Exactly one year, five months and 16 days had passed since England had last lost a game of rugby. But our long winning run ended on 18 March 2017 when, in a fevered but rain-sodden Dublin, Ireland stopped us dead in our tracks. Any hopes of a new world record were over. We remained stuck on 18 Test wins in a row with New Zealand. The All Blacks’ own streak of victories had also been broken by Ireland, in Chicago, four months earlier.
Ireland deserved the win. It was strange because we’d had a really good week of preparation and everyone looked ready to go. But, psychologically, we slipped that day, and simply could not find the intensity and physicality to match the Irish. It was easy to tell the truth after we lost 13–9. ‘You have these days,’ I said straight after the game. ‘Ireland played superbly. They were too good for us.’
Our run had been driven more by the courage of our players than the quality of our rugby. In most of the games, we played reasonably, but it was the players’ refusal to give in that carried the run. They simply would not surrender and kept finding a way. They are tough bastards. When they get in the fight, they stay in the fight and never take a backward step. It’s a tremendous quality for a rugby team. Effort is a key ingredient in high performance and our England team always give everything.
That loss was a reminder that rugby, particularly in Europe, is cyclical. Periods of success and failure keep following each other. Rugby in the northern hemisphere is a harsh business. Ireland slumped in 2015 before Joe Schmidt found a style that suited them and they returned to the winners’ circle. We were on the other side of our bell curve and headed for hard times. We had started to get comfortable and a little complacent. We were approaching the third year of our four-year plan and I knew this would be the most difficult time. If we were to be contenders in Japan we needed to change again.
I should have started well before the Six Nations, but I was like the players. The winning had seduced me into thinking we were going OK. Looking back, it became obvious that something wasn’t right. We were not paying enough attention to the tiny details where even the smallest effort matters.
Fortunately our winning run meant we had plenty of credit in the bank. When our performances went off the boil, which I knew they would, we would be able to resist the inevitable calls for either my head or a return to old ways.
My planning cycle, which I adopted first with the Wallabies and then developed further with Japan, is built on selection and strategy. The first two years are about establishing a foundation. You want to settle on the 60–70 per cent of your core players while you are on the lookout for the other 30–40 per cent of players who will bring something different. Talent-spotting is the most important part of a head coach’s role. The third season is the time to experiment, while in the fourth year you can hopefully settle on an effective game style that is tactically adaptable.
The World Cup is the tournament on which you are judged as a coach. It’s the ultimate prize. In 2019, no one will remember who won the rugby championship or the Six Nations. But they will remember who won the World Cup.
While we lost the match in Dublin, we won the championship. As the fireworks exploded above Dylan Hartley, while he held up the Six Nations trophy, it was a real anti-climax. I was happy to have won another championship, but the loss had rubbed away most of the shine from our achievement. The boys were more sheepish than celebratory. As we packed up the dressing room that night and headed for the bus to take us back to the team hotel, I’d already started to consider the changes we needed to make.
A small part of me was glad the run was over.
Some players don’t want to change. But the best players are curious and have the courage to improve. In talking to them one-on-one and as a group, I spelt out the obvious facts. International rugby was becoming increasingly athletic and so, while it wasn’t a traditional English strength, we needed to find a new athleticism. We also needed to become more tactically adept. It was up to me and my fellow coaches, as well as the senior players, to find a way to develop our tactical thinking. The reputation of England and our hopes at the World Cup would be determined by how successful we were in building those dual strengths. This sort of challenge makes me want to get out of bed every morning. It’s complex problem-solving in a high-pressure environment every day – and I love it.
If the mood around the team is too relaxed, I will generally try to create some sort of disturbance. High-performance sport is about being on edge. For example, I will go into the coaches’ room and pick out a few aspects from the previous day’s training and say: ‘This isn’t good enough. What were we thinking here?’ It might not actually be too bad, but it will keep them and the players on edge. You can’t do that every day of the week. There also needs to be an element of truth to your comments. But I am constantly looking to challenge people to improve and to think. I want people who work with me to be curious and ask questions.
There’s a trend in both rugby and wider society to always be nice. We’re told that everyone should feel involved and have their say. Everything is about good feedback and being positive. This works for a while and can achieve positive results. But ultimately you create a false environment if you don’t speak the truth. And that’s what happened to us. We had developed a polite and congenial environment where we had stopped asking the hard questions and being honest with each other.
As I was finding my way during my first 18 months as England coach, I’d often bite my tongue and let things ride. But that had to change. Many of the players and coaches were not going to like it, but I knew this more abrasive atmosphere would steel us for the World Cup.
I also started paying serious attention to some of the analytical work being produced at the RFU by a smart young bloke called Gordon Hamilton-Fairley. Gordon was a talented data analyst who was employed by Rob Andrew and Stuart Lancaster to investigate different problems in the game. Some of his projects included referee decision-making, lineouts and kicking. Rugby is dominated by video analysis, which has weaknesses. Often the video analysts who travel with the team listen to the views of the coach and then find the video evidence to back it up. Gordon was a devotee of the American sports-style independent data analysis that relies heavily on mathematics. Gordon had read politics and economics at the University of Virginia in the States and built a strong relationship with the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. He wanted to replicate – at the RFU – the Nets’ research statistics department that built various models to examine team and player performance.
I had a meeting with him in my office at Twickenham and he presented a compelling case for his independent, maths-based approach. I was drowning in data and we didn’t have the skills to make sense of it. I had a gut feeling about which statistics mattered most, but I didn’t have the evidence. That bothered me. My hypothesis was that if we could use mathematics to work out what wins and loses games, we could design our training to make sure we improved.
Gordon undertook to do the research to unlock the secrets of success in international rugby and engaged his colleague, James Tozer, to help him. James is a data analyst, educated at Oxford, whose day job is writing for The Economist. After the 2015 World Cup he had written a piece analysing the infamous Robshaw decision to kick for touch which cost England against Wales. Between them they set about building regression models and using machine learning to analyse five years of international rugby. Their discoveries were amazing.
Based on their analysis, James and Gordon, who have now set up a company called Prospect Sporting Insights, presented me with the six key metrics that matter in rugby. I won’t reveal all six, but one metric is effective kicking.
They didn’t stop there. They have continued to develop other models that help us to track and predict not only our own performance but those of our competitors. Their data, which was branded as Pressure Plus, gave us the information we needed to start developing our game. It has been worth every penny.
But, before I got around to making too many changes, my best players left on the British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand in June 2017. I was delighted for all 17 of our players who were selected, although Ben Youngs and Billy Vunipola didn’t tour. I was selfishly very pleased for England. Going on the toughest tour in rugby to play against the best team in the world with the finest players from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales was guaranteed to improve every one of them. And it did. Jamie George came on in leaps and bounds as did Kyle Sinckler, Anthony Watson, Jack Nowell, Jonathan Joseph, Owen Farrell and Elliot Daly. Maro Itoje learnt to cope with being targeted while George Kruis, Joe Marler and Dan Cole realized that if they were to stay at the top of international rugby, they would have to work harder. I got out to see them all before the second Test. I was keen to find out what they had learnt from training and touring with the Lions but, most importantly, what they had discovered about New Zealand and All Black rugby. The tour was an another important stepping stone in the development of our team.
