White Gold

by Peter Burns

  There was a wild, carnival atmosphere around Lansdowne Road that bright Sunday afternoon. But right from the moment that Martin Johnson led his team on to the pitch, England refused to give an inch – causing considerable controversy before the first whistle had even been blown.

  Leading his side out of the tunnel, Johnson turned right, where England would be playing the first half, and lined his men up along the red carpet for a pre-match greeting from the Irish President, Mary McAleese. As the Ireland team prepared to follow them out there was a delay – the side that Johnson and his men now occupied was Ireland’s ‘lucky end’ and a groundsman was dispatched to ask England to move to the other side.

  Neil Back broke ranks and marched along the line shouting, ‘Stand firm, stand firm!’

  Johnson glowered down at the groundsman. ‘This is our end,’ he said. ‘We’re not moving.’

  England didn’t budge – and nor did Ireland accept the situation, which led to the bizarre sight of O’Driscoll and his team lining up on the grass even further to the right of England. Neither side were willing to concede even a sliver of an advantage to the other.

  ‘If we’d moved we would have given Ireland an immediate psychological edge,’ said Back later. ‘In the frame of mind that we were in, we weren’t prepared to give them anything. Not during the game, and not before either.’

  And so began one of the great Grand Slam encounters. Ireland, full of pride and ambition, played magnificently; a David Humphreys drop-goal and penalty meant that they trailed England 13–6 at half-time after two Jonny Wilkinson drop-goals (both struck with his weaker right foot) and his conversion of a Lawrence Dallaglio try. Ireland were a great team full of great players who would all go on to have great careers, some of the most celebrated in Irish rugby history – but in the second half they just couldn’t live with England. Even O’Driscoll could do nothing to conjure any serious opportunities to reverse the tide.

  ‘For myself and Phil Larder, it was his attacking threat that was our big concern,’ said Woodward of O’Driscoll. ‘We worked on a plan to man-mark him with three players, so the tackler was not exposed by O’Driscoll’s footwork and pace in a one-on-one situation. That’s how big a threat we believed he was – he needed three men to handle him. Ireland were going for a Grand Slam, but none of the players around Brian were in the same league. Whenever he had the ball we wanted one player opposite him and one man either side – it would usually be Wilkinson, Will Greenwood and Mike Tindall. The trick was to get on to him quickly and shut him down, give him no time or space in which to run. For the first quarter of that game the scores remained close, but Ireland had the bulk of the ball. Wilkinson got on top of O’Driscoll more than any other player, making twenty tackles in the first twenty-five minutes. Shutting down O’Driscoll shut down Ireland.’

  Playing into a strong wind in the first half, England had been delighted to push their noses in front, especially as Ireland had dominated many of the early exchanges. But in the second half there was never any doubt as to England’s superiority.

  England scored four more tries, with Wilkinson weighing in with a penalty and two further conversions while Paul Grayson converted England’s fifth try of the day after replacing Wilkinson late in the game. For all of Ireland’s committed and often highly skilled play, the final scoreboard read 42–6 to the visitors. Had a Grand Slam ever been sealed in such an emphatic fashion? They had scored second-half tries through Tindall and Luger and Greenwood had gone over twice. The second of these was from an intercept and after a clear run to the line he mischievously veered right and dotted the ball down near the corner flag to ensure the conversion was as challenging as possible for Wilkinson.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ said Wilkinson drily as he collected the ball from Greenwood. It was almost like a preconceived scene from a magic show; Wilkinson placed the ball just inside the touchline, lined up the kick and delivered for the crowd: the ball sailed straight and true between the posts.

  ‘Jonny Wilkinson was magnificent,’ said Greenwood of his fly-half’s performance. ‘He was awe-inspiring that day. We had our tactical differences, but after that match I vowed to always back him up. If he was willing to put that much effort in for a team then the rest didn’t matter.’

