by Peter Burns
‘Looking back on that tour – and there’s no escaping how horrendous it was in terms of results – there was still a great deal of value taken from it,’ said Roger Uttley. ‘Firstly we found out that several players weren’t up to scratch and they never featured in an England squad again. But then, on the other side of that, we had guys like Jonny Wilkinson, Josh Lewsey and Phil Vickery playing their first full Tests against the southern hemisphere big boys and you had guys like Matt Dawson really having their leadership abilities and their resilience put to the test. You don’t learn anything by winning all the time.’
The tour had a profound effect on Wilkinson in particular. He confesses to weeping and screaming in his hotel room after the 76–0 defeat in Brisbane, utterly ashamed by what had happened and pinning a large proportion of the blame on his own shoulders. But then he had an epiphany. ‘Then I get it,’ he writes in Jonny. ‘That 76–0 is a bit like kicking with Dave Alred. Dave shows you what being the best is; he makes you realise how much work you have to do and how far you have got to go. The Australians have just done the same. They have shown me what being the best looks like. They’ve shown me what I want to look like too, and how much work I have to do in order to be that way. And now that I know, I make a promise to myself – I am never going to feel this way again. I’m never going to feel so helpless, never going to feel so second-rate, never going to allow myself to feel as unvalued as that. Never. The day we were defeated 76–0 is one of the worst and most important days of my life.’
It was a significant psychological shift for Wilkinson. He went from passively trying to just make his way in the England set-up without causing any unnecessary waves, without drawing any undue attention to himself, to realising that he could have a controlling influence on proceedings, that his destiny – and that of his team – was ultimately in his own hands. And it wasn’t just Wilkinson who experienced an epiphany from the tour.
‘That was the lowest point in the history of English rugby and I was in charge of it,’ said Woodward. ‘It didn’t matter that I’d only been doing the job seven months from a standing start. That was the time when I had to be absolutely convinced that I could pull this thing around. A lot of resolve came out of that experience. I’d been to the bottom of the pit and I was determined to be bloody-minded and fight hard to get a team of people around to make England competitive.’
The squad flew out of Brisbane and crossed the Tasman Sea for two Tests against the All Blacks and midweek matches against New Zealand A, the New Zealand Rugby Academy and the New Zealand Maori.
After disappointing losses to New Zealand A (18–10) and the New Zealand Rugby Academy (50–32) they travelled to Dunedin for the first Test against the All Blacks. England’s hopes were seriously hampered after Grewcock was sent off and then Jonny Wilkinson was injured during the forty-third minute, which ended his tour. New Zealand ran in nine tries to record a 64–22 victory, their biggest winning margin against England.
While few obvious positives could be taken from an experience like that, Humphrey Walters, who was travelling with the team, picked up one that he would use as part of the refurbishment of the players’ area at Twickenham.
‘When you get off the bus in Dunedin and walk into the stadium, you are greeted by the words, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE HOUSE OF PAIN,’ explained Walters. ‘When I saw it I turned to Clive and said: “We need something as intimidating as that.” So when we got back we hung a big sign that every opposition player would see when they arrived at the ground: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FORTRESS TWICKENHAM.’
The tour was already a nightmare, but it was overshadowed by tragedy when Woodward received news shortly after the Dunedin Test that his father had died. Leaving the tour in the hands of his deputies he flew home for the funeral. He missed the 62–14 midweek loss to the New Zealand Maori, but returned in time for the second Test against the All Blacks, this time at Eden Park in Auckland.
‘On the flight back to New Zealand, for the first time, I looked at my situation as my father would and knew what he would be asking me: was I really doing this job properly or just trying to keep everyone happy? Losing my father put many things into perspective. In many ways it was time to take the gloves off and stop pussyfooting around with the dozens of people who were playing with the politics of English rugby.’
England lost the second Test 40–10 but there was a new steel in Woodward’s resolve to do anything within his power to help the team succeed as they flew to South Africa for the final leg of this impossibly tough tour.
