Lord of the Big Dance: The old-school character behind decades of Brumbies dominance

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When Laurie Fisher was embarking on a coaching career in the mid-1990s, he took a job overseeing the athlete residences at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra.

On the runway to the Sydney Olympics, the joint was buzzing. Stars like Michael Klim and Patrick Johnson were living at the famous athlete factory, and so too Russian swim great Alexander Popov, the four-time Olympic champion sprinter who trained at the AIS pool.

The luxury for an aspirational coach of living at the AIS, however, was the ability to walk out the door and watch the best in the business go about their work. And that doesn’t mean the athletes.

“I was able to walk up on pool deck and look at guys like Gennadi Touretski, Mark Regan and Barry Prime, or go and watch Phil Brown or Gordie McLeod at the basketball,” Fisher says.

“You were watching how they acted with athletes, what they demanded, what was important. It was a great environment to develop an understanding of high-performance and just watch great coaches coach.”

Also spending a lot of time on back fields at the AIS were a new professional ACT rugby team called the Brumbies, who were born when Super Rugby was created in 1996 and armed with Rod Macqueen and local stars like George Gregan, Stephen Larkham and Joe Roff, immediately became a successful outfit.

Laurie Fisher is calling time on his career at the Brumbies.Credit: Getty

A retired Canberra club rugby legend turned coach, Fisher would watch the Brumbies train, too, and before long he’d joined them. In 1999 Fisher coached the Brumbies reserves, and the next year he took over the academy program, which he ran until becoming an assistant in 2003, and eventually head coach in 2006.

This month, 24 seasons later, Fisher will pull up stumps at the Brumbies; having decided to retire from full-time coaching. The Brumbies take on the Chiefs in the Super Rugby semi-finals in Hamilton on Saturday evening, and though the plan is for the Canberra team to farewell Fisher a week later with a victory in the final, it is a fitting environment for the 65-year-old to depart, either way; the Brumbies swinging away deep in the playoffs.

It has been a consistent place for the Brumbies across the last four decades, and though he’s been offshore and come back several times, Fisher has been there for most of them. And that, according to most Brumbies figures, is no coincidence.

Ask anyone why the Brumbies have been the most successful Australian province in Super Rugby, and they’ll point to a strong culture, a focus on hard work and a simple, but relentlessly applied, Brumbies gameplan.

And then they’ll point to Fisher, who has – across a variety of coaching roles across 20 seasons – driven the standards to make it all work, year-in, year-out.

And so you knock on Fisher’s door and ask: why are the Brumbies always so good?

“Our game hasn’t changed significantly. You try and change little bits here and there but it is basically about doing simple things well,” Fisher explains.

“Whether it is about your carry, it’s your kicking or your set-piece. So we are not chasing maybe the next fad in the game, or whatever. Our bedrock is simple things done well. Making sure the set-piece is the cornerstone of our game, a strong kicking game, a strong defensive game and an ability to recycle. We hit those things all the time. The things we value, we work on.

The Brumbies after winning the 2001 Super Rugby title.Credit: Simon Alekna

“We try and extend in other areas, of course. But what I like about here is we never say ‘oh well, we have ticked that off, we’re good at that now, let’s move on to the next thing’. We just hammer and hammer and hammer simple things, done well. We hit that stuff every week, every year.”

But if consistency is one key, culture is the other. The Brumbies have accrued some mythology since their birth in 1996; some fact, some fiction and all of it repeated until it was hard to separate.

Under Macqueen, the early Canberra sides built an identity of being a home for outcasts from other states.

It brushed over the fact they had a smart and talented crew of locals, like Gregan, Rod Kafer, Larkham and Roff – who’d already been successful for ACT and Canberra, and were at the forefront of re-imagining the newly professional game.

George Gregan on the attack in 2001.Credit: AP

Macqueen now admits he played up the misfits tag, but it had enough truth to stick, and exists to this day. But so too does the same tight-knit culture born in those early days, which is accentuated by geography, and the same small-town factor that helps places like Green Bay and Christchurch produce champion teams.

“I think in the early days, it was recognised that it wasn’t going to be about money and resources and facilities that would make the difference,” Fisher said.

