White Gold

by Peter Burns

To say that the conditions suited the style of one team significantly more than the other was nonsense. Both England and France had powerful players and clever tacticians and both sought to play a Total Rugby game involving all fifteen men on the field running comfortably with the ball. In these regards, the teams were evenly balanced. The difference, as it would transpire, was a mental one – it would come down to who could better control the ball and the run of the play in the conditions. It was rugby’s equivalent to a game of chess – and the lessons learnt from playing at Murrayfield in 2000 and in Wellington in June suddenly came to the fore.

  Woodward was pleased with how the week had gone. He could sense a calmness among the players; even though they hadn’t been playing to their best, every player knew that they had it in them – individually and collectively – to play leagues better than they had been. Now was the time to turn up the heat. The biggest game of their lives was on the horizon and it would be the coolest heads that would emerge triumphant.

  Part of that calmness, he knew, was instilled when it was announced that Richard Hill had finally overcome his hamstring injury and was ready to rejoin his brothers in arms in the back-row.

  ‘Mentally we were where we wanted to be,’ said Catt, ‘partly because Richard Hill was finally fit, partly because everyone, it seemed, had written England off.’

  ‘You can’t overstate how important Hilly was to us,’ said Matt Dawson. ‘In my eyes he’s the best player England have ever had. He was so important to how we played. We stuttered through against South Africa, Samoa and Wales and there was a big, big difference to the way we played the game against France when Hilly came back – not only because of what he could bring to things, but also what he enabled other players to do, particularly the back-row.’

  With Hill back in the team, Woodward had some other decisions to make around selection. With everyone back to full fitness he was able to name his strongest XV and bench for the match. Trevor Woodman replaced Jason Leonard at loose-head and Josh Lewsey came back in at full-back. The only real surprise was the role reversal of Mike Catt and Mike Tindall, with Catt taking the starting position and Tindall moving to the bench. Memories of the Paris clash of 2002, when Serge Betsen had hunted down Wilkinson, were still vivid; while Tindall offered a stronger defence and was a more powerful and direct runner, Catt’s distribution and kicking skills would help offset that tactic if the French sought to employ it again.

  ‘It was a big surprise when Catty was selected because I thought we were fine in the midfield,’ said Dawson. ‘But the big thing that he brought was that he took the pressure off Jonny. His distribution was obviously great but we knew that we would have to play a territorial game against France and Catty definitely had the ability to do that. And with Hilly coming back into the side, we knew we would get a bit more dominance up front and with the way the weather went it was always going to come down to who controlled the territory and possession the best.’

  Mike Tindall epitomised the resolve in the squad that the team performance and the result were the most important things – not personal disappointment. ‘You haven’t got time to be feeling sorry for yourself,’ he said when he learnt that he was to take up a bench position. ‘It’s tough and it hurts but there’s nothing I can do about it. You can’t afford to be disappointed, otherwise you won’t be able to do yourself justice when the time comes. Besides, there’s some reasoning behind it in that Mike bossed the game when he came on against Wales. He helped Jonny and kicked superbly. If people are targeting Jonny and pressurising his kicks, it gives us an option.’

  ‘We had no fear of the French – they were a team that we wanted to play against,’ said Woodward. ‘We felt that we were fitter, faster, stronger and more mobile than them all around the pitch.’

  ‘We have a confidence born out of what we’ve achieved,’ said Neil Back. ‘We’ve won nineteen of our last twenty games, the one defeat by one point to a full-strength French side, in France, against our second string. If that doesn’t give you confidence, I don’t know what will.’

  Bernard Laporte stuck to the starting XV that had demolished Ireland and played with such flair throughout the pool games. Laporte had transformed the French team from a side that could be flaky and hot-headed into an efficient, well-disciplined team that still retained the basic cornerstones of the French game: brutal forwards and mesmeric backs. But if the France coach thought he had worked hard to remodel and reshape his team, it was nothing compared to the work that Woodward had put in over the previous six years. On the eve of the match, Woodward spoke of the confidence he had in his players, knowing that he had done all he could to change them from spirited also-rans into the best side in the world.

