Brighton, England. Saturday, 19 September 2015
This is the hardest time. We are on the team bus driving slowly to the ground. After four years of careful planning and brutal work, I have to let go. I have to trust our preparation and the character of the young men around me. I have cajoled and driven them, encouraged and even changed them. Right now, though, I can do little to control the test of courage they face.
On a beautiful day in Brighton, the sun bounces off the blue sea in a way that happens so rarely in England. It reminds me of the sky above Wedding Cake Island just off Coogee Beach in Sydney. But there is an uneasy backdrop to all this sunshine. Japan are about to play South Africa in our opening game of the 2015 World Cup.
I see John Pryor out of the corner of my eye. John, a fellow Aussie, is our flame-haired strength and conditioning coach, who has worked day and night with me for the last three years. I first worked with John at the Brumbies and then the Wallabies. As soon as I was appointed as Japan’s head coach, one of my first calls was to John. I knew that if we were going to make an impact at the World Cup our strategy and tactics required the right physical and mental preparation.
This game against the Springboks has become our obsession. We know that they will try to smash us in the scrum and at the breakdown. We have to match them physically to have any chance today. Our players have to be powerful and hold their body position close to the ground. We plan a high-tempo attacking game, so we cannot drop the ball. Under this immense physical stress, we need remarkable stamina. It is a huge ask.
I look out of the window at the masses of fans in their Springbok and Japan jerseys. We might be stewing in the tense silence, but they’re enjoying the friendship of rugby with their fish and chips and beer. I wonder if we have done enough to face down the mighty Springboks.
Japan have only ever won one World Cup game, 24 years ago against Zimbabwe. The Springboks have been world champions twice, in 1995 and 2007. Apart from one draw, Japan have lost every other World Cup match by an average of 35 points, with the most humiliating defeat being in 1995 when they conceded 145 points to the All Blacks. Meanwhile only three teams – New Zealand, Australia and England – have beaten South Africa in the World Cup.
I know all about the strengths of South Africa, having faced them so often when coaching Australia, and during Super Rugby tournaments where I have tried to outwit some of their best players. I was Jake White’s assistant coach when the Springboks won the 2007 World Cup in France. Some of the players I became close to during that tournament, including the great Fourie du Preez and Victor Matfield, will play against us today. Du Preez, who was such a revelation for me in club rugby at Suntory, just outside Tokyo, is one of the best players I have ever coached.
Today, returning from a long injury, he will start on the bench. But South Africa have chosen the most experienced starting XV they have ever fielded. Their players have earned 851 caps between them. Even with Pryor’s innovative work, stacking on the muscle while retaining our speed and agility, we will be featherweights stepping into the ring against a heavyweight champion.
Our team nickname is the Cherry Blossoms, which I can’t stand. Seriously. The Boks must be laughing at the thought of crushing us. They expect, along with the rest of the rugby world, that annihilation is near. Our Brave Blossoms, another little alias that means nothing to me, are supposedly going to be ground into red-and-white petals which are crumpled underfoot.
I know how this feels. I coached the Queensland Reds when we were pumped 92–3 by the Bulls in Pretoria.
In the silence I give Pryor another look. I want to say: ‘This is why we do it, mate. This is why we don’t put on a suit every morning, pick up a briefcase and catch the same eight o’clock train to a routine office job. This is the feeling you get nowhere else in life. It’s this intensity, this fear, this hope, this dread, this thrill, all knotted together in your gut. There is a need for courage in the face of adversity. This is what we do, mate.’
But I don’t say a word. I prefer not to talk to anyone on the bus. It’s a lonely job and I’m used to its solitary nature. Coaching any international team is difficult. You’re supposed to know everything and offer constant belief and hope to a huge number of mostly complex individuals. At the same time, everyone thinks they can do the job better than you. You’re never short of someone telling you what you are doing wrong. Most of the time you take it in your stride but sometimes, if you’re not strong, it blows you off course. International rugby also lacks the camaraderie of the club game. It’s cut-throat – with more distance between you and the players. You are picking men to represent their country, or dropping them, and you need greater detachment. You also know that if they fail, or let you down, you will cop the blame.
