Gilbert Enoka: Why Chelsea Are Turning To New Zealand Rugby Team's Mental Skills Expert

Enoka, who helped created a winning culture at the All Blacks, one of the best sporting sides ever, will now be working as a consultant for Chelsea. Who is he? And why him?

It was a crisis unlike anything that the All Blacks, New Zealand’s indomitable rugby team for the uninitiated, had ever faced. After a 40-26 loss to the Springboks (South Africa’s Rugby team) in Johannesburg sealed a humiliating bottom-placed finish at the 2004 Tri Nation Series, a few of NZ’s senior player organized an alcohol-fueled “court session” (a mock inquest) that quickly spiraled into chaos. Players were found passed out in bushes, drains and gutters. The South African players, who were also staying in the same hotel, had to put their sloshed Kiwi counterparts into recovery positions. One management employee drank so much he feared for his life.

After the team landed back home in New Zealand, a meeting of senior figures and players was called to analyse the aftermath of their disastrous campaign. The meeting lasted three days. Gilbert Enoka, the team’s mental skills coach, who was yesterday reported to have been recruited by Chelsea as a consultant, was in that meeting. He would prove instrumental in transforming the All Blacks’ team culture, turning a winning machine into a pressure-fueled juggernaut. Up until that point, the All-Blacks had won one of the five Rugby World Cups, the first one ever held in 1987. They would go on to win two of the next four, becoming the first side to win three. The World Rugby Rankings were introduced in 2003; since then, the All Blacks have held the number one spot longer than the rest of the teams combined.

This is just one small glimpse into Enoka’s impact during a 19-year spell with the All Blacks. He attributes his resilient roots to a tough upbringing, which saw his father leave his physically-handicapped mother to fend for six kids, which led to him being admitted into foster care at just 18 months old. He stayed there will he was 12, after which he left to go back home, but discovered his mother had remarried a man with alcohol issues. He joined university at 16, taking up a course in physical education. He eventually befriended Wayne Smith, an All Blacks player and future assistant coach of the team. Smith was forced to sneak Enoka in as his masseur, as sports psychology was still viewed with cynicism and ridicule.

It was in 1997, where his name first came to prominence. The Canterbury Crusaders were struggling a few months after embracing professionalism. The team was made up from individuals around New Zealand, hindering local support and damaging morale within the side. Enoka, along with Smith, used principles of storytelling to construct the identity of the ideal Crusader player, an idea that took form only after contributions from every player in the side. The Crusaders won the Super Rugby season in 1998, and would win it six times in the next 9 editions. They’ve also won six of the last six titles since 2017. “It’s crazy because if you want to build up strength, you go to the gym and work three times a week on your core strength,” he once said to Real Estate Business magazine. “If you want to develop your ability to concentrate, focus and be flexible from a mental perspective, wouldn’t you apply the same approach?” So how has Enoka, along with other prominent members of the All-Black team achieved this?

Dual/Devolved Leadership

A crucial change that was inculcated post the 2004 debacle was recognizing the need for increased accountability from the players themselves. A senior leadership group was created within the team, which was given more power than the management to make key-decisions. They were expected to enforce the right behaviours of all team-members and expected to maintain the highest standards of discipline and excellence, on and off-the-pitch.

A great example comes from the 2011 Rugby World Cup. A few days before a crucial quarterfinal vs. Argentina, two players – Cory Jane and Israel Dagg – took sleeping pills in a bid to see who could stay up the longest, before going out drinking; a shocking episode considering what had happened in 2004. Instead of throwing them to the wolves however, the two players were made to stand in front of the senior leadership group and apologize for their transgressions. The matter was dealt with internally. Jane played in the quarters against Argentina, while both him and Dagg started the semis and the finals as the All-Blacks won the World Cup.

Rituals

The power of rituals and cultural symbolism are also central to the All-Blacks identity. Enoka was key in bringing in Derek Lardelli, a Maori dance performer, tattoo artist and cultural expert, to initiate key conversations on cultural identity. These conversations led to Derek composing the Kapa o Pango (Team in Black) a haka exclusive to the All-Blacks.

The haka, a ceremonial war dance, is a Maori tribe’s displace of pride, power and togetherness. It is a challenge, a declaration of war, on the opponent – the chants proclaim the tribe’s oneness with its land; it is an ethereal call summoning and awakening the spiritual bond between the tribe and its ancestors. The opening passage of James Kerr’s Legacy is a beautiful ode to the terrifyingly beautiful show of ferocity the All-Blacks perform before they go to war. The opponents may not understand the intricacies of the Maori tongue, but the snake-like hisses, the thumping of the chest like a war drum, making the earth sing to the thrum of their stamps and the thumb drawing a slit across the neck, all while staring straight into the opponent’s eyes… it all inflicts damage before the game begins. The first Kapa o Pango was performed just over a year after the 2004 collapse, under the very same opponents that caused it. This time, the All-Blacks won 30-27.

Red Head/Blue Head

In 2010, Enoka called upon the services of Gazing Performance System to help the team grasp a better understanding of how the mind performs under pressure. Together with the player leaders, they formed MAD, the Mental Analysis and Development  group, to help increase productivity under pressure. Gazing helped the All-Blacks grasp the difference between two extreme states under pressure. The first being a Red Head – someone overwhelmed physically and mentally due to negative feedback loops, leading to poor decision-making, collapsing under pressure and chaotic responses to simple actions. Gazing worked on cultivating the opposite mentality – the Blue Head – to constantly adapt to a dynamic game-state, how to make accurate situational assessments under pressure and resisting the impulse to deviate from a plan because of external stimuli. “When the pressure is at its highest,” says Enoka, “champions don't necessarily raise their game, they just deliver brilliant basics.”

