White Gold

by Peter Burns

  The Wallabies would be ready – but so too would England. This game had been six years in the making. More than that, it was the coming together of a lifetime of experiences. The influences of Kirton, Greenwood and White had all contributed to the shaping of the England team that was about to play in the final; so too had the revolutionary backline play of the Ella brothers and Woodward’s coaching career at Henley, London Irish and Bath. Was there anything more he could have done to prepare the team? Thanks to the philosophies of Paddi Lund and Humphrey Walters, he knew that there was not. Every possible stone had been turned.

  His thoughts wandered back to the two semi-finals and the contrasting attitudes of the victorious teams at full-time. The Australian players had leapt in the air with joy, bear hugged one another and then set off on a lap of honour to thank the home crowd for their support. It had been a titanic battle against the All Blacks, a side that many pundits had named as tournament favourites, and the Wallabies had made it to the finishing line with their noses in front. The home fans were ecstatic and the joy that the players felt was writ large on their triumphant faces.

  The England players, meanwhile, had barely uttered a cheer of congratulations to one another when the referee called full-time against France – and this was after a devastatingly effective performance, undoubtedly their best since the summer tour. They had recognised the game for what it was – a hurdle that they had to get past on their way to the final, where they would face one last challenge on their journey to rugby immortality. The job was far from done. Yes, they were pleased, but the dance had not yet finished.

  Had Australia, in contrast, played their metaphorical final in that victory over New Zealand? Would they be able to raise themselves both mentally and physically for another brutal test of their mettle and their skill?

  Woodward took a seat at the desk in his hotel room and poured himself a cup of tea, carefully straining the leaves and thoughtfully watching the milk as it clouded, spun and dissipated in the almond-coloured water. Australia had, like England, failed to really hit their straps until the semi-final. In the last four encounters with them, England had found a way to win. Every Wallaby player in that side feared England. They would never admit it, but deep down Woodward knew it to be true – he had seen it on their faces at full-time in Melbourne a few months earlier. And despite the mental strength that they would harvest from defeating the All Blacks, he knew that there would be a lingering anxiety in the backs of their minds at the prospect of facing Martin Johnson and his men. The final difference between the winner and the loser would be mental. Think Correctly Under Pressure. The team with the strongest mental steel would win. Of that he had no doubt.

  All he had to do now was pick his team. The physios – Phil Pask, Richard Wegrzyk and Barney Kenny – had worked wonders with the players and Woodward had a full roster to choose from. The most difficult decision was to decide which eight players would miss out on the night altogether. Only twenty-two of the squad of thirty could be involved. For those eight, there was a heart-breaking disappointment to come.

  He looked down at the piece of paper on which he had scrawled the twenty-two names he wanted. There had been a few choices to consider; who would start in the centre alongside Will Greenwood – Mike Catt or Mike Tindall? Who would sit on the bench – Lewis Moody or Joe Worsley, Andy Gomarsall or Kyran Bracken? But he had finally made his decisions and he was happy with his team. Tindall had won the nod over Catt – in part because Catt felt too battered after the semi-final to feel comfortable that he would last the distance. Catt had come to him and told him of his worries and that he had been pleased with the way he had contributed to matches coming off the bench. If it made the team selection easier, he would be happier with the bench spot. Woodward appreciated the honesty – and it was a testament to Catt’s desire to put the interests of the team first that he would give up the chance to wear the starting shirt in a World Cup final. The only concern that Woodward had was that Jonny Wilkinson wouldn’t have a foil outside him to help with tactical kicking; the flip side of that was that with Tindall and Greenwood in place, the midfield had the strongest defensive combination available – and the Wallabies were likely to repeatedly throw their biggest runners down those channels. But thinking back to the way the quarter-final had developed, Woodward knew that if Wilkinson began to struggle with his tactical kicking, he had Catt in reserve to come on and help address the issue. That decision made, the rest of the team virtually picked itself.

  Josh Lewsey, a deadly strike-runner, as tough as they come defensively and a totally uncompromising competitor, was at full-back; Jason Robinson, a man with dancing feet that couldn’t be matched by any other player on the planet, was on one wing with Ben Cohen, arguably the best winger in the world in 2003, with speed and size that made him virtually unstoppable, on the other; Tindall and Greenwood were a combination of power and brains in the centre, both were quicker than many would give them credit for, and they were outstanding footballers; Wilkinson and Dawson were the controllers, the talkers, the strategists at half-back, the men who would move the team around the field, with Wilkinson the tackle-hungry points machine; Woodman, Thompson and Vickery were the finest front-row in the game, they were big and powerful, quick in open space and blessed with soft hands; in the engine room Ben Kay was the line-out master while Martin Johnson alongside him was Captain Fantastic – hard, obdurate, grounded and an incredible athlete who would walk into any team in any era; and then there was the Holy Trinity of Back, Dallaglio and Hill in the back-row, who would run themselves into the ground and never, ever admit defeat.

  It was one hell of a team.

