Читать книгу Matt Dawson: Nine Lives - Matt Dawson - Страница 11

Sitting on the sodden turf at Newlands, it was hard to believe I was back at the scene of my greatest moment in rugby. The blindside break, the dummy pass, the try that had decided the first Test for the Lions against South Africa a year earlier seemed a lifetime away. England had just lost to the Springboks, our seventh defeat in seven matches on what will forever be remembered as the Tour from Hell. Much had changed since my last time in Cape Town. Then I hadn’t been able to get into the England side; now I was captain of my country.

The call had come two months earlier as I walked my springer spaniel, Freddie, in the fields around Tim Rodber’s home just south of Northampton. My mobile phone rang and I immediately recognized the voice. Clive Woodward wanted to know if I would meet him the following day at the Compleat Angler, a hotel on the banks of the Thames in Marlow, a couple of miles from my parents’ home. He wouldn’t say why. Weeks earlier he had threatened to drop me and my Northampton team-mates from his squad in response to Saints’ owner Keith Barwell withdrawing us from England tour duty, claiming the summer trip to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa was a ‘tour too far’. My England career might have been over there and then had not Ian McGeechan saved the day by persuading Keith to back down.

Clive, who had succeeded Jack Rowell as coach the previous autumn, had picked me for the last two games of England’s 1998 Five Nations campaign, but even so, after what had gone before, making the tour squad rather than leading it was my only thought. Then, as we sat sipping coffee looking out over Marlow Weir, Clive popped the question: would I captain the tour?

Blimey, I thought. Of course I will.

There is no greater honour in all of rugby. It makes no difference what team you’ve got or who you’re playing. I believed that then and I still believed it as evening turned to night on the southern tip of Africa and we could at last bring the curtain down on a tour which none of us who experienced it shall ever forget.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t recognized the potential for a disastrous trip from the moment Clive and I went our separate ways that day on the riverbank. England faced an itinerary of four Tests in five weeks over three different Continents, and I had charge of a squad containing 20 uncapped players as a result of a mass withdrawal by many of the senior players. Reaction to this came thick and fast from Australia, our first port of call. Dick McGruther, chairman of the Australian Rugby Union, described the England tour party as ‘probably the most under-equipped group of Englishmen to be sent to Australia since the First Fleet’ (referring to the 11 ships that sailed from Portsmouth in 1787 bearing the first European settlers, mostly convicts). He accused the RFU of treating the southern hemisphere with contempt, saying that England had broken its word to send its best team. Australia was insulted, McGruther maintained, by what he described as the ‘biggest sell-out since Gallipoli’, and he added, ‘I think England will have their own fatal landings in Australia and New Zealand over the next few weeks.’ He then invited all Australians to come and enjoy a ‘Pommie thrashing’.

His inference was clear: that England’s missing stars were not injured but had instead been persuaded not to tour by their clubs, who were in dispute with the Union over who controlled what in English rugby. I won’t have that. There were a lot of England players who had played a lot of rugby through 1997 and 1998 and had picked up niggles which, had they played an extra summer, would have turned into chronic injuries. I could fully understand what they were doing by pulling out; I was more interested to know who had organized this type of tour after a Lions year. Where was the thought for the players? I, too, had thought of pulling out because we were fast approaching World Cup year and I wanted above all to be right for that. It seemed that nobody was thinking about what was best for the players; it was all about what was best for the clubs, the RFU and England. I didn’t have a problem with being a little bit selfish in that respect. It came down to the question of whether the benefits of a summer of rest would outweigh the loss, in the short term at least, of my England shirt.

Four years later I would opt out. I spoke to Clive and Wayne Smith at Northampton and said I felt I needed to rest rather than go to Argentina. Clive made the call for me not to go, but I don’t think I would have done so anyway because my body was telling me I had to have some time off, away from rugby. I did lose my shirt, England won the Test match and everyone was singing and dancing about my replacement, Andy Gomarsall. But I swallowed it and got on with it, and I believe my form the following season vindicated my decision.

But in the summer of 1998 I was swayed by the offer of the captaincy. It was an opportunity I could not refuse, an honour I would never turn down. For all I knew it would not come my way again. It was a priceless chance to enhance my rugby education, and, boy, during those five weeks did I learn things.

