Louis Deacon is responsible for choreographing the Red Roses’ highly effective lineout routines
He is the brains behind the Red Roses’ thunderous set-piece which has battered teams at the World Cup, but Louis Deacon wants to make one thing clear. “I’m not a lineout nause,” he says, straight faced. “My idea of a Friday night is not watching lineouts on repeat.”
It is a surprising revelation from the former Leicester lock, given he has spent the past year meticulously fine-tuning England’s greatest weapon – their lineout maul – a white projectile weapon which has become the envy of others.
Deacon, who came on board as England’s forwards coach in August 2021, has watched on with pride, satisfied that he is delivering on his remit. He joined the Red Roses set-up after a coaching stint with England’s under-20s and was set a challenge: to mould the most dominant set-piece ever seen in the women’s game. Having been part of Leicester’s iconic pack which dominated during the noughties, the six-time Premiership winner seemed the perfect candidate.
“We ripped the old lineout completely apart and brought in a new one,” he says. “We did a walk through and the next day, we did it in a live training session and they’re picking it up. I’m going to Midds [England head coach Simon Middleton], ‘I can’t believe how quickly they picked that up.’ It needed to be a fresh start. I don’t think as a coach, coming in, running a previous coach’s lineout, you should be doing that. I’ve given the girls a new framework and they’ve used that to grow it.”