  *

  The week leading up to the final would require careful planning. The main job was to keep the players focused without overwhelming them with the enormity of the occasion that awaited them. Woodward knew that the players would be hounded by sponsors, agents and fans, who would all want a piece of them – special appearances, new deals and endorsements, autographs by the thousand. He discussed the matter with Martin Johnson and then they called a meeting with the entire group. Johnson stood up and asked his players to shelve all of the peripherals for a week – just one week. After that they could do what they liked. But after all they had been through, it would be criminal for them to lose their focus when they were so close to achieving something incredibly special.

  In just a few days’ time they had a chance to right the wrongs of the 1991 World Cup final, when Will Carling’s side had lost to Australia at Twickenham.

  During this final stage, Woodward was unwilling to risk exposing his team to any disadvantage. During the 2001 Lions tour there were suspicions that the Lions’ training sessions had been watched – even filmed – by the Australians and that their hotel rooms might have been bugged in order to reveal their game plan and codes. It was felt, in the aftermath of the deciding Third Test, that the Wallabies had come into possession of the Lions’ line-out codes, so well did they read where the ball was going to be thrown throughout the match.

  Woodward was not prepared for the same thing to happen again, so he hired security guards to keep any spectators from lingering too long while the team were training, had barriers erected around the Manly Oval and had their hotel rooms swept for bugging devices. ‘I took a fair bit of stick for it,’ said Woodward, ‘and people called me obsessive but it was all part of creating a world-class environment where security and secrecy were high on the agenda. I wanted to give the players the impression we were under siege, that they were in a rarefied environment available only to them.’

  They kept training light throughout the week and after assessing the physical condition of the team, particularly the front-row players, after the battle with the French, it was decided that they wouldn’t hit a single scrum in practice – something unheard of in preparation for a Test match.

  ‘We had short sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday and that was it,’ said Martin Johnson. ‘You’d think, with the Worl
d Cup final just a few days away, that we’d all be nervous wrecks but I had never seen the boys so relaxed. They were full of life and energy. I guess partly it was because they were in the final and partly that they could see light at the end of a seven-week tunnel. No matter what the occasion, you want to get home after that length of time. It was strange: I caught myself thinking, This is the World Cup final, and wondering why it felt like any other week, why I wasn’t more jittery.’

  ‘Johnno was excellent that week,’ recalled Woodward. ‘To be fair, he was always excellent, but he was especially good that week at keeping everyone calm and focused. His line was “everyone do your job.” If I did my job, the players did theirs, the other coaches and the physios and so on did theirs, then we would win. We would go to the game, win, and go home. It was as simple as that – and that was as simple as it needed to be. He said that, unlike when England played in the World Cup final in 1991, it wasn’t the time to change anything. We had to do everything exactly as we always did, train exactly as we always did (although a little bit lighter), play the way we always played, and we would win. Everyone had to stay away from all the peripheral stuff going on, stay disciplined, do their job, play well and we would win. It was therefore a fairly normal week and I was immensely proud with how everyone handled themselves.’

  Striking the right balance was a precarious job – get too relaxed and the players might not be able to get their focus attuned correctly; go overboard and they could choke.

  The phenomenon of ‘choking’ in sport is one that has been pored over obsessively by journalists, sportswriters, scientists, pundits and fans since time immemorial. Why do some of the most talented, gifted and experienced sportspeople choke when the stakes are at their highest and they are on the edge of sporting greatness? Why does one of the world’s greatest golfers fluff a three-foot putt that costs him a major? Why does a top-five-ranked tennis player double-fault in a crucial tie-break in the final of Wimbledon? Why does one of the highest-paid strikers in the world hoof the ball over the crossbar during a World Cup penalty shoot-out? One of the clearest studies of its occurrence can be found in Matthew Syed’s Bounce. Syed writes how a lifetime of practice allows sportsmen and women of all gifts and talents to ‘automate’ their skill sets: ‘Many hours of practice have enabled him to code the stroke in implicit rather than explicit memory,’ writes Syed. He examines the work of Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, who conducted a number of brain-imaging experiments to trace the transition from explicit to implicit monitoring that occurs over many hours’ practice. Poldrack discovered that the prefrontal cortex is activated when a novice is learning a skill, but that control of that skill switches over time to areas such as the basal ganglia, which is partly responsible for touch and feel. ‘This migration from the explicit to the implicit system of the brain has two advantages,’ explains Syed. ‘First, it enables the expert player to integrate the various parts of a complex skill into one fluent whole, something that would be impossible at a conscious level because there are too many interconnecting variables for the conscious mind to handle. And second, it frees up attention to focus on higher-level aspects of the skill such as tactics and strategy.’ He then goes on to reference Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago: ‘It is not the pressure in a pressure situation that distracts us into performing poorly,’ said Beilock. ‘The pressure makes us worry and want to control our actions too much. And you cannot think your way through a routine, practised action, like making a three-foot putt. Compare it to quickly shuffling down a flight of stairs. You could do that without thought. But if I asked you to do it, and at the same time think about how much you bend your knee each time or what part of your foot is touching the stair, you would probably fall on your face. That’s what happens when people choke. They try to think their way through the action.’