On arrival Down Under in late May it was impossible not to take McGruther’s insults personally, even if his words were aimed at the RFU rather than us directly. We quickly became hacked off with reading the papers because everyone seemed to be laughing at us, but I believed we could use it to our advantage and show them that we were not a second or even a third team. Nobody had given England a chance in the World Cup Sevens in 1993; no one had given the 1997 Lions a chance either. We had won both. So why not again?

Actually, there were a number of reasons why not, not the least of which was that only six of the tour party – me, Austin Healey, Ben Clarke, Graham Rowntree, Garath Archer and Steve Ojomoh – had more than 10 England caps to their name. The average across the 37-man party was less than four, and there were 20 debutants – 10 in the backs and 10 in the forwards. But I had to stay positive, I had to keep faith, even if I knew in my heart of hearts that we were on a hiding to nothing.

On the day we departed I wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph in which I remarked that ‘there is a great depth of talent in English rugby. What we may currently lack in experience we make up for in enthusiasm and raw skill. Every player is keen to prove himself.’ That was fairly true. Some of that squad are not only still playing for England but playing bloody well for England, Jonny Wilkinson, Josh Lewsey, Phil Vickery, Lewis Moody and Danny Grewcock among them. It was unrefined talent at that point, very unrefined. We were one or two players short of giving the back line the necessary experience required, but, despite the absence of Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio, Jason Leonard, Richard Hill and Tim Rodber, the forwards were definitely competitive. In the first and second Tests against New Zealand later in June we matched them up front for more than half the game, and at some stages we were better. The first half in Dunedin, for example, we were on fire, even after Danny had been sent off. Likewise, up until half-time in Auckland our forwards obliterated the All Blacks.

Ultimately, however, the tour will not be remembered for those cameo performances, rather for the record defeats we suffered at the hands of Australia and New Zealand, and for the pledge from Clive that never again would England plumb such depths. It was straight after the tour that the gloves came off. Clive told us straight that we had to stand up for ourselves. ‘The players have to be their own people now,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph. ‘I hate it when people say the players are the meat in the sandwich, stuck between club and country. That’s crap. They’re all big boys, all over 18. They have to stand up and be counted.’

This was not an off-the-cuff remark. Right at the start of the tour he had batted the ball into our court, saying that it was up to us to be fit for England. He would no longer pick on reputation. Unfortunately, his outburst coincided with me aggravating a knee injury, having to pull out of the Test match against the Wallabies in Brisbane on 6 June, and having to pass the armband over to Tony Diprose.

I’d picked up the injury in a freak diving accident during a pre-tour break with Austin Healey in Lanzarote. Austin had this ability to bounce unbelievably high on the springboard and then, like a trampoliner, kill the bounce on landing by bending his knees. I gave it a go, but as I landed my knee turned out and I tweaked it. I cursed him, but there was nothing new in that. I fully expected it to be fine, but 48 hours before kick-off I had to concede that it wasn’t strong enough to get through an international game.

The upshot was that I spent the match in the BBC Five Live commentary booth at the Suncorp Stadium, trying to find words to describe a 76–0 defeat. I had to analyse 11 Australian tries, which by the end was proving painful. I’m sure the listeners at home could sense my tone. John Mitchell, our forwards coach, had said beforehand that the team was ‘shit scared … it’s the fear of being wiped out which motivates us’. And wiped out we were by the future World Cup winners, even if we didn’t concede a try for more than half an hour. I could hear the Aussie commentators absolutely digging it in and there was nothing I could do about it. It became so embarrassing that the Aussie crowd started leaving long before the match was over. But we couldn’t go home. There was nowhere to hide. It was an horrendous day and a harsh, if valuable, lesson to learn.

I didn’t say it then, but sometimes you need experiences like that. Those who were in the side and got severely shown up – and there were a few of those – realized they weren’t up to it and needed to go away and do some work. It made everyone open their eyes, because there was a feeling among some that they were young and as good as their potential hinted they could one day become. I went into the dressing room afterwards and it was a shocking scene. As tour captain it was just a matter of trying to raise heads, pick up the pieces and point out that we were in for a torrid month and that it was going to be a severe test of character. ‘Some of you are going to come through and some of you are not,’ I told the boys. ‘Where do you want to be?’ I couldn’t come on any stronger than that because it was the first match of the tour and I knew it wasn’t going to get any easier. What hurt most of all was that all the press, the outrageous predictions and comparisons with Gallipoli, had come true. We needed to stick together, the whole squad, cop the flak and try to move on.