At the same time, as those players headed off to New Zealand, we had the chance to uncover a few gems on England’s tour of Argentina. This is precisely what happened.
If I had to pick out three players who improved consistently throughout their Test careers, the first two names would be easy. George Smith and Will Genia. The third might surprise you. It’s still a little early to say for sure, but I think Tom Curry might take that slot. He’s going to be a special player.
I remember seeing him the first time, playing for Sale, and it reminded me of the feelings I’d had when I watched a young George Smith in Sydney grade rugby. After 30 minutes of watching Curry, who at the time was largely unknown outside of Sale, I thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone mentioned this kid before?’ He was head and shoulders above everyone else on the field. And I mean way ahead. He made hard, aggressive tackles, showed great commitment in attack and clearly had a natural feel for the rhythm and pace of the game. Like Smith, he was not a leader. He was a follower capable of playing great rugby. Sometimes the quiet ones, the hard workers, can be exceptional players.
Curry was still only 18 when I selected him, along with his twin brother Ben, who also played as a flanker for Sale, for the Argentina tour. I picked three other teenagers in Joe Cokanasiga, the London Irish wing, Harry Mallinder, the Northampton back, and Nick Isiekwe, the Saracens lock. They were all 19 when we flew to Buenos Aires. Jack Maunder, the Exeter scrum half, had just turned 20. Sam Underhill, the Ospreys flank, was also an uncapped 20-year-old. Ellis Genge, the Leicester prop who had made such a great double act with Kyle Sinckler in Australia the year before, was 22. Sinckler had been snapped up by the Lions, but I had great faith that Genge would really develop in Argentina.
‘We have focused particularly on youth because we want to find players who are going to be better than the 17 England players on the Lions tour,’ I said. ‘To win the World Cup we need to have the best talent. That is our ultimate destiny.’
Piers Francis was older, being 26, but he was also little known. He had travelled an unlikely road. Born in Gravesend, Kent, he had moved to New Zealand at the age of 18 to improve his rugby. He had played at fly half or centre for Old Gravesendians, Maidstone, Auckland under-21s, Edinburgh, Doncaster, Counties Manukau, the Blues and Northampton. Only a few years before we picked him for the Argentina tour he had been working in Starbucks in Auckland while playing New Zealand club rugby.
I also selected Mark Wilson, an uncapped 27-year-old who was a hard-edged, grafting blind-side flanker from Newcastle. The talent of Henry Slade, who had won five caps at the age of 24, was obvious.
Cokanasiga, after Curry, excited me most. He was 6 foot 4 inches tall and weighed 280 pounds. I could tell he was a few years away from being ready, and he would not play against Argentina, but I wanted him to train with us. I thought he had the potential to become one of the most explosive and powerful wingers in world rugby. He’s a Fijian boy, from an army background, and modest and quiet. You could tell that he’s been brought up well by his family. He’s a lovely kid.
Just over two years later, England’s World Cup squad would include Cokanasiga, Curry, Francis, Genge, Slade, Underhill and Wilson. Luke Cowan-Dickie, George Ford, Joe Launchbury and Jonny May, who all went to Argentina, also made it to Japan. Marchant, who was part of the World Cup training squad, just missed out. Dylan Hartley, Chris Robshaw, Mike Brown, Danny Care and James Haskell – the older players in Argentina – did not make the cut.
The leadership of the senior players on tour was exceptional. They set the standards on and off the field and showed the youngsters what was required to play for England. They didn’t let up and were generous in sharing their knowledge and experience. Their contribution accelerated the development of those young players. They also showed the younger players that rugby tours are great fun. I was grateful for their contribution and they were a credit to English rugby. But the biggest revelation in Argentina was Tom Curry. He was immense in the first Test, which we won 38–34. But it knocked him physically because, at that stage, his body wasn’t ready for back-to-back Tests. Curry was the youngest England debutant since Jonny Wilkinson and I wanted to look after him because I knew he was going to be brilliant. Sam Underhill, another of our outstanding young prospects, replaced him for the second Test, which was another England victory, 35–25.
Curry and Underhill, just before the 2019 World Cup, would become my Kamikaze Kids as they played alongside each other as flankers.
It was a great tour – a low-budget, old-school rugby tour with the senior players leading the way. At one point we ended up staying in a rough and ready hotel in a town called Santa Fe. It was the home of a brewery that was a sponsor for the tour. It was also a ghost town. But the players made their own fun. Jonny May’s quirkiness kept everyone entertained. It was a great experience and a brilliant way to spark change. I remember thinking on the flight home that the tour had delivered everything I had hoped for, and more.
There are 10,080 minutes in every week. A game of rugby lasts 80 minutes. How you use the other 10,000 minutes each week is vital when you want to win the World Cup. You have to deal with your players, fellow coaches, additional staff, executives and administrators, sponsors, the media and supporters – as well as giving precious time to your family and your own well-being. Preparing for three World Cup tournaments has taught me that there is never a minute to waste because every idea, word, action and their consequences have to be considered, calibrated and either adopted or discarded. Each day from 1 December 2015, when I started in the job, to 2 November 2019, the date of the World Cup final, had been planned and mapped out in detail. I’m an obsessive planner.
I work to a clear and deliberate strategy. Even my sleeping patterns are ordered. Generally, I won’t sleep for more than four or five hours at night. But I always try to slot in 30 minutes to an hour for a nap in the afternoon – otherwise I’ll get quite tired. I need to keep an eye on my health and stress levels since the stroke.
This regime works well for me. It begins with a 5 a.m. alarm call. I am so used to getting up early that I produce some of my best thinking between five and six in the morning. I am in the gym soon after six. After a workout and a little breakfast, I turn this additional early morning time into a quiet period free from disturbances. By 8.30 or 9 a.m., when we join the players, my fellow coaches and I will already have done a decent chunk of the day’s work. The days are long, but it is great fun. Before I get into bed, I reflect on the day and decide how I could improve. It keeps me honest and it’s funny how the list is always pretty long. I’m hard on myself. It helps to guard against complacency.
As we approached the end of the second year, my desire to change the way the players trained and operated extended to myself and all the assistant coaches. We all needed a shake-up as we set about rebooting England. Only one game had been lost in the past 21 Tests, but I wanted to make us more flexible and resilient – physically and psychologically.
My positive experience in assisting Jake White at the 2007 World Cup encouraged me to appoint Neil Craig as the England team’s head of high performance. Neil, who is a few years older than me, was 62 when he joined the team in October 2017. He brought vast experience with him. A former Australian Rules footballer, Neil had coached Adelaide and Melbourne and been the head of performance and coaching development at Essendon as well as the director of coaching at Carlton. The professionalism of Aussie Rules compares favourably with any other code anywhere in the world. They really know what they are doing. Neil did not have a background in rugby, but his understanding of coaching at the highest level in elite sport would be invaluable. And, most importantly, he is a good bloke.
