by Peter Burns
Ten minutes left in the final to end all finals.
Three minutes into the second period, Australia launched an attack on the England 10-metre line. The ball swept through the backline and Tuqiri hit the ball at pace on the wing. He carried it for twenty yards until he was met by Robinson, but again the Australian’s size and weight won the contest and he barrelled over the England winger. Only the intervention of Cohen put Tuqiri to ground. The ball squirted infield and Wilkinson pounced on it, just a matter of yards from his line. The forwards poured over their fly-half and Dawson kicked the ball into touch.
The sides continued to spar back and forward. Punch, counter-punch, punch. Then came a moment of madness in a ruck on England’s 22 and Andre Watson spotted the hands trying to wrestle the ball back on the deck. Penalty to Australia.
Flatley, shoulders hunched forward, slowly approached the ball and stroked the kick over. 17–17.
From the restart, Wilkinson rifled the ball long down the middle. George Smith gathered and set off upfield, where he was met by the kick-chase defensive wall. The Wallabies set up a ruck and Gregan fed Mat Rogers.
Phil Larder had spent dozens of hours drilling the players on effective charge-down techniques as a means of triggering counter-attack opportunities. Lewis Moody had shown the worth of his exuberance and willingness to throw his body in harm’s way during the pool match against South Africa when he had charged down Louis Koen’s clearance and Will Greenwood had scored. Now, fresh after arriving on the pitch for Richard Hill, Moody was haring around, ready to do it again. As soon as Gregan’s fingertips were on the ball, Moody was out of the traps. He belted towards Rogers and as the full-back drew back his leg to kick, Moody launched himself through the air. Rogers’ boot connected with the ball and he managed to clear the charging figure of Moody, but he sliced the kick into touch.
Woodward was prowling back and forth along the touchline, his hand rubbing his forehead. ‘T-CUP, T-CUP, T-CUP,’ he muttered.
‘Call zig-zag, Jonny,’ shouted Andy Robinson. ‘Call zig-zag!’
Woodward stared at the stadium clock. There were just a few minutes left. Statistics began to fly through his mind. It takes twenty seconds to score. If we can retain the ball for five phases our chance of scoring a try, a penalty or a drop-goal increases to 85 per cent. We know how to win these games.
‘Call zig-zag,’ said Dave Alred under his breath, his eyes burning on his protégé.
Gathering themselves just outside the Australian 22, Steve Thompson listened for the call from Ben Kay. When he heard it, he sniffed but displayed no emotion on his face. The call was to go long to the tail to Moody. Thompson knew that Moody’s heart rate would be up after chasing down Rogers and that he would be trying to get his head around the occasion having just come on to the field – now he had to prepare himself for the line-out jump and take. But the call had been made – and before Moody would even be involved there was the small matter of Thompson delivering the ball to him.
Memories of watching the final agonising moments of the 2001 Lions tour flickered for a moment through Thompson’s mind. It had been the Lions’ throw. It was meant to go to Johnson, the safe option at the front of the line, but the call had been anticipated and the ball intercepted and won by Wallaby lock Justin Harrison. Harrison was again in position alongside Johnson, watching the body-language of the England players, trying to read their movements, hoping that the same thing would happen again. Kay had obviously had the same thought. The front and the middle of the line-out were the safe bets and Kay knew that the Aussies would guess that that was where the ball would go. The tail was a gamble – but it would also be unmarked. The only problem lay in the throw – in the rain and the wind, the ball could slip and fall short, or go too long, or deviate left or right.
Thompson raised the ball above his head and focused. Since coming into the England set-up he had been working with two dedicated specialists: Simon Hardy and Sherylle Calder. Hardy had honed his technique, Calder his spatial awareness. They had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours working together and he had spent hundreds more back at Northampton with Colin Deans, the man who had been the inspiration for his move to hooker. Was this the moment that all that time and dedication would pay off, or would he falter at the crucial moment? He took a steadying breath, drew back his arm and threw. The ball spun smoothly away from his outstretched fingers and spiralled in a perfect arc. Fifteen yards away he saw a shuffle of movement and then Moody’s blond mop of hair rose above all the others. The young flanker reached skywards as he was propelled up and at the apex of the jump the ball landed safely in his hands. It had been a perfect throw. Indeed, the whole line-out operation had been executed to perfection.