When I became Australia’s head coach in 2001, two years before we made the World Cup final against England in Sydney, Rod Macqueen, my predecessor, explained the challenges of the job. His final words hit home. ‘You’re now the loneliest man in Australia,’ Rod said with a smile.
He was right. Of course coaching Australia or England is different to being in charge of Japan, where expectations are limited. But, for me, the pressures and demands are the same. I insist on the same commitment, probably even more, with Japan. The inherent disadvantages of working with players who lack the size, skill and experience taken for granted in Australia, or England, need to be overcome. The only way you make progress is through hard work – and more hard work.
Japan are not going to win the World Cup, but I have always believed we can make the quarter-finals. To achieve that sporting miracle we have to beat South Africa. It seemed a pipe dream to everyone else for a few years. But, over the last four months, the team started to believe. Slowly but surely, as we slogged our way through day after gruelling day of training, the players and then the coaches see that it is possible. We can win. We can beat the Boks.
Our plan is simple. If we can keep the score close after an hour, it will unsettle them. Rather than smashing us into oblivion, they will start to have doubts. They will question their tactics and plans. The unthinkable – losing to Japan – will become a possibility. And if that possibility becomes real, you can guarantee that panic won’t be too far behind.
We need to play rugby with real pace and intensity, never giving South Africa a breather and making the big men in their pack turn again and again. We will climb into them from all angles and find space which stretches them to breaking point.
Mike Tyson once said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. His own invincible aura was shattered for the first time in Japan. But even Buster Douglas’s shocking knockout of Tyson was more believable, in Tokyo in 1990, than the incredible idea Japan might win today. Douglas was a 42–1 underdog against Tyson. A Japan victory over South Africa is 1,000–1.
As we shuffle off the bus and head down into the basement of the Brighton Community Stadium, I keep to myself. The players also prepare for their warm-up in silence. Eventually, they step out into the sparkling sunshine with my assistant coaches. Wisey (Scott Wisemantel) takes the backs and Borthers (Steve Borthwick) works the forwards up into a sweat.
I watch from the sidelines, still saying nothing, feeling helpless 45 minutes before kick-off. It’s up to the players now. It always is.
Twenty-four hours ago I had felt they were ready. Then Michael Leitch took the team on his captain’s run – a traditional and almost ceremonial workout for the boys on the eve of the game. It was hopeless. The players were edgy and out of sorts. It was so bad I told Leitch, my New Zealand-born but now thoroughly Japanese captain, to end it early.
Watching a warm-up can be misleading. Sometimes your team looks so switched on you feel certain they’re going to win. But then the whistle blows, the ball is kicked, one of your players spills it, the other team scores, heads drop, and you’re on the way to a defeat before anyone has even settled. On other occasions you look flat in the warm-up and then the game starts, a long pass spins out and one of the boys catches it beautifully and he is away, with the rest of the team hungry to follow.
I remember coaching Australia against New Zealand in the 2003 World Cup semi-final and, just a few months earlier, we had shipped 50 points against them at home. We were hammered by the press and given no chance of challenging the All Blacks at the World Cup. But then, in the semi, we started like a freight train. Stevie Larkham, at number 10, threw every pass perfectly. We had runners steaming onto the ball in wave after wave. For 90 seconds we played almost perfect rugby, which gave the players enormous confidence. You could see the belief surging through them and we went on to win that game pretty easily. But what if one of those early passes had gone astray? What if it had been intercepted and they scored a breakaway try?
This is the beautiful challenge of professional sport. How do you train your players to change, to recover, when things don’t go your way? How do you coach a group of athletes to be resilient when the plan goes wrong?
For all its brutality, rugby can be a very delicate game of agonizingly fine margins. A player’s confidence can be fleeting and, if it slips once the whistle blows, there is little you can do. After the game starts, your ability to influence the outcome is minimal. We rely on the players to make good decisions, to think on their feet and to adapt, to let mistakes go and get on with the next task. We can relay messages to them but it’s infrequent and you need a stoppage in play. All you can really do as a coach in the midst of a game is to be smart in your use of substitutions.
Preparation is everything. If you get it right you improve your chances of success. But, in a team of human beings, nothing is guaranteed.