His official title was pretty meaningless. Head of high performance did not resonate with either of us. He more accurately described his role as being a critical friend to me. Just as I had supported Jake, and eased the pressure on him whenever I could, so Neil became my observant right-hand man. His job was to watch closely and advise me where I might improve my interaction with my players and the other coaches. Neil understood the pressures and subtleties of a head coach’s role and he brought a fresh perspective. I also wanted him to work with Steve Borthwick, Paul Gustard, Neal Hatley and all our coaches and key support staff. After all, who coaches the coaches?
Neil said that, rather than being a micro-manager, he saw himself as a micro-monitor. It was his task to watch our work closely and to offer a critical view. His initial feedback to me was positive. Neil had known me since before the 2003 World Cup and he felt that, while I was still demanding and sometimes intolerant, I had developed a greater empathy with my coaches. In the past, if a coach didn’t know the answer to a question, I would erupt. Now I was more likely to give the coaches a bit more time. I would still make my dissatisfaction clear, but I was nowhere near as volatile. He also said that there was a clear gap between the media’s cartoonish stereotype of me as this tyrant with funny eyes and the reality of my behaviour. I still have my moments but, over time, I’ve learnt to modify my more extreme reactions.
He agreed that one of my repeated frustrations with the England job was valid. Both the players and the coaches were, at least initially, reactive rather than proactive. This English reticence, in my opinion, reflects wider English society. I’ve never lived in a country with the cultural and class differences of England. It’s an even more hierarchical society than Japan. This creates huge challenges when you are trying to build a united team where everyone’s input is equally valued. One of our priorities was to level the playing field and bring unity to our mission.
I faced a similar problem in Japan, where a junior player would not dare speak to a senior player. I had to break that convention. I tried to do the same in England. My observation was that when a group of Englishmen get together they’ll often behave like they’re back in school. There will be characters who act like they’re prefects and they will boss everyone around. The others will do as they are told. The Japanese and English are very similar in that there is always a facade of politeness to their interactions. People don’t want to stand out and it appears as if cohesion is important to them. But there is no doubt that, beneath the surface, the English and the Japanese both love to bitch about everyone around them.
Now this is not to say that Australia is perfect. Far from it. We have our own problems but, as Australian outsiders, we were desperate to shake things up and change the team dynamic that was heavily influenced by these cultural traits. We needed to break the reticence. We needed to get everyone to feel confident enough to contribute and to speak up. I wanted a team from mixed cultures and backgrounds that reflected the strength of diversity in modern England.
You drive through Surrey and other privileged areas in the south of England, where the houses are palatial and the gardens are massive, and you see a society of accumulated wealth and status. People in the south seem much less open to change, as they look pretty comfortable. When I visit somewhere rougher in northern England, perhaps a town like Wigan, where Andy and Owen Farrell come from, it could not be more different. People are friendlier and more open. It is not for me to say one is better than the other, but I am happier and we are stronger when my squad contains a mix of these different English cultures.
Neil agreed with my observation that the English in general, not just in sport, want to be told what to do. They like clear instruction. In Australian culture there is more a tendency to question the instruction – and that is encouraged. But this more forceful approach is obviously foreign to the English players and coaches. Neil noticed that, occasionally, one of my fellow coaches would say: ‘Just tell me what you want me to do, Eddie.’ I would respond: ‘Well, mate, I actually want your opinion. I want you to bring some different thoughts to the table. I want you to think and then act. I don’t want you to do things only on my say-so.’
The English coaches found this hard but I didn’t care. We are working in a brutal, unforgiving environment and it’s my head on the block if it doesn’t work out. If we are going to achieve our goal of being the best team in the world, we need to squeeze the very best effort and ideas from everyone on our team. I wasn’t going to do that part of their job for them. Test rugby requires an aggressive mindset. This requires players to be clear about their role and accountable for their performance. They have to own it. No excuses.
Coaches can’t be on the field with the players. But if coaches are not showing initiative in preparation, how can you expect the players to? Neil began to encourage the coaches to be more open, forceful and braver in voicing their opinions and insights. I loved it when we started to see their behaviour change.
We also needed the players to take more ownership of how the team operated if we were going to win the World Cup. After just a short time in our camp, Neil felt our boys had a great work ethic. But, again, they were more comfortable following orders rather than doing anything original. They all called Neil ‘boss’. He would suggest they try something and they’d say, ‘Right, boss’ or, ‘Yes, boss.’ Neil was used to Australian players who would never call him boss and always ask him ‘why?’ We had to accept that we were working with English players; but we needed change. The positive was that the players were up for it and hungry to try new ways of learning.
Each player agreed their individual leadership plan and we made sure that we gave them plenty of opportunities to fail in camp. Failure is always painful but it’s an important way of learning. We created scenarios that would test their attitude and resilience and encourage them to take risks and possibly fail. It was fascinating to see them grow in their own ways in their own time. But to a man, they were desperate to be a part of the team and desperate to improve.
Neil’s work was supplemented by the great Frank Dick, the former head coach of UK Athletics who had led the GB team to four separate Olympic Games. Frank had also been Daley Thompson’s coach when he won Olympic gold in the decathlon in 1980 and 1984. He might have had a few years on the clock, but Frank has one of the sharpest minds in elite sport. I had asked him to join our team in 2016 as a consultant and visit our training camps once a week. Neil is with us all the time, whereas Frank’s occasional visits allow him to observe our progress with more detachment. His official title is ‘strategic planning consultant’, but in reality he is just a smart bloke with a lot to offer. He has made a huge impact on our progress.
I remember how, in one session, he spoke to us about the fact that, when you’re in a team, there are four ‘fatal fears’. The first is the fear of getting it wrong or making a mistake. But if you never make a mistake it means you’ve never challenged yourself to go beyond the limits. The moment you start something new, or step beyond the edge of risk, the chances of making a mistake are notably high. But every time you make a mistake you need to make a point of learning from it and not repeating it. When you become really brave, you don’t wait for somebody else to see the mistake. You put your hand up straightaway.
Frank’s second fatal fear is of losing. When you enter any contest in life you can only control yourself. But if you can deliver the performance that you’re capable of, every time, the result should take care of itself. The third fatal fear is fear of rejection. This means you don’t put yourself forward. But, by risking the fact you might be knocked back, you learn how to ask questions and to grow as a person. The final fatal fear is of criticism. But here, Frank said, the key point is to replace the word ‘criticism’ with the concept of ‘feedback’. Once you start looking for feedback you will be much stronger and more resilient.
These four fatal fears are as relevant to non-sporting teams in business, government or the not-for-profit sector. Build a team of individuals who can conquer these fears and you will be well on the way to achieving your objectives.