Like a well-oiled machine, thought Andy Robinson with a sigh of relief.
As the ball came down to Matt Dawson he heard the call of ‘Zig-zag, zig-zag!’ from Wilkinson. He spun the ball wide to his fly-half and then repeated the call to the forwards.
Ten thousand hours of practice, of repetitive drills to hone skills to world-class standards. Now was the time for all that dedicated practice to come into its own.
Mike Catt hit a flat line to set up the first phase. He knew there was no chance of breaching the Aussie line on his own like that, but the ruck would set up field position. His contact skills would have to be perfect and he repeated the actions he had been through countless times with Andy Robinson barking in his ear: shoulder into contact, pump the legs to buy time for your support to reach you, pivot your torso, hit the deck, place the ball back towards your scrum-half at full stretch, steady the ball with your hands.
Catt crashed into the line and was thumped in a double tackle by Larkham and Flatley. As he twisted his body to lay the ball back, the forwards piled in over him to retain possession. But too many went in and Dawson suddenly found himself with very few options. He looked up for Wilkinson, who had dropped back into the pocket for the drop-goal. He could sense the Australian defenders lining up, ready to charge Wilkinson as soon as he passed the ball. They were more than forty yards out from the posts and Wilkinson had already missed two drop-goal attempts. The risk was huge but time was running out.
‘I’ll tell you one thing, Daws. If it’s on for a late drop-goal to win it, you’ve got to take it on yourself. No one will be looking at you. All eyes will be on Jonny.’
Paul Grayson’s words echoed through his thoughts. Dawson glanced out of the corner of his eye – and there, as Grayson had predicted, he saw a gap. He snatched up the ball, shaped to pass to Wilkinson, stepped off his left foot and slipped through the hole. He carried the ball for fifteen, twenty yards before he was hauled down by Mat Rogers and George Smith. Jason Robinson and Will Greenwood had been the first English players to react to the break and they bridged over the top of Dawson before Smith could attempt to steal back possession.
Again, Wilkinson dropped into the pocket. Neil Back stepped into scrum-half and readied himself for the pass. But Johnson, as cool at that moment as he had been throughout the match, knew that Wilkinson needed Dawson’s whip-fast pass to buy him as much time as possible to strike the drop-goal cleanly. He screamed for the ball from Back and charged up the right-hand flank of the ruck, carrying his team a further two yards forward. At this range the Wallabies didn’t want to concede a penalty, so they didn’t contest the ball on the ground and Johnson was able to lay it back cleanly for Dawson, who was back on his feet and back in position.
George Gregan, acutely aware of the danger his team now faced, began yelling, ‘Field goal! Field goal!’ and Australian defenders spread out across the line, crouched like sprinters in the starting blocks ready to burst off the mark to close down Wilkinson. Some of them were too eager and, as Dawson set himself for the pass, the Wallaby defence kept creeping forward offside and then retreating. Forward and back, forward and back. But Dawson wouldn’t be rushed. Then, when he was ready, he let the ball fly.
Wilkinson was set to kick but Dawson’s pass was poor and
as the ball arced through the air towards him it swung left to right, forcing him to change his body angle, shifting his balance away from his favoured left foot. A wall of gold-shirted defenders desperately raced up to hit him, the barrel-chested figure of Phil Waugh springing ahead the fastest, screaming at Wilkinson as he approached.
The ball hit Wilkinson’s outstretched fingers and he drew it down, adjusting its angle to open the sweet spot for his right foot. He released it from his grasp. His leg drew back and Waugh was almost on him, his bellowing scream rising high above the roar of the stadium. Head down, eye on a stitch, harden the toes, lock the ankle, strike with the inside-arch, follow-through. For the white-shirted warriors around him on the pitch, those on the sidelines and the management in the stands, for all the players that had played a role in Woodward’s six-year campaign and for those whose lives had influenced each and every protagonist in this story, this was the moment of truth. And for Wilkinson, this was the moment when a life of tortured, unrelenting dedication and obsession would either mean something... or nothing.