There was a difference in opinion as to the best way to do that. Clive, who admitted he got it wrong in selection and that he should have injected more experience into the team, packed us off to Surfer’s Paradise the following day, saying, ‘It’s not a question of being soft, it’s a question of doing the right thing. The players need a break.’ Mitch had a different take on it. He said that had he had his way the squad would have spent the day running round the paddock hitting tackle bags and being reminded of who they were representing. Sports medicine, he called it. He added that had he played in that match he would have been indoors hiding, not sunbathing on a beach. Most forwards and backs coaches don’t see eye to eye, to be honest, but it was a bit naughty of Mitch to talk out of school – if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black! While I agree with him that humiliation is not easy to accept, the fact is that some players had given their all. It wasn’t good enough, but they had still given everything.

From that point on we pretty much shut ourselves away from the papers, as every Tom, Dick, Sheila and Bruce had something to say about us. England are everyone’s favourite enemy so there was no shortage of people to rub our noses in it. There were people all over the world absolutely loving it. But you’ve got to be bigger than that. It was humiliating, yet we took it on the chin, learned the lessons and came back better for the chastening experience. In fact, it turned out to be a huge turning point in England’s development; never again will there be such a weak England side. We have now developed from having one competitive fifteen to the point where England’s third XV would probably be better than the team that played against Australia that day.

A week later we were in New Zealand, the Land of the Long White Cloud and, potentially, even longer nightmare, especially when first up, in rain-lashed Hamilton, was a New Zealand A team coached by Graham Henry and featuring one J. Lomu. But we really got stuck into them and restricted them to an 18–10 win. I wouldn’t say it was a moral victory for us, but it was definitely an improvement. And that’s the path we needed to follow. The pressure on us all was immense as the public and media were waiting for us to fall flat on our faces in the mud. To defend as we did deserved credit, and the forwards turned in an heroic performance in horrendous conditions. The Gloucester boys, who made up five of the pack, felt right at home. I was proud of the grit and determination shown by the team. ‘We can progress with this type of display,’ I told them afterwards.

To then ship 50 points against the New Zealand Academy team three days later in Invercargill was devastating. It had quickly become clear which players were going to be involved in the Test team and which were not. In fact, the wheat was being separated from the chaff at an alarming rate. Some of the boys found it very hard, not just in terms of the physical pounding on the pitch but the relentlessness of playing and living rugby in a country where the game is king. With hindsight, the Academy fielded a pretty fair team: Daryl Gibson at full-back, Bruce Reihana and Doug Howlett on the wings, Pieta Alatini at centre, Byron Kelleher at scrum-half, and up front more future All Blacks in Greg Feek, Kees Meeuws and Reuben Thorne. By contrast, England’s team contained few players who would go on to have international futures. There’s the story.

It may seem strange, but even at this low point no parallels can be drawn with the 2001 Lions in terms of failing squad morale. Talk to the boys of ‘98 who are still in the England squad and they will tell you it was one of the best tours they have ever been on. We had a magic time. The initial part in Australia wasn’t too hot, but in New Zealand we really gave it our all. Mitch did get stuck into us and Phil Larder made us do some mindless tackling drills, but we worked hard and played hard.

By the time we arrived in Dunedin for the first Test on 20 June I could sense which of the players were not up to it and which were resigned to being a little bit out of their depth. Yet, as I said, the other side of the coin was that people were really rising to the challenge. For the weekend games, one forward after another was saying, ‘I might not be a Lawrence Dallaglio or a Martin Johnson, but I’m going to give it my all.’ To do that going backwards is proof positive that attitude was not a problem.

As captain, I had to decide how best to spend my time. Should I spend it encouraging individuals who were not going to be making an impact on the team in the very short term, or should I concentrate on the top 25 players and really build competition for places? It was a difficult balance to strike. For the most part I played a pastoral role, picking people up, lifting heads, boosting confidence. But there were some players we needed to get right on board because they were going to be an integral part of the Test team. Austin Healey, for instance, will go down as one of England’s great players, but at the time he wasn’t performing and he needed bringing on board.

