by Peter Burns
‘But even after that magnificent effort, you only had to look at the scene in our changing room at half-time to realise why we were miles away from the best countries in the world,’ said Dallaglio. ‘After playing at the higher tempo that Clive demanded, we were physically shattered after forty minutes. I felt sick and was retching, other guys were in an even worse mess and it was plain that forty minutes of rugby at that pace was more than we could cope with. We knew we couldn’t sustain that level of performance through the second half and Clive must have looked at us and thought: “We’re not fit enough, we’re not strong enough, we’re simply not good enough.” He knew, as we knew, that to win a World Cup you’ve got to play back-to-back Tests at the level we couldn’t even sustain for forty minutes. It was carnage in the changing room. No one could speak. Players were sprawled on the floor, others were vomiting into the bins and it was simply a question of allowing players to regain some semblance of physical normality. We should have gone out and closed the game down, but instead we started falling off tackles and allowed them to get into our territory. One try came, then another and, at the end, we were happy to hang on for a 26–26 draw.’
Will Greenwood had made a similar observation about England’s physical inferiority to the South Africans the week before: ‘I don’t know whether the stats bear out my impression, but I remember thinking how much bigger and more powerful than us the South Africans seemed that day. Perhaps it’s a trick your mind plays on you when you are beaten, but it certainly felt a little like boys against men… If we gained anything that afternoon, it was the realisation that we had a vast amount of work to do if we were going to turn the tables on the southern hemisphere and start bullying them.’
This lesson was the most important that England took away from that brutal autumn. In many respects they knew that they could play at the level required to compete with – and even surpass – their southern hemisphere rivals. But their physical conditioning was not up to par and without that base they were building on sand. It was with this in mind that Woodward began to hand greater resources and influence to Dave Reddin.
Reflecting on that autumn series with characteristic bluntness, Johnson said, ‘Looking back, we weren’t a good enough team to beat those sides at that stage. We might have defeated the Aussies if we had had a really good day, but the New Zealanders and the South Africans were a level above us. It had been a pretty tough baptism for Clive: four games, two heavy losses and a couple of draws. If that wasn’t enough, our first game in the 1998 Five Nations was France. In Paris.’
*
It was a bitterly cold afternoon in Paris in early February. The training pitch that England had been assigned had frozen solid and the team had had to change plans and train in the garden of their hotel. As the team bus swept down the Périphérique towards the glittering new Stade de France in the suburb of St Denis, there were serious concerns that the game might be cancelled. Even though the French had spent more than £270 million on the new stadium that would be central to their hosting of the football World Cup that summer, it had been built on an old industrial site that contained potentially explosive pockets of methane and engineers had been unable to fit the ground with undersoil heating. As it transpired, the game went ahead as scheduled, but the pitch was rock solid and an icy wind whipped in from the north to chill the warm glow that still radiated from Woodward’s squad following their last encounter with the All Blacks.
The French had swept all before them on their way to a Grand Slam in 1997, crucially winning at Twickenham and at Murrayfield. They had suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the Springboks in the autumn and they were desperate to right the wrongs of that fixture. So here England were; after a bruising autumn playing the top three teams in the world, they were off to Paris to play the fourth best. The challenges just didn’t let up.
Intriguingly, despite the fact that Woodward’s team had yet to secure a victory, the bookmakers and pundits had pencilled in a Grand Slam next to England’s name. This was owing to the euphoria of the last autumn Test against the All Blacks – but it seemed to have been put to one side that they had managed only a draw after the All Blacks had hit back from England’s strong start. And that was at Twickenham. Travelling to Paris was quite a different undertaking.
Despite the wintry conditions, the battle that afternoon was heated, with an enormous French pack furiously fired up in their intent to make their new home as fortress-like as the old Parc des Princes had been for Les Bleus. Behind this collection of behemoths, which included the monstrous Christian Califano and Franck Tournaire propping on either side of the inspirational captain Raphaël Ibañez, the towering Olivier Brouzet and Fabien Pelous in the second-row, and the emerging genius Olivier Magne at open-side, there was the impish genius of Thomas Castaignède at stand-off. He controlled the pace of play like an old master, bringing the exceptional talents of Christophe Dominici, Christophe Lamaison, Stéphane Glas and Philippe Bernat-Salles into play as he saw fit to terrorise the English defence. The final scoreline of 24–17 more than flattered the visitors and it served as a marker as France marched on to claim a second consecutive Grand Slam.
The ledger against Woodward’s England now read: played five, won none. The draws against Australia and New Zealand had been respectable and some of their play had been very encouraging in terms of vim and excitement, but the pressure on the new regime to convert that promise into results was already mounting. They needed to turn the tide and turn it quickly.
‘There was some consolation in the fact that we had played the best four teams in the world,’ said Johnson. ‘But essentially it wasn’t good enough. As we faced Wales at Twickenham there was a lot of pressure on the team to do well – and we certainly felt it.’
