THE FRONT OFFICE

IT WAS so predictable. At the first unit session Chris Boyd witnessed in the flesh, the Northampton scrums turned into WrestleMania on skates. With scarcely one of the eight scrums being completed, assistant coach Matt Ferguson could sense his new director of rugby getting redder and redder.

“He sat me down after and said, ‘What the hell was that?’” Ferguson recalls, able to laugh now. “I said ‘welcome to English set-piece unit sessions’, but he opened his laptop and showed me what he was used to at Hurricanes sessions.

“I told him that’s where I wanted to get to but it would take a huge amount of learning for that to happen. We needed to train the way we wanted to play – that’s a big thing for Boydy. So quite quickly we became tight as a group, based on the characters that we have.

“Dylan Hartley