Frank was interesting because, being Scottish, he was quite blunt in his assessment of the English national character. He felt that English people are pretty soft until their backs are up against the wall. It was a sweeping generalization, but the old spirit of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain – desperate situations when you’re one step away from a precipice – were still obvious in English sport. We wanted to reach a position where our team didn’t have to wait until things were going off the rails before they produced their best effort.
We had achieved the stability and excellence implied by an 18-match winning run. But we had been fortunate to win some of those games while our motivation and intensity had dimmed. We needed to galvanize the players and coaches so that fresh impetus pushed us forward.
In late 2017, while speaking to the press, I had said: ‘Players like to get comfortable. They like to have a nice house, drive a Range Rover, like to do the same thing every day in training. To get them to have the courage to try to be different is the biggest trick. Encouraging them to do that consistently, to be different, is vital. Don’t be comfortable . . . be uncomfortable.’
Frank, like Neil, had seen a strong work ethic in the players and coaches – but he rarely saw them give each other any constructive feedback. The coaches, in particular, did not challenge one another. They were diligent but passive. It seemed to my two expert witnesses that I was driving the process too much on my own. People listened to me and carried out my orders – but what we really needed was debate and a questioning attitude if we were to grow as a team.
I’m always looking to improve every aspect of my coaching, and it was enormously helpful to have Frank and Neil point out to me that my relentless quest to get better could intimidate those around me. They would give me examples of when I had pushed too hard and compromised my impact. I always appreciated the radical candour of their feedback, no matter how uncomfortable it made me feel at the time.
The three of us wanted to break the mould. We saw ourselves as pioneers and we wanted to do things better than before. Continuous improvement was our goal. This explained why feedback and engagement were so important. It was not about belittling people. Encouraging constructive criticism and debate was an opportunity to improve.
As part of this drive to improve, we looked everywhere for advantage. In a conversation with the swimming coach Bill Sweetenham, he mentioned the work of the neurologist Professor Vincent Walsh from University College London. Knowing we had limited time with the players, we explored ways to maximize impact on their learning. Vincent introduced four key principles. The first was to ensure that the room in which you spoke to the players was open and well lit. The second principle was to introduce some sort of primer that would release dopamine from the brain. The third was built on the structure of only ever having three points. And so the fourth principle was to start and not to finish. We would leave meetings without resolution. This allowed the players to think more about the final solution. These changes worked a treat. Our players are with their clubs for 40 weeks a year and if you consider, on average, they have three meetings a week, that’s 120 meetings before they get anywhere near us. We had to find ways to make it as easy as possible for them to learn.
In the autumn of 2017, the players were unaware that a radical reboot of our system was under way. Many of them were still physically and mentally tired after the Lions’ drawn series with New Zealand. You could sense a real flatness about them in the November internationals. But we kept on winning. The results looked impressive on the scoreboard. England beat Argentina 21–8, Australia 30–6 and Samoa 48–14. But just beneath the surface the cracks were clear. They were exhausted and only their toughness drove them on. But it couldn’t last. We were heading into difficult terrain and it was going to take us almost a year to reach the other side.
The traditional southern hemisphere season is like a 400-metre race. You get out, you go hard and you finish strongly. Here, in the north, it’s more like a 3,000-metre steeplechase. You need to pace yourself because it’s a long and draining season – and there are plenty of obstacles in the way. Rather than give 100 per cent at every session or in each league game, you do just enough to stay under the radar. It explains why a southern hemisphere coach can come in and instil that toughness and pace and intensity from down under very quickly. But if you keep it up, it wears the players down and exacerbates the symptoms of third-season syndrome.
My third season coincided with the aftermath of the Lions, so I copped a double whammy. It was a disaster. Our best players were out on their feet but needed to return to their clubs to perform. A limited off-season meant they were in terrible shape physically and mentally when they got back to us. The clubs pay the players’ wages so they owe them their best effort and loyalty. It makes it incredibly hard for the national team. Contrast that with the Kiwis, Irish, Scots and Welsh where the players are all under central contracts and are rested properly. The poor old English Lions were thrust back into club rugby far too early but, as expected, they were brave. They kept at it and their desire to work hard remained. But they were down a couple of percentage points – which was enough to take the edge off their normal standards.
When they came into camp before the Six Nations, I deliberately pushed them harder than ever in training because I needed to find out who really wanted to be there. It was the wrong thing to do in terms of achieving immediate results but the right decision in looking ahead to 2019. I knew we had a decent team but, at that stage, we weren’t good enough to win the World Cup. I worked them relentlessly in training and took them totally out of their comfort zone. They hated it. But it sorted out the player group for me. It helped me work out which players I wanted to keep and who I was ready to drop. It was ruthless but it was massively important. I had to endure fierce criticism because, as a consequence, we had a terrible tournament. It obviously hurts but you try not to allow the barbs and jibes to get to you. Some of the same people who had hailed me as a brilliant coach nine months before now piled in and depicted me as a madman who had lost the plot.
We beat Italy and then scraped past Wales in our opening two games of the 2018 Six Nations. It meant we had won 24 out of my first 25 Tests as head coach. But then we lost 25–13 to Scotland on a freezing February evening at Murrayfield. We started badly and were 22–6 down at half-time. Scotland had not beaten England for ten years or even scored a try against them at Murrayfield since 2004. They bagged three tries against us and played with a ferocity which matched the passionate roar of their supporters. I tried to rationalize the defeat: ‘We’re human beings. Human beings aren’t robots. We prepare to be intense, we prepare to be aggressive, but for some reason, we weren’t. It’s a great lesson.’
I guessed that we weren’t as intense or aggressive as usual because I had pushed an already weary group of players to their limits. But the long-term strategy took precedence and so I kept working them hard throughout the rest of the tournament. In Paris, we needed to win big and score four tries to take the championship into the final weekend, as Ireland were streaking ahead. But we did neither as the zip and verve of 2016 was replaced by a heavy-legged fatigue. We looked physically and emotionally weary and France won 22–16.
I dropped George Ford and switched Owen Farrell to fly half against Ireland in a bid to find a physical spark. It was a repeat of the year before. A Grand Slam decider – with the only difference being that, this year, we were at home and Ireland had won their first four matches. We were under pressure and under threat of losing three matches in a row. Our prospects looked bleak.
I saw it differently. ‘It’s the best time in rugby, when you are under the pump and you have got to produce,’ I said in my midweek press conference.
On the eve of the match, someone released a video of me at a corporate event in Japan the previous July. I still don’t know who did it. In my attempt to amuse the Japanese audience I referred to the ‘scummy Irish’ and Wales as a ‘little shit place’. I was embarrassed. Not only because the slurs weren’t funny but because they weren’t my real views. I was going for a cheap laugh. While it was clear in the video that I was smiling and joking, it looked bad. It was bad. The leaker had timed the release to cause me maximum damage. Mission accomplished.
Immediately, both myself and the RFU apologized unreservedly. It had been a stupid mistake. No excuse. You might ask: what did I learn? Don’t make jokes at others’ expense. And, in my case, be careful when trying to be funny. I should leave the gags to the comedians.