  Tactically Woodward knew that his team had to get their decision-making spot-on. But he had known this for a long time, which was why he had stuck with tried-and-tested combinations as much as he could throughout his reign – the players had spent so long in each other’s company, had trained and played together so much, that they had instinctively come to understand how those around them played. They could read running lines, feints of movements, the shaping of passes, and each others’ body language.

  The problem with choking is that it is individual. If the occasion got too much or a player wanted to overtly stamp their authority on the game, then everything could fall out of sync. And with a highly structured team game like rugby union, if one cog begins to malfunction, the whole machine can run into catastrophic difficulties.

  Martin Johnson made it his mission to ensure that no heads drifted into the clouds and that no player developed ideas of pressing his cause too forcibly in the limelight. The team, the performance and the result had to come above everything else. ‘We’ve won nothing yet,’ he said at a press call during that final week. ‘We’ve not achieved our goal yet. We have one single aim, and we’ve had it ever since we lost in the quarter-final four years ago. That defeat has haunted me ever since. Not just the fact that we lost, but how we lost, by five drop-goals to which we had no answer. So now it’s only ever been about winning the World Cup. To go home as losing finalists is not what it’s all about, and never has been. It should be an incredible occasion, an incredible game, and I have complete respect for the Wallabies. It will be tight, will probably be decided only in the final quarter, maybe even in the last ten minutes. But we’re as ready as we can be. We’re going to give it our all, every single one of us, and I’m hoping – and expecting – this to be enough. We know we can beat Australia, but we also know we’ll have to be at our best.’

  *

  Twenty-four hours until kick-off.

  All the players and back-room staff were gathered in the team room at the Manly Pacific. The room was darkened and on a screen at the front of the room the second of two motivational videos was just coming to an end. The films were short but spine-tingling: highlights of the team’s best pieces of play and motivational messages, all set to music. The films were Tony Biscombe’s last gift to the team before the final.

  The film finished and the lights went up. Clive Woodward rose to his feet and cast his eyes around the room. He fixed each pair of eyes for a moment – connecting with the twenty-two men he had selected for the biggest match in English rugby history and the eight devastated but resolutely loyal men whom he had had to cut from the side; Julian White, Mark Regan, Simon Shaw, Joe Worsley, Andy Gomarsall, Paul Grayson, Dan Luger and Stuart Abbott had come to the highest reaches of Everest, but they would not be pushing on to the summit. ‘Telling those guys that they wouldn’t be involved was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do,’ said Woodward. ‘But they were all magnificent throughout that week. They trained just as well as everyone else and they supported the guys in the team. It was a testament to them as individuals and to the values we had set down about being One Team.’

  For the other twenty-two, they knew they were on the cusp of history. Jason Leonard was alone among them to have experienced the high of playing in a World Cup final and the crushing low of defeat. He had spoken privately to every player and made it clear that this was their chance to set their names in rugby lore for ever... or be simply known, once again, as the also-rans.

  Woodward cleared his throat. ‘England versus Australia,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t get any bigger or any better. Playing them in Sydney is one of the biggest challenges any rugby player can ever face. But we know that we have the measure of them. And so do they. We are bigger, faster, stronger, fitter. We have the superior pack. Our backs can shred theirs to pieces. I wouldn’t swap one of their players for ours.’ He pointed to a large whiteboard on which both squads had been written down side-by-side. ‘Man for man we are better than them in every department. Not one of their players would get into our team.

  ‘What we must not do tomorrow night is go in
to our shells. No one has attacked Australia during this World Cup. That is what we have to do for eighty minutes – attack, attack, attack. We need to mount the pressure on them time and time again. If we do that, they won’t be able to live with us. That is how we have beaten them that last four times we’ve met. We have never given up, never given them space to breathe. We have to be relentless throughout the entire match. We build a score any way we can – tries, penalties, drop-goals, anything. Just like we did against France, whenever we get near their posts we are scoring. We get our noses ahead and then we push on. We never give up, we never think the job is finished. Australian teams above all others know how to stage a comeback – so we don’t give them a sniff. We crush them physically and then we crush them mentally on the scoreboard. Our destiny is in our hands. We control everything.’

  He looked over at Martin Johnson and nodded. Johnson pushed back his chair and walked to the front of the room.

  Johnson towered, upright and powerful, his deep-eyed gaze panning around his teammates. He wasn’t one for Churchillian orations. He preferred concision. The way he saw it, rugby was a simple game. It didn’t require overly complicated thinking and if the men around him couldn’t psyche themselves up for an occasion like Test match rugby, let alone a World Cup final, then they were in the wrong place, in the wrong team. ‘Let’s play our normal game,’ he said. ‘Let’s not force things, try to do things we wouldn’t do in any other match. Let’s do the things we would always do. Don’t let the occasion get to you. If you start thinking it’s the Rugby World Cup final as you receive the ball the likelihood is that you’ll end up paralysed by the moment. We’ve got all the guts and courage we need. It’s big, yes, but let’s just go and play our game. It’s just another game. It could be at Twickenham; it happens to be in Sydney but that stretch of grass is the same as anywhere else. It has two sets of posts and it has white markings. We know what to do on a stage like that – so let’s do it.’