  ‘I strongly believe England will beat France,’ he said. ‘We have an outstanding set of players, outstanding leadership, we’re fresh, we’re very experienced and we know how to win games. Just a look at our track record will confirm this. I have absolutely no doubt that England will step up to the plate. We came here to win the World Cup and we will not be leaving the field until we’ve made it to the final. Of that we are absolutely determined.’

  On the day of the game, the downpour from the heavens was formidable. A strong wind whipped through the Telstra Stadium and the temperature plummeted – but on the field there was a different kind of tempest and the temperature was fiery. Both teams erupted out of the blocks with fierce intensity. Wilkinson knocked over a right-footed drop-goal after a period of sustained pressure before France gained a foothold of their own. As can often happen in a game that is so structured, the unexpected can create space and chances to score opportunistic tries – be it from a knock-on or a bouncing ball, one side’s defensive line can be pulled out of joint and open up a gap for the opposition. In this case it was a poorly executed French line-out that caused havoc for both sets of forwards; Raphaël Ibañez threw the ball in, but Jérôme Thion was not lifted properly and the ball spilled wildly into space behind him. Serge Betsen was the quickest to react and grasped the ball from the air before racing through a space between Dallaglio and Hill to score.

  As the England players waited for Michalak’s conversion, there was no sense of panic among the ranks. It was an unfortunate score to have conceded, but it had come from a lucky spill. France hadn’t threatened their line in any other way and Johnson’s men knew that hard graft and accurate application of their skills would get them into the right areas of the pitch from which to score points. ‘The guys basically said, “Forget about it, and let’s move on,”’ said Johnson. ‘I was confident that we’d stop them scoring after that.’

  After Betsen’s try, Johnson began to marshal his forwards around the field, placing the emphasis for gaining momentum back squarely on their shoulders. He knew that if the French tight-five could be squeezed, their back-row would have to commit themselves to the contact areas of the game and couldn’t play the roving style at which they had been excelling in earlier matches. For the remainder of the game England were clever, calm and relentless. The forwards picked around the fringes, they rolled mauls and they were solid in the scrum and the line-out. And France, unable to withstand the onslaught, collapsed under the pressure. ‘The forwards were absolutely awesome that day,’ said Catt. ‘The amount of ball they gave me and Jonny to do whatever we wanted with was phenomenal.’

  With possession in short supply and with England’s defensive line pressing up hard, France began to lose the rhythm of their game. Michalak was young and relatively inexperienced on the Test stage and he struggled to adapt his previously free-flowing game to deal with the pressure of England’s defence; he was the leading points-scorer in the tournament but after his successful conversion of Betsen’s try, his radar abandoned him and he didn’t hit another successful kick at goal. And as he started to lose control, so too did the rest of his team. As the game wore on, the Frenchmen became increasingly ill-disciplined; they began to stray offside, giving away needless penalties, their defensive line started to dog-leg,
their defenders around the breakdown grew lazy and their set-piece began to creak horribly. Both Betsen and winger Christophe Dominici pressed the self-destruct button and were sent to the sin bin – Betsen for a late hit on Wilkinson, Dominici for recklessly throwing out a leg to trip Jason Robinson after the England winger had stepped inside him. On the hour mark, France were in freefall and substituted two of the players deemed before the game to be central to their chances of success – Betsen and Michalak.

  It seemed that France had believed the hype that had built up around them, while England’s troubles had steeled their resolve. And while the England forwards strangled the life out of the French pack and Catt and Greenwood dictated play in the midfield with precision kicking, clever passing and a solid defence, it was the man in the England No.10 shirt that made the biggest difference.

  After having suffered uncharacteristic inconsistency with his kicking earlier in the tournament, Wilkinson was deadly in front of goal in the semi-final. He kicked five penalties and three drop-goals (two of which he struck with his weaker right foot) to collect all of England’s twenty-seven points and consign France to a third-place place play-off match against the All Blacks.

