When Clive Woodward was appointed as England coach, one of the first things he did was drive up to the north of England to meet with me in Altrincham Kersal. The purpose of his visit was to see if our philosophies were aligned. It turned out that they were, and I agreed to join England. But not before I had made a call to New Zealand.
The guy I rang was Matthew Cooper, who played for Waikato and the All Blacks. He was also Ciara’s godfather. His was an opinion I respected and I now needed his advice. Somehow, it just didn’t feel completely right to be working as a coach for another country, and I didn’t want it to jeopardise any prospect I might have had to work with the All Blacks one day. In those days, professionalism hadn’t taken hold to the extent that it has today. I don’t think too many modern coaches would have had the misgivings I did back then.
But Matthew was adamant. He said I had to do it. And he most emphatically didn’t think accepting the England job would mess up my chances of coaching the All Blacks one day. It was what I wanted to hear, and I signed on the dotted line.
Where Woody perhaps erred a bit was in drawing up my contract, which specified that I would work on a pro-rata basis, with remuneration calculated according to the amount of time I spent with England and the time I spent at Sale. Of course, as much as you like to think everything will be sweet in such a situation, it wasn’t. In the end, the England job did compromise my work at Sale.
The first Tests I was involved in were, ironically enough, against New Zealand. In the British autumn of 1997, the All Blacks played two games against England, the first at Old Trafford and the second at Twickenham. Any fears that I might not be accepted by the England players were quickly dispelled when the big arm of their captain, Martin Johnson, wrapped itself around me and drew me into the huddle in the Manchester United change room before the game at Old Trafford. Despite being accepted by England, it was interesting that, because I had never played for the team, I was not allowed to wear an England tie or blazer during a career with them that spanned 33 Tests.
In the build-up to the Old Trafford match, the All Blacks had destroyed, and I mean really destroyed, England A at Huddersfield. Christian Cullen and Carlos Spencer were on fire that day. As a result of that demolition job, fear set in and I’ve never seen a team as nervous and scared as England were before the opening Test. It quickly became apparent to me that they had no intention of playing to win. They just wanted to hang in there and not prove an embarrassment.
And that is what they did. The All Blacks won 25-8, but not as comfortably as expected. That day, England did a lap of honour after the game – even though they had lost. For a Kiwi, it was an interesting introduction to England. I realised that they use fear of failure as a motivation, and I think that still holds true today. The All Black haka, led that day by Norm Hewitt, was a special performance, if not perhaps a little provocative.
In the week building up to the Old Trafford Test, it was all about fear, and you could sense the objective was damage limitation rather than winning the game. But because they had come quite close, even though the mental preparation had been so poor, the whole mindset changed overnight and suddenly we were heading to the Twickenham Test with a degree of confidence. England took on an attacking mindset and started off at 100 miles an hour.
The change in the England approach surprised the All Blacks, and we managed to rush them. England were up 23-9 at half-time, but when I went in to speak to the forwards it was clear that they were blowing bubbles and gasping for oxygen. Jason Leonard could hardly speak.
Everyone knows about Woodward and the extra effort he took to make the England players feel special, and it was very much in evidence that day. Everything in the change room was personalised, from the players’ name plaques on the wall (which even got mailed back to them if they were dropped), through to the pots of tea, the wine gums and the King George flags spread all over the place.
But it didn’t matter how much effort had been taken to make the place look like Woody’s envisioned theme, it was hard to redirect the team for the second half. We eventually hung on to a 26-all draw, but as much as the final result brought relief, it also brought home the message to Dave Redding, the conditioning coach, that his field of expertise was going to have to become a key element in England’s development. The players’ half-time fatigue was something I will never forget.
We had plenty of big men to draw on. That was not the problem. The trick was to get them leaner and to build bigger engines so that they could operate for longer and bring repeat efforts.
