White Gold

by Peter Burns

  The most notable feature of that match against Italy at Twickenham, however, was that it marked the debut of Jason Robinson. Robinson was a legend of rugby league, having enjoyed a stellar career for Wigan and Great Britain before crossing the code divide by signing for Sale in 2000. He made an immediate impact for the Manchester club and just four months later received a call-up to the national side, becoming only the second player in history to play rugby union for England and rugby league for Great Britain.

  ‘Just when you think you might be learning the game, when you think you know what the best looks like, how to get there and how the game works, along comes someone who breaks all the rules,’ wrote Wilkinson in Jonny. ‘Here is a guy who forces me to reassess what I thought was possible in the game... His ability to beat players both ways and make ninety-degree direction changes without losing speed totally obliterates what I believed were the limits for footwork and speed.’

  Robinson’s dazzling athleticism impressed every player in the squad. One particular moment, which occurred during a training session on the 2001 Lions tour, also revealed the hunger that Robinson possessed and made more of an impact on his teammates than anything he did while winning his first caps for England. It was during one of Phil Larder’s defensive sessions. The ball was being passed along the line and, as the defence pressed up, one of the attacking players thought there was space on the outside for Robinson. He threw a long looping pass towards the diminutive figure on the wing. As it sailed towards its target, Iain Balshaw shot out from the defensive line and easily plucked the ball from the air before it could reach Robinson. Everyone in the squad knew how fast the Bath full-back was and they stopped in their tracks to watch Balshaw cruise in for the try. Everyone except Robinson. As Will Greenwood recalled in Will Greenwood on Rugby, ‘It was like a cheetah hunting down a gazelle, the short powerful sprinter against the languid, graceful, suddenly-terrified beast. For the first time, there was fear in Iain’s eyes – he was thinking about the abuse he would cop, he was worried his gas would be deemed flat – and to counter it, he put his foot to the floor. It was to no avail. Jason had Balshaw’s ankles in sight and ten yards out the blonde Lancastrian was grounded. Jason Robinson had arrived. He had let his feet do the talking and we had witnessed a truly remarkable piece of pace and desire.’

  Pace and desire. It was the hallmark of Robinson’s play. He had electricity in his feet, piston-like drive in his legs and the upper-body strength of a powerlifter. Wherever he played, every time he touched the ball, spectators would be on their feet as defences scrambled desperately to shut him down; they rarely could. It is remarkable that he started for the Lions in the summer of 2001 before he won a starting shirt for England, but Woodward had monitored him very closely and knew just what a potent weapon he could be. Robinson was a born match-winner but Woodward played his hand carefully and didn’t rush to introduce him into the starting line-up. Instead, he began by bringing him on towards the end of games, when opposition defences were tiring and suddenly had to try to find a way to cope with Robinson’s explosive pace. After playing for thirty-four minutes against Italy and failing to receive a single pass – as the England midfield tore through their opposition and the ball seldom needed to go any further out – it was the Scots in the third match of the tournament who would become Robinson’s first true victims.

  The home Calcutta Cup clash threw up a raft of new records: the biggest winning margin, the highest score and the most tries in an England–Scotland match. ‘On the night before the game, Clive gathered us all together for a team meeting,’ said Wilkinson. ‘His tack was straightforward. Last year we had let ourselves down; this year we had the chance to put it right. We were shown a few video clips of the previous season’s game, highlighting the despair we felt at the end. Remember the feeling, was the underlying message, and make sure it does not happen again.’

  England were merciless throughout, with their play orchestrated brilliantly by Matt Dawson, Jonny Wilkinson and Mike Catt and gilded by the pure pace of Iain Balshaw and the power of Ben Cohen on the wing. Wave after wave of England attacks brought two tries for both Balshaw and Lawrence Dallaglio and one each for Will Greenwood and Richard Hill, while Wilkinson added a further thirteen points from the boot. It was in the last quarter of the game, however, when Woodward introduced Robinson, that the Twickenham crowd witnessed a global superstar in the making. Robinson twice received the ball deep in the England half, shimmied and arced and split the Scottish defence like a lightning bolt; on the second occasion he swept upfield on a forty-metre run before drawing the Scottish full-back Chris Paterson and putting Greenwood away for an easy canter to the posts.