Now, you would think I might have really learnt my lesson about making off-the-cuff remarks. But no. I’m not that bright. Just over a year later, in March 2019, I again dug a hole and tripped over into it. It was nearly as dumb as the embarrassment I caused myself in regard to Ireland and Wales.
I have for a long time wanted to coach the British and Irish Lions. I still hope that, one day, I might get the opportunity. Apart from telling Pemby, I’d kept it a secret that I had set my sights on the 2021 tour of South Africa. That will be one of the great tours in the history of world rugby. In preparation, we were keeping our powder dry and saying all the right things about how you have to be asked before you could consider it. But then I got a long-distance phone call from a journalist in Brisbane. I tried to have a laugh with him and said coaching the Lions was an ambassador job. ‘The last thing I want to do is spend eight weeks in a blazer. That’s an ambassador job. I’m a coach. I’d rather coach the Queensland Sheffield Shield [cricket] team.’ Again, it was a terrible lapse of judgement.
Pemby was straight on the phone: ‘Mate,’ he said incredulously, ‘I thought you wanted to do the Lions job?’
‘I do,’ I said sheepishly.
‘Well you can safely say that ship has sailed, mate. Seriously, you really make it hard for yourself sometimes.’
It was another bad error on my part and, to this day, I don’t know why I said it. But, as I’ve stressed before, I don’t do regret. It’s better to learn from these little disasters. Maybe one day I will get the chance to coach the Lions. Despite those very public and insulting comments, my genuine opinion is that it would be an honour and a privilege.
Back in 2018, we faced Ireland at Twickenham on St Patrick’s Day. It was a grey afternoon made miserable by the perishing cold and my earlier stupidity. It was probably the coldest day I had experienced since arriving in England – and little about our performance provided comfort or warmth.
Ireland were more powerful than us. They were also sharper and smarter than us. We tried hard but they dominated the game and, if anything, the 24–15 score flattered us. I don’t like losing but I was not as dejected as the crowd or the media. There was at least one bright moment. After we dominated the first five minutes, Owen Farrell chased a kick to Johnny Sexton and drilled him. We had been under pressure in the media and you could see Owen was trying to lift the team and lead by example. It’s one of his great qualities and why I love having him captain my team. He knows no other way than straight and hard and never takes a backward step. At the end of the game I was not ready to reveal the full reasons for our lapse, but it felt important to address the differences between 2016 and 2018.
‘We knew during that long winning run that we were not good enough to reach where we wanted to end up.’ I said. ‘A run like the one we are going through now is instrumental to the development of a team. It was easy to improve England initially, fixing this and that, but internal mechanisms, such as developing leaders, are slow burners. It is part of the process of becoming a better team. We are moving forward, even if results do not show that.
‘A run like this tests your resolve, your purpose and the character of your team. That is what we are going through at the moment. I thought our effort today was outstanding. The players stuck at it but Ireland were too good. They are a tough, well-coached side with good leadership and they played exceptionally. We played with character but we just weren’t good enough.’
Sections of the shivering Twickenham crowd booed as they saw me on the big screen. In the distance I could see the Grand Slam-winning Irish players frolicking in front of their ecstatic supporters. They had replaced us as champions, and as the second-best team in the world rankings – behind New Zealand. ‘Good luck to them,’ I thought. They had earned it.
I walked back to the dressing room beneath a darkening sky. Even in mid-March it felt as though we were back in the depths of winter. Ireland looked as if they were strolling down a sunlit path. I consoled myself with the private belief that Ireland had just peaked. They would be on a downward slope from this glorious high. We were again being mocked and ridiculed by the pundits. I was secure in the knowledge that the details of our World Cup plans were safe because the media, as a rule, are generally not curious and more interested in opinion than fact. No one was probing for the truth and, instead, they preferred to load up on the insults. But I knew that, in 18 months, at the World Cup, we would be stronger having endured days like these.
In preparation for 2019 we were still looking to develop the right training plans to generate an adaptable game style. We had to balance the demands of the game with the way we trained. Designing training is perhaps the most fascinating part of professional rugby because this is the only area, if controlled effectively, where you will improve. Raymond Verheijen is a Dutch football coach and an expert in conditioning. He had worked at three World Cups and three European Championships with the Netherlands, South Korea and Russia. Raymond has also worked with Barcelona, Chelsea and Manchester City. He is an expert in tactical periodization and, as we wanted an external view of our approach, he held a three-day course for our coaches. It was brilliant.
Raymond also joined us on our tour to South Africa and the outcome was a new approach to our preparation. Instead of training Tuesday and Thursday we would switch to Wednesday, as it was the day where the players would be best able to train hard. We decided to dial up the intensity of that session. Our training would be really hard. We intended to push the players harder than ever on our tour of South Africa.
New Zealand and South Africa are the two greatest touring destinations in world rugby. The quality of rugby, and the significance the game carries for each country, mean that no other nation can match these traditional powerhouses. England have never won a series in South Africa, and so I considered our June 2018 tour to be another special opportunity. No one expected us to do well and I had the feeling that the media almost wanted us to lose because it would be a big story if we suffered a whitewash. I also knew it was going to be exceptionally challenging as we were missing 20 frontline players through injury or the need to rest them.
Dylan Hartley was the most significant loss. He was injured and I knew he was struggling. Owen Farrell was his obvious replacement as captain, and I was intrigued to see if we could discover some more leaders on a testing tour. Dylan had held us together for two and a half years but we could no longer rely on him. His body was creaking and, as much as I still hoped he could make it to the World Cup, it was imperative we had alternatives in place. I believed in Owen. He’s one of the great players in world rugby and an inspirational figure in our squad.
Manu Tuilagi, Anthony Watson, Jack Nowell, Jonathan Joseph, George Kruis and Sam Underhill were all injured, while older players like Danny Care, Dan Cole and James Haskell needed a summer break away from rugby. Selection is always a difficult process, but I felt we had picked a promising squad with a good mix of established players, fresh faces and a few guys who were returning after a period away from England. Danny Cipriani had not played for England since 2015 and he had won only 14 caps after he made such an explosive start to his Test career. In March 2008 he was hailed as England rugby’s saviour after he played brilliantly in a big win over Ireland in his first Test start. He had been meant to start the previous match against Scotland, but he’d been axed from the squad for ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in the week of the game. A tabloid photographer had snapped him leaving a nightclub.
I knew Cipriani was an outstanding talent in club rugby. I had coached Saracens against Wasps, when he was still a teenager, and Cipriani made the difference in that game. He had brilliant feet, a good eye for space and reasonable skills, so he always looked like he was going to be a very good player. He really caught the eye against Ireland, but then everything seemed to go awry. He was injured and his personal life was consistently chaotic. He was in and out of the newspapers for all the wrong reasons for years. I guessed that this was the main reason why his talent had not been matched by consistent performances.