Interestingly, Aston Villa and World Cup winning goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez alluded to this red/blue state of mind when speaking about Arsenal’s FA Cup final win over Chelsea, crediting his psychologist with helping him keep his head after Arsenal 1-0 down. "Nothing [got in] because I knew exactly what I wanted,” Martinez told Graham Hunter on The Big Interview. “I work on psychology, on red and blue mind. We did three cycles with the psychologist of the club at 1pm the day of the game and an hour and a half the day before, just me and the psychologist, to make sure I leave the red zone out of the game and concentrate on the blue side – winning the game, distribution, concentration and crosses."

Martinez also consulted a psychologist after experiencing a vast mental toll post Argentina’s shocking loss to Saudi Arabia, a game in which he conceded two goals from the two shots on target he faced. He went on to star for La Albiceleste, saving two penalties against the Netherlands in the quarterfinals, making a massive save in the dying minutes of the final vs. France, before going on to save another penalty in the shootout.

Birds of a Feather

In an online interview titled The Game Between the Game, he references an interesting experiment by evolutionary biologist William Muir. To study productivity in chickens, Muir divided a group of chickens into two groups. The first one had chickens with average levels of productivity. He put the highest egg producing ones into a second group of “super-chickens” and left both groups to themselves for six generations.

At the end of the time frame, he discovered that the first group of average chickens were healthier, plumper and had enhanced levels of egg production. In the group of super-chickens, only three were left standing. They had pecked the others chickens to death.

“If you tolerate the super-chickens,” Enoka observes, “you get dysfunction, cultures of secrecy. The whole notion of everyone contributing to a cause is an important one.”

The Boehly-Clearlake era rebuild has been swift, and in many respects, similarly brutal. 10 of the 23-man squad that won the Champions League have been sold or left on a free. The man who led the flock in that victorious campaign, Thomas Tuchel, was swiftly removed after reports of squad disharmony. As many as seven more players from that squad – Azpilicueta, Kovacic, Kante, Havertz, Hudson-Odoi, Pulisic and Ziyech could leave as early as this summer. The side that started in that win over City had an average age of 27.4. Had Ziyech’s move to PSG gone through and Madueke started, the average age of the side that started vs. Fulham would have been around 24.

For years now, Chelsea’s transfer policy has relied on hoarding super-chickens, with little regard for how many feathers it ruffled among the rest of the flock. The new hierarchy’s buys have all been under the age of 23. None of them have any claim to being super-chickens yet. Enzo Fernandez, arguably the closest to that category, is on reportedly 180k a week, a vast departure from the previous regime offering around 250k offered to both Timo Werner and Kai Havertz, as well as around 300k to Romelu Lukaku. Moving to quickly cut out a bloated wage bill and make the squad profile younger offers a strong base with little reason for individual discontent regarding financial disparity.

The senior leadership group idea of the All-Blacks was once a core tenet of the Chelsea dressing room. John Terry, Michael Ballack and Didier Drogba, three national team captains, while Frank Lampard, Jon Obi Mikel and Michael Essien also captained their respective NTs at times. On the biggest occasions, it was collective endeavour that helped them acquire silverware. Despite frequent managerial changes and violent transitions between footballing philosophies, the trophies came rolling in. The vanishing of that breed of leadership, that connect between individuals and the jersey they come to represent, is what Chelsea will be hoping Enoka can sow the seeds of.

However, you may argue – representing a national team, where players are united by factors exponentially powerful than at club football… is it even possible to emulate a similar degree of unity? ‘New Zealand society has changed,’ says All-Blacks’ 2011 WC winning coach Graham Henry, “the All Blacks team is made up of Tongan, Samoan, Fijian, European, Māori . . . We would stand up and talk about Fijian culture, and talk about Samoan culture . . . we might have a Samoan meal after that talk.” Inclusivity, strength in diversity and the need for a common unifying factor, like the new haka, all proved invaluable in that process.

Chelsea’s winter signings are diverse too – a Ukrainian winger, a French CB, an Argentinian CM, a Brazilian wonderkid, an English winger who moved to Netherlands at 16, a Portuguese forward and an Ivorian striker plying his trade in Norway. Interestingly, despite all of them being 23-or-under, they all already have experience in UEFA’s European competitions, where their individual showings have been blunted by collective failings. Enoka will be able to work with a young, exciting crop of players who will be hungry to impress in a side where no starting spots have yet been secured for the long-term.

In James Kerr’s Legacy, Graham Henry says that “if each player improves by 5 per cent minimum, 10 per cent, 15 per cent, the team’s going to improve. If you put these collective percentages together you’ve got something special.” The scope of marginal gains for players still well short of their incredible potential, is truly immense. At Chelsea, Enoka will have another Graham with whom to mull these matters over with, hoping to recreate the processes that turned the All Blacks from the best to even better. Whether Graham Potter is the right man or not might still hang in the balance come summer. One thing that is abundantly certain, however, is that the Boehly consortium rebuild is going beyond just player recruitment and addressing the most essential of foundations.