  ‘There was a bit of negativity around Robinson when we brought him across from rugby league,’ said Woodward, ‘but after a couple of games I remember sitting in the stand at Twickenham and as soon as half-time started, you had about four hundred people sitting around you shouting, “Bring on Robinson! Get Robinson on!” And then when he came on everyone would just go nuts. He brought a real superstar factor to the game whenever he touched the ball.

  ‘I remember a great quote from Andy Nicol in 2001 when we played Scotland at Twickenham: “There were twenty minutes to go,” he said, “and we’re getting stuffed, we’re out on our feet, and there is a stop in play – and they bring on Jason Robinson. And you’re just thinking, give us a break!”’

  ‘It was pace as much as anything that beat the Scots,’ said Wilkinson of the 43–3 win. ‘As well as the six tries we scored, one of the most pleasing aspects of the victory was keeping them out from our try-line. We had conceded two tries on our first two matches of the championship and knew we had to improve. We placed a lot of emphasis on defence in the build-up and it showed, particularly at the end when we could have leaked a soft try and it would not have mattered. Instead, the discipline remained right until the final whistle.’

  England were on fire. Next they were due to travel to Dublin, but the match was postponed because of the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease across mainland Britain. The rescheduled match wouldn’t be played until the autumn. ‘It was massively frustrating because we were on a roll,’ recalled Richard Hill. ‘But we took out those frustrations on France.’

  England scored six tries against Les Bleus at Twickenham, including an audacious set-up by Austin Healey when, with his back to the French posts, he chipped the ball over his shoulder for Mike Catt to run on to and score. No try epitomised the confidence of England’s attack more than that one move, executed to absolute perfection. The other scores came from Balshaw, Greening, Greenwood, Hill and Perry, while Wilkinson kicked all six conversions and a further two penalties for a 48–19 victory.

  ‘You’d wake up on a Saturday morning and no matter who you were playing, you were just so excited about the game,’ recalled Woodward. ‘It was real Jim Greenwood stuff, because you just knew your team was going to go out and play; you just knew. And you could see how excited the guys were to play together and to play with the style that we had developed. It would have to take an incredible performance from the opposition to stop them winning. I used to say that in the team meetings, “If anyone can beat you, good luck to them. The only thing that will stop us playing is us.” It really was a magical time.’

  By the end of those four games, England had scored an incredible 215 points, which included a record twenty-eight tries, and had conceded just sixty points. ‘Twenty-eight tries, an average of seven per game, tell the story of a golden period of fifteen-man, free-flowing rugby that had the crowd standing on their seats,’ said Woodward.

  ‘The other big thing that year – actually, it was probably another of those defining points in the team’s progress – was the fine-tuning of our style,’ said Richard Hill. ‘We realised we had to be adaptable. Different conditions would demand a different approach. So would certain opponents. We had to be able to play whatever game was required on the day.’

  With the conclusion of the Six Nations postponed
until the autumn when Ireland would play their remaining fixtures against Wales, Scotland and England, attention turned to the Lions tour to Australia. Martin Johnson was named captain, the first player to captain a Lions tour twice, and seventeen of his countrymen were selected alongside him in the tour party, a fair reflection of their total dominance of the Six Nations in the spring. It was a source of extreme pride to Woodward that so many of his charges were recognised by the Lions selectors, but little did he know how heavy a toll the tour would take on them all.

  As well as the large number of English players selected, the back-room staff was also thickly populated by members of Woodward’s team – yet another testimony to the quality that he had assembled behind the scenes at Twickenham. Andy Robinson was forwards coach, Phil Larder was defence coach and kicking guru Dave Alred was joined by Jonny Wilkinson’s mentor and fitness expert Steve Black.

