Head coach needs to hone gameplan and combinations that offer team the best chance of winning the next World Cup

Rugby union has bid adieu to two significant figures in recent days. Today’s players may not be overly familiar with Kevin Bowring, the first professional head coach of Wales between 1995-98, or Ronnie Dawson, who led the British & Irish Lions to a famous win against the All Blacks in 1959 and later became Ireland’s first national coach, but both helped to change their sport for the better.

Dawson, among myriad other roles, was a member of the committee that organised the transformative first Rugby World Cup while Bowring was a brilliant mentor to many of modern rugby’s most thoughtful coaches and educators from Stuart Lancaster and Shaun Edwards to Ben Ryan and Toby Booth. Lancaster reckoned Bowring, the Neath‑born son of a carpenter, had few peers – “I really think the world has lost one of the great coaching minds” – and Ryan felt likewise: “[He] pushed my thinking upstream, when as a young coach I only ever swam downstream.”