GONZALO QUESADA has never been a head coach in international rugby before now, but Italy’s newly-installed leader sees plenty of parallels between the challenge confronting him in the Bel Paese and his rich experience of the club game.
These similarities are in part stylistic, starting with his quest to bring more defensive steel to a team whose World Cup routs by New Zealand and France continued a theme of incontinence from their last few Six Nations campaigns.
Where Kieran Crowley had some success in encouraging Italy to attack from anywhere, as they sought to engage the rapier talents of the likes of Ange Capuozzo, Monty Ioane, Pierre Bruno and – latterly – Paolo Odogwu, this approach left them hideously open at the back; ripe, indeed, for the sort of picking to which the French and Kiwis merrily helped themselves.
Quesada has experience of toughening up ambitious but lopsided teams, most recently in the final yearFrançais when, after bringing in Paul Gustard, the mastermind behind Saracens’ ‘wolf pack’ defence, he managed to graft a layer of robust resilience onto a previously flighty style.