  On paper, the squad looked extremely powerful, with many critics regarding them as one of the finest touring sides ever to leave the British Isles. The Wallabies were the world champions and were playing at home in front of their own supporters, but for all that it was felt that the Lions were favourites to claim the series. The tour itself was short, with just ten matches in total and head coach Graham Henry and his back-room staff felt that the players needed to put in as much work off the field as they did on it to prepare for the series.

  ‘We made big mistakes on that trip,’ said the Ireland hooker and captain Keith Wood. ‘We overtrained heavily and I remember having conversations with Martin Johnson about it and we challenged Graham. We said, “Listen, we’re overtraining, we’re knackered, every one of us, we’re wrecked.” And he said, “We’re going to stop in a week’s time and that’ll be all the really hard work done.” But by the time we stopped it had taken too much out of the players.’

  ‘Looking back,’ said Donal Lenihan, the tour manager, ‘I would accept 100 per cent that we worked the players too hard early on but there were reasons for it. England as a professional entity were two years ahead of the other three countries at the time. England had a defence coach. Ireland, Scotland and Wales didn’t have one. So you had Phil Larder who demanded more time because defensively he would say the other fellas didn’t have a clue. This was a whole new set-up for three-quarters of the players. So Larder demanded more time and, in fairness to Graham, because it was largely an English management team that were used to working with each other, he was trying to find common ground and so he was keen to give them the time they needed for their specific aspects of responsibility. As a result of that, I’d put my hand up and say we trained too long.’

  Lenihan’s observations about the superior fitness and professionalism of the England players over their Celtic rivals is interesting as it corroborates the progress being made towards achieving Woodward’s ambitions for his team to become the fittest in the world and for them to be the best prepared and most professional outfit in the game. It also reveals just how effective Dave Reddin’s programmes were proving and the commitment that the England players were showing in adhering so rigidly to them. Even two years out from the World Cup, they were a long way ahead of their British and Irish rivals. Indeed, in the face of all the complaints about being overworked, Lawrence Dallaglio took a different attitude than many to the heavy training routine imposed on the tourists. ‘Contrary to many reports which emanated from the tour,’ he said, ‘I believe that the fact that the Lions stayed in contention right to the final whistle of the final Test was in no small part attributable to the huge workload we put in as a squad in the first three weeks of the trip. I don’t accept the criticism that the training was far too hard and there’s been a lot of rubbish spouted on the subject. This is the modern professional era and the players are paid to do a professional job. I firmly believe that the two main coaches, Graham Henry and Andy Robinson, did a first-class job.’

  While the English players naturally, because of their number, formed the bedrock of both the midweek and Saturday side and were central to much that was great and good in the Lions’ play, two of their more celebrated number also courted considerable controversy. Matt Dawson and Austin Healey both wrote damning newspaper columns which, in Dawson’s case, undermined the coaching and management of the tour and, in Healey’s, insulted the Australian players and the nation at large.

  Despite the criticism of the training schedule and the way the teams were selected (many players felt that the Test team had been pencilled in long before the squad had even left Heathrow and that there was little or no chance to stake a claim for a Test berth if a player was outside that predetermined side), the Lions played some astonishingly good rugby throughout the tour, picking up where England had left off in the spring and augmenting that attacking style with the best of the best from the other home nations. In the First Test at the Gabba in Brisbane, Jason Robinson showed all his magic in his first start in a union Test by scoring a sensational early try, rounding Wallaby full-back Chris Latham with barely a metre of space to work in. His try sparked a blitz from the Lions and they went on to take a crucial 1–0 lead in the series.