Martin Johnson, the England coach in the 2011 World Cup, didn’t trust or rate him and so Cipriani made a clean break. He left England and went to play Super Rugby for the Melbourne Rebels, who were a new team coached by Rod Macqueen. The Rebels struggled and, in 2011 and 2012, Cipriani was terrible. He looked to have lost his way completely. He was so bad that I thought there would be no way back for him. But since I became England coach I had been pleasantly surprised by how his game had improved. When I first came in, he wasn’t playing well enough to be in the squad, but his quality over the next two seasons could not be ignored. He had a particularly good season with Wasps in 2017 and deserved an opportunity to play for England.
One of the reasons I had not picked him before was because I did not like the way he reacted to his teammates. But his language and attitude to the other players had improved enormously and he was having a much more positive effect on his team. The job of the number 10 is to drive the attack forward. Cipriani had been guilty of sometimes moving the game sideways rather than forward, but I saw a much more effective mix in his play. He had matured both as a rugby player and a person and I was happy to pick him to tour South Africa.
I regarded him primarily as a number 10, but I said I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that he might play at 15. I wanted to give him a good crack, even if, personally, I thought he lacked the gas to play full back. His relationship with the other players was the most important facet and I said that I only wanted him to appear on the back pages for good rugby reasons – rather than being splashed over the front page in yet another scandal.
It was not easy for Cipriani. There has always been an English fascination with someone who seems unusual and generates gossip. The media were obsessed with Cipriani and it was not entirely his fault. We played – and lost to – the Barbarians in a warm-up game before we flew to South Africa. A girl visited him at the hotel before the game and the press tried to turn it into a story. It was bullshit. The players were allowed visits from their wives or girlfriends and so Cipriani had done nothing wrong. But he was ‘newsworthy’. This attitude filters down to the fans. Whenever I spoke to anyone in the street in England, one of the first questions they would always ask was: ‘What do you think of Cipriani?’ They wouldn’t ask me about Owen Farrell – but I suppose that’s because he’s a tough, hard-working player whose story is dominated by rugby.
I was willing to see what Cipriani could do – despite often feeling frustrated because even the rugby reporters wanted to talk about him more than any other player. I agreed that this was a chance for him to convince me that he had a long-term future for England and that he was better than Farrell and George Ford. I’ve said before that I am very open to picking players who are regarded as X-factor talents, and who have come from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’. Cipriani was different; I knew he’d had quite a tough upbringing and he owed a lot to his mum who drove a black cab in London to give him a good education and a real chance in life. I was encouraging, and Danny reacted with a good attitude.
My hardest task was not coaching Cipriani. Rather it was coaxing my players into being more creative. We needed to become bolder and more attacking. We could not thrive in Test rugby by playing conservatively. Rugby had become a high-scoring game. I knew we would need to score lots of points to win a Test, and we also had to uncover the mental toughness required to beat the Springboks in South Africa. I was set for a tour of real discovery.
Ellis Park is a brilliant place to play rugby. It’s loud and it’s raucous and, on a still and beautiful winter’s afternoon in Johannesburg, on 9 June 2018, the atmosphere crackled with its own unique electricity. The significance of the occasion was amplified by the fact that the Springboks were being led for the very first time by a black captain. Siya Kolisi, a good rugby player and an inspirational man, had been appointed by Rassie Erasmus, who had replaced Allister Coetzee as Springbok coach. Allister and I had a good relationship, after we worked together for the Boks in 2007, but I knew Rassie was the better head coach. We were in for a mighty battle.
I could not have been happier with how we started. After two minutes we had a penalty ten metres inside our own half. Owen consulted with Elliot Daly, who has a monster boot, and we decided to have a crack at the sticks. Johannesburg is nearly 6,000 feet above sea level and, in the thin air of altitude, the ball flies. Daly nailed the penalty. Three minutes later, after a slashing cross-field move, Henry Slade fired a pass to Mike Brown, who I had switched from full back to wing. Brown went over for our first try and Farrell converted.
After 18 minutes we were 24–3 up as Daly and Farrell also scored excellent tries. It had been our best start as an England team in three seasons of my coaching. All the momentum was with us and then, suddenly, almost inexplicably, we allowed it to slip. I had been so impressed by our mentality because, usually, the away team crumbles at the outset at Ellis Park. We did the opposite. We fronted up and took total control of the game. But midway through the first half, when we should have just shut them out of the match entirely, we were sloppy. We allowed them back into the game. Faf de Klerk was a real menace at scrum half for the Boks and he got them flying. De Klerk’s try was followed by three more in quick succession. From 24–3 up we went in at half-time trailing 29–27.
We had missed Hartley’s calming influence, as well as a number of other experienced older heads. In the second row, owing to injuries, I had picked Nick Isiekwe. He had just turned 20 and he was one of the players who made it look as if, after our initial surge, we had a few too many boys playing against men. We simply lacked leadership. The Springboks were always going to come back strongly and get some advantage from the referee. That’s the reality when you play the Springboks in South Africa. You just have to grit those periods out. Don’t get too excited, don’t get too frustrated. Hang in there and you will come out the other end. But the game swung away from us and we struggled to claw back our momentum.
We were chasing the game and trailing by ten points with eight minutes to play. Jonny May scored our fifth try, to match the five scored by the Boks, and it looked as if we might have one last shot at a famous victory. But the score stayed 42–39. We had lost an epic game of rugby.
The second Test in Bloemfontein followed a similar pattern. We raced into a 12–0 lead after just 13 minutes. Tries by Brown and May gave us another rollicking start after I had shuffled the pack by dropping Chris Robshaw. He had been a real warrior for me, and for England, but he was one of many players whose form had fallen away. But our positive start again melted away and shortly before half-time we were trailing 13–12. We didn’t score another point in the second half and the Springboks, who kicked well, wrapped up the series with a 23–12 victory. It had been the same exasperating story. I was happy with Farrell as captain but there was a general lack of leadership, confidence and composure throughout the team.
We missed Hartley massively because he was our main ‘glue guy’ who holds the team together. He’s a leader who comes into his own when the heat is on and the team are buckling a little. Hartley knows when to have a harsh or a calming word. As a coach you generally choose a captain in your own persona. The quiet coach prefers the quiet captain, the abrasive bloke goes for the abrasive skipper. But, with experience, you learn to coach and choose your captain in different ways. Hartley and Farrell fell into the abrasive camp. But Hartley had learnt to temper himself and be more in quiet control. Farrell was only 26 and I was sure he would grow as a captain. We still had 15 months left before the World Cup. I decided that, after the tour, I would experiment with Hartley and Farrell as co-captains and we’d see how the next few months unfolded.
Even the great leaders of world rugby take time to emerge. I saw it with George Gregan. He turned out to be one of the finest captains I’ve ever seen, but it took years for his real leadership powers to mature. John Eales, one of the great Test captains, struggled at the start of his career. He was a poor captain which, now, is hard to believe. Richie McCaw didn’t have consistent success when he was first captain, though he went on to win two World Cups. But McCaw went through the pain of 2003 and 2007. So he had an eight-year incubation period to learn those leadership skills. It takes time. Leadership often comes from failure because that’s how the hardest lessons are learned.
