by Peter Burns
Woodward thought for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t kick very well off my left foot.’
Greenwood smiled. ‘And here I was thinking you were a footballer! Come with me.’ He stood, grabbed two rugby balls from a bag by his desk and walked out of the room, Woodward trailing behind him.
Greenwood turned down a corridor and made his way to a side door. When he pushed it open Woodward saw that they had come out by one of the university football pitches.
‘Your body is like a machine,’ said Greenwood, ‘and the best machines are well-balanced and finely tuned. It’s not rocket science – it’s simple biomechanics. That’s what you’re going to learn here – both in the classroom and out on the training field.’ He flicked a ball to Woodward. ‘Kick this with your good foot. Nice and relaxed.’
Woodward took the ball and, careful to keep his balance in his leather-soled shoes, swung his foot at it. Although his non-kicking foot slid slightly on the grass, he made a sweet contact with the ball and it spiralled through the air, landing some thirty yards down the pitch.
‘Very nice,’ said Greenwood. He tossed a second ball to Woodward. ‘Now, go through each step that you did there again – but slowly and don’t actually kick this time.’
Woodward made a small adjustment with his hands, angling the ball at a slight right-to-left diagonal, set his shoulders square, took a step, planted his non-kicking foot as firmly as he could on the ground and then swung his right foot. As instructed, he didn’t release the ball from his grasp.
‘So, thinking about your body as a machine, have a close look at every aspect of your kicking process. You angled the ball right to left to open up the sweet spot for the arch of your foot. You set yourself square to where you wanted to direct the ball. You made sure you had a solid base with your left foot and then you swung through the point of contact with your right foot. A textbook spiral punt. Pass me the ball.’
Woodward passed him the ball and it was immediately spun back to him. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ called Greenwood as the ball fell into Woodward’s hands. ‘Kick it with your left foot.’
Woodward adjusted the ball, planted his right foot, pivoted his body and kicked. He skidded on the grass and sliced the ball horribly off to his left.
Greenwood wandered over to collect it. ‘Your balance was all wrong. You angled the ball OK in your hands, but you swung your upper body at it and brought your foot round at the same time. Your right foot was set badly and the momentum was turning in an uncontrolled pivot. Biomechanics. Your body is a machine, remember. You kicked with precision with your right foot, every aspect of the kicking process under control. You just need to learn to mirror those movements, to have as much control and poise when working the other side of your body as you do when working with your more natural side. Everything in your body needs to be balanced, to feel connected and under control. That’s what you’ll learn here. It will require a commitment to hard work and a constant dedication to improve. But if you give me that, I’ll give you the results you’re looking for. Let’s try the kick again.’
They worked on the kicking for another ten minutes. Every time Woodward went through the motions, Greenwood made small adjustments. It took perhaps fifteen or twenty strikes but then he nailed it – a perfectly executed spiral punt off his left foot. And it was no fluke – Woodward felt the movement and balance as comfortably in the left side of his body as he felt in his right when kicking with his stronger foot. Again and again Greenwood passed him the ball and, alternating his kicking foot as instructed, Woodward fired off spiral punt after spiral punt. It was one of the most satisfying feelings he had ever experienced.
Some thirty years later, Greenwood would fondly recall that first meeting. ‘I was impressed by Clive straight away. I’d heard good things about him before he came for his interview and I wasn’t disappointed. He was very absorbent of ideas. He recognised very early how important small details were to the bigger picture of achieving success. At Loughborough we were focused on honing excellence in the basic skills – whatever the sporting discipline you were involved in. Without that attention to detail and to the fundamentals of your sport, you can’t achieve anything great. The key to the question that I asked him – about what he wasn’t good at – is to admit to a weakness in your game. That is often a very hard thing for athletes to do. But it is invaluable. If you can admit to your weaknesses, identify them, analyse them and then do everything you can to go out and improve yourself, then you are preparing yourself in the best possible way for a competitive environment. When a rugby player is out on the pitch in the heat of the battle, there is nothing a coach can do to help them. If they understand every aspect of their play and have principles and methods to fall back on, then they can control the outcome of their performance.
‘I was a teacher rather than a coach. I tried to get people thinking. I wanted each player to be his own coach, and I encouraged each player to expand their awareness, to find truth wherever it lay. All coaching is one-to-one: there’s a place for the motivational speech, but it’s far more effective to talk to people individually. I liked to break down teams, plays and players and examine each as individual components, looking for areas of strength and weakness and working out how to improve each part. It’s like a jigsaw. Then, when you have your targets figured out you go out and you work as hard as you can to improve. And you just keep doing it again and again and again.
‘It was my mantra that my players would always work harder than anyone else. We would make sure we covered every base we could in our preparation, which meant that we always had that strong foundation to fall back on whenever we came into difficulties during a match. Looking at how Clive developed as a player, a businessman and then a coach, I’m pleased to see that it was a philosophy that clearly rubbed off on him.