  The Second Test started well for the Lions and after a try from Neil Back they led 11–6 at half-time. But then the tour imploded. Jonny Wilkinson, playing at fly-half, wafted a looping pass to his outside backs that was intercepted by Australia winger Joe Roff, who cruised in to score. Roff’s try was the start of a twenty-nine point blitz that left the Lions ragged. To make matters worse, Richard Hill, who had been one of the most outstanding players in the series up to that point, was poleaxed by a stiff-armed challenge from centre Nathan Grey just before half-time and was concussed out of the series.

  By the time the Lions reached Stadium Australia in Sydney for the series finale, the team was being held together by sticking tape. Exhausted and battered, they had been unable to stage a single training session with the starting team throughout the week building up to the Third Test, with Graham Henry later revealing that if the game had been scheduled just two days earlier, five players from the starting line-up would not have been able to play.

  Despite all this, the Lions remained in the game until the final seconds, with Wilkinson, who had been an injury doubt during the week, scoring a total of eighteen points, including a try, to go alongside Jason Robinson’s second touchdown of the series. Trailing 29–23, the Lions had one last roll of the dice but Martin Johnson was beaten to the ball on the Lions’ own throw at a line-out and their last attacking opportunity was lost.

  Desolate and beaten, the Lions players had to return home to deal with the loss of a series that had been there for the taking while also trying to pick themselves up for the conclusion to the postponed Six Nations, the autumn series, and the next stage in their cycle towards the 2003 World Cup.

  *

  As Woodward welcomed his troops back into camp before the rescheduled match with Ireland in Dublin, he believed that he could nurse his players back into form and fitness in time for the final hurdle in their Grand Slam crusade. His team had played with such confidence, power and uninhibited skill in the spring that he felt sure that just gathering the players together once more under the red rose banner would be enough to get them all back on track. But he had not foreseen quite how severe the remedial requirements were – or how other obstacles would emerge that would have significantly debilitating effects.

  For one, their preparation was almost non-existent. The England players were battered and downcast after the Lions tour. Some, like Dallaglio, had been injured and ruled out of action in Australia and were still to return to full fitness, while Martin Johnson was also unavailable because of injury. Iain Balshaw, who had been sensational in the spring, had lost his confidence in Australia and his form had disappeared. Furthermore, all of the team’s arrangements in terms of player release, hotel bookings, fitness and training sessions had been based on the upcoming autumn Test series, not this rescheduled match. They now had to shoehorn in an extra fixture and all the procedures t
hat went with it. ‘We were horribly unprepared,’ said Woodward. ‘There was no way we could negotiate any additional players’ release from their clubs in that time. And Ireland would be playing Scotland and Wales on successive Saturdays before playing us, which gave them a huge advantage... I also totally underestimated what the Lions tour had taken out of the players, and got selection badly wrong.’

  ‘The mistake we made,’ said Matt Dawson, ‘was to think we could play the way we did in the spring in a one-off game, when Ireland had two games already under their belts and had ironed out the creases in their game, and we’d not had even one.’

  Ireland’s captain, Keith Wood, looked at the England team-sheet and realised there was a chink in England’s armour beyond their lack of preparation, or the form and fitness of some of their key players. Having been pitched into battle alongside Martin Johnson and Lawrence Dallaglio with the Lions in 1997 and in the summer of 2001, he knew that they were a different opposition without those two men in their ranks. Dallaglio was the beating heart of the team, a giant ball-carrier and a complete nuisance at the breakdown. As well as being one of the finest players on the planet, Johnson had an aura that galvanized those around him, that inspired and drove them to the limits of their ability – both individual and collective. If Johnson and Dallaglio were playing it wouldn’t much matter what else was set against England, they would always be in with a shout. With them gone, Ireland had a real opportunity.

  In celebration of Wood’s iconic status, huge numbers of the Lansdowne Road crowd were decked out in masks bearing the visage of the home team’s talismanic captain. And it was therefore fitting that after Ireland tore into the visitors with a ferocious appetite from the first whistle, it was Wood who would score a try, peeling off the back of a line-out and charging over Neil Back.