  The effort that Greenwood refers to was not just Wilkinson’s immaculate goal-kicking or his orchestration of England’s attack, but the bone-crunching nature of his defence. Late in the first half, Ireland’s bullocking centre Kevin Maggs had charged on to the ball near England’s line and had been smashed to the ground by Wilkinson. The England fly-half made several more telling tackles, but none more dramatic than his second-half hit on Justin Bishop; the Ireland winger had burst on to the ball near the halfway line, looking to use his pace to burn through the English defence, but he was met by Wilkinson, who stopped him dead in his tracks, lifted him horizontally and slammed him into the ground, just as he had done to Émile Ntamack three seasons before. Roars of delight echoed from the English supporters within the Lansdowne Road crowd.

  After five heart-wrenchingly close attempts, Woodward had finally achieved his first Grand Slam as a coach and he was justifiably delighted. ‘Had we lost this game the ramifications would have been huge,’ he said in the aftermath of the match. ‘People would have said again that this is a team that cannot win the big games. If we hadn’t nailed this one, it would have been tough to recover and it would have made the months going into the World Cup even harder. We responded with a colossal performance.’

  *

  After the glories of the autumn and the triumph of the spring, the summer tour Down Under was a potential bombshell. Both New Zealand and Australia had wounds they had been licking for nearly eight months; they were desperate to right the wrongs of November 2002 and shove the results at Twickenham back down English throats with interest. The danger for Woodward and his team was that this wish would come true and England would suffer two humiliating defeats, just as they had done in 1998 on the Tour of Hell. And if that were to happen, the team’s confidence, which was now somewhere up in the stratosphere, could be shot to pieces just months before the World Cup kicked off.

  It was a three-match tour with fixtures scheduled against the Maoris, New Zealand and Australia. The temptation might have been to wrap the core of the Grand Slam-winning team in cotton wool before the World Cup, but Woodward was having none of that. ‘What happened five years ago was a very low point in the history of the game,’ he said, in reference to the Tour of Hell. ‘It was a total mismatch and I was determined it would not happen again... There are risks involved but this is the right thing to do. We’re prepared to put everything on the line. If your mindset is to be worried about losing, then you might as well not play Test match rugby.’

  Martin Johnson, as ever, had his feet planted firmly on the ground. ‘Let’s be honest about it, they lost by only three points at our stadium at the end of their long season. They had big names missing but still beat us on the try count by three to one. We have the Grand Slam, which is a huge weight off our shoulders, and we’re very hungry to prove to the world that we can win in places like Wellington. If we’re close to our best, we can win. If we’re not, we’ll be taught a harsh lesson.’

  ‘We felt we could play against anybody anywhere in the world,’ said Woodward. ‘We’d won big games away from home and we’d lost a couple of big games. We looked forward to playing those away games. If you want to be the best team in the world, you’ve got to get a win away from home. There’s no point being able just to win at Twickenham.’

  The first tour match, against the Maori in New Plymouth, was played in a tempest. The Maoris were a true force to be reckoned with, even though the game didn’t have Test match status. Until they lost to a full-strength Wallaby side in 2001, the Maoris had gone undefeated for an extraordinary seven years and twenty-four matches, and had defeated twelve international teams, including the 62–14 humiliation of England in 1998.

  The New Zealand media fo
resaw a similar result as England fielded a second-string side, but the tourists set down an impressive marker with a thoroughly deserved 23–9 victory. England controlled the ball and the territory to near perfection in the dreadful conditions.

  There were some big-name omissions from the All Blacks squad for the first Test of the tour as John Mitchell shaped his team in advance of the Tri Nations and World Cup: Jonah Lomu’s kidney condition, which he had been battling for several years, had worsened to such a point that he would soon begin dialysis and eventually require a transplant; Christian Cullen, the full-back whose try-scoring rate was the best the world had ever seen, with forty-six tries in just fifty-seven Tests, was now considered surplus to requirements; and Taine Randell had been supplanted as both captain and flanker by Reuben Thorne. With the Auckland Blues having won the Super 12 in glorious fashion just a few weeks earlier, Carlos Spencer was again chosen ahead of Andrew Mehrtens at fly-half and his electric Auckland teammate Joe Rokocoko was on the wing.

