'How are we going to go? Don't know. But we are going to fight'

Gilbert Enoka, the famed former All Black mental skills coach, has been bringing his insight to England

- Simon Burnton

"We've got a smooth lake at the moment," Gilbert Enoka says, relaxing in the bar of England's team hotel a few days before the battle for the Ashes gets under way. "But the series is going to start and then there's going to be really, really choppy water in terms of what we have to sail. All I want is to help the guys develop structures that can help them be reliable when those waves come.

Enoka is the mental skills coach most famous for instigating a “no dickheads” policy during his 21 years in the All Blacks dressing room. He is a man whose path to the pinnacle of team sport is as remarkable as the effect he has had since getting there.

At 16, he trained as a PE teacher, playing volleyball on the side, well enough to represent his country. “I was looking at ways to get better and found that most of the problems people were having were in the mind, in their heads,” he says. “Mistakes, setbacks, self-doubt, all those things.”

One day Wayne Smith, then an All Black and also part-time PE kit salesman, arrived at his school for a sale. He and Enoka had coffee. “He was struggling with the expectations and the scrutiny and the consequences of being in the fishbowl,” Enoka says. “I told him about what I was doing and he loved it, so I started working with him.”

After retiring from playing, Smith went into coaching and took Enoka with him, all the way to the All Blacks. He stayed there for 304 games and a period of extraordinary success. “All I wanted to do was help my team to get better and I wanted to perform better personally,” he says.

He first came across Brendon McCullum when the man who is now England head coach was coming through New Zealand’s academy. The two clicked.