How undefeated boxer-cum-coach gets Glasgow up for ‘the fight’

Eight weeks on from that glorious night in Pretoria, a good number of Glasgow’s URC winners are already back at Scotstoun getting a sweat on before the new campaign kicks off in late September.
The bulk of the players who went straight from the title celebrations to Scotland’s tour to the Americas are not due back until next Monday but there is still plenty to work with for Cillian Reardon, the Warriors’ head of athletic performance.
The 36-year-old Dubliner is a key member of Franco Smith’s backroom team, responsible for shaping and maintaining the sort of physical specimens who can produce their most complete, most combative performances of the season deep into its final month, by which time many of those involved had effectively done two seasons back-to-back via the small matter of a Rugby World Cup.
The variety, adaptability and sheer toughness — technical, mental and physical — which Glasgow displayed in seeing off Munster and the Bulls away from home on successive weekends spoke volumes for how clearly, deeply and effectively Smith and his staff have managed to embed the South African’s core principles.
“There are definitely themes to the different periods of the season here,” Reardon says. “The pattern is that we come back [for pre-season] later than some other teams. But we also train harder for longer.
“The front end of our season, maybe the front half of our season, is a development window — not just for six weeks in the pre-season. You can definitely see with Franco and the coaching staff very clear shifts in the emphasis through the season. So then built into us is that we have different models we can go to.
“For example, after we won against Munster on the Saturday night, imagine being a team manager and being told, ‘OK get your team to South Africa by Tuesday.’ And it’s not like money is no object.
“Having these different models that we can go to to make sure we’re putting out a team that’s ready is huge for us. Your best team is your readiest team, not necessarily your biggest names.”
Smith’s labour-intensive Monday and Tuesday sessions are the stuff of dressing-room legend, with Huw Jones only half-joking when he said the best thing about landing a final on the other side of the world was being spared another two epic shifts on the Scotstoun back pitches.
Closer inspection confirms that the head coach does indeed have gears, and he has certainly added layers to the team, whose success at the business end of the campaign was underpinned by the sort of gritty qualities that wouldn’t have been readily associated with recent Glasgow sides.
“A huge amount of the difference between winning and losing teams in rugby is going to be about physicality and your ability to stay in the fight,” Reardon acknowledges. “Whether that’s in the set piece or repeated [defensive] sets or whatever it is. Most teams are doing similar-ish things. They’re going to differentiate on a number of things. But one of the big things is how physical they are.
“If you look at the big, threshold games for us last year — the obvious ones are Stormers, Munster, Bulls [in the knockouts], but also Bayonne and Exeter, this team is characterised by their ability to stay in the fight.
“I can draw a direct line between the way we train and the way you see that play out on the pitch. If we train harder than everyone else, if we do things that other teams don’t do, that can translate to outcomes.”
For all that the Glasgow players clearly respect Smith and would be wary of disappointing him, the 52-year-old is also something of a people person who leads with emotional intelligence, not least in how he allows his staff the headroom to bring their own expertise to bear.
For Reardon and the various medical and conditioning colleagues who make up his department, the most obvious expression of this trust is Smith having adopted a “return to perform” approach with injured players, rather than the much more common “return to play”.
In essence, Smith empowers his support team to deliver players back to him when they judge they are best placed to meaningfully contribute.
“The way we see it, you can have a guy back a month earlier in name but he’s not really back,” Reardon explains. “Franco cares about the club and he cares about the people in the club. He wants to be successful, the players want to be successful, the staff want to be successful. Everyone’s interests are aligned but it’s about communicating in such a way that you’re always reminding each other.”
Those not involved in World Cup preparations were given an extended break last summer — music to the ears of welfare advocates who have long argued that running players into the ground is not a prerequisite for success. Much of this is about trust, and players taking responsibility for their own bodies.
As Reardon holds court in the media room at the back of the main stand, Stafford McDowall is pounding up and down the touchline.
“He flew back from his holiday overnight three days ago, the following morning I saw him in at Scotstoun and he’s here again today. That’s why we can operate a short pre-season. Because the guys come back in and they’re fit on day one.
“Really, we don’t get guys fit here. They get themselves fit and then we translate it through the rugby programme. That’s a much better role for your performance department to play: to help players climb a framework, the pinnacle of which is this awesomely demanding training. The opposite of that is [a coach saying], ‘You get them fit then I’ll train them to play rugby’. That just doesn’t work.
“You’re always managing multiple waves of players. With that, you need your coaching staff to set the scene weeks and months down the road so that you as a performance department can be preparing the right waves of guys to deliver the right performance at the right time. We have that setting here.”
Reardon initially embarked on a business degree before quickly realising that his true calling was in sports coaching and sports science. He did an internship at Leinster before becoming part of the province’s academy support set-up and making his way up the ladder to the senior team. The chance to head up his own department convinced him to move to Glasgow in early 2021, and he and his wife, Claire, have recently welcomed their first child.
Alongside his Leinster duties, Reardon briefly pursued a career as a professional super welterweight/light middleweight boxer. He put the gloves on the back burner during Covid, boasting an unblemished 5-0 record, but has been known to have players spar with him to mix things up during Scotstoun training.
“I’m a better coach because I spent five years in that environment,” Reardon reasons. “It’s a very tough training environment and I had to be very, very well organised to have a full-time job and be an athlete at the same time.
“That was where I picked up my habit of starting very early in the morning and making sure my sleep was right — a lot of the stuff we ask these guys here to do. It’s about changing players’ minds about what’s actually possible. And then they stay in the fight.”
That fight is sure to be even tougher this year, with Glasgow there to be shot at.
“You know what got you here won’t get you there,” Reardon says. “I don’t know exactly how we’ll confront that yet, but I know the fact that the question is in everybody’s mind means we’ll come to some conclusions around it. We know we’ll have to be better.
“It’s going to be about consistency, which you’ll build with the intensity of your training environment every day. It’s going to be that squad depth which comes from your training environment because there will be guys who don’t get game exposure for long periods of time. So your training has to be so demanding that it actually prepares them for the game.
“The hardest thing those guys do is actually train for us. The game feels easy, I think.”