England rugby star Mark Cueto on Darren Campbell's coaching
England’s star rugby winger Mark Cueto is in action against Argentina on Saturday. Spikesmag.com caught up with him to talk about the key role 2004 Olympic 4x100m champion Darren Campbell has played in his recent revival of fortune.
Mark Cueto, whose ‘try’ in the 2007 World Cup final was controversially disqualified, dropped out of the England reckoning last year. He was even finding it tough to keep his place in the Sale Sharks line-up after a long sequence of hamstring and calf injuries.
“I was considering packing the game in,” he says.
But after starting to work on his sprinting technique with Darren Campbell in November, the 29-year-old winger has transformed his game at club and national level – he was one of England’s outstanding personal successes in the Six Nations tournament in the spring and although he narrowly missed out on the Lions Tour, he is finishing his season on a high.
“I met Darren through a friend of a friend, and I asked him if he could advise me on my sprinting technique,” says Cueto, who made three tries in England’s 37-15 defeat to the Pumas at Old Trafford last week. “Because I knew he had already helped a lot of football and rugby players.”
Cueto was not wrong;
since retiring in 2006, Campbell has worked with some of the world’s finest talents, including the massive New Zealand winger Jonah Lomu -- whom he helped to reach match fitness after a serious operation -- and Chelsea’s Ukrainian forward Andrei Shevchenko.
Darren has advised players at nine Premier League clubs, including Stoke City and West Bromwich Albion, and has also helped out Cardiff Blues rugby players.
While Usain Bolt gained massive publicity for his recent visit to Manchester United, where he advised Cristiano Ronaldo on his sprinting technique, Campbell’s coaching of leading figures from other sports has been a matter of steady input rather than high profile, one-off consultations.
But it only took Cueto a few minutes of their first meeting -- at the indoor track alongside the City of Manchester stadium -- to realise that Campbell was the real deal.
“I’d told him about my hamstring problems, and he soon showed me how I was putting too much pressure on that part of my leg when I was accelerating in my first strides,” Cueto recalls.
“But then he got me doing some short sprints and he asked me if I’d ever had a problem with my right shoulder because the range of movement in my arm didn’t look right – I’d had a labral tear in my right shoulder a couple of years earlier, but I had forgotten about it.
“When something like that happens it makes you trust someone. But
Darren didn’t just work on my technique, he worked on my general confidence, too.
“At the time I didn’t have the spark I relied upon to be effective in the position I play. I was so afraid of injuring my hamstring again. I was almost afraid to put my foot on the ground. If I’d had a range of injuries it would have been different, but my hamstring seemed to be going wrong again and again,” says Cueto.
“So when I started running it was as if I was jogging for the first three or four steps, just until I could reassure myself the hamstring wasn’t going to go again.
Once Darren changed the way I was accelerating I found the confidence to really put my foot down.
“But one of the biggest plus points of working with Darren was the way he improved my confidence. I used to think that as I was in a team sport and Darren was in an individual sport we wouldn’t have that much real communication.
“But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Talking to Darren about his mindset and the way he approached top level competition has been unbelievably valuable for me,” adds Cueto.
Darren Campbell has now worked with enough footballers and rugby players to see clear patterns emerging.
“Generally, they don’t think about how they are sprinting because they have never had to. They just do it,” says Campbell. “But becoming more efficient is all about posture and balance.
“Usain Bolt picked up on the fact that Ronaldo leaned forward too much and tended to fall forwards when he was at top speed,” says Campbell. “And that is a common problem. You often see footballers over-rotating and losing their footing.
“I tell people they have to get the posture and bio-mechanics right before they can gain the speed. But you have to adapt the technique. Sprinters lift their knees up to almost 90 degrees. But football and rugby players don’t need to do that.
“A lot of it is about getting people to just relax and work on the co-ordination between their arms and their legs,” says Campbell, the retired athlete turned acting sprints coach for the world's top sportsmen.
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