by Peter Burns
‘The great thing with Clive’s England set-up,’ said Austin Healey, ‘was that you could phone the guys up in the week and they’d be there at your house in six hours. They’d do video analysis with you, or take you out on the pitch and train you, or advise you on any and every little detail of your game.’
When the meeting was adjourned, the players were told to pick up a copy of a book on their way out of the Elizabethan Room. It was called Building the Happiness-Centred Business by Dr Paddi Lund. Lund was an Australian dentist who had revolutionised his business practices and had devoted much of his energies towards identifying and improving what he called ‘critical non-essentials’. The theory has subsequently been adopted by sports teams and businesses all around the world, but it was relatively unheard of in 1997 and captured Woodward’s imagination as powerfully as the teachings of Humphrey Walters.
While attending a three-day conference featuring the American marketing guru Jay Abraham in London in 1996, Ann Heaver had discovered Building the Happiness-Centred Business. She read it from cover to cover throughout the conference – much to Woodward’s annoyance at the time. But when she handed him the book and insisted that he read it, he experienced an epiphany almost as powerful and influential to his career as Jim Greenwood’s Total Rugby. Lund had been depressed at work and on the verge of suicide; pulling himself back from the brink he analysed his life and decided to make some drastic changes at work so that he, his staff and his clients would actually be happy in that environment. It had stunning effects. His practice became something of a private members’ club; sophisticated, relaxed and welcoming. His satisfaction at work soared – as did his profitability. Woodward was captivated by the concept. He knew the power of positive thinking and of a happy environment in sport – but it had never been articulated quite as clearly as Lund had done in his book.
‘I remember hearing the odd comment from the players that I was mad giving them the book,’ said Woodward. ‘But I don’t think I was mad. The message was very simple – if a dentist could turn his entire business upside down, doing the same with rugby is not going to be very difficult. I said to them, “We are so conservative, so stuck in our ways, we’ve got to open our minds up.” And I just used Paddi as an example that this can be done – you can change the way you look at things and how you run your organisation. And it can’t all come from your leader or your coach, the players have to buy into the idea in order for it to happen and for it to work. And the more you can get your team totally thinking about it, the more good ideas will come through from everybody. But you’ve got to get your whole team in on it and not just sitting there with their arms folded. You can’t just have the coach coming out with idea after idea after idea, you need to get some interactive engagement. Yes, the coach leads it, but we called it “Paddi thinking” and we got the players to question everything. The big question was always why – why are we doing this, why do we do it this way? Why do we stay here, why do we train this way? Because now we are professional there is no excuse – we have to question everything we’re doing and to get better than everyone else. People talk about changing for the sake of changing and that’s important not to do, but you’ve got to question everything and work out what needs changing and what doesn’t. And that’s why I used Paddi as an example: if a flipping dentist can do it – and there can‘t be that many ways to run a dental practice – then why can’t we as a rugby team do the same thing?
‘You don’t just bring it all in at once – it’s a gradual thing. I took one or two of the senior guys aside for a private chat and I explained what I planning. I wasn’t looking for approval, but I wanted to help them to understand what the rationale behind my thinking was.
‘It was a hugely exciting time because you have one chance and you’ve just got to go for it. And I wasn’t scared of it; I think that’s where running my own small business really helped. I started that from a garage and then I employed a couple of people and we took risks and we lost money and we made money, we mortgaged the house, and we did all sorts of stuff – and by that stage you’re used to just getting on and doing things. I wasn’t a big corporate animal, I was small businessman – which is what a rugby team is, you’re running a small business, you have 30-odd people in a room, it’s not a huge operation. That’s how I used to think about it with the players: “It doesn’t really matter what’s happening out there,” I’d say, “it’s just here in this room that matters – it’s down to us whether you like it or not.” As an England coach you’re at the sharp end, you can’t affect player development; we’re here now, we’re the end result – and we have a job to do. And that’s the message you’ve really got to get across: it’s now or never. You either look back in twenty years’ time and say, “That was great,” or you have what I have with my playing career and you look back and say, ‘I wish we had done it better.’ That’s one thing that I can get across to people, whether they are Olympic athletes, rugby players, footballers, golfers or whatever – you only have one shot and you have to give it everything you can. And you are a long time retired. But it isn’t easy. You can sit in that room and think you’re quite good, but there are rooms of players in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and France and they all think they’re pretty good too, and those are the guys that you have to beat. But I think I did get that message across to them and they trusted me. And I wasn’t afraid to try things. I got this tag of the “mad professor” which I don’t like because there was nothing mad about the things we tried, they were all carefully thought out and had a specific purpose; I prefer the term “maverick”, which has also been used, because what we were doing was different and no one else was trying it – but it wasn’t madness. All I wanted to do was to ensure that we weren’t going to die wondering. And some of the more conservative players maybe thought some stuff was a bit daft, but I still don’t think any of it was. It was maybe something that no one else had done before but it wasn’t daft, and I think that that’s what a lot of the players actually liked – they liked being challenged.’