  England, meanwhile, had a date with destiny against the host nation. ‘It’s a dream final,’ said Woodward. ‘We came here to win the ultimate prize and now we’re one match away. We’ll have to play the game of the tournament to beat Australia.’

  TEN

  THE ANATOMY OF THE SUMMIT

  ‘He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.’

  Edmund Burke

  WOODARD STOOD AT the window of his room at the Manly Pacific, watching long rivulets of water streaming down the glass and occasionally blooming into flower as fierce squalls from the sea blasted against the pane. A pot of tea was steeping on the nearby desk, where a lamp illuminated a pile of notes in the slate grey morning light. He looked out over the promenade to the roaring waves beyond and let his mind drift. Here he was back in Manly and it felt like things had come full circle.

  Manly had reinvented him. He had pushed himself out of his comfort zone in Leicester by coming to Australia and his business career had benefited hugely from the lessons that he had learnt there. He and Jayne had married and their first two children had been born in Manly – the suburb whose rugby club had inspired him to apply business techniques to a sporting environment, where he had first seen flat backline play up close, and where he had grown to understand the winning mentality at the heart of the Australian sporting psyche. Australia and Australian rugby had played a pivotal part in his life. His experience at the Institute of Sport had galvanized the idea of cross-sport expertise, the sharing of knowledge and the utilisation of specialist coaches in elite sport. His first steps towards coaching a flat-line attack had been aided by the introduction of two imported players from Manly, his first game in charge as England coach had been against Australia and the humiliation on the Tour of Hell had spurred him to never accept second-best – or to feel the horror of such heavy defeats again. And after three straight wins against the Wallabies at Twickenham he had masterminded the first victory for England in a Test match on Australian soil.

  Woodward recalled sitting on the rocks outside his old apartment down the road almost twenty years earlier, enjoying an early-morning cup of tea and watching the rolling surf tumble on to the golden sands. His mind wandered across those long-ago breakers to downtown Sydney of today where, somewhere out there, Eddie Jones and his Wallabies were also preparing for the biggest match of their lives.

  Eddie Jones. The antagonist. The pantomime villain of world rugby – at least from an English perspective. Ever since he had taken over from Rod Macqueen to lead the Wallabies in 2001, Jones had seemed to relish playing England more than any other side in the world. It was as if his raison d’être was to try to wind up Woodward and his team in the build-up to a match. During games he would yap endlessly at the referees, trying to highlight some new ploy or deficiency in England’s armoury. The sniping and sledging was nothing new in sport – particularly between England and Australia – but the media lapped it up and pitched the two coaches against one another whenever they could.

  The Australian media, in particular, loved the rivalry and had taken the sledging up a level or two during the 2003 summer tour when the term ‘Dad’s Army’ had first been coined; a poll in one newspaper had even found that Woodward was more unpopular with the Australian public than the perennial English villain, Douglas Jardine – the England cricket captain who secured the 1932–1933 Ashes series thanks to his controversial Bodyline tactics. When he heard this, Woodward had been delighted by the comparison. Jardine had, after all, won the series.

  Things had escalated steadily since England’s arrival in Perth for the World Cup. Is that all you’ve got? read a headline in The Australian after England had defeated South Africa thanks largely to Jonny Wilkinson’s boot – never mind the fact that England had crushed a world power without playing particularly well. John Eales, the double World Cup-winning former Wallaby captain, had made lengthy analyses of England’s apparent illegalities in the rolling maul; Toutai Kefu, the injured Wallaby No.8, had appeared on television calling for England to be kicked out of the tournament after the incident with the sixteenth man; and Eddie Jones had endlessly criticised England for being a one-trick pony with their tactics: keep the ball tight until the opposition give away a penalty and Wilkinson will kick the goal.