We lost that opening Test to New Zealand by a record score and margin, but the 64–22 scoreline doesn’t begin to reflect the way we played. The forwards were nothing short of heroic, especially after Danny Grewcock was sent off on the half-hour, supposedly for kicking hooker Anton Oliver. Danny’s dismissal was significant, as were the double standards preached by All Blacks coach John Hart, which sickened me. On the one hand, Danny got his marching orders for an alleged kicking offence for which there was no clear television evidence; on the other, All Black lock Ian Jones escaped punishment for blatantly stamping on the face of Graham Rowntree at a ruck, his studs getting caught in Wiggy’s headguard as he tried to withdraw his boot. At the dinner afterwards I made a speech which went down like a lead balloon. I said I thought it was fairly poor that New Zealanders were going on at us about discipline. It was unfortunate that Danny had been sent off, I continued, before adding, ‘Unfortunately, there should have been another second row sent off, shouldn’t there?’

I don’t retract that remark because the situation was farcical – as Mick Cleary put it in the Daily Telegraph, a ‘staggering betrayal of fair play’. Playing in New Zealand is like being a visiting team at Old Trafford. You never get a decision in the Manchester United box, but if Ruud Van Nistelrooy goes down you know he’s more than likely to get a penalty. There seems to be an angelic aura around the All Blacks, one that allows them to get away with committing the same offences again and again without getting penalized. It is so frustrating for the teams playing them. Everyone in New Zealand thinks that England players slow the game and wind scrums and delay passes. Try using the other eye.

The following day a disciplinary committee – two New Zealanders and an Australian – handed Danny a five-week ban and rejected the allegation of foul play against Ian Jones after the referee, Wayne Erickson of Australia, was shown the video and stated that he ‘would not have imposed a penalty for what he considered to be legitimate rucking as opposed to trampling’. But Ian Jones could clearly be seen rucking on Graham’s face. How can we condone this in the rugby world? Because of the way the tour in general, and the weekend in particular, was going, we just knew that nothing was going to come of it, though that did not prevent the RFU from later lodging a formal protest.

It was an even more difficult time for Clive Woodward, as on the morning of the match he’d received news that his father had died. He was under a lot of stress at work, and then, with him on the other side of the world, comes the most appalling news about his father. To his immense credit he didn’t let it affect the side, and he left soon after the final whistle to concentrate on what he needed to do at home. Coincidentally, one of my close friends – Mick Owen, my managing director when I worked at Firm Security in Northampton – had been diagnosed with cancer only days earlier, and Clive was aware of that, so he knew I had a rough idea how he was feeling. Both of us were very sensitive with each other as we parted, wishing each other well.

By the time Clive’s plane headed skywards he was angry as well as upset over what we all saw as the childish carry-on in and around the players’ tunnel by John Hart, and his attempts to distract and intimidate the referee. Hart claims he spoke to Erickson in the tunnel at half-time only out of concern for the safety of the scrummage in light of Danny’s red card; he didn’t, he said, want to be responsible for an injury occurring. But Erickson said he considered Hart’s approach ‘inappropriate’.

The hostility did not end there. Later that evening Richard Cockerill was involved in a brawl with New Zealand hooker Norm Hewitt. In true captain’s form I knew as much about the spat as anybody else – bugger all. I only caught wind of it when we got back from a night out with some of the other All Blacks. It was described to the press as ‘play fighting’, and I only learned the full truth when Cockers brought out his autobiography, In Your Face, after the 1999 World Cup. It contained the following extract:

John Mitchell, Graham Rowntree and I go into town for a beer. We enter this bar, it must be two or three in the morning by now, and find Hewitt in there, badly pissed up. He starts slagging English rugby, saying how shitty we are. I ask him how his arse feels with all those splinters in it from sitting on the bench. Then I really get to work on him. I start doing the Haka in front of him, slapping my thighs and sticking my tongue out. He seems to take it all right, considering he’s got a reputation for being as much a handful as I am. It’s agreed we’ll all move on somewhere else and we call a cab. Hewitt gets in first, ahead of me, and as soon as I stick my head through the door to follow, he leathers me. Suddenly it all kicks off in the van, him and me going at it for all we’re worth. My eye swells up straight away and is a right mess. He’s had a good cheap shot at me but it’s far from over. When we reach our destination I’m the first out of the taxi, and I’m waiting for him this time. When he gets out I smack him one and we end up brawling again, right down the street.

