by Peter Burns
He arrived at the Xerox office in Sydney with grand plans to transform it into a replica of his old Leicester office – target-driven, hungry for success, relentlessly ambitious. But it came as a major shock to him to discover that his new colleagues had no desire to adopt such an approach. He turned up in a suit and tie and found his sales force in shorts and sandals. They had no interest in topping sales charts, in his proposed 8 a.m. daily meetings, or to be as unerringly driven as his colleagues and staff had been in Leicester. At first he was bullish, determined to force them to fit the mould that he knew could deliver results, but he hit resistance at almost every step.
As he was soon to learn, the priorities of his staff were simply different to his own. They didn’t care about league tables and proving themselves to be the best. They just wanted to do their job and enjoy their lives away from the office. It was like Conway, but in reverse – here he was the disciplinarian with draconian views of how things should be done, facing an almost carefree institution that would not bend to his desires or wishes. And just as he had done at school, so he had to do in Sydney – he learnt to adapt.
Changing his hardline focus, he strove instead to make the office a fun place to be – veiling his targets behind humour and light-hearted approaches (such as changing his office into a Hawaiian-themed hut for a day). It took time but he gradually won his staff over and began to make great strides in the efficiency of the office and his team’s ability to hit – and even surpass – their targets. It was a hard lesson for him to learn because he constantly had to mask his frustrations at the lack of importance placed on success in the workplace. But with perseverance he managed to make a difference.
Away from the office, however, he discovered that the Australian psyche was not endemically bereft of a furious drive for success. That, he discovered, was reserved for the sporting environment.
While generalisations can often be hollow and misleading, in this instance it is probably fair to pull out a broad brush and state that there is a winning mentality in Australia that is prevalent across all major sports in the country – particularly at international level. There is an entrenched belief that they should win every encounter they enter into. That’s not to say that they are deluded in this belief – their fierce competitiveness, along with skills honed in largely ideal weather conditions, allows them, more often than not, to back up that confidence with results. It is a cultural difference, particularly in rugby, between the hemispheres. The All Blacks, Wallabies and Springboks expect to win every game they play, no matter who it is against. The northern hemisphere teams hope to just keep in touch when they face their southern rivals and, maybe, sneak the odd win. While Woodward had to adapt to the laissez-faire attitudes at work he subsumed himself in the sporting culture of Australia and relished the style of attacking rugby – on hard, fast grounds, invariably played with a bone dry ball – which encouraged speed and skill from every player for the full eighty minutes.
He soon saw how much importance the whole country placed on success in sport. It was a medium that allowed them to show themselves off to the rest of the world, which in turn fostered positive feelings at home. It was a culture that extended from games played by children in the street to political policy.
At Manly, full of the joie de vivre of the style of rugby played at the club, he moved back to his old position of fly-half and was eventually to captain the side. There were a number of internationals in the team at the time: Phil Cox at scrum-half, his brother, Michael, on the wing, Steve Williams and Peter FitzSimons at lock, Ross Reynolds at No.8 and Bill Calcraft at flanker.
It wasn’t long before Phil Cox and Woodward struck up a tremendous playing partnership. ‘We’d had the odd player from Wales, Ireland and England, but never an international from Britain,’ recalled Cox, in an interview with Richard Williams. ‘He was great to have around the club because of his experience and, being an international, the boys looked up to him. Our coach insisted we ran with the ball, the tracks were hard, and I think that’s why Clive enjoyed himself so much, having come from the soft pitches and the ten-man game in England.’
It was, as Cox intimated, like manna from heaven for Woodward, even if the first few games were much tougher than he might have expected. His first game was against Randwick, one of the powerhouses of Sydney rugby. Randwick were coached by Bob Dwyer, who had been head coach of the Wallabies from 1982–83, and they had in their armoury three weapons that had been revolutionary in transforming Australian rugby into a world force: the Ella brothers, Mark, Gary and Glen.
Growing up in La Perouse, an Aboriginal community in Sydney, in the 1960s and ’70s, the Ella brothers had spent every moment they could playing sport. While they were incredibly talented at a whole range of sports, particularly cricket, it was rugby that had truly captured their hearts. Playing for hour upon hour on Tasman Street amid a bubbling mass of other children, the Ella brothers developed an attacking style of perpetual motion, flat attack play, lancing late running angles, short pop passes and looping support runs, all held together with pinpoint passing accuracy.
From the chaos of street rugby, this style was adapted to the more organised structure of a fifteen-a-side game at Matraville High School in Chifley by the rugby master, Geoff Mould, and the school first XV went on to win the prestigious Waratah Shield in 1976 with Mark, Gary and Glen pivotal to the team’s success. In 1977 all three boys were selected for the Australian schoolboys side that toured Britain – and went undefeated in sixteen matches. It is ironic that the style of play utilised by the Australian schoolboys had its roots in Jim Greenwood’s Total Rugby. While Greenwood was largely ignored by the rugby establishment in the UK, his ideas were gospel in Australia and combining the fifteen-man rugby philosophy with the talent of players like the Ellas, Andrew Slack, Michael Lynagh and the burgeoning genius of David Campese, Australian rugby was on a steep upwards curve.