His foot struck the ball. Waugh leapt forward, his arms stretching out to charge down the kick.
The ball spun end over end, up and over the Australian flanker’s clawing fingers. All around the stadium the crowd rose to their feet, faces craned forward, hearts in mouths, breath caught...
And the stars aligned.
The ball sailed through the posts.
20–17.
Twenty seconds remained on the clock. The players scrambled back into position and the Wallabies grasped the ball for one last roll of the die. And an opportunity presented itself. As Larkham raced back to the halfway line to take a quick kick-off, he noticed that there was a space in the midfield. In their excitement, England hadn’t aligned properly for the restart. Larkham hoisted the ball – but his intentions had been read by Trevor Woodman, perhaps the most unlikely of eleventh-hour saviours, who darted over to fill the space at the last moment.
‘From the coaches’ point of view, I was out of position,’ said Woodman. ‘But I was in a place where I thought they might kick. They looked at me, a prop, and I mean if you saw a short fat bloke, you’d kick it to him, wouldn’t you?
‘At the time I felt like I’d jumped two feet in the air to make the catch when in fact all I’d done was jump three inches.’ Woodman made a good catch, two arms above his head, and then braced himself for the impact of the chasing Wallabies. He rode the storm just long enough for his support players to help him out.
Matt Dawson bent to retrieve the ball. He looked up and saw Mike Catt in the first-receiver position. Good old Catty. As Dawson spun the ball back, he yelled, ‘Kick it to the shithouse!’
And Catt duly obliged. His booming punt sent the ball spiralling into the crowd. Andre Watson checked the time and then whistled for the end of the game.
England were world champions.
PART FOUR
HUBRIS
ELEVEN
THE ANATOMY OF THE THEREAFTER
‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
IF THIS WAS a movie, we would fade to black and the credits would start to roll. But no retrospective study can end at the moment of glory – there has to be an examination of what happened to the protagonists after they had scaled their Everest.
For the rest of 2003 all was well in the garden of English rugby – the red rose was in stunning bloom. Ben Cohen had made a special history of his own in following his uncle, George, who had played right-back in the England football team’s historic victory over West Germany in 1966, in becoming a World Cup winner. The victory was nevertheless tinged with poignancy, as Cohen knew how much his father would have wished to have been there to see his son’s greatest triumph. Cohen was not alone in experiencing those feelings. It was perhaps Johnson who summed up best what the victory meant to the players, many of whom had experienced tragedy of one sort or the other over the previous few years. ‘I can’t remember what I was thinking as I picked it up,’ he said of raising the World Cup after the medal presentation. ‘Pride in the boys, pride in my country, relief that we’d finally done it. Most of all, I wished my mum had been there to see it; she would have loved it.’
The team flew home on a plane renamed Sweet Chariot by British Airways. While the players mingled with fans on board and showed off their winners’ medals and the Webb Ellis Cup, Mike Tindall attempted to break Aussie cricketer David Boon’s record of drinking fifty-two beers on the journey back, a feat that had stood unbeaten since 1983. Some accounts say Tindall managed it, others say he passed out a long way shy.
They landed at Heathrow Terminal Three at 5 o’clock on a cold, wet winter’s morning – and were greeted by the astonishing sight of more than 10,000 fans who had made an early-morning pilgrimage to welcome their heroes home.
In the following days the players took part in an open-top bus parade through the streets of London. The RFU estimated that some 20,000 spectators might turn up to watch the team show off the World Cup; more than 750,000 people came out to party.