While touring Australia in the summer of 1996 with the Under-21s, Woodward went to meet Lund at his practice in Brisbane. It was a meeting that inspired him as much as reading the book and Lund’s philosophy would form as important a cornerstone to his coaching mantra as those of Kirton, Greenwood and White.
In what has become a widely recognised practice in the sporting world in recent years, Lund opened Woodward’s eyes to the importance of critical non-essentials (CNEs). In the context of the England team this will be discussed in more detail later, but for Lund it meant offering his clients a range of luxury teas and coffees upon arrival, insisting on having his staff and customers talk politely to one another at all times and ensuring that his staff knew his clients’ names and faces so well that a client would never have to give their name upon arrival at the practice. By adding CNEs into sport, a coach, manager or player is creating an environment in which tiny marginal gains can be achieved that ultimately improve overall performance, giving them a crucial edge on their competitors.
‘You don’t win a Test match because you’ve got better clothing than the All Blacks,’ said Woodward on critical non-essentials some years later. ‘You don’t win a Test match because you turn up on a bus with a big red rose on the side of it. But when you add up all the hundreds and hundreds of tiny details that we added, it gives you an edge and it does make a difference. And in Test match rugby, it’s those edges that can be the difference between winning and losing.’
Woodward knew that if the England players spent more time fine-tuning their game and considering hundreds of tiny assets that could improve their fitness, diet, physique and preparation – improving things that no other team had even considered improving – then they would give themselves a potentially defining advantage over their competitors. As he would often say to the players, ‘It is impossible to improve one thing by 100 per cent. But you can improve 100 things by 1 per cent and give yourself a crucial edge.�
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Again, Woodward’s focus on incremental improvements in myriad tiny details aptly demonstrates the power of Carol Dweck’s growth mindset theory in practice. By encouraging his players to take control of their performances and creating a structure that would not only support them but which would allow them to flourish, he provided a framework with achievable targets that could significantly improve their fitness, conditioning, diet, mental well-being, and their physical and mental preparation for Test match rugby – which would ultimately set them in better stead for winning on the Test stage than ever before. But it would be a long road.
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England’s first game of the autumn was against Australia at Twickenham on 15 November – a fitting opposition for Woodward to face in his first Test match as an international coach.
Woodward had sent a message of intent to the Wallabies, and to the rugby world at large, by making a trip to Buenos Aires to see Australia play Argentina. The game was not televised, so he went in person to analyse the Australians. It was an impressive demonstration of the lengths to which he was willing to go to ensure that he and his team were properly prepared.
He was up against a coach who was almost as green as he was on the Test stage. Rod Macqueen had only recently been appointed as head coach of Australia and the match at Twickenham would be just his third in charge. Although Macqueen would go on to have a decorated tenure, he had a mixed start – winning the first Test in Argentina but losing the second in Buenos Aires as Woodward watched from the stands.
While Woodward had been intent on making the England set-up as professional as possible, he was also keen to experiment, with an eye firmly locked on the 1999 World Cup. As well as naming Lawrence Dallaglio as his new captain ahead of Martin Johnson and the previous incumbent Phil de Glanville, he named five new caps: Matt Perry, David Rees, Will Greenwood, Andy Long and Will Green. It is easy to understand the rationale behind this when examined in hindsight – Woodward was experimenting with new players to see if they could cut it at international level – but it also contradicted what he had said about focusing on results and building his team from a winning foundation. Woodward would often contradict himself while in charge of England; sometimes his sudden changes of heart would pay off for his team, at other times they would backfire.
Martin Johnson was unconvinced by Woodward’s ‘new broom’ approach for that first Test. ‘For a game like that,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘you want to pick your most experienced players, but Woody wanted to bring in some new players to freshen things up and he selected Will Green at tight-head over Darren Garforth and Andy Long over Mark Regan. I can understand that he wanted to show he had his own way with selection, but it is a huge, huge call to pick two guys to have their debuts against one of the best sides in the world. If you struggle to set your foundations up front, the rest of your game is going to struggle – and it was a huge ask for those two guys. It was too soon for Andy and he was replaced by Richard Cockerill at half-time. Will had a difficult game as well and, although he was a good player, he was never a front-runner again. I think Clive learnt a lot from that first selection – although he also made some good ones, capping Will Greenwood after he’d had a good Lions tour and giving Neil Back a shot in the No.7 shirt. Australia were a little limited in that game but they scored two tries to nil; we held on to draw 15–15 with them thanks largely to Mike Catt’s boot.’