Upon leaving high school, Bob Dwyer, who was close to Mould, persuaded the Ellas to join Randwick, where their revolutionary game tore apart the Sydney league. In 1980 Mark won his first cap for the Wallabies and was joined on the international scene by his brothers in 1982.
In simple terms, the Ellas’ attacking strategy was organised with all the backline players standing flat to the gain-line, with numerous changes of angle and direction all coming at the last moment, right in the face of defence. For players accustomed all their lives to facing a deep lying attack and consequently having a lot of time to line up a tackle – which was invariably made at a side angle, around the knees – this new attacking formation was completely bamboozling. The defender had no time to react to the change of pace or direction of the ball carrier or to track the lines of the support runners. With Mark Ella pulling the strings at stand-off, the Wallabies destroyed every defence they faced on the 1984 tour to Great Britain and Ireland and will be remembered as one of the greatest attacking sides the world has ever seen.
Playing in the Sydney league, where the flat-line attacking style was being adopted by various teams and expertly executed at Randwick, Woodward came across a style of rugby that at first shocked and then utterly enthralled him – even if it took him a little while to get his head around it, particularly in defence. Not only were the attacks he was trying to defend against devilishly difficult to track, the flat-line approach also meant that attackers and defenders were often smashing directly into one another.
‘I had never made a front-on tackle in my life,’ recalled Woodward, ‘and suddenly every time they had the ball from a set-piece I was having to make one – or try to make one. I was run over a lot in that first game. It was a physicality that I hadn’t encountered before – and the speed was just mind-blowing.’ It was as if every philosophy that he had aspired to under Kirton, Greenwood and White was, at last, being brought to fruition. It was intelligent, fast, expansive and highly skilled. It was Jim Greenwood’s vision of Total Rugby.
But it wasn’t just Dwyer, the Ellas and Randwick that were
rewriting rugby in Australia. Alan Jones had been head coach at Manly before taking up the role of head coach for the Wallabies in 1983, and the structures, mantras and philosophies that he had put in place were still very much in evidence at the club when Woodward joined.
Jones did not have much of a playing CV himself, but he transferred his considerable business skills to the sporting environment to startling effect. Peter FitzSimons was enticed from Sydney University to Manly by Jones in the early 1980s. FitzSimons went on to win seven Wallaby caps before beginning an illustrious career as a rugby journalist, broadcaster and author. In his book, FitzSimons on Rugby: Loose in the Tight Five, a collection of some of his finest articles, he recalls his first experiences of Alan Jones. ‘Right away he was different. His was not an ad hoc rugby training that you made up as you went along, but rather it was precisely prepared and slickly executed. Each drill flowed smoothly into the next, each training session having its own cohesive theme. We danced to his whistle, but even that early in the Year of Jones, there was a sense that he seemed to know what he was doing. This wasn’t a bloke who thought we might have half a chance to win the competition if we got it right. This was a bloke who said – and meant it when he said it – “We are going to win this competition, and this is how we are going to do it.”
‘The first rule we had to understand, and it wasn’t one of those rules of the unspoken variety, was that it had to be “his way or the highway”. We could discuss things all right, but we were to be under no illusions as to which one of us had the final say. Alan did.’
For anyone with even an inkling of how Clive Woodward developed as a coach, this portrait of Jones could be instantly transferred to Woodward’s approach in later years.
‘Alan Jones’s most fundamental principle of rugby,’ wrote FitzSimons, ‘was eliminating errors. “The difference between professionals and amateurs is that the professional is dedicated to the total eradication of error,” Jones was extremely fond of saying. “It has nothing to do with how much money you’re earning, and everything to do with not repeating the same mistakes.”’
Jones would analyse the game more than any coach in the league, constantly taking notes during games and then applying his analysis in training the following week. This analytical approach was deeply embedded into the culture of the club when Woodward joined Manly. At the start of training each Tuesday night each player would be handed a typewritten analysis of the previous Saturday’s game, with tailored notes on their own performance – what they did right and what they needed to work on. As Woodward would subsequently do, Jones transferred his business knowledge and skill base into a rugby environment.
‘Did he know a lot about rugby?’ FitzSimons questioned of his coach. ‘What I have no doubt about is that he knew a lot about motivation, about the principles of getting fifteen people together and functioning smoothly. And whatever he might not have known about the game was compensated for by the experts he called in to take us for particular training sessions.’
This philosophy of bringing in experts in certain aspects of the game was unheard of at the time in rugby union. Indeed, when Woodward adopted the Alan Jones blueprint in his coaching career some ten years later, he was ridiculed. Yet again, the southern hemisphere giants were showing the way years ahead of their northern counterparts. But this was the reason that Woodward had moved to Australia, even if he hadn’t realised that it would have such a bearing on his later life. He had gone to experience a new life and culture and to learn. He had found that he had to adapt to the circumstances that he found himself in and, while he had gone with a mind focused on furthering his business career, it was the global influences on his rugby that really made the long-term difference.