  Woodward stuck by the squad of players that had won him the Grand Slam for the Test at Wellington’s Westpac Stadium, the only change occurring when Matt Dawson withdrew due to injury on the Wednesday before the game. His place was taken by his perennial rival, Kyran Bracken, and Andy Gomarsall was promoted to the bench.

  The rain was falling steadily and a wicked wind was whipping in from the Cook Strait on the evening of the match, swirling around the stadium that had been nicknamed ‘the Cake Tin’.

  Every England player put his hand up that day to be remembered for ever in the country’s rich rugby history, but Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio and Jonny Wilkinson, in particular, bolstered their positions in the pantheon of all-time greats of the game.

  Wilkinson’s goal-kicking, superior to that of Carlos Spencer, ultimately decided the outcome of the match, but the story of the game was so much more complex than that. Spencer created a try for Doug Howlett with a kick into space but, this moment of inspiration aside, the dominant stand-off on the pitch was wearing white. With four penalties and a drop-goal, Wilkinson’s points haul took England home – in quite a different fashion to his last experience in New Zealand.

  ‘I didn’t enjoy it,’ he said of the Tour of Hell, ‘but the experience helped me speed up my improvement. Going through such an intense range of emotions allowed me to progress quicker than I would have otherwise. In terms of my education, it was vital. I thought I was getting somewhere in the game until I went on that tour. It was as if someone was saying to me: “You think you’ve done well, but hold on. You’ve got a long way to go to even get close to this level.” I raised my standard and set out to reach a level I would be satisfied with. In one respect I’ve been distancing myself from the experience, but I have always maintained that it taught me more than anything else I have gone through, or ever will.’

  But the real turning point in the game, which will be referenced for decades to come, occurred shortly after half-time. Stuart Dickinson, the referee, had repeatedly warned both sides about continued infringements around the breakdown and finally his patience wore out. In the forty-sixth minute he sent Neil Back to the sin bin; just sixty seconds later, Dallaglio committed a similar offence and followed his teammate into the bin for ten minutes. England, away from home, were down to thirteen men against a full complement of All Blacks. Then it got worse. From the penalty that Dallaglio had conceded close to the England line, only halfway between the posts and the touchline, the All Blacks opted for a scrum instead of a shot at goal. With only six forwards against New Zealand’s powerful eight, a try seemed a foregone conclusion.

  Johnson gathered his men around him, his sharp dark eyes glaring beneath his furrowed brow. ‘Push,’ he growled. ‘Just push.’

  Four times the ball was fed into the scrum. Four times England held firm. They twisted and turned, they rose and they fell, but they did not move backwards. After another reset scrum Dickinson penalised England’s front-row for standing up. Rather than pack down again Rodney So’oialo, the All Blacks No.8, tapped a quick penalty and drove for the line. He thought he had made it but the video referee decided that he had grounded the ball before the line and had committed a double-movement in his attempt to score. England cleared their lines and, even more extraordinarily, Wilkinson kicked a penalty to move England three points further ahead before Back and Dallaglio rejoined the fray.

  Asked afterwards what had been going through his head during that scrummaging sequence, Johnson answered drily, ‘My spine.’

  It was an heroic back-to-the-wall effort, but it was also one that England had planned for. For more than a year Phil Larder had regularly introduced drills in which they had to cope with defending while a man down. ‘We try to think what we will do when certain players get a yellow card,’ said Woodward. ‘That effort in Wellington doesn’t just happen by luck, but by experience and practice.’

  England went on to record a 15–13 victory, only the second ever by an England side on New Zealand soil.

  As a testament to the standards now set and expected within the camp, there was, incredibly, a palpable sense of disappointment with the way they had played. ‘The dressing room was like a morgue afterwards,’ said Johnson. ‘I had to remind everyone that winning away in New Zealand is a great achievement.’

