by Peter Burns
There were a number of other fringe players that Woodward was interested in looking at while his established stars were resting. He wanted to see whether lock Ben Kay and flankers Lewis Moody and Joe Worsley could continue the progress they had been making when opportunities had come their way, and whether Phil Vickery could show leadership skills to guide this young and inexperienced squad against one of the most powerful teams in the world.
An unpleasant atmosphere greeted the team upon arrival in Buenos Aires. England were never popular opposition in Argentina and the tour was unfortunately timed so that it coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the Falklands War. To make matters worse, the country was in the throes of an economic crisis, with banks collapsing and demonstrators taking to the streets; and to add to the uneasy feeling, England had just knocked Argentina out of the football World Cup.
Amid the furore of the game itself, with the crowd going wild behind twenty-foot metal fences, England played a simple but direct game, refusing to cower in the face of an aggressive Argentinian pack or the pressure pouring down from the crowd. In a remarkable demonstration of the depth of talent England now had at their disposal, Vickery’s men won 26–18. ‘I felt so proud,’ said the stand-in captain. ‘We won the match and it sent a message back to the guys who weren’t there that they had competition for their places. This was a valuable thing for them to hear, because it ended up lifting the whole squad and making everyone play to the best of their ability. A lot of guys said, “I’m good. I’m ready for this”, and when we returned to England Clive must have realised that he had far more players to choose from than before we left for Argentina.’
The victory was indeed significant and kept up momentum within the squad. However, of more significance was an agreement made that same summer between the RFU and the Premiership clubs that created the new Elite Player Squad. The EPS allowed England to identify a squad of players at the start of the season and essentially buy training time with them from their clubs. It gave Woodward a full twenty days of training before the 2002 autumn internationals and the 2003 Six Nations and handed the players over to England full-time from the end of May until the end of the World Cup in November. This gave him a total of an incredible eighty days with the players in the World Cup calendar year. After years of craving quality time with the England players to prepare properly within the international camp, Woodward finally had his wish granted. And what a difference it would make.
It was estimated that to bring the side to a peak in time for the World Cup would cost the RFU in excess of £20 million. Woodward continued in his determined crusade to ensure that no stone would be left unturned as they prepared for the sport’s blue riband tournament – and so it was that Sherylle Calder was appointed visual awareness coach in the autumn of 2002. Calder was a former South Africa hockey international and captain, who had become an expert in visual perception. Originally employed for the Six Nations and the summer tour, she so impressed Woodward that she was kept on for the World Cup. Calder, who would go on to work with the World Cup-winning Springboks team of 2007 and the Australia cricket team before becoming part of Team GB’s back-room staff for the London 2012 Olympics, specialises not only in improving hand-eye coordination but also in developing peripheral vision. Just as Woodward had first imagined an Ajax-styled Total Rugby philosophy in a pub when he was a young Harlequins player, he had never given up on his ideal of players playing ‘heads-up rugby’, with every member of the team a potential attacking weapon. In order to achieve that, the players needed first to be totally comfortable on the ball and within the team itself, but they also needed to understand space and timing and opportunity. They needed to see, absorb and react to all the visual information available to them on the pitch at any given moment. That was exactly what Sherylle Calder was able to hone and refine.
‘When I first brought in Sherylle Calder,’ said Woodward, ‘I remember some of the players saying, “What on earth is this all about? How can you train your eyes?” She was brilliant. And look at her career, she’s won two Rugby World Cups, has worked with both the English and Australian cricket teams, she was on the 18th green with Ernie Els when he won the Open at St Andrews, she was part of Team GB at the 2012 Olympics... She is just fantastic.
‘I think the idea of getting in touch with her came from one of the players, who had read an article about her working in cricket and about how you can weight-train your eyes, and gave it to me. And at first I was literally imagining small dumbbells on your eyelids. And so I tracked her down and I liked her immediately. She had played international hockey for South Africa, and she explained over the phone that the eye is a muscle and you can make your eyes stronger by doing things on computers, doing exercises with balls, you can do all these things that make the muscles in your eyes stronger. I had no clue scientifically if it all stacked up, but to my common-sense way of looking at it, it sounded plausible. So I brought her over for a couple of months and she did various sessions with the players and then I employed her full-time.
‘I remember introducing her to all the players in the team room and then we went outside and I said she was going to do the first session. So she went up to the players, with one finger raised which they would track as she approached them, and she touched them on the bridge of their nose – and could instantly tell which of their eyes was the stronger. She then handed out eye patches that they all had to wear over their stronger eye. It was hilarious, all the players were falling about laughing, taking the piss out of each other, and even I was thinking, “Oh my god, what is this?” And then she turned to me and said, “Clive, I just want you to run the session as normal and we’ll see what happens.” So we got them all in position to receive a kick-off and one of the guys dinked a kick to the forwards – and it was just a little lofted, gentle kick. And Danny Grewcock shouted, “Mine!” and jumped up to catch it – and the ball landed about three feet to his left. It was hilarious, all the guys were killing themselves laughing. But it showed how much your depth perception can be worked on and they were eventually able to do all these training sessions with the eye patches on, catching and passing and so on, with as much accuracy as they did with unrestricted vision.