Weeks of celebrations followed. They met the Queen at Buckingham Palace and the Prime Minister at Downing Street. Woodward was named UK Coach of the Year at the Sports Coach UK awards, the team was named Team of the Year at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards and Jonny Wilkinson picked up the main gong, before Woodward and four members of England’s coaching staff – Andy Robinson, Phil Larder, Dave Alred and Dave Reddin – were inducted into the UK Sport Hall of Fame. Finally, every player and the senior coaches were appointed MBEs, Johnson a CBE, Wilkinson, Robinson and Leonard OBEs, and Woodward was knighted. But perhaps the greatest legacy was that all over the country, thousands of children were standing over rugby balls in a half-crouch, hands held out in front of them, mimicking the golden boy Wilkinson as they readied themselves to kick for glory.
The rugby landscape was now changed for ever – tight shirts became the norm, as did expanded playing squads, bloated back-room staff, military off-field planning, the utilisation of critical non-essentials, specialist coaches, and freakish fitness and strength levels. This latter point was to become an issue in later years as the size and power of the modern professional player gave rise to greater risk of serious injury. After the brutal 2009 Lions Test series against South Africa, veteran Lions doctor James Robson voiced his concerns for the modern rugby player. ‘I hope, at some point, that welfare will become a bigger part of player management,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of talk and rhetoric but, for the players’ sake, I hope more action is taken. We’re reaching a level where players have gotten too big for their skill levels. They’ve become too muscle-bound and too bulky... These have been the most physical three Test matches I’ve been involved in.’
England had set the pattern and they knew that they would now have an even bigger target on their back than ever before. Other teams would focus on matching and then overtaking them. In 2004 New Zealand developed their own version of Prozone called Verusco Analysis – and the rest of the top nations would shortly follow suit. By 2013 it had become regular practice for all professional clubs and international teams to wear heart monitors at training, GPS chips in their shirts (even on match days) and to have their every movement on a training field or in a match filmed and pored over by video analysts. Woodward, the pacesetter, the mastermind, had started a revolution and it had gone global.
*
But all things in life are transient. In The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, the anthropologist Sir James George Frazer examines the ancient tradition of the sacred king in a multitude of cultures around the world. The king rises in the spring, an all-powerful deity able to control the elements and, crucially, the growth of crops. But when the crops fail he is sacrificed, to be reincarnated once again in the spring – and so the cycle of life continues. Nowhere is the symb
ol of the sacred king more obviously present in modern Western society than in the world of sport. Football is undoubtedly the dominion of sacred kings where the firing and hiring of club and international managers dominates newspaper and TV news headlines throughout the year – every year; but Woodward was soon to experience the phenomenon in rugby union. From 2001 until the end of 2003 he was flawless, untouchable; and then the crops began to fail.
In January 2004 Martin Johnson announced his retirement from Test rugby. ‘When I look back now,’ said Johnson in 2006, ‘I think, you lucky, lucky bastard. I don’t think I ever played in a team that lost more games than it won, and that’s from the age of 11 to 33. And look at the guys I played with. People like Graham Rowntree, Darren Garforth and Neil Back were there almost all the time. The World Cup was great, but the best thing was the guys you were with.
‘I find the bad memories fading, leaving the good. I appreciated what we had at the time but I appreciate it more now. I couldn’t stand the moaners, the people who said it was hard. We were playing sport. We’d train for a few hours, then we’d sit in a hotel. Some things in life are hard. That wasn’t.’
Over the course of the next few months he was followed into the international twilight by Jason Leonard, Neil Back, Kyran Bracken, Dorian West and Lawrence Dallaglio (although Dallaglio would later reverse his position and return to play for England, and both he and Back were selected for the 2005 Lions tour, where Back became the oldest player to wear the Lions’ red in a Test match). Injury woes struck many more. Jonny Wilkinson underwent the first of many operations that would plague his career, and Iain Balshaw, Mike Catt, Matt Dawson, Lewis Moody, Mike Tindall, Phil Vickery and Julian White all suffered injuries that kept them out of the game for extended periods. For those who played in the World Cup and remained fit, there was a noticeable tail-off in their performances the following season – so much so that, despite depleted resources, Will Greenwood, Ben Kay and Jason Robinson were given the summer off to rest and recuperate in the hope that their form would return.
