Our backs at scrum’
half-time. England had to fight tooth and nail to get back into the game, and did so through a familiar route of forcing a collapsed scrum in the
52nd minute. Even then it took a late try from Phil Vickery to help them to a 35-22 win. Martin Johnson was typically blunt in the aftermath. “That was not good enough. We’re not going to win anything if we play like that.”
Leonard is a team man to his bootstraps and, at 35, was well aware this would be his last World Cup. He gave able-bodied support to his propping team-mates, Trevor Woodman and Vickery, only starting the pool games against Samoa and Uruguay. But his competitive juices had not diminished.
“I knew the score with Trev and Vicks, but I still gave Robbo [forwards coach Andy Robinson] an occasional roasting to let him know that I thought
I ought to be starting and wasn’t in Australia just to make up the numbers,” said Leonard.
A quarter-final against Wales was not the scary proposition 16 years ago that it might be in a few weeks’ time in Oita. Wales had lost 13 of their previous 15 matches against England, conceding an average of 40 points. So much for the stats – an unreliable indicator as ever. Wales took the game to England, running hard and running wide. Shane Williams was a real handful, creating a try for Stephen Jones, and it was no surprise that they led 10-3 at the interval. It might have been more, before England fought back in the second half.
“We were heavy-legged and Wales were on fire,” said Leonard. “We managed to get out of jail. We put them under some pressure, they conceded and Jonny did what Jonny does and kicked his goals [six in total, five in the second half ], to get us there [28-17] but we had to sort it out.”
They did. A clear-the-air meeting once they set up camp in Sydney proved the necessary tilt on the tiller. The team had been training hard all the way through. It was time to rein back. “We’d done the graft, now it was pay-off time,” said Leonard. “We’d left our best out on the training field. We needed to get it out on the pitch.”
And they did, helped, perhaps, by the weather gods. The night after the first semi-final, between Australia and New Zealand, won 22-10 by the Wallabies, the heavens opened over Sydney and the rain barely relented all week.
“It probably suited us but we’d got to the point where we’d have gone well no matter what the conditions had been,” said Leonard, who became the world’s most capped player, eclipsing Philippe Sella, when coming on as an early blood replacement for Vickery to win his 112th cap. “I wasn’t really aware of all that. The team was the thing. France was our best performance of the tournament.”
“It’s the dream final,” said Woodward after the 24-7 win. No one would disagree with that.
The South African referee, Watson, had briefed both final teams that he wanted proper, active scrummaging. “It didn’t look that way from the bench and I could see the boys were getting agitated,” said Leonard.
“I had a ref link and I heard Andre say that ‘there are 80,000 here, millions watching on TV and they’ve not all tuned in just to watch you scrum’. I knew we had to do something.”
On went Leonard with a mission to take the scrum out of the equation. He did. Normal time. Extra-time. Extra-extra time? It looked that way. Until Jonny struck.
“We’d been rehearsing that scenario for two years,” said Leonard. “I was sitting on their prop, Matt Dunning, at a breakdown, trying to prevent him getting up and into the defensive line. I saw the ball go back from Matt [Dawson] and then all I heard was the sound of Jonny’s boot on the ball. I didn’t even have to look. It was sweet. I knew it was over.”
The All Blacks brand is back in business. So, too, is that of the Springboks. Both teams have been mobbed at hotel and training fields in Kashiwa and Fukuoka. Television crews clamour for their every appearance, microphones are poised to catch sound-bites. New Zealand head coach Steven Hansen was moved to reveal after yet more gushing adulation that he was not “God, just a normal human being”.
In Japan, these players are rock stars with studs on. New Zealand against South Africa is the most potent and deep-rooted rivalry in rugby, every bit as fierce and unremitting as El Clasico or a Boca-river Plate derby. Recent years may have seen the competitiveness between them wane, but put all that on the back burner. The behemoths are in town, ready to face off on Saturday in Yokohama, a pool match in name only. It is the sort of contest this World Cup needs; a game that will resonate beyond the confines of the tournament itself.
“It is the Test match that every kid wants to play in,” said All Black lock Sam Whitelock – a two-time World Cup winner – yesterday at the team base in downtown Tokyo following a morning training session. “Some of my greatest memories are when I was a little fellow waking in the middle of the night to watch those matches.”
Rugby is as guilty of fixture overload as any sport. These two rugby tribes used to be kept apart for five or six years at a time between series, licking wounds, nursing grievances, harbouring grudges. These days, through the Rugby Championship, familiarity has bred a certain “familiarity” –
Seven years later, there was fear of a repeat humiliation if the All Blacks did not stand toe-to-toe with their great rivals. New Zealand won the first Test, but lost the second. Anxieties rippled through the nation and there was excited uproar when the team was read out on radio, the naming of an All Black side being a national event in those days, and Kevin Skinner was nominated at prop.
Skinner, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion as well as a formidable former All Black, had been summoned from retirement to subdue the Springboks scrum. He duly did, and his punches have gone into folklore. “I hit him [Springbok prop Chris Koch], just once,” said Skinner after the All Blacks had triumphed. “Just once. But it was a good one.”
Hansen and Whitelock are both acutely aware of the special nature of Saturday’s encounter.
“This is a massive match because it has always traditionally been so,” said Hansen. “There’s a big box of chocolates at the end of the week, but you can’t eat them now on Monday or there will be none left by the weekend.
“You can’t play it too early in the week. Everything this week has got to be short, sharp and proverbially hot. The older guys know what is coming.”