Twickenham is a special place, and it is very much regarded as a fortress by the England team and its supporters. I was there as an All Black in 1993, but I was not in the starting team. That was the day Jamie Joseph went over Kyran Bracken’s ankle. England played exceptionally well and the All Blacks lost (the final score was 15-9).
Neil Finn of Australian rock band Crowded House came into the England change room after that 1997 draw in his faded jeans and black coat. He pulled out a guitar and played ‘Four Seasons in One Day’ and ‘Six Months in a Leaking Boat’. Later, he joined us on the bus and played all the way to the Test dinner in Kensington. That was an example of some of the special moments you get to enjoy when you are involved with an international rugby team.
England also played against the Springboks during that autumn part of the season, and we were well beaten. In fact, at the time it was a record win for the South Africans at Twickenham (29-11). They were superbly coached by Nick Mallett and well led by Gary Teichmann, and you could see that they were well on the road to recovery from the disastrous series defeat against the British & Irish Lions earlier in the year, when they had been coached by Carel du Plessis.
It was an enjoyable time for me but, in many ways, I should never have been in the role that I was. Although I was more experienced than Woodward in terms of the time we had spent coaching, I was still inexperienced and too young. Having to manage two jobs was also challenging, and Sale was not a professional outfit yet.
I knew I had a lot to learn about coaching, and one of the things that made me uncomfortable being in charge of the England forwards was that I had still been playing against most of them the previous season. I was still in my early thirties, so it wasn’t as if I was significantly older than many of the players.
During my first Five Nations with England, we lost 17-24 to France. I was bitterly disappointed with the forwards’ showing. The heat was being turned up because we had had no great outcomes that autumn, and we had to face Wales next. They had Graham Henry as their coach and had won their previous match, and were heading into the Twickenham game with a lot of confidence.
It was Phil Vickery’s first international match. He was just 18. I remember sitting in my room in the Petersham Hotel in Richmond before a meeting with the forwards contemplating how I would need to lay down the law – I was unsure how I was going to go about it. ‘I am just 34 years old,’ I thought to myself, ‘and I have played against these guys myself.’
In particular, my mind went back to that draw against Leicester the previous season, which had cost Sale a chance to play in Europe. A massive fight had broken out at a key moment of the game and I was on the floor, as was teammate Dave Erskine. He got his nose wiped off by Dean Richards and, before I knew it, Martin Johnson was about to put his boot into my guts.
I put my leg up to avoid a possible injury, and then all hell broke loose. The England players were all in there – Neil Back, Richard Cockerill, Martin Corry, Johnson and Graham Rowntree. It ended up being quite a fight.
And now, reflecting on this, I found myself as coach to those same players. For a long time, I mulled over the vexing question of how I was going to get my point across to the forward pack when I had been involved in a blow-up with them just a matter of months earlier. Intuitively, I knew what to do, but I had fear in my plan. I procrastinated in my room for what seemed like forever, but finally I decided, ‘Bugger it, I’ve got to stand by my power.’
So, I went into the meeting with the pack. I took an England jersey with me. In the room was Jason Leonard, with 90 Tests behind him, Martin Johnson, who at that stage had 60 or 70, and Lawrence Dallaglio, who had played more than 50. To make my point, I addressed the most experienced guys first. I had to get Jason, Jonno and Lawrence motivated about playing for England again, and if I managed that, the rest would follow.
Johnson is called ‘Monobrow’ by the people who know him because of the way he furrows his brow when he gets angry. You know you are in deep trouble when he does that. I knew I would get the monobrow treatment, but I accepted it as something that came with the territory. Jason would take whatever you said to him on the chin and then catch up with you for a drink and chat about it afterwards. And Lawrence was the type who would listen and take it on board and get motivated if he felt what was said had merit and had been communicated properly.
I spoke to them in the order of the number of Tests they had played.
‘Jason, does this jersey mean as much to you as it did when you first played for England?’ Then I paused and said, ‘I am not so sure.’ And then I went around the group. And, yes, Jonno did give me that monobrow look, but what I said during my pep talk clearly inspired the right outcome, because we beat Wales 60-26.