On arrival in the Republic, the team headed to the Holiday Inn Garden Court Hotel near Newlands Stadium in Cape Town, where they would be playing the Springboks. It was the same hotel that the Lions had stayed in the year before and the South African Under-21 side were also in residence at the same time as England. Despite this, Woodward felt that the accommodation and facilities fell way below his expectations for an elite sports team. So he decided to do something about it. He made some calls and, putting the entire cost on his own credit cards, moved the team across town to the exclusive Mount Nelson Hotel at the foot of Table Mountain, nicknamed the Pink Palace. He felt that he could not ask his team to give their best if they were not given the best. It was Paddi Lund’s theory of the importance of critical non-essentials put into practice on the largest scale the RFU had yet seen. England lost to the Springboks, but the 18–0 scoreline was the best of the tour and was impressive after all they had been through and given the players they had at their disposal. The RFU eventually picked up the bill for the Pink Palace and Woodward quietly celebrated the precedent of higher standards. Now that the bar had been raised to that level, they couldn’t go back.
There was no doubt that, on paper, the tour was an unmitigated disaster. But from the ashes of the hammerings, some phoenixes were to rise. The tour had seen the emergence of a new resolve never to let a run of results like that happen to the team again; it had allowed the management a chance to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of which players could or couldn’t cut it at Test match level; and it had given valuable game-time to Jonny Wilkinson, Josh Lewsey, who could play full-back, centre or wing, and prop Phil Vickery – all of whom would play vital roles for England in the years to come.
‘Defeat makes you a stronger person,’ said Uttley. ‘The only good thing about that trip is that the players remained competitive. It hardened the notion, too, that if we were going to be successful we had to learn to win down there. The lessons learnt by the likes of Wilkinson, Lewsey, Dawson and Vickery were invaluable for the seasons ahead.’
FIVE
THE ANATOMY OF A WINNING CULTURE
‘I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’
Michael Jordan
STEVE BATES WAS a chemistry teacher and rugby master at Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire. He had enjoyed a prosperous playing career as a scrum-half for London Wasps, playing alongside England and Lions fly-half Rob Andrew for many seasons and earning himself a cap for England against Romania in 1989, while also touring with England to South Africa in 1994 and making several appearances for England A over the years.
Bates had seen many talented players pass through his teams over the years, but there was one young lad that he felt was quite different from all the others, one young lad who had something about him, who he really felt could go all the way. A lad by the name of Jonny Wilkinson.
Wilkinson had been playing mini-rugby almost since he was old enough to hold a ball. Encouraged by his father and spurred on by his close relationship with his older brother, Mark, he was soon playing for teams above his age grade. Indeed, from the age of eight onwards, he almost exclusively played in sides that were for boys a year or more older than he was. In a country like New Zealand this is not unusual and often, tha
nks to the Polynesian influence, youth teams are delineated by weight grade rather than age because of the physical maturity that Polynesian children reach before their Caucasian counterparts. But in the northern hemisphere such an occurrence is a lot less common – and particularly so for Wilkinson, who was no overgrown physical specimen. As a stand-off or full-back he was regularly the smallest player on the field. But despite this, he was able to cope with playing in such an environment because of two things: audacious skill and tremendous bravery. The former he worked on obsessively and will be discussed more closely shortly. The latter was fuelled by a deeply ingrained competitive streak and by an acute sense of self-doubt. While this may sound contradictory, it is not – the two traits go hand in hand. Wilkinson was an anxious, often overwrought child who obsessively overanalysed his life, judging every facet of his existence by a barometer of success and failure; but success to him meant absolute perfection, failure was anything that deviated from that. His life was haunted by seemingly never-ending incidents where he felt that he came up short, was exposed physically or mentally or let someone down. It plagued him incessantly and drove him to work longer and harder than ever before so that he could stamp out his perceived imperfections. The drive to overcome these shortcomings not only meant that by the age of nine he could comfortably spiral punt and kick goals with both feet, but that when it came to a competitive game he would throw himself at the challenge with total commitment in an effort not to expose any weakness or let his teammates, coaches and family down. And all of this was done while often being so cripplingly nervous about failing that he would be physically sick with nerves before a game – even when just playing in a Sunday morning mini-rugby tournament.