Doubtless Cockers would regard this as normal Leicester activity, a bit of harmless rough and tumble. Whatever it was, it was definitely not a sign of the tour going off the rails. As I would discover with the 2001 Lions, when a tour goes off the rails you don’t go out for a beer with your mates, let alone the opposition. All right, what went on shouldn’t have, and everyone wishes it hadn’t because it was unnecessary, but Cockers, like me, had been an amateur rugby player in the days when you could indulge in rough and tumble without coming under scrutiny.

As skipper, I tried to refocus minds on the solid performance the Test team had produced in so many areas, little knowing that the tour was headed for rock bottom in Rotorua against the New Zealand Maori. They were well up for the opportunity to give England a good thrashing, but that could be no excuse for what unfolded. England lost 62–14 and missed 24 first-up tackles along the way. Mitch ripped into the midweek players afterwards, saying that they had had their chance, had blown it, and England would never see them again.

His words echoed a warning I had issued prior to the game. I had felt the need to warn the squad that certain individuals were in danger of kissing goodbye to their England careers by the way they were behaving – going out all the time and regarding the trip as a bit of a jolly. ‘Look,’ I told them, ‘if you don’t get serious we will get home and Clive will never pick you again. It’s quite simple. You’ve made a rod for your own back really.’ It is no secret to whom I was referring; you only have to look up which players last wore an England shirt on that tour. Whether they were already resigned to never being picked again anyway is for them to say. Clive’s maxim, except in extreme cases, has always been that if you are good enough you will play, and in my experience he has stood by that.

The good news for our hopes against the All Blacks in the second Test was that the mood among the first-choice players was upbeat as we swept into Auckland. We had taken a lot of confidence from the Dunedin game and we thought that if we could keep the ball for a bit we would actually be in with a chance. Our hunch was right. At half-time at Eden Park we trailed 14–7, and it should have been all square. I scored a try inside the first half-hour which gave me immense satisfaction, breaking from a ruck and beating Taine Randell and Christian Cullen to the line, and Ben Clarke had a perfectly good score disallowed. Given that we bossed the Test for an hour, the final scoreline of 40–10 in favour of New Zealand certainly felt cruel; we’d conceded four tries in the last quarter as our resistance finally waned. Nonetheless, the game, without question, was the highlight of the tour. For once, all the heroes were dressed in white, and I would pick out Dave Sims, Rob Fidler, Graham Rowntree and Ben Clarke. Stephen Jones, writing in the Sunday Times, noted, ‘England’s rag-bag collection of second, third and even fifth choices, derided all around the country, had the temerity to stay in contention for an hour and even raise serious question marks over the current All Blacks. The plain and heroic fact is that England’s forwards outplayed the New Zealand pack.’ He also described me as a ‘massive force’ at scrum-half, which was very flattering, especially when Clive, who had returned from attending his father’s funeral shortly before kick-off, added his own praise. ‘I am seeing Dawson in a new light,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to know him very well over the last five weeks. He’s really impressed me as a player and captain.’

I don’t actually remember an awful lot about the day because I was as tired as I’ve ever been on a rugby pitch. And that was at half-time. The second half was too knackering to describe. I remember sitting in the changing room at the break and Mitch coming over to talk and me not being able to say anything. It was as though I’d already played a full 80 minutes. I was absolutely screwed. I was not alone either, and that state of physical exhaustion contributed to us leaving the gameplan behind in the last 20 minutes.