‘Sebastian Coe was at Loughborough at the same time as Clive. He had a wonderful athletics coach in George Gandy and Clive used to go and watch Gandy put Coe through his paces. Again it came down to attention to detail and hard work. They spent a lot of time concentrating on preparation, nutrition, recovery, building strength and stamina. These were things that were alien in rugby union but which we were starting to introduce at Loughborough.
‘The rugby that I most enjoyed playing was fast and open and that is the style that I always wanted to encourage as a coach. I wanted every player in my teams to be able to handle the ball comfortably, to be able to offer something in attack, in defence and as a support player. This meant, of course, that they had to have huge fitness levels and had to work hard all the time on their skills. But if they did that then I would build a game plan and a structure where they could all play and enjoy a truly fifteen-man game of rugby. That’s what the game should be about – that’s the game that, ultimately, every player wants to play and every spectator wants to watch. It doesn’t mean spreading the ball wide at every moment; it’s about decision-making and player judgement. It’s about creativity in the tight channels and exchanges as much as it is about opening up space and gaps for breaks in the wide expanses or on a counter-attack in broken play. Again, I think that’s where my instinct to teach rather than coach kicked in – I always wanted my players to think. I wanted them to be able to change tactics at will, to adapt to any game situation and to react to opportunities when they arose – not just adhere to the strictures of a clearly-defined game plan.
‘What I like about the approach that we had at Loughborough was that there could be no cutting corners – everyone worked as hard as anyone else. No one got by on a bit of flash talent. That meant that our players tended to be level-headed. That’s something that I certainly noticed in Clive. He was a player capable of real individual brilliance but he was also very level as a character. You always get highs and lows in sport – it’s an emotional business to be involved with. But that ability to be level-headed is so important to long-term success. If you don’t buy into the hype, then you can weather the storms when they break. And if
you have a long career there will always be storms.’
Woodward left the interview absolutely buzzing. He had dreams of playing for England and now he could see a pathway to achieving that dream – and the next step lay in Loughborough. Just before the end of December he received a letter from the college. His application had been accepted and he would be starting his first year the following autumn.
‘I was ecstatic,’ recalled Woodward. ‘Jim was such an exciting guy to be coached by. His whole ethos was different to anyone else coaching in the UK at the time – with the exception of maybe Earle Kirton at Quins and Chalkie White at Leicester. He always loved to say that ‘there are no rules in rugby’, meaning that we should never just accept the ingrained style of play that was fashionable at the time – which was a relief because it was a torturous period in English rugby. The national team was dreadful and they played such a depressing style of ten-man rugby. During my four years at university I think England only managed six wins in twenty-two games. Jim said that any side in the world could be beaten as long as you had several ways to play the game. If you only had one way, as England did at the time, opposition teams could work you out very quickly and easily nullify any threat that you might pose. It was a lesson that I would always remember. The way he saw it, every player on the pitch had a role to play in attack and defence, even if they were nowhere near the ball. I loved it. It was everything I had been looking for since I first began playing rugby.
‘A few weeks after my interview with Jim Greenwood, I had my first taste of playing for England when I was selected for the England Colts, the under-19 side, against Wales at Twickenham. I was up against several players that I knew from the Welsh Schoolboys trial – and I played directly against Gareth Davies. It was a pretty dire game; we won 9–6 and even though I scored the only try of the game, we were playing a dreadful style that was endemic in the England set-up at the time. I had been warned about it by David Cooke, who was playing in the centre for England in that year’s Five Nations. “The game plan is to kick the ball if we’re anywhere other than inside the opposition’s 25-yard line,” he said. “Then, when we’re there, the forwards keep the ball until they can’t bludgeon their way forward any more, and that’s the moment that the backs get the ball to play with – which is pretty much the worst ball to have, especially when you’ve hardly touched it before then. It usually all goes wrong and we butcher any chances to score. The old joke is that if you’re picked as an outside back for England you should bring a hat and some gloves to keep you warm until you touch the ball. We’re told that we can only run the ball from other areas of the pitch if we’re twenty points up – but with that style of play we’re never twenty points up.” And that was pretty much exactly the style of play I was ordered to orchestrate when I was playing for the Colts. The whole system got to me; I was young and it was an incredible experience to be pulling on an England shirt and to be playing for my country, but the set-up and the style of play nagged me. It was the antithesis of what I had heard Jim Greenwood talk about during my interview. I couldn’t wait to get to Loughborough in the autumn.
‘I played for Jim for three years, captaining the squad in my last two seasons. No man has done more in our time to single-handedly transform the modern game of rugby than Jim Greenwood. He published Total Rugby in 1979 when I was there and it has become a classic all over the world. It remains the only coaching manual I have ever read and I have referred to it constantly over the years. He was a visionary and was the premier strategist on the game during his lifetime.
‘He would get so angry if we walked off the field and he felt that we hadn’t risked everything out there, if we hadn’t tried things. He would say, “We’re not getting paid for this, why would you want to do anything other than enjoy yourself out there? You’re not under any pressure. The only pressure is from me and I’ll only be annoyed if I feel you haven’t tried things.” He was obsessed with trying to play rugby differently. He was an amazing, amazing man. We were small because we were a bunch of students, but he felt that if we were fit enough, fast enough and skilful enough we could play anyone and beat them. It was fantastic. It was probably the only time in my career that I was as close to being a professional as it was possible to be. We trained properly, we ate properly and as a coach he was a genius. A pure genius. And you just learned so much from him – not just in terms of technique but in the philosophy of how to play and how to enjoy the game to its fullest.’
