Dan McKellar’s first season in England was a bust. This is what he thinks might have gone wrong

Leicester Tigers and potential future Wallaby coach Dan McKellar is looking for answers after a disappointing first season in England.

The ex-Brumbies head coach and Wallabies assistant under Dave Rennie went to the Tigers instead of joinging up with Eddie Jones for the doomed World Cup smash and grab.

McKellar led the Tigers to the Premiership Cup final but lost it. They were knocked out of the European Champions Cup in the second round, and are eighth in the Premiership table, and out of finals contention, with one game remaining of his maiden season in charge.

(Photo by Bob Bradford – CameraSport via Getty Images)

He told the BBC that the results this season had left him “really disappointed”.

“I knew coming here that it is a very different competition to Super Rugby, so we had to train and I had to make sure my approach was what was require for this group and this competition, but we haven’t got that right – we have fallen away at the back end of games when we should be storming home,” McKellar said.

Instead of coming home strongly, the Tigers have lost six of their past seven games in all competitions since games restarted in March after the Six Nations.

Before that, they won nine out of 12 games to be in contention in three competitions.

“Since the Six Nations we hit the brakes,” McKellar said.

“After 23 weeks on the bounce, we built quite a bit of momentum and for whatever reason, and we will dig and find out, we haven’t got it right since then.”

McKellar said he needed to reflect on what went wrong.

“It’s a new coaching group, I’m new to this club, new to this competition, and as I’ve said in the past, things I do well is I’ll listen and adapt and I’ll make sure we are not sitting here in eighth position in 12 months’ time,” McKellar said.

He will start with a full review into the season.

“Our physical preparation, our preseason, was hard and we probably went too hard too early,” McKellar said. “And did we peak early and burn the players out?”

“We’ve had many conversations around what is required, because there are some things we have had to cope without that have made life pretty difficult.

“The club has been supportive and understand that. We will make sure we have a full deck of cards from a coaching and starting perspective for next season.

“I pride myself on running a program that is world class and for whatever reason we haven’t been able to do that this season.”