In late October 2001, I had been given the privilege of guiding the All Blacks to the global rugby showpiece event, and now it was the culmination of those two years: the World Cup had arrived.
I knew we would have to win the tournament, but even that might not be enough for me to remain as coach, given the enmity shown to me by the New Zealand rugby administration.
I was concentrating on the here and now. The fact that New Zealand hadn’t won the World Cup since 1987 and the expectation from the nation to break that drought didn’t place any extra weight on my shoulders. It was not something I dwelt on. I was just excited to be there and to be part of it. Failure was not something I thought about, possibly because of the enormous amount of self-belief we had. We might have lost to England earlier in the year, but there had been mitigating circumstances, and we had developed our attacking game since then.
I didn’t really believe we had too much to fear from either Australia or South Africa, both of whom we had beaten quite easily during the Tri-Nations season. I believed we had made the right selections, and the team had been prepared as well as they could be. It would just be a question, then, of controlling the variables, which is true of any coach of any team at any World Cup.
I knew we would need a bit of luck, though, and, unfortunately, some of our lead players had injuries. Tana Umaga was injured in our first game of the tournament, which was a setback, and Justin Marshall also struggled a bit. Jerry Collins carried a rib injury in the last weeks of the tournament.
We played Italy first and won 70-7. To be honest, the pool games are all a bit of a blur to me now. The problem with the World Cup is that it only really gets going in the play-offs; most of the early games are too easy for the top teams. Apart from the issue of Umaga’s injury, my main recollection of that opening game was of Brad Thorn’s try, which was scored from about 30 metres out.
When Tana went down and was ruled out until the closing stages of the tournament, I never thought to myself that we were now in trouble. I felt for the player, but I was still confident we had the squad to win the tournament. I was also aware that I needed to ensure the players didn’t become too anxious about having lost a teammate. All the same, Tana was a world-class player, so it goes without saying that his absence had an impact on both team morale and performance.
We played Canada next and won 68-6. We had been drawn in a poor-quality pool, and I am convinced that it did not help our cause. Both those games were in Melbourne, and then we thumped Tonga in Brisbane 91-7 before we played Wales in Sydney and wiped them 53-37. I struggle to remember those games in detail. Later, when I went to the 2007 World Cup as a spectator, I only bothered watching the games from the quarter-finals onwards. Of course, as a New Zealander, that didn’t turn out to be a smart move …
So we won our opening games by 63 points, 62 points, then 84 and 16. There was no real opposition and no tightly contested game against a tough opposing side to test us properly before the play-offs.
One of the main things we had focused on during our planning was the short turnaround between the last pool game and the quarter-final, which was against the Springboks. I can’t say we were that convinced that the Boks would be there, as we suspected they might beat England in their pool game and come top in their group. Either way, though, we knew that the quarter-final would be a physical game against tough opponents.
We had already beaten the Boks twice that year, so we went into the quarter-final with confidence, but I must admit that, during the captain’s run on a soccer field in Melbourne somewhere, it suddenly struck me. ‘Here we go,’ I said to myself. ‘The knockout stages have arrived.’ I was standing in the dead-ball area when Reuben Thorne said, ‘Coach, you look like you realise this is the time to deliver.’ And we did, beating the Boks 29-9. We played really well and were never in any danger of losing that match.
The semi-final, against Australia, was in Sydney, but we went back to Melbourne to prepare for it. Some critics thought we should have stayed in Sydney and enjoyed the vibe there. In retrospect, I don’t think we got our recovery strategies right, and we didn’t train at the high intensity that we should have. We should probably have done at least one high-intensity training session.
The big decision before the semi-final revolved around Tana Umaga and whether he was fit to play or not. A decision had to be made. The team doctor, John Mayhew, ruled him to be fit. But because a player is deemed to have recovered from an injury does not mean he is ready to play in a high-pressure game. It was my judgement call to leave Tana out and stick with Leon MacDonald, who had played in our good win over the Boks. Leaving out Tana was one of the things that I would be lynched for by the media and public afterwards.
People ask me what the pressure was like in the build-up to the semi-final, but I am not sure I felt it that badly. I had belief in the team, and even during the match, when things weren’t going for us, I still believed that, given our ability to score at any stage, we would break the game open.
We were behind 0-13 after just 24 minutes – Stirling Mortlock scored Australia’s try by intercepting an attempted cut-out pass from Carlos Spencer and running 80 metres to score. That was cruel fate, but I still had confidence we would come back at them.