Wales fielded a powerful and dynamic team full of Lions and they roared into an early lead with two tries from former rugby league centre Allan Bateman in the first twenty minutes. But then, at last, things began to click for England. Despite their setbacks, Woodward had never abandoned his desire for Total Rugby and for his players to attack from anywhere on the field. He had stated to the team that he wanted them to ‘inspire the nation’ – and there is little doubt that the attacking élan that afternoon did just that as the home team ran in eight tries to romp home 60–26.
It was the spark that lit up the remainder of the tournament as England overpowered Scotland 34–20 at Murrayfield and then dispatched wooden spoonists Ireland 35–17 at Twickenham to win the Triple Crown.
The fixture schedule of the previous eighteen months had been remarkable in its intensity. For the leading England players, there had been games against Italy, Argentina and a New Zealand Barbarians side in the autumn of 1996, the 1997 Five Nations, the Lions tour, the one-off match against the Wallabies in Sydney, the four-Test series in the autumn of 1997 and the 1998 Five Nations, as well as all their club commitments. In the summer of 1998, for some inexplicable reason, and with the World Cup just one season away, the RFU had organised one of the most taxing tour schedules ever conceived: seven matches, including four Tests. These were against Australia, New Zealand (again twice) and South Africa on their own turf.
‘Clive recognised that because of the previous year’s Lions tour, England’s top players hadn’t had a proper break from the game for almost two years,’ said Dallaglio. ‘In the Lions season, I played fifty-two matches, the last three but one against the Springboks in the most punishing series I’d ever been involved in. I was desperately in need of a long break. Jason Leonard, Martin Johnson, Richard Hill and Neil Back couldn’t have felt any better than I did.’
In the end, seventeen leading players were unavailable for the 1998 summer tour, either through injury or fatigue – the latter being listed as injured by their clubs, who saw that their most valuable commodities were about to break down under the workload. Twenty of the squad of thirty-seven would be making their England debuts and only six players had won more than ten caps – tour captain Matt Dawson, Ben Clarke,
Austin Healey, Graham Rowntree, Garath Archer and Steve Ojomoh.
Woodward and his coaching staff looked at the schedule ahead of them and the personnel at their disposal and knew that they were on a hiding to nothing. They were about to face the three strongest sides on the planet, again, at full strength and this time in their own back yards – with players that were at best second or third choice. The media and the rugby unions in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were incensed that England were sending such a weakened squad, claiming that in doing so they were not only breaking an agreement made by the RFU to send their strongest squad, but that they were also devaluing Test match rugby. Dick McGruther, the chairman of the Australian Rugby Union, was so furious that he publicly announced that it was ‘the biggest sell-out since Gallipoli’. While McGruther’s statement was callous, there is little doubt that, privately, Woodward would have struggled to disagree with the sentiment.
One positive to emerge before the tour party departed, however, was the addition of Brian Ashton, whom Woodward brought in to his back-room staff as attack coach. Ashton was widely regarded as one of the brightest brains in the English game and, although he had just endured a short and painful stint as head coach of Ireland – where he had been let go after just a single season in charge – Woodward knew that he was just the man he was looking for to bring a new attacking edge to his team. Continuing with his Total Rugby philosophy, Woodward didn’t want his players to think of themselves as forwards and backs when it came to open play – he wanted fifteen rugby players spread across the pitch. Phil Larder had been recruited as defence coach, now Brian Ashton was there to make every player an attacker in his own right.
Ashton had played scrum-half for Tyldesley, Fylde and Orrell, then also for Montferrand in France and Roma and Milan in Italy, but had never managed to win a cap for England. The closest he got was sitting on the bench for the 1975 Five Nations and on the tour to Australia that summer; they were the days when substitutes could only be made if there was an injury and he never made it on to the pitch.
His coaching career began while he was a history teacher at King’s School, Bruton, in Somerset. He was an assistant coach with England from 1985–86, but felt so frustrated with the political influence of the RFU committees over the team that he resigned and returned to coaching King’s. During his years at the school he developed a policy, almost identical to Woodward’s in his early coaching days, which almost completely banned kicking in the school’s first XV. News of this all-out attacking school side soon reached Bath and Jack Rowell recruited Ashton on a part-time basis as attack coach. After guiding the outrageously talented Bath backs for several of their most successful seasons he was recruited to the Ireland post, but his philosophies were not well received – by the committee men at the IRFU more than the players – and he was soon replaced by Warren Gatland, whereupon Woodward swooped for his services and brought him back into the England fold.
‘Clive and Jack Rowell were similar,’ recalled Ashton. ‘They made me attack coach and told me to get on with it. If it became too mad, they would rein me in, but with Clive you had to go a long way off the beaten path before he’d say you’d gone too far.
‘What I tried to do was to give a team a framework. We had to have solid set-pieces and solid restarts, we had to look to win the tackle area, our kicking strategy had to be spot on and our defence outstanding. But you must also give top players the chance to bring something in when appropriate. That is what liberating players means. You give them a framework but when they are out there and it is not working, they can say bugger it, we are going to change it.’