Of course, the media love to write about failure. It gives them the chance to really put the boot in and to produce explosive and divisive coverage. I was reminded constantly that we had lost five Tests in a row. Most of the writers added the warm-up game against the Barbarians as a sixth defeat on the spin. I was told on the night we lost in Bloemfontein that 126 days had passed since England had last won a game of rugby.
Just as I had ignored the excessive praise during my first two years with England, so I refused to be bogged down in the spiral of negativity that followed us to Cape Town for the third Test. It’s always difficult when you lose. But, in England, it gets amplified many times over. Your team goes from being the best in the world to the worst side England has ever seen. Your status as a coach plummets from brilliance to idiocy in a flash. There is an element of absurdity to the coverage because the English media feeds off hysteria.
The cold, hard reality is that you’re never as good or as bad as they say.
When you’re down, it is interesting to see how the players react. Once again, the England lads were outstanding. The greater the pressure, the stronger the unity and belief. On the rest day before the third Test, with the series gone and the losing streak stretching to five, the players took themselves to a park across the road from the team hotel for a game of cricket. They had a great time. Their laughter and camaraderie could be seen and heard from a distance. As they made their way back into the hotel, they were beaming. It was a powerful demonstration of the strong off-field bonds we were building.
The England job is particularly difficult because, beyond the media, there is a battle every day. You’ve got to box clever to stay on top of all the problems. I knew we were in a bit of a hole and it was time to roll the dice for the last Test. I decided to call up Cipriani at 10 and to give him a chance to run the show. Your number 10 is the equivalent of a quarterback in American football. They set the tone and tempo at training and play a key role in the organization of the week and the match. Ford was a little unlucky to be dropped, but I felt we needed something different and wanted to see what the team looked like under Danny’s guidance.
We were fortunate that, at Newlands, conditions suited us. Instead of it being another fast track, we faced South Africa on a slow deck on a wet day. It was a real arm-wrestle and, once again, we were courageous. The score was tight all the way. We led 6–3 at half-time and the game was still in the balance with eight minutes to go. England were ahead 15–10 but the Boks were firmly in the match. Cipriani then produced a little magic. His delicate and precise cross-field kick found May, who had the simple task of scoring the try which made the game safe.
Cipriani did his job and I was delighted that we had won the match. At the last press conference before the game, I said that we were looking for that special moment from him – and he produced it. But the reaction from the press was outrageous. They thought Cipriani had proved he was a rugby genius. It was one good moment, but he had been very quiet throughout the rest of the game. I remember Farrell producing something similar with a kick which also set up a May try at Twickenham. But no one said much about it then because it was Owen. When Danny did it he was exalted for his ‘unbelievable’ and ‘incredible’ skill. I judge the players on how they prepare, how they train and how they play. Every day is a selection day. At the end of the week in Cape Town, Danny was still a distant third behind Owen and George Ford.
I was more interested in the fact that, for the most part, we outplayed South Africa. I was also really proud of the way we played tactically under enormous pressure. It was good to break the cycle of defeats. When you’ve coached for a long time, you accept that you get these fallow periods. I’ve had them every seven or eight years and you’ve got to battle through them. It helps to know that, if you’ve got the right players and the right staff, you and the team will be stronger for coming through adversity.
I have been on many rugby tours in my career as both a player and a coach. I rate this one as my most enjoyable. The team was tough and dedicated and they kept wanting to improve. You could see the belief growing. It was exciting to see the progress on and off the field.
In tough times I always remember the first year I coached the Brumbies. We finished third from bottom in the Super 12 and it looked like we were miles off the pace. But when we assessed everything carefully, I felt we were only a few percentage points away from making the top four and the play-offs. At Test level the margins are even smaller. We might have won the series in South Africa 3–0, or suffered the same score in reverse, with one or two slight differences here and there. You need to be realistic and accept that you tread such a fine line between success and failure. But impartiality is not part of most sports reporting. People want to read about triumph or catastrophe. There is nothing in between. But the truth is that, for most sports teams, you’re generally somewhere in the middle, occasionally touching the opposite extremes.
I was heartened by the way the squad had moved forward. Their attitude and application, as well as their willingness to absorb pain and get on with it, had been fantastic. We had lost the series, but we had come a long way in a short time. We had turned a tight corner.
On the way home from South Africa, I assessed our games in detail. I focused on the first two Tests. We had come out firing in both games. Our attack was brilliant and the structured parts of our game were solid. But we couldn’t sustain the momentum. Our game style wasn’t working and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Our opponents had kicked well and won both matches. I wondered if there might be something in it. When I landed at Heathrow I called Gordon Hamilton-Fairley. I wanted the maths men to take a look at tier-one rugby matches and see if they could build a hypothesis for a new game style as we approached the last long run to the World Cup.
Danny Cipriani was back in trouble just two months later. He had joined a new club, Gloucester, and on their pre-season tour to Jersey, he was involved in another incident. Cipriani pleaded guilty to hitting a bouncer at a club and resisting arrest. He was fined £2,000 and agreed to do ten weeks’ community service. I was not too surprised or let down. When a player consistently does stupid things, you don’t expect him to change much. Players make choices and they have to live with the consequences.
But the incident in Jersey did not have any bearing on my future selection. I just thought Farrell and Ford were both better players at Test level than Cipriani. I made it clear to him that he remained in my thinking and if either of the two blokes ahead of him were injured or lost form drastically then I would have no qualms about picking him. From Danny’s perspective his cause was done more damage when he played for Gloucester against Saracens. It was billed as a showdown between Farrell and Cipriani, but it was no contest. Saracens and Farrell were dominant.
Away from the Cipriani soap opera, I was much more absorbed and excited by the coaching changes that had occurred. For the South Africa tour, I had persuaded Scott Wisemantel to come in as our attack coach. He worked with me at the Wallabies as our skills coach between 2004 and 2007, and he had done brilliant work with Japan before and during the 2015 World Cup. Wisey’s a really good, energetic coach with a real knowledge of the game, after also working in Super Rugby with the Waratahs and in France with Lyon and Montpellier. The players like him and he is full of new ideas. He offered us an injection of vitality.
Wisey’s role in South Africa was on a consultancy basis, but he was so good that I worked hard to convince him to join us full time until the end of 2019. I was thrilled when he agreed because he offered the contrast we needed with the two excellent English coaches in Steve Borthwick and Neal Hatley. There is no one better than Steve when it comes to the detail of the job, and he gels well with Neal who is also very popular with the players. But Scott is much more of an extrovert and he gave the coaching staff a real spark and zip.
There had also been a change in our defence coach after the South Africa tour. I worked well with Paul Gustard and I was happy with all he had done for England. But I could not stand in his way when he was offered the chance to become director of rugby at Harlequins. Gussy also has a young family, and so I could understand why he wanted to take the job and get off the international treadmill. Our parting was very amicable and it helped that I felt I had quickly found an exceptional replacement in John Mitchell.