Even with just five minutes to go, when the odds were stacked against us and we were trailing by 12 points – and just before George Gregan let us know we had four years of purgatory to look forward to – I was still convinced we would win. Alas, when the final whistle blew, it showed that the Wallabies had won 22-10. We’d been denied our chances, such as when Mils Muliaina was judged to have dropped the ball over the line – but the undeniable fact remained: we had lost the game and were out of the World Cup.
I am not the sort of person who worries about consequences beforehand. I accept responsibility and understand accountability, and my mandate was to win every game. I was ready for that expectation. What I wasn’t ready for was what failure would expose me to and how I was mentally going to deal with it. Those two things were unknown factors to me.
Obviously, after the loss I did some soul-searching about some of my decisions. Should I have held back the Tri-system until later, so that Eddie Jones would have had less opportunity to figure out our strategy? I have said already that if I had the time again, I would do it differently. But our pool games were against weak opposition, so I am not sure we could have started implementing our strategy during the World Cup and then gone into the play-offs with total confidence in the system.
Should I have retained some of the senior players with whom I had dispensed to give experience to the group? I remain convinced that they could not have given me what I needed and that their presence would not have improved our chances. That was a decision I took based on my convictions about their playing performances and, in some cases, what I knew about their physical condition.
We had won the Tri-Nations convincingly and had, after many years, recaptured the Bledisloe Cup, so we had shown in the build-up to the World Cup that we were a capable team. We went to Australia with confidence, and in the end we came up short in one game, where there was an intercept try against us, and a game where I didn’t feel the refereeing was that great either.
That’s life, and it is something anyone who coaches a team in the knock-out phase of any competition has to accept. But I honestly hadn’t thought about the personal consequences of failure, and the issue was that I wasn’t ready to deal with the aftermath of that defeat.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to cope with the same situation Rudolf Straeuli had to face the previous week. At least I didn’t bump into Eddie Jones in the lift, knowing he was staying on at the World Cup while I was on my way home.
Perhaps I should rephrase that – I wasn’t going home just yet, for what still awaited me was the most challenging rugby preparation I have ever been involved in. After the numbing experience of getting blown out of the World Cup, I had four days in which to prepare the team for the third- and fourth-place play-off game against France.
Our goal was gone, but some of us remembered the meek way in which the 1999 All Blacks had accepted their fate in a similar play-off match against the Boks in Cardiff. We didn’t want to end on a similar low note.
So, as coaches, we focused a lot on character in the build-up. I told the guys they had a choice, in that some of them might be playing in another World Cup in four years’ time and that people would be ‘watching your character’.
On the day of the game, we didn’t go through the normal preparation. Instead, we went on a picnic, and played lawn bowls and darts. We stayed together that day much longer than usual because I felt that if everyone was left alone in his room thinking about failure, it would lead to implosion.
We ended up beating France 40-13, which was a good win in the circumstances. Only, no one cares about those games.
I was dreading the post-match press conference because I knew I was going to come in for a tough time from the Kiwi media. The questions went along the lines of, ‘What do your mom and dad think, sitting in their small town, of the loss and the effect it has on New Zealanders?’
I said, of course, that they would be hurt.
Then some smart arse said, ‘The journey is over!’ They were always on about that, and I could never get my head around why people had such problems with my theme of a journey to the World Cup, which I had initiated in October 2001. I found that press conference extremely cynical. Reuben Thorne handled himself well, but the media-liaison manager, Matt McIlraith, seemed out of his depth.
It is one thing training a guy to speak more confidently to the media but another thing entirely to support him with the right expertise. McIlraith was an NZRU appointment. He is a wonderful historian of the game; Matt really loves rugby and has stats coming out of his ears. But if asked whether he had enough experience for the press-liaison job, my answer would be no. There had been a guy in the job before him, before I became coach, who had worked as media-liaison manager for some New Zealand politicians. I am not sure why he moved on from being the All Black media man, as we needed someone with that sort of experience and gravitas, because rugby is always a big issue with the New Zealand media and public.
Whereas the international press treated us with respect, the New Zealand media were cynical towards me and our relations were strained. I thought this was orchestrated, for even though I was focused on my team’s performance and did not court the media, I believe I am an easy guy to communicate with. I think a lot of that negativity was inspired by the very people who should have been backing me.
After the play-off, I went to the change room and thanked each player. Although I was presented with the bronze medal for finishing third, to this day I haven’t opened the casing. I didn’t go to the World Cup for a bronze medal.
They presented us with the medals after I had been in a meeting with Chris Moller and Jock Hobbs, the chairman of the NZRU board, to hear my fate. I knew what was coming: it was the big HR spiel, letting me know that I had to reapply for the job.