Thirty minutes before the game begins, I turn to John Pryor and finally say a few words. ‘Are three years of work going up in smoke here, mate?’
Gallows humour. He smiles nervously. It’s a hideous thought but he knows what I mean. We have worked together so closely for so long. All the obvious parts of the preparation have been pulled apart, examined from every angle, tested, reset and tested again. As we creep towards kick-off the simple and most obvious question remains: ‘Will we get the performance we have worked so hard for?’
We could run out and, in the first play, the Bok forwards knock us over. We lose the ball, they hammer some holes in our defence and score a try. It’s 7–0 after a minute. They score another. 14–0. Suddenly you’re looking down the barrel at 60 points. That might happen. As the minutes start to tick faster, I still believe we have a chance. But the bad angel is now whispering in my ear, telling me to wake up and prepare for the inevitable. My confidence takes a battering similar to the one the Springboks expect to hand out.
I breathe in deeply, calming myself. We have been good for each other, Japan and me. I have helped them improve as a rugby team and they, in turn, have given me new life as a coach. I am 55 years old now and I returned to Japan in 2009, after a bruising five years.
Apart from the high of the 2007 World Cup win with South Africa, it has been a lean time. I was sacked from my dream job as head coach of the Wallabies in 2005 and, on the rebound, made an impulsive decision and took charge of the Reds in Brisbane. After being rejuvenated by the Boks I went through an uneven two years in English club rugby with Saracens. I was starting to build a team I believed would become a powerhouse of European rugby, as they eventually did. But when the ownership changed, so did everything else. A South African consortium walked in and I walked out. It was never going to work.
Then, for the only time in my career, I put my wife, Hiroko, and our daughter, Chelsea, first. They had followed me from one job to another and, with Chelsea at a crucial stage of her education, it felt right to choose stability. I returned to Japan, where my wife and my grandparents were born, to coach Suntory. Chelsea finished her schooling in a settled environment, at an outstanding English-language school in Tokyo – and I got on with life as a club coach in Japan.
Some people thought I was crazy because they considered Japan a backwater of world rugby. But I didn’t care. I knew it would be a good move for my family. I could also rediscover the pure pleasure of coaching without being distracted by rugby politics, money, heat from the media or any of the other pressures which always test my passion for the game.
But I would remain an outsider. While I found myself feeling more at peace in Japan than I had done as a coach at Tokai University, as an assistant to the national team and then in my first stint at Suntory 20 years before, I was still an Australian in a foreign land. It’s the reality of coaching internationally. Still, by 2011, the desire to coach at the highest level had fizzed back to life and I relished leading Japan.
I challenged the old mentality of Japanese rugby which would be satisfied with defeat as long as the team looked as if it had tried hard. There were moments when I had to rip into the players in public and question their acceptance of being a second-tier rugby nation.
On one infamous occasion, after we lost to the French Barbarians in 2012, I let them have it. During the media conference after the game, my captain Toshiaki Hirose had smiled and laughed in answer to a question. I know Japanese people often laugh when they are extremely anxious, but his response gave me a chance to ram home the point. My anger was genuine and, unlike most of my media performances, unscripted. ‘It’s not funny,’ I snapped. ‘It’s not funny. They just don’t want to win enough. They don’t want to change enough. I’m going to have to change the players . . .’
When I calmed down, I wondered whether I might have overstepped the Japanese cultural mark. But the chairman of the Japan Rugby Football Union spoke to me afterwards: ‘It’s about time someone said that.’
There was a sustained reshaping of Japanese rugby’s collective thinking behind closed doors. It was a fascinating, draining and inspiring experience. I learnt more about coaching and myself than I had done in years. Some of this knowledge came from external sources. Pep Guardiola, when I visited him at Bayern Munich in 2013, gave me new insights into how to train your team in intense, concentrated bursts and how to find space on a field. He told me to be an idea thief. Pep opened my mind and made me think differently about coaching. But most of the changes came from within.