‘It was tough, going straight into a fierce environment I’d never been in before,’ recalled Andy Long of his nightmare debut – after which he was dropped straight back into the Under-21 squad. ‘Then to fall out of it like I did – not going down to England A or being supported. Things could have been different. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the experience. That week leading up to the Australia game was just amazing. It was the dawn of a new era, Clive Woodward coming in, so it was a really big week. Running out at Twickenham was amazing for me and my family. It was awesome. But who knows what might have happened if I’d been drip-fed into it.’
The Andy Long story is revealing in two ways. First, it shows that Woodward could be rash in some of his decisions and that not all of his ideas paid off; that is only natural – when he made so many changes and introduced so many new ideas, not all of them would work. But it also showed how ruthless he could be if things weren’t working. He wasn’t afraid to admit his mistakes and do something immediately to try to rectify a situation. It was incredibly tough on Long and he made only one further appearance for the national side, after which he reflected, ‘Clive said afterwards, “I wanted to get you off that one cap.” I think it was on his mind.’
Despite the stalemate, many fans and pundits were pleased with a solid if unspectacular start, but for both sets of coaches and players it was a disappointing result.
And it wasn’t about to get any easier. Next up they faced the All Blacks at Old Trafford. The RFU had decided to take the game to Manchester to help encourage the growth of the game in the north of England. The match at the Theatre of Dreams was a sell-out as New Zealand fielded a team of modern-day legends; that crop of All Blacks made up arguably the greatest team never to win the World Cup. Among those who faced England that day were Christian Cullen, Jeff Wilson, Frank Bunce, Andrew Mehrtens, Justin Marshall, Craig Dowd, Olo Brown, Ian Jones, Josh Kronfeld, Taine Randell, Robin and Zinzan Brooke and the global superstar, Jonah Lomu. The bookmakers and the newspaper pundits had predicted something of a massacre, but New Zealand, despite scoring three tries, were never able to completely break free from England.
‘We surprised ourselves with how well we competed,’ said Johnson. ‘I think they had become an even bigger test in our minds than they actually were.’
As well as giving the England players the much-needed insight that they were not light years behind New Zealand in terms of quality, the match at Old Trafford was notable for two other things that would have a huge bearing on the future of the team’s performance. The first was the introduction to the team of Phil Larder, the defence coach. He was initially invited to join the team for just a week to familiarise himself with the environment and to meet the players, but he was soon inducted into the ranks as a full-time member of the back-room staff.
The second was the introduction of a new back-row combination that would come to be known as the Holy Trinity – and which again demonstrated Woodward’s ruthless side. ‘We started with a back-row of Richard Hill at 7, Tony Diprose at 8 and me at 6,’ said Dallaglio. ‘Clearly, Clive felt the back-row hadn’t performed in the first half and at the interval he came into the changing room, looked at Diprose and said, “Right, you’re off.” Turning to Neil Back he said, “You’re on.” It was brutal. Rugby substitutions didn’t happen like that, at least not in an England dressing room. That was the start of the successful back-row of Hill, Dallaglio, Back.’
The third leg of the autumn challenge saw England return to Twickenham to face the world-champion Springboks, still smarting from their series defeat in the summer to the Lions. And the South Africans exacted their revenge on the English Lions with a 29–11 victory, the home team’s heaviest defeat at Twickenham.
For the final match of the series, the All Blacks came to Twickenham for what many claimed was the best game the old ground had ever seen.
Before the match, Woodward was fired up. After a moderate start with the draw against Australia, he had seen his team picked apart by slicker, fitter and stronger opponents – but they had not been crushed. He knew that they weren’t as far away from their illustrious opponents as some might have suggested before the autumn began. In another example of Dweck’s growth mindset, of casting off indoctrinated ways of thinking and so find new paths to success, he instructed them to abandon all sense of a game plan and to ‘just have a crack at them from anywhere’. It was Henley and his ‘no kicking rule’ all over again. In many respects it was what Martin Johnson would later call ‘naive thinking from Woody’, but it also had a tremendously liberating effect on his players.
‘Paul Grayson was at stand-off,’ said Woodward, ‘and I remember during the week standing in a team meeting and saying to him, “We have nothing to lose now, we’ve not had a great autumn, we’ve drawn one and lost two, so we have to try and do things differently now. I want you to push up flat to the gain-line on attack, I want you right up in the All Blacks’ faces. And I mean right up there.” And the whole team was listening in to this. I said, “I don’t care what you think about this or how you feel, you’re going to do it. And if you don’t, I’m going to pull you off. I don’t care if we’re only five minutes into the game, I’ll sub you for someone who will do it.” And that’s what we practised all week. And Grayson was awesome. That whole performance stemmed from him standing flat and passing so well. It really was fantastic. He said it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever done – but the All Blacks didn’t know how to handle it.’
