Brendan Venter is not to everyone’s liking, least of all the Rugby Football Union. But he has a strong claim to be English rugby’s manager of the season. Right now he is up to his neck in trouble, banned…

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Brendan Venter is not to everyone’s liking, least of all the Rugby Football Union. But he has a strong claim to be English rugby’s manager of the season.

Right now he is up to his neck in trouble, banned from the touchline for 14 weeks for behaviour the powers-that-be consider ‘totally unacceptable’.

Yet his Saracens team are through to next weekend’s Guinness Premiership Final on the back of an astonishing run of form.

In successive weeks a club which for years has under-achieved has notched away wins at Northampton, Leicester and Northampton again.

Leicester finished the season top of the table, Northampton second. Until they played Sarries neither had lost at home in the league all season.

The Hertfordshire club were not remotely lucky in any of those three games. Twelve years after their one and only trophy, Saracens are on fire heading to Twickenham.

Venter deserves a lot of credit for that. In his first season in charge he has not only moulded a team of individuals but built a rock-solid team spirit.

The South African is abrasive and passionate, outspoken and chippy. If you’re with him he will defend you to the end of the earth. If you’re not, good luck.

Steve Borthwick is his team captain. The guy is widely maligned as England skipper yet, as a player and leader of Saracens, Venter insists he would not swap him for the world.

He makes Borthwick feel special and the appreciation is mutual. Yet Venter is also prone to provoking very different sentiments.

Matt Dawson, in his autobiography ‘Nine Lives’, describes him as a “bad loser and a bad winner, an all-round horrible person. In the world of rugby there is not one person I genuinely dislike other than Brendan Venter”.

Trust me that is the polite stuff from a rant which lasts three pages. In short, Dawson did not care for the cut of his jib. And neither, it appears, does RFU disciplinary chief Judge Jeff Blackett.

Blackett spoke of a “certain disdain” from Venter towards the RFU Panel trying his case, “for example by coming back to hear his sanction eating a biscuit and throwing sweet papers across the table”. Ouch.

Venter clearly wins the Premiership’s ‘Marmite’ award as the man who divides opinion like no other. One way or another you simply can’t ignore the guy.

The question is, does that make him Manager of the Season?

Let’s start by ruling out the bosses of Worcester, Sale, Newcastle, Harlequins, London Irish and Wasps – none of whom would claim to have made a success of the campaign.

Bryan Redpath at Gloucester and Steve Meehan at Bath deserve plaudits for turning round early-season slumps and finishing strongly.

So too Andy Key who, in partnership with Neil Back, kept Leeds up in their first season back in the Premiership despite only half the budget of their rivals. A major feat.

But I place Venter above each of them, in the top three alongside Leicester’s Richard Cockerill and Jim Mallinder of Northampton.

Both Cockerill and Venter make the podium for getting their teams to the Premiership Final as much through force of their own personality as anything else.

And I give Venter second place on the basis that he has done it without a single player from Martin Johnson’s 44-man England touring squad.

My choice for Boss of 2009/10, however, is Saints’ director of rugby, Mallinder.

Northampton challenged strongly for an historic Treble until the final weeks of the campaign: winning the LV Cup, reaching the last eight in Europe and finishing runners-up to Leicester in the league.

They counted mighty Munster, French champions Perpignan and Premiership kingpins Leicester among their scalps.

And they did it by playing edge-of-your-seat rugby and along the way developing the likes of Ben Foden and Chris Ashton who, in turn, have reinvigorated the England team.

It is of, course, a subjective judgement, but for my money the Saint pips the sinner.

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