by Peter Burns
‘Clive played in the centre in the Second Test and got in on the wing for the Third Test,’ said Renwick. ‘He was probably a bit like me from the point of view that he wasn’t happy with the way the back play was going, and I think he felt there should have been a backs coach. At Leicester, where he was playing, Chalkie White was the backs coach and he was actually in South Africa at the time and there was some chat amongst the players about trying to get him involved, but it never came to anything.’
‘A Lions tour is like a three-year university degree crammed into three months,’ said Peter Wheeler, Woodward’s Leicester, England and Lions teammate. ‘When you are living so closely together, sharing such an intense experience, you cannot hide anything. Whether it’s strengths, weaknesses or foibles they will be found out and examined.’ Unfortunately, the truth of this statement would be hung around Woodward’s neck like a millstone.
‘We were 2–0 down in the series and had to win the Third Test at Port Elizabeth to stay in it,’ recalls Beaumont. ‘The weather was terrible, with lashing rain and a howling gale. With about ten minutes left to play, we were 10–6 up after Bruce Hay had scored a try and Ollie Campbell had kicked two penalties. Then disaster struck... Clive Woodward normally played centre but had been selected on the wing and made the kind of mistake that is typical when someone plays out of position. He chased after a loose ball and tapped it into touch and then turned his back and ran off to get back into position. I was about thirty yards away and hammering across the pitch and it was one of the worst moments of my career because I could see exactly what was about to happen. Clive was jogging away and his opposite number, Gerrie Germishuys, picked up the ball and took a quick throw-in to their flanker, Theuns Stofberg, who passed it back to him, and Germishuys belted up the wing to score in the corner. Naas Botha kicked the conversion and for the third time in three Tests we had been the cause of our own downfall.’
It was a slip in Woodward’s concentration – a trait that had dogged his youth but which he had learnt to largely overcome. It was deeply unfortunate for both Woodward and the Lions that it should rear its head at such a crucial moment in the Test series. Regrettably, it wouldn’t be the last such lapse that would haunt his playing career. The Lions completed the series with a morale-boosting win, 17–13, with tries from Clive Williams, John O’Driscoll and Andy Irvine combining with the kicking of Ollie Campbell to save them the humiliation of being the first Lions side to be whitewashed in a series in South Africa, but Woodward was not involved with the match-day squad and would never again play a Test match for the Lions.
Returning from the tour, with his playing reputation still very much intact despite his error in the Third Test, Woodward plunged himself into his new career. But it wouldn’t be long before another lapse in concentration would cost him dear in the sporting arena.
17 January 1981: England opened the defence of the Grand Slam title against Wales at the Arms Park in Cardiff.
The final seconds of the game were ticking down and England had worked themselves into position to record an historic victory – their first in Cardiff for eighteen years – with a slender lead of 19–18.
After a midfield move off a Welsh line-out broke down, Robert Ackerman, the Wales right-wing, collected the loose ball in his own half and popped it to J.P.R. Williams, the Wales full-back, who looked to salvage the attack. He swerved back towards the blind side and, as the England defence pushed up to meet him, he passed the ball outside to his scrum-half, Brynmor Williams, who hoisted an up-and-under to relieve the pressure. It was fielded by Dusty Hare, the England full-back, who attempted a clearance kick of his own, but he was clattered by tight-head prop Graham Price as his leg swung for the ball and all he managed was to slice it into the charging body of Wales’s open-side flanker Jeff Squire. The ball ricocheted around and eventually fell back into the arms of J.P.R. Williams, who carried it a few vital yards further downfield. He was finally hauled to the ground and a melee of bodies collapsed around him as Brynmor Williams desperately scrabbled for quick ball and the England defence did all they could to stifle its release. Brian Anderson, the referee, blew his whistle as the ball failed to emerge and he awarded Wales a scrum some twenty metres from the English try-line.
The stands all around the old ground were shaking with the noise from the crowd, the lamps that lined the South Stand trembling from the vibrations of song and cheer and stamped feet as the partisan home crowd roared encouragement to their team.