  After the game, Dallaglio made an interesting observation about one of the key differences between the teams. He had been up against the somewhat unknown quantity of Rodney So’oialo, so he and Tony Biscombe had spent hours poring over videos of the young No.8 playing for Wellington in New Zealand’s National Provincial Championship and the Hurricanes in the Super 12 competition as well as the few run-outs he had had for the All Blacks. It seemed obvious, however, that with the exception of Wilkinson and Johnson, the All Blacks – and even the New Zealand press corps – seemed to know nothing about any of the England players, their strengths and weaknesses as a team or even their style of play. The New Zealanders had clearly forgotten one of Sun Tzu’s most fundamental lessons from The Art of War: ‘Know your enemy.’ It was an accusation that could never be levelled at Woodward’s team.

  *

  Less than twenty-four hours after their Wellington heroics, England were on a plane to Melbourne. They had six days before they had to face the Wallabies at the Telstra Dome.

  With the roof of the stadium closed, there couldn’t have been a greater contrast in conditions to those experienced in New Zealand. England had proved that they could beat the best in the wind and rain, and now they had the chance to prove that they could beat the best on a dry, hard pitch unaffected by the elements.

  Australia began the game with the odds stacked slightly against them as fly-half Stephen Larkham had been forced to withdraw with injury and his back-up, Elton Flatley, was stood down from the squad by coach Eddie Jones after missing a recovery session the day after their win over Ireland the previous week. In their absence, centre Nathan Grey was handed the pivotal No.10 shirt.

  But even if Larkham or Flatley had been available, it is debatable whether it would have made the slightest difference, such was England’s almost unerring dominance throughout the eighty minutes. England scored three breathtaking tries, each a demonstration of the wide variation available in their play.

  The first, finished by Will Greenwood, was a celebration of continuity through phase play. There were fourteen phases, the ball skilfully retained and recycled time and time again between incisive running angles and deft offloads.

  The second was a combination of quick thinking, quick hands and even slicker continuity than had led to Greenwood’s try. Johnson peeled off a line-out and fed Dallaglio, who popped the ball to the rampaging Woodman. As the prop was felled, the ball was almost instantly recycled. Back acted as a scrum-half and fed the ball to Wilkinson, who offloaded to Thompson. He slipped a pass to Greenwood, who in turn flicked the ball to his centre partner, Tindall, to slide over the line. The ball had flashed through each pair of hands as the outside runners hit the line flat
and at full pace; it was the Mark Ella-inspired flat backline attack at its very best, come back to haunt the Australians.

  The third and final try, which killed off the Aussie challenge, came from a set-piece play, executed to absolute perfection. The forwards won a line-out just over the halfway line and drove the ball on to the Australian 10-metre line. As Dawson, on as a replacement for Bracken, released the ball to the backline, Wilkinson shaped to pass to his centres, who were arcing towards the wide outside, when out of nowhere Ben Cohen appeared from his blindside wing, slashing back against the run of play. Wilkinson dropped a soft pop pass to Cohen and the giant wing lacerated the Aussie defence. Travelling at full speed, he rounded Chris Latham to score.

  Australia, as is seemingly imprinted on their DNA, refused to buckle and fought back with a late try from Wendell Sailor, but England played for territory, bossed the forward collisions and won Wilkinson a further two penalties to build on their lead and push them out of sight.

  But the drama did not end there. As the game drew towards its conclusion, there was a spat between the full-backs, Mat Rogers and Josh Lewsey. The two had to be separated and play continued, but it was clear that both were livid with one another. A few minutes later, Australia looked to break out from their 10-metre line. The ball came to Rogers, who looked to attack down the left wing. But just after he received the ball, a blonde-haired meteor smashed into him. Lewsey’s tackle was a moment of defensive perfection. He came at full pace, from just on the edge of Rogers’ peripheral vision, sprung like a tiger and clattered Rogers at chest height. The entire stadium let out an exhalation at the impact. Lewsey leapt to his feet, point proved, while Rogers lay writhing in agony for several minutes. While the match proved to any remaining doubters England’s mantle as the best team in the world, that tackle demonstrated the savage pride that coursed through the team. ‘I’ve taken a fair few hits in my time, but that one was like getting run over,’ recalled Rogers several years later. ‘I think that hit will take the crown as the biggest ever. I just remember lying there writhing in pain, unable to breathe. It left me with broken ribs and for months afterwards I couldn’t go surfing because my rib stuck out on the board!’