As he progressed through school and eventually moved to Lord Wandsworth College he continued to play for the first XVs in the year above him until he moved into his senior years and came under the wing of Steve Bates.
Wilkinson was without doubt the hardest trainer Bates had ever seen. He was just insatiable. He never got bored, always gave 100 per cent and seemed to just soak up anything Bates said to him like a sponge. He was ticking every box and Bates could already see him continuing his rise through the England age group teams and eventually reaching the highest position in the land. But Bates also knew that there were thousands of boys across the country with that same dream, all vying for the same shirt. He knew as well as anyone how hard one had to work to make it at a top club and to then attract the attention of the national selectors. He had experienced the euphoria of representing his country in a Test match – and the agony of his international career ending there. In a country with so many players, it was easy to slip between the cracks, become disillusioned with rugby and eventually just drift out of the game. Looking at Wilkinson, Bates knew that it would be a crying shame if that fate were to befall him. So what could he do to help?
Having trained and played alongside Andrew, who had won seventy caps for his country and played in five Test matches for the Lions during the 1989 tour of Australia and 1993 tour of New Zealand, and who was regarded as one of England’s finest ever stand-offs, Bates knew exactly what it had taken for Andrew to scale the heights that he had done in his career: a work ethic second to none. But Bates knew a little secret of Andrew’s; his teammate was recognised the world over as one of the best kickers in the game – but he had had help with his kicking, having employed a specialist kicking coach by the name of Dave Alred to assist with his training.
Alred had played full-back for Bath and Bristol in the 1970s and also enjoyed stints playing rugby league for Shefield, before giving up rugby in 1978 to play American Football. He played for the Minnesota Vikings for three seasons and it was there that his fascination for coaching kicking blossomed. He returned to the UK to coach Great Britain’s rugby league side in the mid-eighties and enjoyed periods working with the Wallabies and in Aussie Rules, before taking up a role as kicking coach with the ’97 Lions. This was particularly successful as the Lions clinched the series thanks to the unerring boot of Neil Jenkins and a late drop-goal from Jerry Guscott to seal the Second Test. Much of Alred’s expertise is transferable across a number of sports because his focus is not just on technique and biomechanics, but on the psychology of performing under pressure and the mantra that all practice must be of the highest quality. As well as working in the various oval ball codes, he has worked with Joe Cole at Chelsea and Luke Donald, Padraig Harrington and Paul McGinley in golf. He is, without doubt, regarded as one of the world’s best, if not the best, in his field.
Bates knew that if Wilkinson was to really make it on the world stage as a fly-half then he would have to develop his kicking to a world-class level. And so he arranged for Wilkinson to have a private session with Alred.
When he broke the news to his young charge, Wilkinson was unconvinced. He was both confident that he was good enough already as a kicker and also shy about meeting a perfect stranger. But after some gentle persuasion from Bates he reluctantly agreed.
A week later, Wilkinson and his father drove to meet Alred at the training grounds at Bristol University. They found him out on a pitch with a pile of balls, a flip chart and several plastic cones dotted around the field.
Alred was in his forties, dressed in a tracksuit and boots and looked ft and strong. To the relief of the socially awkward Wilkinson, they almost immediately got down to business – although to Wilkinson’s surprise they didn’t start kicking balls around straight away. Instead, Alred directed him to the flip chart and began to talk through the essential mechanics of kicking, the movement and balance of the body, the flight path of the ball. Wilkinson had never dreamed that kicking could be broken down into so many components and that each component could be finely tweaked and refined. But if Wilkinson had been impressed by Alred’s theory, it was nothing compared to seeing him in action.