Down on the pitch, England hooker Peter Wheeler barked at the rest of his forwards for one last superhuman effort in what had been a brutal forwards-orientated arm-wrestle for nearly the full eighty minutes of play. As they assembled themselves in formation for the scrum, England captain Bill Beaumont roared for them all to keep their heads. ‘No penalties!’
Behind the scrum the message was repeated. From scrum-half Steve Smith all the way out to winger John Carleton, the call was repeated again and again: ‘No penalties! Knock them down, drive them back, they’re not getting through! No penalties!’
In the centre, Clive Woodward set himself in a half-crouch beside Paul Dodge. It was imperative that the Welsh midfield was shut down quickly. Get up in their faces, be aggressive, give them no time to think. If we give them space they might conjure a gap, find half a space and get an offload in; then they would be in behind our defence and that would spell real trouble. Shut them down fast. Give them no room to breathe.
There was a thump as the front-rows collided. Brynmor Williams fed the ball and hooker Allan Phillips heeled it back cleanly to his back-row. Gareth Williams, the No.8, controlled the ball at his feet and then bent his back into the drive to help the rest of his pack as the English forwards put on the squeeze, looking to disrupt the ball at his feet.
Woodward’s eyes were fixed on the central midfield axis of stand-off Gareth Davies and centres Steve Fenwick and David Richards. Up in their faces. No time to breathe. No time to think. Shut down their attack before it even gets started. Brynmor Williams bent down to retrieve the ball, paused for a moment, and then snapped upwards, his arms sweeping out towards Gareth Davies.
Woodward was out of the traps like a greyhound. But before he had taken even three strides he could instinctively tell that something was wrong. There had been no movement on either side of him: both Dodge and Carleton had remained where they were in the line. He looked at Brynmor Williams, whose hands were empty and was now appealing desperately to the referee for offside as the crowd broke into raptures and cheers.
The referee blew his whistle at the same moment that Woodward recognised the cool chess move that Brynmor Williams had played against him: the scrum-half had dummied the pass; the ball was still at Gareth Williams’ feet, and Woodward had sprinted into the offside trap. Penalty Wales.
As Woodward stood beneath the posts, his stomach in his boots, he watched Steve Fenwick, the Welsh captain, line up the ball. The stadium went eerily quiet. Fenwick kicked and the crowd erupted. 21–19 to Wales.
England had one last throw of the dice in the very final moments of the match when they were awarded a penalty. But Dusty Hare, who had rescued the game for England at Twickenham the previous year with a similar match-winning kick, could not repeat his heroics and England’s bid to repeat their Grand Slam achievement was over after just one encounter.
Just as Woodward had allowed his concentration to slip in the Third Test in South Africa with the Lions, so too had he allowed it to slip in the Cardiff cauldron.
Woodward continued to feature in the England midfield for several more seasons, with mixed results. The rest of the 1981 Five Nations saw England record wins over Scotland and Ireland before losing to France 16–12 at Twickenham. They had a successful tour to Argentina that summer, winning the first Test and drawing the second, before defeating Australia 15–11 at Twickenham in January 1982.
Woodward appeared in the 9–9 draw against Scotland in the 1982 Five Nations, which was Bill Beaumont’s last game for his
country. Steve Smith took over the captaincy and they lost 16–15 to Ireland, but they bounced back after that setback and Woodward scored a magnificent individual try in a thumping 27–15 win over France in Paris, before beating Wales at Twickenham 17–7 in the final match of the championship.
In 1983 England had a horror show in the Five Nations and finished with the wooden spoon. Their best result had been a 13–13 draw with Wales in Cardiff. Woodward played only one match because of injury (a loss to Ireland at Lansdowne Road), so it was something of a surprise when he was selected for the Lions tour to New Zealand ahead of his centre partner Dodge, who had played in every game in the championship – which was to be later lamented by the former Lion and rugby historian Clem Thomas: ‘Imagine leaving out Paul Dodge, amongst many other terrible errors of judgement!’