‘I broke my jaw against Warringah, which was the big local derby,’ recalled Woodward, ‘and I was lying there in the hospital bed and the first person who came to see me was Alan Jones. He came in with a guy called James Black, who was the Wallaby full-back, to see how I was doing. And I was like, “Wow, thanks so much for coming to see me.” And we chatted away for a while and he eventually worked into the conversation that he thought I would soon be playing for Australia. At the time I was just like, “What? What are you talking about?” But he was just applying business principles to his new role as Wallaby coach. He saw me as a potential asset who could make his team better and there was nothing in the rules at the time to stop me from changing my international allegiances to Australia. I ended up going to a Wallaby training session, but it just didn’t feel right and I didn’t pursue it after that – and Alan understood that. But it was intriguing to see him thinking outside the box like that.’
While he was in Australia, Woodward took the time to visit the world-famous Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra. Just like his experiences at Manly, his tour around the AIS’s sixty-six-hectare campus in the northern suburb of Bruce had a profound effect on him. As Woodward wandered around the huge multi-sport campus, he could see that the AIS was Loughborough writ large on a massive, national scale.
In 1973 Professor John Bloomfield was commissioned by the Australian government to construct a plan to increase the professionalism of elite sport in the country. Bloomfield and his team conducted a number of studies of successful sports institutes in Europe and concluded, in The Role, Scope and Development of Recreation in Australia, that a national institute of sport should be established to monitor and develop elite athletes. This report was not acted on initially, but following Australia’s disastrous participation in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where they managed to win only one silver medal and four bronze medals before finishing thirty-second overall in the table, moves were made to put Bloomfield’s plan into action. On 26 January 1981, Australia Day, the Australian Institute of Sport was officially opened by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser.
By the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the work of the AIS was already in evidence as Australia dramatically improved on their performances in Montreal and also at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and in 1985 the federal budget increased the Institute’s funding by 60 per cent. By the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, seventy-five current and former AIS athletes competed in the Games and won nineteen gold, sixteen silver and seventeen bronze medals.
In 1987 the AIS brought rugby union under its umbrella and established centres in Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra. Through scouts, recommendations and personal applications, the AIS identified talented young athletes across a range of sports and monitored their progress at school, club and at national level, bringing them in for elite training sessions and providing them with programmes to develop their fitness, strength, speed, conditioning, diet and so on. What impressed Woodward the most was to see another Loughborough trait transferred on to a much larger canvas – the sharing of knowledge across sporting disciplines. Just as he had been fascinated watching Seb Coe’s training under George Gandy, the AIS had adopted a system where every sporting programme would pool its collective expertise and new findings so that every athlete under its aegis could become the very best that they could be.
Within just a few years of its inception, the AIS’s rugby centres were producing Wallabies in the shape of Tim Horan, Phil Kearns and John Eales, who would go on to lift the 1991 World Cup before being joined by AIS graduates Jason Little, George Gregan, Matt Burke, Ben Tune and Joe Roff to form the core of the 1999 World Cup-winning side. There is no arguing with the phenomenal success of Professor Bloomfield’s brainchild – and it was a structure that Woodward envied greatly.
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In 1987 Woodward’s playing career began to wind down towards retirement. Feeling that he had achieved all that he could with the Xerox office in Sydney, Woodward left the company and started working for Portfolio Leasing, a company whose modus operandi was based on the most profitable side of Xerox’s business – the leasing of office equipment to businesses around the country. He hand-picked a very effective sales and administration team, adopting a crossover philosophy between his management style in t
he UK and Australia, and was soon making a huge success of the new venture. His networking and people skills were exceptional and he ensured that his staff all felt part of one big team striving for collective excellence – which would be rewarded on a regular basis if they achieved their targets. The drawback was that the business was hugely time consuming and there was little or no time for rugby any more and so, without much fanfare, he finally hung up his boots.
The Woodwards (for he and Jayne were now married and had had their first child) continued to live in Australia for a further two years until the siren call of home proved too much and they returned to the UK in late 1989. Portfolio Leasing were desperate to keep him, so they arranged for a transfer to their London branch. This proved to be only a temporary arrangement, however, as Woodward was as disenchanted with the London branch of Portfolio Leasing as he had been with the Sydney branch of Xerox – and he soon sought to spread his wings independently. In February 1990 he left Portfolio Leasing and set up his own company, Sales Finance and Leasing, based in the converted garage of his new family home in Pinkneys Green, just outside Maidenhead. As he had done in Australia, he chose a small team of employees and led them on an aggressive drive to build the business. Within a very short space of time they had developed the leasing business into a multimillion-pound concern and moved out of the garage and into a proper office space. It was an incredibly impressive start for such a new venture – its success due to the culmination of years of accumulated knowledge and acumen, Woodward’s leadership of a carefully selected team that he trusted completely, his own grand ambition and vision, and hour upon hour of hard work by all concerned. It would prove to be a powerful blueprint.