His brilliance as an attack coach was soon recognised among all the senior players – as was the new idea that every man on the field should be comfortable with the ball in hand.
‘Brian Ashton was very good,’ recalled Jason Leonard. ‘He is credited with being just a backs coach, but he also did a great deal of work with the forwards as we all tried to become more complete, more “total” players. Under Clive, there was no room for “forwards” and “backs” – we were all players who had to get out there and do whatever it took to win. The forwards had to break down defences as well as the backs, but we always used to do it by barging through the middle. Brian would say things like, “Why do you have to run through someone, why can’t you run round them? Why can’t you find some space to run in? I can’t understand why you would want to run at a bloke who’s sixteen stone when you could just run round him.”’
‘Clive was a visionary and he let me get on with it,’ said a self-effacing Ashton. ‘We had a great platform, and a great balance. Those players enjoyed being challenged.’
‘He’s more than a backs coach,’ Jonny Wilkinson said of Ashton. ‘He’s an attack guru, an inspiration in his understanding of running lines, space and width.’
‘He was very meticulous but also had a way of keeping the game simple and enjoyable,’ said Jeremy Guscott. ‘For example, the skills involved in working an overlap, or beating a man, have not changed in one hundred years. What Ashton did with us was to give us drills with endless variations and problems to work out. If we were practising a three-on-two he would bring in defenders coming in at different angles so that it was more like a maze – and the maze was different every week. Some coaches can easily come across like bad salesmen and you can hear their hollow patter. But Brian earned our respect by always putting a lot of effort into his training routines.’
So while Ashton’s arrival provided a silver lining to the pre-tour preparations, because the squad was so underpowered there nevertheless remained a dark cloud hanging over the party as they set off from Heathrow for Brisbane – for what would become known as the Tour of Hell.
*
Jonny Wilkinson was only eighteen years old when he was selected for his first England squad session in the autumn of 1997. To have watched the young fly-half-cum-centre play for Newcastle Falcons during the 1997–98 season and for England Under-21, an observer would have seen a focused, highly-skilled and audaciously talented young player undoubtedly destined for great things. When he eventually stepped out into the Test arena, for a brief five-minute debut during the 1998 Five Nations, he seemed to the manner born. But the ease with which he appeared to acclimatise himself to Test match rugby was surface-deep only. To read his autobiography, Jonny, is to gain an astonishing and brutally honest insight into a painfully shy and deeply self-conscious individual. Despite his undoubted natural abilities and the faith shown in him by the England selectors, Wilkinson confessed to feeling like a fraud among the famous faces with whom he mingled when he first joined up with the national team.
When the squad gathered at the Petersham Hotel in Richmond, he would hide in his room at every opportunity, would agonise over who to sit next to at meal times, would stutter and then fall silent when trying to speak with senior players, and would feel a deep stab to his confidence at even the most light-hearted of playful put-downs.
He took solace in the familiar face of kicking coach Dave Alred, whom he had been working with since his mid-teens. After training the two of them would stay on for several hours working on kicking drills and routines, alone under the floodlights in the middle of a silent and empty Twickenham Stadium, until eventually returning to the hotel for a late dinner, just the two of them, the other players and coaches having eaten several hours before.
Woodward could see that Wilkinson was shy and didn’t like speaking in front of the other players in meetings, but he needed a confident player at stand-off to command the run of play and to boss those around him. He could see that Wilkinson had it in him to be a huge asset for the England team, but he needed him to come out of his shell. To help with this, Woodward would often make a point of asking Wilkinson questions or for his opinion of certain attacking strategies when in team meetings. From Woodward’s perspective it made perfect sense to encourage the young man to speak openly in front of his teammates, but those meetings became a source of deep dread and
anxiety for Wilkinson.
It is extraordinary to imagine how Wilkinson overcame this deep crisis of confidence to become the attacking general of the England backline. He was capped off the bench against Ireland at Twickenham in the last match of the 1998 Five Nations as an emergency winger after Mike Catt suffered a hamstring injury, and in so doing became the youngest player to play for England in seventy-one years. He played that first season as a centre at Newcastle, with Rob Andrew at fly-half, and that was where he was selected in the England squad, but the coaches for both club and country always envisioned the centre position as a stepping stone towards the No.10 shirt. And that was exactly where he was selected for the first Test of the Tour of Hell – against Australia in Brisbane.
For thirty minutes the game was close – on the scoreboard at least. England scrambled like madmen and held the Wallabies to 6–0. But over the course of the next fifty minutes, the floodgates well and truly opened as the hosts ran up a further seventy unanswered points to record the heaviest defeat England had suffered in Test match history.
‘We were doing quite well to begin with, albeit defending a lot,’ recalled Graham Rowntree, the prop. ‘But it ended up being a total disaster. It was hard to take but we were pretty honest with ourselves afterwards and spent a couple of days studying the video. John Mitchell was fantastic and sorted out a few things up front. A week later we played New Zealand in Dunedin and even with only seven forwards – Danny Grewcock was sent off – we did all right.’