The 1983 Lions tour was typically tough and brutal, as has always been synonymous with touring New Zealand, and was not a particularly happy one either. There were divisions in the party from the outset over the choice of captain – Ireland’s Ciaran Fitzgerald – and over the omission of several leading lights among the home nations, Dodge among them.
Looking back on that tour, Jim Telfer, the coach, regrets the structure of the management and coaching set-up. ‘I thought at the time I was good enough to be the coach,’ he said. ‘I thought I had enough experience to take on the All Blacks. But I learnt that I just wasn’t good enough at that stage to get the best out of the players.
‘I don’t know who would have been good enough because New Zealand were streets ahead of us in terms of how they developed players and played the game. We deserved to be beaten. And it was a pretty sad tour by the time we finished.
‘I was the only coach, which meant I had to take charge of the backs. I had never coached backs in my life so I had to delegate a lot to guys like John Rutherford, Roy Laidlaw, Clive Woodward and Ollie Campbell.’
As has been pointed out by both Les Cusworth and Chalkie White, many felt that Woodward was at his best when he played alongside Dodge and his partner’s absence may well have affected his performances on the tour. He played largely for the midweek team and wasn’t selected for any of the Test sides. Even by his own admission, Woodward wasn’t playing as well as he could have – but there were a number of players, pundits and supporters who felt that he could have made a difference to the Lions’ chances in the Test series.
‘Part of the selection problems lay in the fact that Jim Telfer was an out-and-out forwards coach and Willie John McBride, the manager, was also a forward,’ recalled Roger Baird, the Scotland winger, who appeared in all four Tests. ‘By 1983 every team had two coaches, so it was terribly short-sighted. We ended up sorting the back division out amongst ourselves, and consequently I felt we had the balance wrong in the side. John Rutherford should have played stand-off instead of Ollie Campbell, and Clive Woodward should have had a chance to play in the Tests – but you needed a backs coach there to push both those selections. John played brilliantly in the centre, but we could have done so much more with him at 10 and someone like Woodward outside him.’
The 1983 Lions shared the ignominy of their 1966 forebears by being whitewashed in the Test series. The first three Tests were relatively close-run affairs, but the All Blacks ripped loose in the fourth to hammer the Lions 38–6, the heaviest Test defeat in the Lions’ history.
‘Saturday, 16 July 1983 – the date of the Fourth Test – remains one of the saddest days in my life,’ said Telfer. ‘A 38–6 defeat, a 4–0 series loss, there was no coming back from that. The dreams I had held three or four months earlier were in tatters. I was very disillusioned with coaching and with rugby and I was also totally against the whole Lions concept by this stage: it was so difficult to get the team together and prepare properly before going into the biggest Test matches these players would ever experience.
‘I couldn’t fault the players, because they’d given everything, but they’d come through a system that wasn’t good enough to prepare them for the levels of excellence of that All Blacks team, who were just better – both technically and tactically. But for all that I still felt that the fault lay with me because I’d failed to work around those deficiencies and differences. I’d failed to find a way for us to win – and there is always a way to win.’
Appropriate preparation. It was a bugbear so often felt by not only the Lions but also within the England set-up. In the years that have passed since he played, Clive Woodward has often highlighted the lack of time that the players had together as one of the key reasons why England struggled to dominate the world game in the way their resources should have allowed them to. The 1983 Lions tour added yet more grist to his mill over this issue – and it would be one that would remain central to his entire career. There were a number of other issues that affected morale – accommodation and food were consistently poor, there was little or no back-room staff, they trained brutally hard and they had to slog it around New Zealand in the dead of winter, playing some of the hardest teams on the planet in the most dreadful conditions. To say that it was a tough tour is an understatement and the lack of simple home comforts took its toll on the players and management. The Lions is the pinnacle for British and Irish rugby players – they are the best of the best, the elite; but the support environment for them was anything but elite and many felt, Woodward included, that their efforts were hamstrung by the crude organisation of the tour.
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It is a curious fact that as free-spirited an individual as Woodward had been in his youth and when playing competitive sport, he had, by 1983, become relentlessly, even obsessively, driven by his business career. After the disappointments of the Lions tour and the gradual decline in his England career, he took great solace in pouring himself into his work life.