They walked out on to the pitch and then came to a stop some 50 metres from two cones that had been set five metres apart from one another.
‘If you bear everything I’ve just shown you in mind,’ said Alred picking up a ball, ‘you will soon see that you can be in complete control of the ball. Complete control. No hit and hopes, no general satisfaction that the ball is sort of where you wanted it to be. If you can learn to control every aspect of the kick, you can control precisely where the ball goes.’ And with that he took one step and struck the ball. It made a sweet, clean thump as it hit the bridge of his foot and spiralled away through the air with a fffffoooommmm. It was a thing of beauty as it arched high and then dropped, smack in the middle of the cones. It was a perfect kick.
‘Now your turn,’ said Alred, a white-toothed grin breaking brightly across his tanned face.
Wilkinson picked up another ball, set himself and then kicked. The ball made more of a duuumph noise when he connected and the spiral was wobbly and unkempt as it swept away from them – to fall both short and wide of the cones.
Without another word Alred picked up a third ball, stepped and struck. It was identical to his first kick.
In that moment, Wilkinson was sold. ‘As I watch him,’ he recounts in Jonny, ‘I feel this enormous respect and confidence in him. It’s already clear to me that this is a truly special guy, and if I’m really serious about wanting to succeed, I need to learn from him everything I possibly can.’
Over the coming years Wilkinson worked tirelessly on his kicking, his strength, his fitness and his understanding of the game. Not for individual glory, rather because the team needed him to. He did it for his mates, for his brothers in arms alongside him in the trenches. He would practise his kicking for hours after every training session, setting himself a number of kicking challenges which, if he ever missed a kick, he would start again from the beginning until he had completed the task with 100 per cent success. There would never be a day off for him – he even famously practised for three hours in the snow on Christmas Day.
In the seminal book Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, Matthew Syed
, England’s former table tennis No.1 and now a Times journalist, brilliantly brings together a number of scientific studies and social and psychological theories about the development of world-class talent to explode the widely held premise that champions are born naturally talented and predisposed to genius. He draws on a number of works, including Carol Dweck’s growth mindset theory, and explores a wide range of disciplines, including music, sport and academia, to prove that champions are the product of their environment and thousands of hours of dedicated, quality practice rather than natural child prodigies. It is fascinating to hold up several of the theories in Bounce and apply them not just to the England rugby team under Clive Woodward but to Jonny Wilkinson in particular.
As Syed espouses when discussing the ‘talent myth’, Wilkinson was not the product of some fabled natural gift at birth that set him on the road to stardom. He did not just pick up a rugby ball and naturally spiral punt off both feet, spin pass the ball twenty feet with an easy flick of the wrists or know the best area of the field to kick a ball based on instinct. Instead, as his compulsive obsessions show, his talent was the product of many thousands of hours of dedicated and focused practice. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers postulates that the success of outstanding performers – be it Bill Gates or the Beatles – was down to the ‘10,000-hour rule’. Gladwell cites the work of K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist whose studies of a group of violinists at the Berlin Music Academy revealed that the only factor separating the outstanding from the very good and the mediocre was how much they practised. Neither the age at which they began training nor their family background mattered much – it was simply a case of the number of hours devoted to serious practice. This 10,000-hour rule is the basis for much of both Gladwell and Syed’s suppositions and is reinforced by Wilkinson as a test subject: for 10,000 hours of quality practice is considered the minimum time required for the acquisition of expertise in any complex task – from playing the violin, to becoming a chess grandmaster, to being a multiple Commonwealth Games table tennis champion in Syed’s case, or to becoming the world’s greatest kicker of a rugby ball in Wilkinson’s. High-quality practice correlates directly to scientific studies on the development of world-class skillsets and can transform the body and brain to allow an individual to achieve world-class standards of excellence and, importantly, consistency.