In those Five Nations days, the traditions were great fun, like the bow ties that everyone wore, and it was a time when you would give the debutants something special to commemorate the occasion. I was heading up to my room the night after the Wales Test when I bumped into a tipsy Phil Vickery. The 18-year-old newcomer was in the hotel corridor with his girlfriend.
‘Vicks, maybe you should go to bed – you had a big day today,’ I said by way of greeting.
He looked at me and said, in his thick Cornish farming-community accent, ‘Coach, you don’t like me, hey, you don’t like me. You are so hard on me, Coach, you don’t like me.’
‘Vicks,’ I said, ‘just go to bed. You’ve done very well today. Go to bed.’
That was an interaction we both still remember many years later.
After that win over Wales, we started to get excited. We knew we could get to a point where we’d begin holding our own against southern hemisphere teams, provided we could get our conditioning right. That was still an ongoing problem and a work in progress.
There was a strong work ethic in the team, though, and, once he was selected, this was exemplified by Jonny Wilkinson. We could see the floodlights at Twickenham from our Richmond hotel during the build-up to the home Tests, and then we knew that Wilkinson and kicking coach, Dave Aldred, were out there working hard on Jonny’s kicking.
Jonny got plastered like everyone else as a debutant after his first post-match dinner against Ireland, but his work ethic was impeccable and he was always going to thrive in the super-professional environment introduced by Clive Woodward. Wilkinson was always the last to arrive at the dinners, as he was forever putting extra work into his game. It was usual for him to have his dinner wearing a dirty tracksuit after coming back to the hotel straight from training.
Matt Dawson was a good leader and a great bloke to have in the team. He possessed maturity and was a serious rugby player on the field, but a fun bloke off it.
Then, in 1998 came our disastrous tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Woodward sent an understrength team and England got hammered 76-0 in Sydney. Woody had his reasons for sending a B-team, but it really challenged my loyalty to his leadership. When I heard we were leaving all the big players behind, I considered withdrawing from the trip and concentrating on my job with Sale.
Jonny Wilkinson was just 18 on that tour and a lot of the other guys were very young too. I challenged Woody on his selections and told him I wasn’t keen to go on the tour. He made it clear that he expected loyalty and needed me to show mine as the assistant coach.
Even if we had sent an experienced team, the whole idea of the tour was crazy. No team had ever gone to Australia and New Zealand, where we played two Tests, and South Africa all in the same trip. And starting off with such a massive beating really hurt.
We then crossed the Tasman Sea and lost both Tests against the All Blacks. It was my first experience of hearing the national anthem being played in New Zealand since I had left and it was a really difficult moment for me. It filled me with emotion, and tears were streaming down my face, but perhaps it was an experience I had to go through in order to let go. I had always been extremely loyal to New Zealand when the sport wasn’t professional, but professionalism had brought a new angle and it would become common practice for Kiwi coaches to take charge of foreign teams later on.
Sadly, Clive Woodward’s father passed away while we were in Auckland and he had to fly home, so I was given the reins to prepare the team for the second game. We also played the New Zealand Maoris on the tour, and got to see the Kiwi passion for the game from the outside when Josh Lewsey was accosted by an old lady. She gave him a foretaste of what to expect when she told him that the Maori were going to box-kick on him.
We stayed in the contest for a long time in Auckland, which gave me confidence. But the All Blacks were well in control by the end, and won 40-10, though the score doesn’t tell the full story of the match. The week before we had lost 22-64, so it was a marginal improvement in terms of points conceded.
Woody rejoined the team in Cape Town, and the first night he was back with us we received notes in our hotel rooms requesting a management meeting with him early in the morning. I had been out for a meal with Dion O’Cuinneagain, who played for me at Sale but hails from Cape Town, and when I got back to the Newlands Holiday Inn, I found the note.
