Coach, politician and agony aunt

When I picked this book up, I already loved it — or at least I loved the idea of it: heroic sporting underdogs, a new coach with nothing in common with his players, and the forging of an indestructible bond of comradeship, all topped off by success on the world stage.

But I felt trepidation too. Books about sporting greatness often descend into a gruelling slog through humdrum match reportage, reheated banter and details of contract negotiations, game plans, diet plans and training. I needn’t have worried. In this account of three years in charge of the Fiji sevens rugby squad, Ben Ryan and his writing collaborator Tom Fordyce get the mix just right.

Ryan — a long-serving former England sevens head coach — abandoned Teddington in west London for Suva in 2013; but on one level the geography of Sevens Heaven is irrelevant. What we are reading is more like a piece of time-travel: a coach from the era of hyper-professionalism, of bluetoothing personalised video footage to players’ complimentary iPads, finds himself back in the amateur era. Here, everything is still make-do-and-mend.

On another level, though, geography is cental to the book. Ryan encounters Fijian time (approximate), finances (non-existent), politics (brutal), society (nepotistic) and superstition (extensive). Other coaches might have beaten a retreat to their hotel for the duration, holing up with laptop and playbooks to craft instructions for delivery at closed-door training sessions.

Instead, Ryan — short, pale, ginger-haired and freckly (he could not possibly look more un-Fijian) — opts for total immersion in a country that is both ‘a puzzle and a charm’. To connect with his players, to get inside their hearts and minds, he ventures into the hills, over the waves and out to the villages.