“What was going to make the difference down here was people, and what they bring, and getting the best out of them, and getting the best out of each other. And that hasn’t changed one little bit. It is still not about resources and money and all those things, it is about people and how you gel together, how you respect each other and what you bring as a person to the team.

“It is that soft resource, and I am not saying it is a point of difference for us, but it has always been a huge focus for us. It is first and foremost about the people.”

Matt Giteau surging ahead for the Brumbies in 2004, another title-winning season.Credit: Getty

The Melrose Place unit complex that once housed the whole team is gone, but many players still live with each other or hang out away from the club. The joke goes if two Brumbies think about seeing a movie, 19 Brumbies will end up seeing the movie.

“It engenders a confidence and a belief in each other, so you are not just here for the footy, you are here to make friends for life. I do that find grows organically, and it is helped by the nature of Canberra itself,” Fisher said.

It is a harder dynamic to replicate for big-city teams like the Waratahs and Queensland, and goes some way to answering the other big question about the Brumbies’ success: why can’t other Aussie teams just copy them?

Fisher says he hasn’t coached other teams, so he can’t judge, but anyone who walks in the door at Brumbies is given three things to understand: understanding of the Brumbies’ game, an individual role within that and how to prepare to execute it. It creates a clarity of purpose, and on the top of that, the Brumbies’ training is notoriously focused on “intensity”.

Nick Frost celebrates the Brumbies’ opening round victory over the Waratahs this season.Credit: Getty Images

“I think that’s why we have been able to get closer to the Kiwi teams because we are now better in the bigger moments,” Fisher said. “If you have to chase a linebreak, or those little areas where they used to beat you, little races to contests. So we have always been based in hard work but I think we have our intensity model right.”

But along with consistency and culture, Fisher brings a third – and undervalued – “c”: continuity. Fisher, known as “Lord”, is described by most Brumbies as the “heart and soul” of the Brumbies, and looking like an extra from Game of Thrones, his almost constant presence at the club – outside of stints coaching Munster and Gloucester – can’t be underestimated as a tool of success. There is no starting again at the Brumbies.

Laurie Fisher has been a highly respected coach in Canberra for over two decades.Credit: Getty

Mostly a defence and breakdown specialist, Fisher fulfilled a life goal last year of being called up to the Wallabies, under Dave Rennie. It was a great honour, albeit a short-lived one; Eddie Jones elected to not keep him on board.

The exposure to other Australian players was eye-opening, however. Asked if he gained insight into the differences between the Brumbies program, and other states, Fisher said: “I was really impressed with the player group generally in terms of their want to get better.

“But without naming names, I did find there were significant differences from province to province, in terms of players and in terms of their internal motivation, and what they wanted to do to get better, the amount of time they spent chasing feedback, in terms of their ability to stick to a plan.

“I did think there was a reasonable amount of difference between players from different provinces.”

Pressed as to whether it would be possible to replicate the Brumbies’ recipe elsewhere, Fisher questions whether that would even be desirable, given there are many ways to play rugby. But he believes Australian rugby could do a better job of applying consistency in core areas of the game.

“I don’t know why that is, but we have struggled to do is nationally define important areas of the game and get agreement on things we’ll all do. I get the feeling Kiwis do that better, I am not sure, but I do see a lot of similarities across all their teams, in particular aspects. But we have just never been able to nail that,” Fisher said.

“At the back end of Michael Cheika’s reign, and with Mick Byrne, they really did make an effort to standardise some skill areas … but it just didn’t take off.

“Whether it is the Brumbies way, or the Reds way or anyone’s way, I do think trying to get a little bit more understanding in each side on some core things that are common about how Australians play their rugby. We have never been able to nail that, and I don’t know if we ever will.”

Though done with the early starts and seven-day-a-week seasons, Fisher will keep coaching and says his trademark bucket hat will be on a rugby field somewhere in the future. He is involved in Australia A and Barbarians programs later in the year, but is then considering his next steps.

No doubt the Brumbies will want to keep Fisher around, spreading the wisdom. Australian rugby would be wise to spread him around, too.

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