  But Woodward knew that this caricature of his team was grossly inaccurate. England had scored twenty-nine tries in the 2001 Six Nations, twenty-three in 2002 and eighteen in 2003 – an average of 4.6 per game over those three years. ‘You cannot go into big games resting on the comfort of having a top goal-kicker and hope he kicks you to victory,’ wrote Woodward later. ‘This type of conservative approach means victory is out of your own hands. If a team simply plays smart, they will not give you a kick at goal. In fact, you have a greater chance of kicking penalties if you are playing to score tries. It is when presented with such an attacking threat that defences opt to kill the ball and are forced into making the mistakes which give away penalties. It happened on many occasions, including the 2003 World Cup itself. We were outscored in tries in the quarters and semi-final by teams who conceded penalties to stop our attack.’

  Woodward had nothing against Eddie Jones personally – whenever they met at post-match functions they got along well enoughc – it was the public pronouncements, the clear attempts to influence the referees in Australia’s favour, that irritated him. After the victory in Melbourne in June, Woodward had had enough. He told a gathering of journalists, ‘The team didn’t need motivation from me, Eddie Jones did the job. You get labelled by the opposition coach but you just have to get on with winning. I don’t believe in pressurising the referee. It was premeditated and it was not good for the sport. I’m just pleased that we’ve made it four wins out of four against Jones. We’ll wait until the World Cup in October in Australia and the next anti-English media campaign orchestrated by him. We’ll thrive on it.’ And then, at the post-match press conference, he rounded on the journalists that had called England boring before the match. ‘I must be missing something here,’ he said coldly. ‘I thought sport was all about winning. Everything seems to have changed here in Australia, certainly seems to have with respect to rugby union since I lived here. I thought you Aussies were all about winning and not about marks out of ten for performance. Eddie Jones and the Wallabies have been trying to wind us up all week about what an old, tired, slow and boring team we are. Well, all that’s bullshit. You guys all asked us both whether we wanted to play with the roof open or closed. I wanted the roof shut so that the game could be played in perfect conditions, giving us the best chance for a great running game. Eddie Jones wanted it open and to introduce the uncertainty of weather conditions. And you call us boring?’

  Woodward appreciated the idea of trying to get an edge f
or his team, but he felt that Jones’s tactics went beyond the pale. Jones tried to defend his actions before the final by saying, ‘I love mind games, they are a part of rugby: you can look to get a result by messing up the heads of your opponents. England are probably the hardest nut to crack, but that does not stop you trying. Part of your remit as national coach should be to create interest. You are not going to get exposure if you sit at a press conference and say nothing, but there are some who prefer not to get into trouble. Clive Woodward is not one of those and I like that. He plays the game extremely well and he knows that he has the support of the English rugby hierarchy, which is important. When things blow up it is nothing personal: I have met him after games and we have had a quiet chat, but the nature of the beast these days is that you do not get to know your opposite numbers very well.’

  Woodward may have understood the sentiments, but he felt that the barbs were unnecessary. Australia were one of the best sides in the world – and as an ancient rival of England’s the match-up between them had set up a dream final. They had stars throughout their team. The back-three were all ex-rugby league icons: Mat Rogers at full-back, Lote Tuqiri and Wendell Sailor on the wings; each offered a different kind of threat, but all were proven winners. Stephen Larkham at stand-off and George Gregan at scrum-half were two of the most experienced half-backs in rugby history and had guided Australia to victory in the 1999 World Cup, a series victory over the Lions in 2001 and Tri Nations titles in 2000 and 2001, while also winning the Super 12 with the ACT Brumbies in 2001. Outside them they had the clever footballing brain of Elton Flatley and the monstrous figure of Stirling Mortlock. The pack was seen as the weakness in the team, but they were wily and they had set enough of a platform to get the Wallabies to the final. What they lacked in bulk they made up for in speed and skill. All three front-row players were comfortable on the ball and were backed up by intelligent line-out operatives in Justin Harrison and Nathan Sharpe, while the back-row trio were an interesting combination of power in David Lyons at No.8 and foraging skill and link-play in George Smith and Phil Waugh, two natural open-side flankers.