I immediately phoned the other management guys, such as the doctor, Terry Crystal, the John Cleese of the tour party, to find out what was up. Everyone was speculating that Woody was going to resign. Anything was possible, as Woody was one of those highly intelligent guys who is always up and down, and it was impossible to get a read on him. The guys used to call him ‘Tangent’ because of his habit of going off on a tangent when talking and his tendency to change the frequency and times of meetings.
So, the next morning, there was nervous energy when we got together in the hotel meeting room. That was a day when Woodward didn’t go off on a tangent – he got straight to the point.
‘Good morning, everyone. I am not happy with the service here,’ he said. ‘We’re moving to the Mount Nelson.’
There was no consultation whatsoever. I have stayed at the Newlands Holiday Inn many times. The hotel had been serving sports teams for many years, and continues to do so. It is a fine hotel in a perfect spot close to the stadium. But, according to Woody, some of the guys were having stuff lost in the laundry. So we left the Newlands Holiday Inn and went to lord it up at the luxurious Mount Nelson.
Woody put it all on his own credit card because when he made that decision, the RFU hadn’t yet authorised it.
I tried to reason with him. I attempted to impress upon him the fact that the local people would perceive our move as rude and disrespectful. South Africa is a country that prides itself on its hospitality. So what if a few things might have gone missing in the laundry! You have to take the good with the bad when you tour.
It seems I had got the wrong end of the stick. Clive’s objective was to make a statement: the England team had to be special. He didn’t just want the players to feel that they were picking up England caps so they could do well in the business world after their rugby careers were over. He didn’t want mediocrity. He wanted a special environment and, effectively, he was waving a flag at the RFU and telling them to give us five-star treatment in future. Woodward was aligning our people’s processes to meet our plans, and he was a clever bugger in the way he went about getting what he wanted.
He wasn’t at all worried about the public repercussions of his decision – although he did have the shits with the outcome of the tour, which turned out worse than he had expected.
We played the Boks during a typical Cape winter storm on a gloomy afternoon, with the rain lashing for most of the 80 minutes. Joost van der Westhuizen scored on the dead-ball line after charging down a ball and the South Africans won 18-0 in a game that wasn’t particularly memorable. What I do have a strong recollection of, though, is a young Bob Skinstad being capped for the Boks at the post-match function. I remember his parents being there and will never forget the pleasure shown by this baby-faced boy at receiving his national colours and knowing that he had officially become a Springbok. For me, occasions like that are the big moments in rugby – the young men never forget them.
The night after that match, I went out for a beer with some of the forwards, including Richard Cockerill and Graham Rowntree. We partied in Cape Town’s Long Street and it was quite a big night for us, as it marked the end of what had been a difficult tour.
But it nearly became a disastrous last night when we tried to catch a taxi home. Something happened or somebody did something that irritated Cockerill, who is never short of a few words. Suddenly, a group of guys surrounded us. It could have got nasty but, fortunately, we were dressed in our No. 1s (blazers and ties), and Rowntree, who was a sensible bloke, and I reasoned with Cockerill and managed to calm him down.
At the Mount Nelson, the inevitable cliques were starting to form after the poor results on tour, and we had a bit of time to kill before the flight home. We had been given awful terracotta-coloured boots by the RFU to accompany our grey trousers, navy-blue blazers and a red tie. But there was still some humour left in the team, and the forwards decided to pass the time by having a braai and beers in my room. I had a room with windows that opened onto the pool.
The invitation was only extended to the two best-performing backs, as decided by the forwards, on the tour. So Jonny Wilkinson and Josh Lewsey were invited along.
Phil Greening brought in a trolley of beers and we all raised our left pinkies to Jane Woodward, Clive’s wife, who had been with him on the tour, even though no one else was allowed to take his wife along.