Jonny Wilkinson’s tour had finished the previous weekend at Dunedin when he was stretchered off the field, and Josh Lewsey, who’d played centre that day, was moved up to partner me. It was in fact an eventful tour for Josh from the moment we met up in England. The backs were doing some fitness work when, much to Josh’s horror, Clive came over and asked him to take off his shirt and show the rest of the lads his physique. ‘That’s what you’ve got to aspire to,’ said Clive, pointing at Josh. ‘You’ve all got to get into that sort of shape.’ At the same time, on the other side of the field, the forwards were being drilled by Mitch, who instructed prop forward Duncan Bell to remove his shirt. He then absolutely abused him. In the minds of the management, Josh and Duncan offered two extremes as to what an England player should and should not look like. They say you’ve got to be cruel to be kind …

I have since had even more feedback about that second Test. Wayne Smith, my coach at Northampton, has referred to it a number of times, saying that I gained a huge amount of respect from that game as an individual. I never thought of that at the time. The New Zealand public are very critical of their rugby, but they do applaud individual talent. Mitch was also generous with his words. After becoming All Blacks coach in 2002, he said I would be in his team were I a Kiwi. Blimey. It means an awful lot to me that I am respected in New Zealand. There are no people in the world more knowledgeable about rugby, with the possible exception of South Africa. To be respected there will always give me cause for pride. And for that game to have coincided with the birth of my godson, Paul Grayson’s son James, made it a very special day.

The tour should really have ended then and there. There was no desire whatsoever to embark on a 28-hour journey to South Africa after those two Test matches against the All Blacks. All that extra travelling across goodness knows how many time zones, and for what? The only good news was that Austin and I managed to blag a couple of first-class seats, which was nice. We get so much crap for talking too much, but sometimes chat can get you into good places.

The most memorable happening in Cape Town in early July, apart from another towering display from the pack in an 18–0 defeat, was Clive checking us out of the three-star team hotel and into the best gaff in Africa, known locally as the Pink Palace, which was about six times the price. Not only that, but he picked up the tab on his own credit card. That one act spoke volumes for the ambition Clive had for England. It said he would no longer put up with second best. It also said to me that he wanted sole charge from now on (manager Roger Uttley knew nothing about the change of plan). Here, I thought, was a man unafraid to speak his mind. He said what we were all thinking when lambasting those responsible for organizing the tour. ‘This was something I inherited,’ he was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. ‘Unfortunately, the people who put it in place are still on the RFU. They keep their heads down and hide while we travel round the world to play Tests on successive Saturdays. I wish they would say why they did it. What I cannot seem to get through their thick heads is that we don’t control the players. This means they cannot go around arranging fixtures, telling people what strength of teams we will be sending.’ He stepped up his attack on his Twickenham bosses in the pages of the Daily Telegraph. ‘Anybody who could organize a Test match in New Zealand one Saturday and then another Test halfway round the world in a completely different time zone the next Saturday is somebody who doesn’t know about playing the game.’

It was not until later that Clive’s position really strengthened, but at that time he certainly gained the respect of his senior players because he was genuinely looking after our best interests. When he moved us out of the Holiday Inn Garden Court and into the Mount Nelson, it was because he considered the former an unsuitable environment to prepare for a Test match. It was not a case of wanting a bigger bedroom or more luxuries. The food was poor, there were no meeting rooms, and we were sharing the hotel with a couple of other international teams as well as the rugby media.

The precedent he set that day ensured that now England want for nothing in their accommodation. At home we are based at the luxurious Pennyhill Park in Bagshot, where our privacy is guaranteed. We even have a training pitch within the grounds. When we have down time, it is exactly that. You can wander around and you can sit and play backgammon or cards and speak freely without being worried someone is around the corner listening. Your time is your own. Some journalists have told me they need to be close to the squad because they feel certain information is slow to be released to the public domain. My own view is that you have to have a certain respect for the process. I don’t think when things go wrong you can expect the first thought to be, ‘Oh, we’ve got to tell the press about it.’ Whether it be injuries, selection or de-selection, we must be allowed time to get it right first, and then make it public.

On the Tour from Hell England patently did not do the business yet, as I sat on the pitch at Newlands at the end of our final game, soaked to the skin and comparing a record of played seven, lost seven to the elation of Lions victory on the same pitch a year earlier, a peculiar thought crossed my mind. For all the problems we had encountered, for all the defeats we had suffered, for all the insults that had been hurled in our direction in three different countries, I would not have swapped the experience for the world. It was an absolutely essential building block to where I am now. During those five weeks I gathered a huge amount of knowledge on how to communicate with players and management, and the openness and honesty that are central to the person I am now can be traced back to that voyage of discovery in June and July 1998.