John and I had been in opposition in the 2003 World Cup semi-final when he coached the All Blacks against my Wallabies. He had been in charge of a very good team, but anything less than winning the World Cup is a disaster for New Zealanders. John lost his job. But I knew he was a talented coach with gravitas and experience. John had worked around the world and he also knew English rugby inside out. He had been England’s forwards coach under Clive Woodward from 1997 to 2000. John had also been head coach of the USA and looked after five Super Rugby teams in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. He had worked at Wasps and at Sale in the English Premiership, and so he had one of the most wide-ranging CVs in world rugby. John, like all veteran coaches, had been through some tough times, but he was a survivor. And, like me, he loved coaching.
We had evolved the role of the assistant coaches. We now call them positional coaches. While they still coach an area of the game, they are now responsible for a specific group of players. Neil is the scrum coach, but he is primarily responsible for all the front-row players. He’s got to make sure they are fit and on task. If there are any issues, he deals with them before they come to me. Steve is the forwards coach but he’s mainly responsible for the locks. So if the locks aren’t performing, it’s his responsibility to fix it. John focuses on the back row. I look after the inside backs and Scott takes the outside backs. Most of our meetings are now in these positional groups.
Getting Mitch on board completed my coaching jigsaw. I was convinced that we had just the right back-room team to take England to the World Cup.
The 2018 autumn internationals were played less than a year before the tournament which would define my England legacy. Every Test match counts, and you want to win each one you play, but the closer you come to the World Cup, the more it feels as if the other games are sparring sessions compared to the real deal. Our two hardest Tests that November were the first matches we played – against South Africa and New Zealand.
My plan to field co-captains in Hartley and Farrell had its first trial run against the Springboks. Farrell led the team out, but Hartley was back at the heart of the scrum and in joint charge of the team. I sprang a little surprise by picking Mark Wilson at number 8 as Billy Vunipola was still injured. I like the grit and graft of Wilson. Tom Curry was at open side and Brad Shields completed the back row. There was a real freshness to the team, but we had to show so much old-school determination to stay in the game.
The Springboks enjoyed 78 per cent possession and 80 per cent territory for a long period in the first half; we were on the ropes and absorbing one attack after another. South Africa had beaten New Zealand in Wellington, and narrowly lost the return match at home, and they were on a roll under Rassie Erasmus. But they weren’t clinical enough against us and we hung on to reach the break only trailing 8–6. It could have been so much worse.
A fourth Farrell penalty in the 73rd minute meant that we inched ahead 12–11. But the Boks came back at us and, in the very last minute, their big replacement centre André Esterhuizen set off on a bullocking run from just over the halfway line. He looked intent on saving the game, but Farrell stood in his way. Farrell hit him really hard and Estherhuizen went down in a heap. The ball spilled to the ground and we booted it out as we had passed 80 minutes on the clock. Our players celebrated, only to suddenly see that the referee, Australia’s Angus Gardner, had asked the TMO to check the legality of the tackle. He specifically wanted to establish whether Farrell had used his arms to bring Esterhuizen down, rather than hitting him with his shoulders. I thought it was a fair hit, but I knew it was very close – and the legitimacy of Farrell’s tackling technique would come under fierce scrutiny after the match.
This time the decision went our way. We had won a brutal Test match by a single point.
I was delighted. ‘There was a lot of toughness from us out there,’ I said after the match. ‘We stayed in the arm wrestle and turned the game around. We were not quite good enough to take advantage of a couple of opportunities we had but we scored the winning points. We played some of the big moments really well and I could not be prouder of the players.
‘The young players did exceptionally well and we can look forward to New Zealand now. I cannot wait to play them. New Zealand are different to South Africa. They’ll want an athletic contest. But we will not be wearing singlets and running shorts. It will be a proper game of rugby. You want to face the best in the world and the Kiwis are that. Bring it on.’
Our plan was to choke the life out of them. The All Blacks are the kings of unstructured play. Sit back and watch them play and they will cut you to pieces. You have to take their space and hit them hard. When you attack you need to run powerfully to tire them out. You have to get in their heads and make them very uncomfortable. Australia, under both myself and Rod Macqueen, had great success against the All Blacks because we had the players to keep it tight and deny them opportunity.
It was a thriller with the All Blacks at Twickenham on 10 November 2018. A see-sawing beauty came down to another very late decision from the TMO. We had started like a train. In the second minute, after a rock-solid scrum, Ben Youngs fed Ben T’eo, who set up a forward rumble as Sinckler and Itoje blasted a hole in the black wall. Youngs then found Chris Ashton with a fizzing pass and the wing went over. A Farrell drop goal made it 8–0 after ten minutes. We were soon 15–0 up when, from a crisp England lineout, Hartley crashed over on the back of a rolling maul.
New Zealand always come back and they edged into the lead, 16–15, as we entered the last quarter of the game. It wasn’t the usual bursts of All Black brilliance. Rather, on a miserable day at Twickenham, the world’s best side proved that they had learnt how to arm-wrestle under Steve Hansen. When the game is tight, like our clash, they just stick at it. Their scrum and, in particular, their lineout had improved immeasurably. Brodie Retallick was supreme and they hurt us in the lineout. But we hung in, with just as much toughness, and then went in search of the win.
There were just five minutes left when Courtney Lawes charged down TJ Perenara’s kick. The ball bounced loose and Sam Underhill, who had been immense all afternoon, scooped it up. He sidestepped Beauden Barrett and scorched across the Twickenham turf, eating up 40 metres to score. The crowd and the players celebrated a match-winning try – until the referee Jérôme Garcès turned to the TMO to ask whether Lawes had been onside at the ruck when Perenara put boot to ball. It was another agonizing wait, just like the week before. This time the decision went against us. Marius Jonker, the TMO, ruled that Lawes had been fractionally offside. We had lost the match by a few centimetres.
I was justifiably upbeat after the game. ‘We had a team of 400 caps and they had a team of 800 caps. That is a hell of a difference, and your ability to handle those difficult situations comes down to experience. We’ve got Mako and Billy Vunipola to come back into contention so it’s a good situation for us to be in. It’s been a tough year but we needed a slump to reignite ourselves and we’ve done that. The next time we play New Zealand it might be a different story. We feel like we have the game to take to them.’
It felt written in the stars. I was pretty sure that we would next play the All Blacks in Yokohama City on 26 October 2019 – in the first World Cup semi-final. I expected we would both win our pools to set up a titanic battle which would matter so much more than an autumn international in 2018.
I knew that we had got some luck against the Boks, but not against the Blacks a week later. ‘Sometimes the game loves you and sometimes it doesn’t,’ I said with a little smile as another tumultuous rugby year wound to a close on a rainy night at Twickenham. ‘It always balances out. We’ll get some love from the game further down the track.’