Interview with Michael Jones 8 May 2007

Q: What do you think are the pluses and minuses of preparing the Manu Samoa team five months away from the World Cup? (realising that you’ve got a number of different tournaments and tours prior to that).

Michael Jones:

I suppose you never feel like you’ve got enough time compared to the average international team, especially when teams have got super 14 competitions going on and six nations and Heineken Cup and European Cup and there’s a whole lot of tournaments where the average international coach can get 30 or 40 of his best players playing week in or week out playing at high intensity. We certainly don’t have that vehicle for us.
We do have some guys playing professional and some playing in various levels of club competitions to provincial competitions. We have a couple playing Super 14 which is great.

So it’s very challenging, very difficult! What we do have thankfully is South Pacific Six Nations starting end of May and that’s a good hard tournament with five hard games where there are six teams and a test in between against South Africa. So it’s not a bad build up for us, we’re not complaining. We would have liked to have had probably six or seven more games but that’s impossible because the international programme is so cluttered. We do have three games in late August just before we hit South Africa in September against English Clubs. So in the scheme of things it’s probably the best we could do and it’s pretty much what we had in 2003 when we had 9 or 10 games leading into the World Cup and that’s pretty much what we can really achieve in terms of getting games at this level because everyone is so busy and that international programmes are cluttered as I mentioned. But it’s also what we can afford and that’s the other key factor which we just don’t have funding to just take the team on a world tour of Europe or something. So we’re not complaining but I suppose putting my coaches hat on we would have loved to have had 3-5 more games and even ultimately being involved in a competition like the Super 14 where you’ve got guys, you can watch them week in week out, all performing at the same benchmarks against similar opposition and at the same high intensity.

Q: Regarding supporters- just how important do you think the effect of supporters sending their support to the team is?

Michael Jones:

Huge! I mean it really is. For us, it means a lot. It is very significant for us. We like to see ourselves as the “Peoples” team.

I’ve always felt and believed that the Manu Samoa, like other Island teams, play for the right reasons. It’s not about money because there isn’t any. It is about wearing the jersey, the blue jersey for their country. It’s about everything we live and play for, our families, our villages, communities our parents, our mates. It’s all about that and all those good old fashioned values. So we respond very positively to our community and any time we know they’re behind us and they’re with us and part of this journey to the world cup, it means a lot and it goes a long long way.

We’re village people, we have that sense of belonging, connectedness to our communities and our people, so we really welcome it and we see it as a big part of our success and our ability to motivate and inspire ourselves to give our best.

We really look forward to the ongoing support of all our supporters all over the world.