On the bus back to the hotel, the All Black tradition of ending a tour with the young guys attacking the senior guys for the backseat positions was enacted. It was fun, but there was also a noticeable sense of tension: it had been a frustrating few days for everyone.
That night I had a beer in the hotel bar and went to my room. I put down my bags and lay on my bed. And that is when the emotion hit me. Tears came to my eyes. It was the end. But I also quickly collected myself and told myself that I had to stand up and be strong.
The next morning, 19 November 2003, the last All Black I shook hands with was Greg Somerville, or maybe it was Reuben Thorne. Whoever it was, I thanked him for his contribution. I haven’t seen some of those guys since that day. That is the harsh reality of professional sport.
You should always be ready to forgive people, but if there is one thing I will never forgive Chris Moller for, it was the media conference they held in Australia the next day. I was flying back to New Zealand and the least Moller could have done was to have informed me that a conference had been planned. I should have been there regardless of the outcome.
I would have been ready to face the music then. With 24 hours to reflect on things, you get a clearer picture and can state your case more coherently. But instead of being able to put my case forward, I was on a plane crossing the Tasman Sea. I was heading for Wellington as opposed to Auckland, as you can fly from Wellington to Hamilton, whereas you can only travel from Auckland to Hamilton by road. I wasn’t in the mood for a drive. I think I also wanted to give myself time to think about things.
I really didn’t want any of the media to meet me and had hoped Matt McIlraith would keep mum about where we were due to land. But, as the plane hit the tarmac at Wellington Airport, I started to feel anxious. I turned to Matt and asked, ‘You haven’t set me up, have you?’ If I was going to be talking to the media, at least I wanted to be prepared for it. Matt told me that he hadn’t informed the NZRU where we were landing, but someone must have tipped them off.
As I walked through the arrivals terminal, it was clear that it was full on. It felt like the entire New Zealand media corps was there to meet me.
It was then that my life changed. During the few moments it took me to push the trolley through customs and into the awaiting throng, I changed as a person. There were big mikes being thrust in my face. I resolved to just keep moving.
‘So, Mr Mitchell, what do you think of Chris Moller and Jock Hobbs’s comments?’
‘Huh, what comments?’
I wasn’t aware that a press conference had taken place in Australia while I was in the air or that Moller and Hobbs had told the world that I had to reapply for my job, which pretty much seemed to imply that my days as the All Black coach were numbered.
I told the media people that I wasn’t aware of what had been said. The response from the press was that they had said this and that – but it wasn’t clear to me.
‘Have you got a comment?’ I was asked.
How could I have a comment when I didn’t know what had been said? So I said that I had nothing to say. The media can be very unrelenting, and sometimes all sense of reasonableness seems to fly out the window, so they kept on pressing. They continued to ask me for a comment. I suppose I came out with some bad replies, but I honestly gave it my best shot under the circumstances.
Then the vitriolic stuff: I was told I had treated the All Blacks who had been left out of the side badly. So, the matter about having left Christian Cullen, Jeff Wilson and Taine Randell behind resurfaced and became an issue all over again. ‘Look, I was just doing my job,’ I said.
I was being pushed and prodded by the media as I queued for my domestic flight to Hamilton. The members of the public who were in my vicinity were decent and tried to shield me and demanded of the reporters that they leave me alone. They were obviously also disappointed we had lost the World Cup, but clearly had a sense of perspective. I was a human being. Sure, maybe I had made some mistakes but, at the end of the day, I deserved to be treated with respect.
When I got home, I watched the World Cup final on television. I still had feelings for England after having been involved with them for so long and I wanted them to succeed. It crossed my mind while I watched the game that the same England team and management had endured a similar experience in 1999 to the one I was going through now, when Jannie de Beer had knocked them out with his five drop goals.
Then my fighting side came out, and my stubbornness: ‘Right, you said to me I have to reapply,’ I thought to myself. ‘So that is what I will do.’ I looked at myself in the mirror: ‘John Mitchell, you could walk away with dignity, or you could reapply for your job. There is only a small chance you could succeed, but what are you made of?’
Dallas Fisher, who was then on the Chiefs board and is now their chairman, had gone through a bad business experience but had subsequently become highly successful. Being a Waikato boy himself, he liked my fighting spirit. He asked me to meet him. With $35 000 of my own money we prepared an 80-page report on my tenure, where it had gone wrong, where it had succeeded and what I envisaged needed to be changed. We were extremely thorough and left no stone unturned. I wanted to put my side of the story across.