There were many difficult days in Japan. I suffered a stroke and lost my father, the beloved Ted. But I knew I had to keep going. If Japanese rugby was going to change and we were going to succeed at the World Cup, I had to be resilient and tough. It seemed fitting that these qualities, which I get from my mum, came to the fore in Japan. Her grit was forged in the pain of the Second World War when, after the raids on Pearl Harbor, she and her family were sent to separate internment camps – despite the fact that, as a girl in a Japanese family, she had been born and raised in California. There was no sentimentality in my mother’s insistence that I do my best for Japan. She wanted me to do my best wherever I worked, and she followed me closely, rebuking me if I was rude or swore or failed to be clean-shaven. It’s the same today, even though I am deep into my 50s and she is in her 90s.
Coaching, like life, is cyclical. You will have success and failure. It’s the same for a team. They will have strengths and weaknesses. There will be peaks and troughs. You need to build confidence and consistency.
I knew we had practised and prepared far harder than any of my players had done before. I had given my all, as had they, and now we could just wait and see if it would be enough to prevail against the frightening odds stacked in favour of South Africa.
For almost 80 minutes, Japan have been as heroic as they are bold, as quick as they are brave, standing toe-to-toe with the Springboks. The lead shifts from one team to the other and, with less than a minute of regulation time left, South Africa are clinging to a 32–29 lead. They stem one Japanese attack after another. We think we might have scored a match-winning try in the second last minute, only for the Television Match Official to decide that a five-metre scrum should be awarded to Japan.
South Africa send Jannie du Plessis and Tendai ‘The Beast’ Mtawarira back on to bolster an injured and buckling Springbok scrum. They have 132 Test caps between them but, still, we hammer away at them. With just 13 seconds left, the refreshed Springbok pack reel in the face of relentless Japanese pressure. The scrum collapses. Jérôme Garcès, the French referee who has been excellent throughout, avoiding the usual temptation to favour a tier-one giant over a minnow, has no doubt. Penalty to Japan.
I take a quick slug of water but my eyes remain locked on my captain. Michael Leitch has played magnificently all afternoon. He just needs to point to the posts and a certain penalty will be kicked. A 32–32 draw with South Africa will be a staggering result and count as my proudest achievement in rugby after the 2003 World Cup semi-final victory over the All Blacks. I breathe out in relief. Defeat after such a display would have been cruel.
Leitchy, however, has a different thought in his mind. I can see it and, briefly, it horrifies me. ‘Take the three!’ I scream. ‘Take the three!’
He can’t hear me above the bedlam of 30,000 spectators who are roaring as they also realize that Japan are going for the scrum, and the try. My players are searching for victory because a draw would not be enough – not on such a monumental afternoon.
I have been clutching a walkie-talkie all game. It helps me keep in touch with the bench but, most of all, it has been something hard and metallic to grip on to while I deal with the tension. But now, knowing that Leitch has rejected the game-saving penalty, I throw the walkie-talkie down onto the concrete ground in anger. It smashes into a thousand pieces.
I look up and take a deep breath. The mad rage fades and, suddenly, I begin to think clearly again. I feel better as soon as I face the truth.
Leitch has shown real courage. This is more than just the physical courage that my team had summoned all game long, putting their bodies on the line as we rocked the Springboks again and again, driving them back while scoring three tries. Being physically brave in professional rugby is a given for me. This is courage of a different kind. It comes not from me but from deep within Michael Leitch and his players. Risk is attached, because if you fail you will lose the game. Leitch wants the win above all else.
‘Good on you, mate,’ I say in a silent conversation between my captain and me. ‘Go for it.’
In the final minute of a match like no other, with Japan on the brink of history, Michael Leitch shows the courage we all need when it matters most. His decision will reduce grown men to tears and change the course of world rugby, and my own career, yet again. We do not know it now, but the bravery of this choice will be one of the factors behind me leading England into the 2019 World Cup in Japan. Michael Leitch will still be Japan’s captain while I will have another crack at this great tournament and maybe, just maybe, reach my third World Cup final with a third different country.
But in this moment, in Brighton, I am thinking only of Japan, and Leitch. The scrum goes down. Two weary packs of men, drenched in sweat, crunch into each other and collapse to the ground. They set it again for a second, and then a third time.
Then, it happens. The ball comes out. Hiwasa and Leitch lead the charge. My Japanese forwards are on a roll and I sense the truth of it all over again.
This is why we do it. This is when we are most alive. This is it. Here we go . . .