Josh Lewsey was about to graduate from university when he got back to England, and the forwards, with a combination of humour and childishness, elected that Gareth Archer should shave a ‘penalty spot’ in Josh’s hair with a pair of hair clippers. When Josh got home, his parents were far from happy with the missing hair and a few explanations were required. But it goes without saying that it was a very happy flight home.
Later that year, we again played against the Boks. They came to Twickenham needing one win to break a long-standing record of 17 consecutive victories held by the All Blacks. It was a dark and damp evening, though not nearly as bad as Cape Town had been in June. We were extremely motivated to beat them, both because we wanted to halt their record bid and because they had given us a good thrashing at Twickenham the year before. As Tri-Nations champions, they had also become the team everyone wanted to beat.
Unfortunately for the Boks, they revealed some of their plays for the match during the captain’s run at Twickenham the day before. I say it was unfortunate because Clive Woodward enjoyed sitting in the security box at Twickenham when opposition teams trained, and he was there that day. I wasn’t present, but the information that came back from their captain’s run was that Bob Skinstad would play off the back and there would be another play just off that. Perhaps it was because he knew what he got away with that Clive became so security conscious later.
Sure enough, early in the game, around the halfway line, the Boks tried some of the line-out moves that we had spied on and had been prepared for, and they were unable to make the advantage line. That gave England great confidence and played a part in setting us on the path to victory (the final score was 13-7). The England pack started to show confidence and picked up the momentum that was, five years later, to culminate in their World Cup win in Australia.
During my time with England, we had some success against northern hemisphere opposition too, but we lost out on two Grand Slams at the last hurdle. The first was against Wales in early 1999, where I had to forfeit an anticipated bonus payout of £18 000 because of a linesman’s decision. Alan Lewis put his flag out because of a tackle on Colin Charvis that was deemed too high. It was actually a great hit, I might add. Scott Gibbs launched off the next line-out and went right through Tim Rodber, who had been the man penalised.
It was the team’s fault, though, and not the linesman’s, that we weren’t able to win. We just couldn’t get further than seven points ahead during the long periods when we were leading and arrogantly turned down opportunities to kick for posts. The lesson learnt was to avoid relying too much on outcome – and never to rely on bonus money.
Woodward sometimes did get ahead of himself. He had great confidence and self-belief, and before that game he had arranged for the Petersham Hotel to prepare a post-match dinner party where place mats with the words ‘Grand Slam Champions’ printed on them would be part of the table setting. Big mistake.
At that stage the Millennium Stadium was being built in preparation for the 1999 Rugby World Cup, to be hosted by Wales, so we played the game against Wales at Wembley. It was a great experience because of all the FA Cup finals I had watched on television, but unfortunately I also experienced the Celtic hatred for the English for the first time. And it wouldn’t be the last.
I was dressed in my England team tracksuit and about to head into the tunnel for the half-time speech, when I was spat at by a Welshman. I wanted to round on him and say, ‘Hey, I am not an Englishman, I am a New Zealander!’
The second Grand Slam opportunity we lost was to Scotland, the following year. Before that game we were training at the Edinburgh University grounds and had just completed our last session before the match. Woodward had become very paranoid by then and was always stressed by security issues. Some of us laughed it off, but that day we wondered if maybe he was right to be paranoid after all.
We had three hookers in the side at that time, who all happened, ironically, to be together at the same time. As we were coming off the field, all of a sudden this cameraman comes around the corner. He had three women with him. They asked if they could have a photo taken with the three hookers and they agreed to pose, but then the girls pulled up their jackets to expose their boobs.
Phil Greening cheekily aimed his tongue towards a nipple before he became aware that it was a media set-up. It all happened so fast. We had been ambushed by the British tabloid press.
Woodward chased after the cameraman and tackled him into a hedge. But, legally speaking, there was nothing he could do to confiscate the photos. So the pictures broke as a big press story that week and it only served to make Woody even more suspicious of the media. In his mind, England had been deliberately set up by the Scots before that game to unsettle us. They won 19-13.