The environment at Xerox was hugely competitive – even more so than a rugby Test match or even a Lions tour. Daily results on the sales performance of every rep Xerox had in the country were posted on a large league table that could be seen by every employee as soon as they entered the office.
‘Unlike in rugby, the pressure to perform here was relentless,’ wrote Woodward in his autobiography, Winning! ‘The daily 8 a.m. meetings stick in my memory. If we weren’t meeting our targets, you’d think the world had come to an end. It was brutal. But that’s why Xerox was successful... it was a no-excuses environment. If you didn’t make the sales calls, if you didn’t get the business, there was absolutely no sympathy. It was sink or swim.’
This was a very different way of thinking to anything that Woodward had encountered before. Football had given him sporting freedom and imagination, rugby had provided a conduit to international stardom, his three most influential coaches in Earle Kirton, Jim Greenwood and Chalkie White had given him masterful instructions in how to play rugby at its most beautiful. Now Xerox was giving him a ruthless, hard edge, where nothing but the results mattered and only excellence was acceptable.
There is no doubt that his status as a rugby player helped to further his career – first with winning the job at Xerox, but then with making client appointments. ‘He was quite shy to begin with,’ recalled Alan King when interviewed by Alison Kervin for her biography of Woodward. ‘But he worked hard and soon learnt the ropes – and by God he could open doors with his rugby status. He was such an asset for us in that way.’
It was classic eighties yuppism at work in the Xerox office: big money, hugely male orientated, results at all costs. With the exception of the financial incentives, it was a rugby environment in all but name. And if you couldn’t handle the pressure, if you didn’t deliver the results, you were out the door. It was cut-throat – like life at Conway, like life as a Test match rugby player – and it appealed to Woodward’s intensely competitive nature. For a man desperate to prove himself, it was just what he needed. And it was a simple work-and-reward philosophy – work your bollocks off, get the job done and you will reap the rewards. His experience in a team environment was also crucial – he was no
lone gunman, he needed his colleagues to step up to the mark and work as hard as he did, so he had to foster relationships and encourage those around him. Collective responsibility and collective excellence would lead to collective reward. Patterns in the sand.
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After a summer of misery with the Lions, Woodward was back in England colours in November to once again face the All Blacks. Against all expectation, they pulled off a remarkable 15–9 victory at Twickenham, their first for ten years over New Zealand and only their third ever, to mark some revenge for the desolation of the Lions tour.
Despite the glory of that victory, Woodward played in yet another disappointing Five Nations campaign in 1984, which saw England record just a single win – against Ireland at Twickenham – before appearing in his last Test, a dispiriting 25–15 loss to Wales at Twickenham. He was only twenty-eight, an age that many would regard as the beginning of the peak three or four years of an international’s career. But it was not to be.
Woodward never formally retired from the England side, instead his Test career fizzled sadly out with non-selection. For all that he was something of an enigma as a player, he was also a game-breaker and it was a sad end to a career that never really delivered on its undoubted promise – hampered, unquestionably, by the conservatism of the England Test scene. The frustration of the whole environment has haunted him since; Test rugby is the ultimate honour for any player – but save for the odd glimpse when he was able to display his genius, it was an arena of broken dreams.
What is most impressive, however, is that he did not mope around, nor did he seem to pine for the limelight as it faded from his life. Instead he turned his focus ever more ferociously on his business career and flourished as part of one of the best performing Xerox teams in the UK.
In the summer of 1984, after six years at the Leicester office, he received a job offer from the Xerox operation in Sydney (where his former mentor, Alan King, had not long since relocated). He flew out for a recce and fell in love with the prospect of life in Australia, and shortly afterwards he and his new partner, Jayne, moved out there, taking up residence in Manly. Not only was Manly a stunning setting with an easy commute to central Sydney, but it was also home to one of the finest rugby clubs in the world. Alan Jones had just left the position of head coach at the club to take charge of the national team (and guide the magnificent ’84 Wallabies on their Grand Slam tour of Britain and Ireland), and had left behind an excellent coaching and playing structure that appealed immediately to Woodward.
