Paul Grayson and Ben Cohen, having both worked with Dave, plundered try after try from cross-field kicks.

After the flat departure from England during the Robinson era, Dave continued to work with Jonny individually but also moved into golf, firstly with Luke Donald. “I got a call from Luke Donald. I didn’t know who he was, I thought he was a rugby player. But I did some work with him and his swing coach and when I presented my findings to them both, I was challenging, I was quite brutal and I thought I had blown it. But he wanted to take me on and together we helped Luke get to world No1 in 2011 and to top the money lists on the US and European Tour.”

Donald’s achievement was even more impressive as it was the first time a golfer had achieved such a feat. However, his relationship with Donald soured and Dave describes the ending as “acrimonious” due to a dispute over money. 

Instead, he started working with Padraig Harrington and then Francesco Molinari, who he helped win his first major and perform so heroically at the Ryder Cup in 2018, when the Italian became the first player from Europe to score a maximum five points by winning all five of his matches.

That relationship continued right up until the pandemic, when everything ground to a halt. Dave describes it as a “horrible time” as he was stuck in Queensland having been based there for his work with the Reds, which had also just ground to a halt, until O’Connor’s intervention. 

That collective appointment from the Reds’ players could only last so long, however, and once it had run its course, Dave needed to return to England. But first he had to be granted permission to travel outside of Australia, without breaking any immigration protocols. His solution was to work with a golfer who was allowed to travel so he joined forces with the Australian player Jason Scrivenor, accompanying him back to Europe to compete on the European Tour.

In returning to England, there was only one choice: Bristol. He joined the Bears as kicking coach over the summer and has been working principally with fly-halves Callum Sheedy and AJ MacGinty. Five months in and significant changes to Sheedy’s kicking style have already taken place. 

“Callum was very much a round the corner kicker, and didn’t have great range,” explains Dave. “Now he’s straightened up, has a longer range, and is a completely different player to five months ago. So you think ‘where can we get to by the end of the year?’.

“I’m really enjoying it at the Bears. We could be a bit more successful on the pitch but it’s a good group of players and coaches and we’ve had horrendous run of injuries. But it’s been a great environment to work in.” Dave thinks he’s getting there in terms of connecting personally with Callum and AJ, although he admits he’s a long way from striking up a comedy routine like he might have with Jonny. 

“I am getting close to them, but it [humour] comes with the relationship and the understanding of the challenges the player is going through.”

Dave’s contract at Bristol runs until May, at which point World Cup invitations from Jonny Sexton, Beauden Barrett, Callum Sheedy, or any number of kickers and coaches with World Cup glory on their mind may land on his doorstep. 

Next summer’s tournament will be 20 years since Jonny’s drop of World Cup glory, but Dave doesn’t revel in that moment nor derive any significant personal satisfaction from it.

“I’m not really bothered, honestly.” Instead, it’s developing and applying his skill that excites him, the hours on the training field, discovering learning tools (like Doris), and helping his charges to learn more effectively.

“You’re just supporting people,” Dave proposes. “You are looking to create something that appeals to their map of reality, not yours. It’s always a different puzzle. That’s the exciting thing.”

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 20 of Rugby.
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