It wasn’t only the rugby coaching that would shape and influence Woodward’s thinking. The degree in sports science included coaching, medical studies, psychology, nutrition, analysis and fitness – all things that were way ahead of their time as far as British sport, and particularly rugby union, was concerned.
‘My time at Loughborough was everything I had hoped for and more,’ said Woodward, ‘although there were some tough times there, too. I broke my leg twice in five months during the 1976 season and was out for a year, which was very difficult to deal with at the time.’
Stuart Biddle, who was head of Woodward’s degree course and president of Loughborough’s Athletic Union, recalled how impressed he had been with how Woodward coped with his injury setbacks. ‘He was an outstanding player and he made huge strides in his game under Jim Greenwood’s tutelage. What most impressed me, though, was how he dealt with the injuries that cost him a whole season. He never lost his hunger for the game and he came back stronger, captaining the side for two years and leading them to the UAU Championship titles [the Universities Athletic Union managed inter-university competition across the UK] in 1977, 1978 and 1979 and to victory at the Middlesex Sevens. That 1978–79 season was particularly memorable as the side only lost two matches in the entire season.’
As much as Jim Greenwood was a huge influence, he was not the only one that Woodward came across while at university. ‘Loughborough was such a fascinating place to be because of all the other talented sportsmen and women who were studying and training there,’ he said. ‘I used to love going to watch Seb Coe train, which I did quite a bit when I was injured during the ’76 season. Just as Jim Greenwood had been the attraction for me to go to Loughborough, so George Gandy would have been the attraction for Seb. I can still remember some of the brutal training that Gandy made him do – a dozen or so consecutive 300-metre sprints, with only a 100-metre jog around the bend to recover between them, with Gandy barking at him all the time. The whole approach both men took was incredibly professional – strength and conditioning, diet and analysis, the focus on the biomechanics of Seb’s body and how it could all be adjusted to help him run faster. They did everything they could to give him a physical and psychological edge. And it paid off – it was all part of the road to him breaking twelve world records and winning both gold and silver medals at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics.
‘I absolutely loved my four years at Loughborough and I really enjoyed that I only played for the university team. There was quite a bit of pressure to play for one of the established clubs and the England selectors told me that they couldn’t pick me if I was only playing for Loughborough – but it was a decision that felt right for me. It was only when I graduated that I thought about where to play next and what I might do career-wise. I went back to London and rejoined Harlequins, but I remember chatting to Jim about what I might do and he suggested looking into a management training scheme with Rank Xerox.’
‘They were an American company and I heard how good their graduate training schemes were,’ said Greenwood. ‘As much as I knew he had enjoyed his PE degree, a management training scheme with a company like that would open up a lot more options for him. As he has gone on to speak and write about, his experience with Rank Xerox had as big an impact on his life and coaching career as anything I taught him rugby-wise.’
‘Despite how much I had enjoyed my degree, I wasn’t interested in a teaching career,’ said Woodward. ‘NatWest had promised that I could return to work for them after graduation, but the banks sector had
lost its lustre for me. Earle Kirton had gone back to New Zealand by then as well and it felt like the end of an era for me.’
Fortunately the decision of where to play next was an easy one to make. One of the biggest clubs in the country was Leicester, which was only a few miles from Loughborough, and they were being coached by another visionary who was determined to buck the national trends. Herbert ‘Chalkie’ White was a hard taskmaster in training but he was always willing to encourage his players to attack and play the game as they saw fit. Like Greenwood, he didn’t prescribe to restrictive game plans. While he never felt that he was a great coaching innovator, he was open-minded in his approach and trusted his players’ judgement. If they felt that it was on to attack, he backed them – no matter the field position or what stage the game was at. It was a liberating approach for his players and they often more than repaid the faith that he put in them.
White took a pastoral approach to his player management. He was not a bawler or screamer. He understood that his players were all in full-time jobs and that they should be looked after as best they could when they stepped inside the Leicester gates. In midwinter he introduced the initiative of the groundsman welcoming the players to training with piping hot mugs of tea.
‘It was these little things that can make a huge difference to the players and to the general environment of a team and a club,’ said Woodward. ‘Chalkie was also a great guy to talk to. He was always ready to listen to ideas that you might have. He might disagree with them, he might argue with you over opinions or points, but he would always listen. From a player’s point of view, that kind of open rapport with a coach is hugely important.
‘He had a talented team there, but he would say, ‘Look, we’re not getting paid to play here, we should enjoy ourselves and we should look to entertain, because that’s why people are coming to watch.’ And I think you have more chance of winning if your team is genuinely excited about going out to play. As a player it was great, you really looked forward to each game and the chance of going out and expressing yourself rather than going out to bludgeon your way through a game.