Like I said, I knew I was gone, but I resolved that I needed to show commitment to the team and the organisation. ‘I am a committed bloke and I’ve got to show dignity in the situation,’ I said to myself. ‘And if I handle this well,’ I thought, ‘there could be light at the end of the tunnel. It isn’t what I should anticipate, but who knows?’
There had been so much unpleasantness and a rumour campaign had continued unabated during the World Cup. It was all garbage, but I felt I needed to front up to the bollocks that was being spoken and give it to them honestly. Why should I let someone get away with that, and why couldn’t they just say to my face, ‘You’re not good enough’ or ‘We don’t have money to pay you’ rather than introducing all that other nonsense?
Dallas and the team he appointed to drive my re-application campaign were excellent, but I was the one who had to endure the irritating experiences one would associate with the hype at the time, such as when I went to the gym and a cameraman jumped out at me. I was filmed in a Nike vest and shorts, and of course the All Black sponsors are Adidas, although this happened in the transition period after the World Cup. Then a New Zealand Herald features journalist visited me. I am not sure why I let her into my house, but I really opened up to her. When the story came out, however, there was a caricature of me with devil’s horns on my head and references to me living in low-income housing.
Another journalist, John Matheson of the Sunday News, who had always been a vehement critic, also came knocking on my door asking for an interview, and later even had the cheek to ask if he could write my book.
I became suspicious of people during that time. It was difficult to decide who was a friend and who was out to get me in some way. I had to be careful with whom I associated. Fortunately, I had a good circle of friends who were very supportive.
As there hadn’t been too many Waikato coaches taking charge of the All Blacks, my own community was generally very respectful. I could go and watch Daryl play cricket and the people around would respect my space. It was only when I travelled to other provinces that I sensed the tribalism.
Those were tough times for me, but I was very clear about one thing: although I had seen many All Black coaches whacked down and not be able to get back up again, I resolved that I was going to continue working as a coach. I had no doubt about it: I was too young to let what had happened end my coaching career.
To hear my application, the NZRU asked me to go to Wellington for three days. The first day was the review, and I gave them the 80-page report I had prepared. They seemed eager for me to get through it as quickly as possible. By the end of the day, I wasn’t finished and they asked me if I felt we needed to carry on with it into the second day, as that had been set aside for the application process.
But I felt it was important for them to hear my report-back from the World Cup. If nothing else, hearing it might at least minimise the chance of mistakes being repeated. I wasn’t fooling myself, though: I knew Steve Tew had met with Graham Henry, the former Auckland, Wales, and British & Irish Lions coach, after the Bledisloe Cup game earlier in the year and I was pretty sure he would be the favourite for the job.
Before we finished the review and went into the application process, I warned Chris Moller and some of the other NZRU people that they needed to stop their rumour campaign. ‘I have an affidavit here,’ I warned them. During the Rugby World Cup, I had had a phone call from Moller asking me if I was okay with my wife not being with me at the tournament. I had said I was fine with that – after all, I had two young kids at school. But I’d thought at the time that it was an extremely strange question. Only afterwards did I figure out what it was all about.
Rumours had been doing the rounds that I had had a sexual relationship with the NZRU personal assistant assigned to the All Black team, who had travelled with us to the World Cup. I told them they had to stop their insinuations or I would sue them for defamation. They immediately asked if we could adjourn for an hour, so my warning must have rocked them. They had been trying to derail me.
What had actually happened was that the PA, Bridget Hickman, had broken the team protocol related to drinking – that was all. The rules about drinking applied to both the staff and the players. We were strict about it. That, and her workload, had forced her to go home early from Melbourne. When her job was ‘restructured’, she also threatened the NZRU with legal action. People often ask me what happened there. I can tell you that nothing happened. It was all complete rubbish. It was probably a figment of the NZRU’s imagination that later just grew legs and they felt they could use it in their campaign against me. The situation was blown out of all proportion because the perception it created helped the NZRU with their exit strategy.
So, if there are people who bought this book in the hope that it would be a kiss and tell – my humblest apologies. There can’t be any telling when there has been no kissing.
After the adjournment, we reconvened. I finished off the review and started the application process. I sensed the NZRU resented me for doing that. I wanted a controlled application, but they caught me off guard a bit by turning it around and asking me questions, such as what I would do if an attack was forming in a certain direction on the pitch. I’d been the All Black coach for two years, so surely they knew what I could or couldn’t do as a coach?