‘What was also great was that normally when you have injured players, they just hang around on the side, but Sherylle would take them off and get them working on computers, which was fantastic from my point of view because there was no wasted time.’
‘I work on visual motor performance – how accurately you use the information you see and put it into your hands to respond,’ said Calder, who uses a specially designed computer program called EyeGym which develops reflexes, testing how quickly users react to games on a screen. EyeGym works to develop skills such as hand-eye, foot and body co-ordination, better peripheral vision and spatial awareness. Peripheral vision and spatial awareness are crucial in rugby and being adept at reading as much information as possible from what is around you on the pitch significantly aids decision-making in both attack and defence. ‘What it really teaches,’ said Calder, ‘is the ability to see accurately and to process that information correctly.’ Calder’s work was just another cog in Woodward’s obsessive plan to cover all the bases possible; it was a ‘one per center’, another area in which his players might be able to improve by even a single percentage point. Cumulatively, these areas would give them an advantage over their opposition. Above all, Calder’s skills had a psychological impact – as many of the critical non-essentials tended to have – because not only did they improve the players’ vision but they also stimulated a greater self-confidence in them as they appreciated that they were part of an environment in which everything possible was being done to help them succeed.
While many coaches around the world focused on picking teams with their thoughts on the future, particularly during a World Cup cycle, Woodward stuck by a simple mantra that flew in the face of this perceived wisdom: the next game was the most important so always pick the strongest side available
to you. Not only did this mean that his team was more likely to win, but that the central core of the team built up experience together – units were well established, each player knew instinctively what those around him would do, and they learnt to win together. While this would prove costly if the team began to break up with retirements, injury or loss of form, for the process of working towards a winner-takes-all tournament like the World Cup, it made perfect, logical sense.
As we have seen with Jonny Wilkinson’s development into a phenomenal striker of a rugby ball, thanks to thousands of hours of deliberate, high-quality practice, so too can we see the development of the entire team in this light. Each component player within the team – as they trained and played together year on year – accumulated successful decision-making characteristics and skills and acquired the complex knowledge of how to win games, no matter the situation, which can be built up only through deep experience. It is no coincidence that every team that has won the World Cup since its inception in 1987 has had many years of development together and experienced as many bitter lows as they have highs. It is also no coincidence that there has yet to be a back-to-back winner. Rugby World Cup dynasties have not, as yet, come to pass. By the time a team has had a chance to accumulate the necessary skill and knowledge to triumph in a World Cup the core of the team tends to be at an age when another World Cup cycle is beyond them. This may change in time. A country may be able to blood a core of players young enough to build up the necessary experience to win a World Cup and then continue their development for a further four years to do it again, but it would no doubt also require the assistance of chance and the form of opposition teams, particularly for the first triumph, to allow this to happen. In sport nothing is impossible, but the chances of such an eventuality occurring are slim.
*
When the squad gathered again at Pennyhill Park to prepare for the 2002 autumn internationals, they had, at last, entered World Cup year. Standing at base camp and staring up at the peak of Everest, every player and member of the back-room staff knew that they had a gruelling climb ahead of them. From October 2002, if they made it through to the World Cup final in November 2003, they would play twenty Test matches – each of them, including the games against the ‘minnows’ in their World Cup pool, huge encounters of staggering significance. The challenge that Woodward set down was for the team to be the No.1-ranked side in the world by the time they entered the tournament and favourites to lift the Webb Ellis Cup. In order to do that they needed to stamp their authority on every game they played – and win. No matter how, they had to win.
And their first challenge was considerable: an autumn series against the best three sides in the world on consecutive weekends.
‘Looking back, they were about as close as you could get to the last three phases of a World Cup,’ said Richard Hill of the scheduled games against New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. ‘Quarter-final, semi-final and final, one after the other.’
Even though the stakes were high and there were fewer than twelve months to go before the World Cup kicked off, Woodward was still tinkering with the make-up of the team, with Cornishman Trevor Woodman making his debut start for England in the front-row. Woodman was raised in a village near Liskeard in south-east Cornwall and played his early rugby for Liskeard Looe before moving to Plymouth Albion, then to Bath and finally to Gloucester. There he teamed up with Phil Vickery, a player he had first encountered as a twelve-year-old when his school played against Vickery’s Bude. Little did the two young props realise how intertwined their careers would become. ‘Who would have believed when we were slogging it out in eight inches of mud down in Bude that we would be running out to play the All Blacks together?’ said Woodman.
At the start of the 2002 season, Gloucester were dominating the Premiership thanks in no small part to the power, speed and dynamism of their two props. While Vickery was often very effective in the wide channels and the cornerstone of the scrum, he acknowledged that Woodman was the faster and stronger of the two. The injection of pace that Woodman could put on the ball when in open space created a potent new attacking dimension for Gloucester and it was one that Woodward was keen to incorporate into the England team – and it pushed him ahead of his rivals for the No.1 shirt, Jason Leonard and Graham Rowntree.