Serious though it was, some of us found the whole saga uproariously funny, particularly because it was three hookers who had been photographed with three ‘hookers’.
By that stage of my England coaching career, I had broken ties with Sale and moved to Wasps. It had started off well for me at Sale, but at every club there is a pre-existing union and culture, and you ignore it at your peril.
Fran Cotton and Steve Smith ran Sale, and Smith was good mates with Steve Diamond, who is now director at Sale but, at that stage, was still playing in the team. For all Diamond’s faults, he was a great fighter and survivor, and it was fantastic playing rugby with him. But he was not an exceptional rugby player and was much better as a wheeler–dealer businessman. He survived as a player only because of the pre-existing union.
There came a time, though, when I knew he could not be in the squad that I was building for the future. That unsettled him because his rugby profile helped his business networking. Suddenly, there were allegations that my training regime was too tough, and it certainly wasn’t to be the last time I was to hear that accusation.
Eventually, because of the Diamond situation, and also perhaps because my England commitments were compromising the time I could devote to the club, my relationship with Steve Smith and the still unknown consortium company became too frayed for me to continue.
Simon Cohen, who is now CEO at Leicester, was my lawyer and I called him in to deal with the Sale consortium, who said they wanted to pay me out. From there we negotiated a severance that was in my bank account within 14 days.
I had enjoyed my time at Sale but I wasn’t too heart-sore about the break-up, because I had the England job to fall back on. As soon as I had negotiated the severance, I walked onto the training field and let the assistant coach, Jim Mallinder, a former Sale captain who is now Northampton head coach, know that the team was his.
It didn’t take long for another job to land in my lap. I was sitting at home in Manchester reflecting on my career at Sale when I got a call from Wasps director of rugby, Nigel Melville, who asked me if I would like to come to them, as Lawrence Dallaglio wanted to work with me. Moving to London would have the advantage of my being closer to the England training venue, and Sudbury, the Wasps ground in Middlesex, was just a few miles outside of London, so I knew it made sense.
It wasn’t always plain sailing at England either, and I found myself becoming increasingly drawn in as a mediator, as the players felt that Woodward was becoming too distant. This despite the fact that the players’ manual, which outlined all the team protocols, was clear and specific, if a bit wordy – you needed a suitcase in which to carry it around.
England played against Australia in June 1999 in Sydney in the old, traditional England jersey, while Australia played in the Cambridge colours. Special dinners had been organised featuring past captains, and it was quite an occasion. This coincided with the time that Woody was starting to introduce technology as a way of communicating with the players. Initially, it was a disaster.
We stayed on North Stradboke Island, near Brisbane, in the first part of the build-up, but when we moved to Manly later in the week and Woody named the team by sending players emails, I had guys knocking my door down.
‘What is this all about? Where is the personalisation?’ they were asking. And I sympathised with them. In fairness, I think Woody was intending to use IT eventually to send qualitative feedback on performance, but when it came to announcing the team by email, I couldn’t agree with it.
So I ended up having to engage with the players on some of the management issues to deflect them off Woody. I also had to deal with players’ personal issues and keep them away from the coach, because he wasn’t particularly interested in them.
That was all part of my job as a member of middle-management: I had to deflect the day-to-day problems from Woody so that he could remain free to think of strategies that would lead us towards fulfilling our vision. Head coaches today are only as good as their middle-management. As soon as the players’ union finds a weakness or a crack, they exploit it.
Woodward did have the foresight, though, to anticipate the future role that computer technology would play in team and player management. The management was getting bigger and bigger all the time as the roles became more specialised. Roger Uttley, who had been England manager for a while, was replaced and Woody brought in an organisational leadership consultant who went around the world on a yacht, Humphrey Walters.
Woodward’s approach was to compartmentalise everything, but as the management group got bigger, the players, in my view, became more confused by the fragmentation of the message, at least in the initial stages. So many different consultants were being appointed, by the time I left England after the Six Nations in 2000, management consisted of 26 members.