The third day involved meeting the board. Why did I put myself through the pain of going through such a process after I had taken the All Blacks to a World Cup final and when, in my mind, I knew I had little chance of success anyway? My rationale was that I wanted to show that I was committed, professional and that I believed in the player group, which the players knew. I also wanted to make it clear that if the decision didn’t go my way, I would still pass on useful information.
Just as I will always remember where I was when I first heard of my selection as an All Black, I will also never forget where I was when I heard I had been dropped as All Black coach. I’d returned from Australia and the World Cup on 19 November, and it was exactly one month later, six days before Christmas, that the news came.
It was the first day of the cricket Test in Hamilton between New Zealand and Pakistan, and I had just parked my car at my mate’s sports shop, near the cricket stadium, when I got a call from Jock Hobbs.
‘We have made a decision as a board to go for Graham Henry as the All Black coach for the next four years,’ he said.
I was on my way into Trust Bank Park to watch the cricket when it was announced over the loudspeaker in the stadium that Graham Henry had been appointed as the new All Black coach. That is how big rugby is in New Zealand – the news had gone public in the time that it took me to walk from my car to the stadium.
The people inside the cricket stadium were respectful. It’s not that anyone was trying to console me or said that I had been unlucky or anything like that, but, then, no one gave me a hard time either. Being a lover of sport probably held me in good stead in public.
A top lawyer approached me soon afterwards and told me I might have a case against the NZRU – after all, I did have a win record of 86 per cent. I told him I would prefer not to go there. It just would have been nice for the NZRU to have shown the same mature attitude towards me as they would towards Graham Henry when he went through a similar experience four years later.
Being dropped wasn’t the end of the world for me. In fact, the whole affair appeared to have more of an impact on my family than on me at the time of the announcement. Fortunately Kay was very good at keeping Daryl and Ciara grounded and allowing them to get on with a normal life and, in many ways, what the family went through then has stood them in good stead, as they are aware of the pitfalls in both sport and life. It helped them be prepared for any eventuality.
Nevertheless, even if you have resolved to move on from something like that, it is hard to do so completely. It felt that whatever I read always somehow referred to the All Blacks’ World Cup disaster, and my role in their defeat. It is as if you are constantly being told to eat shit; it is very hard to escape from that. Even when the All Blacks are playing under a new coach who is also feeling the pressure, the hurt stays with you.
The experience made me want to prove to people that I could win again and, in retrospect, that had an impact on the coaching jobs that followed, in the sense that at the Western Force and, later, at the Lions, I might have tried to chase success too quickly. Whereas I had previously shown patience and was prepared to take time to develop a team, in those jobs I may have been lacking in patience.
I don’t agree with everything people have said about me, but if I look at myself closely, I realise I became too desperate to win trophies when the quality and depth of the player groups at those franchises actually required that I had to play a developmental role.
I also went through a period where I was very hard on myself. I resolved that I had to take responsibility for not winning the World Cup and, as a consequence, the softer side of me went missing for a while, as did an element of genuineness. I felt as if I was constantly being watched and judged. It was as if everywhere I went I was seen as a failure.
The hurt and the feeling of failure lasted for exactly four years – right up until that day I watched England play Australia in Marseilles in the 2007 World Cup quarter-final. I had stopped at a restaurant on the way back to Nice to watch New Zealand play France.
In that game, the All Blacks seemed in control in some respects but not in others, and they never got away from France. When the French won, it felt as if a great weight had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders. My phone didn’t stop ringing after that. I received tons of calls and emails, so my friends had obviously felt the same hurt as I had for those four years. I couldn’t get over the response.
It is sad to admit that you are able to feel a little better because of someone else’s failure. In fact, it’s ridiculous, to be fair, as was the hurt I had been feeling for those four years. It was only one intercepted pass that had let us down in 2003, after all. But the realisation that what had happened to me could happen to someone else did make me feel better.
In Nice, four long years after the 2003 World Cup defeat, I could finally put into perspective what I had gone through. It made me realise that I had to get some balance back into my life and that I shouldn’t continue to expend so much emotional energy on one thing.
Should I have let go earlier? Did I have the skills to let it go earlier? I don’t think anything prepares you to be the All Black coach. The older you are and the more you experience, the wiser you get, but even if I had been 50 when I got the job, I don’t think I would have been fully prepared. It is probably the same for the Springbok coaching position too.
Maybe I was too hard on myself, but it’s difficult not to be when you think the whole country is on your back. I also really believed we could win the 2003 World Cup. And it was a genuine belief – it wasn’t just me plucking the idea out of the sky.