In the twenty-three matches that had taken place between England and New Zealand, England had managed to secure just four victories. While Kyran Bracken, Jason Leonard and Martin Johnson had been part of the famous 15–9 victory in 1993 and Leonard and Johnson had won the second Test with the Lions in New Zealand that same year, the closest most of the squad had come had been the 26–26 draw at Old Trafford in 1997. Every other encounter had ended painfully for the men in white.
The 2002 game provided a return to Twickenham for Woodward’s former right-hand man, John Mitchell, who was now head coach of New Zealand. Mitchell knew all about the strengths of his former charges and was aware that the All Blacks side that he had brought on tour had an experimental flavour to it. He cleverly stated at a press conference that, with twenty capped players left at home, his team was extremely inexperienced – and in so doing set himself up in a no-lose situation. If his side lost, he could blame it on the fact that it was a second-string line-up. If they won, it showed both the strength in depth of his squad and his ability as a coach. And the statement also turned the pressure up on England.
But even with so many front-line players left at home, there was still more than a sprinkling of stardust in the All Blacks ranks. Doug Howlett and Jonah Lomu were on the wings, Tana Umaga was in the centre, the mercurial Carlos Spencer was at No.10 (with Andrew Mehrtens poised to replace him from the bench) and Taine Randell was in the back-row.
England’s first-choice XV had not played together since defeating Italy in Rome in the spring. Woodward sprung some selection surprises of his own by picking Lewis Moody ahead of Neil Back, with the young tyro pulling on the No.6 jersey while Richard Hill moved to the open-side. Dallaglio was back in harness at No.8 after eighteen months out with an horrific knee injury suffered in a club game for Wasps.
Woodward’s introduction of Moody was just reward for the young flanker, but he also wanted to show the old guard that no player’s place was assured.
For the All Blacks, Lomu was making his first appearance after a torrid few years out of the international set-up, during which he had suffered from kidney problems and a loss of fitness and form. Of all the players selected for the tour, Mitchell publicly stated that Lomu was the only one picked on reputation alone. The press in both the UK and New Zealand leapt on the story, highlighting Lomu as a weakness – possibly for the first time in his career – in the All Blacks backline.
The England players, however, knew enough about Lomu not to accept reports of his decline as gospel. ‘Lomu has always produced when it counts, and especially against us,’ said Johnson before the game. ‘His was an amazing performance in the 1995 World Cup semi-final, and his try in the 1999 World Cup group game sank us when we’d fought hard to get back into the game. It’s easy to say from a broadcasting booth that Lomu’s not the player he was, but they don’t have to tackle him.’
But while Johnson was wary of the threats the opposition posed, he was still bullish in his assessment of where England were. ‘This is one of those must-win games,’ he said. ‘We haven’t beaten them since 1993 and if we are to be taken seriously as World Cup contenders then we have to put that record right.’
In the event Twickenham was treated to a breathless, exhilarating and intensely entertaining match. Defence coaches on either side would have been pulling their hair out while the attack coaches alongside them were purring loudly.
Lomu, spurred by the criticism levelled at him, had two early touches and with each one he reminded the world just what a potent force he could be. His first was a crash ball off Spencer, straight down Wilkinson’s channel. The fearless fly-half, who prided himself on the solidity of his defence, could do nothing in the
face of physics and was swatted aside. The giant winger’s second touch was even more significant as he again took the ball at pace, this time on England’s line, and charged straight through the challenges of Mike Tindall and Jason Robinson. The try and Ben Blair’s conversion cancelled out two Wilkinson penalties to make it 7–6 to the visitors.
But England lost neither their shape nor their composure. They knew that whenever they were deep in New Zealand’s territory, in the ‘red zone’, they had to come away with points. It was a strategy and a mantra that had been established in the team’s game plan since the 2000 summer tour to South Africa. And so it was that as England pressed near the New Zealand posts, Wilkinson received the ball from Dawson at a ruck and thumped over a drop-goal to regain the lead.
England looked as if they were getting into their stride when calamity struck. Richard Hill, dependable, solid Richard Hill, threw a wild pass out of a tackle that was intercepted by Tana Umaga, who swiftly transferred the ball to Doug Howlett. The winger put on the afterburners to race forty metres to the posts without a finger being laid on him.
With two minutes left on the clock before half-time, Wilkinson kicked another penalty. England then began to work their way methodically upfield and a chance presented itself. Wilkinson switched direction and took the ball down the blindside, fixed Lomu and fed James Simpson-Daniel. The young Gloucester winger’s burst of speed put him free and he drew the last line of the All Blacks defence before passing to Lewis Moody, who scored in the corner.
Will Greenwood had to be withdrawn at half-time with a dead leg and there was concern that, with such an important player now missing, England might be exposed in the second half. But it was not to be. Just five minutes after the match resumed, England had worked their way back into the red zone.
