England seek a cure for their broken hearts
Eddie Jones’ biggest Six Nations challenge is bucking the trend of beaten World Cup finalists struggling to hit the heights again, says Daniel Schofield
On the England team bus after the 2007 World Cup final, Rob Andrew stood up to address the beaten squad. Then the Rugby Football Union’s director of elite rugby, Andrew knew the pain of losing a World Cup final, having played in England’s 1991 defeat by Australia, but no words of solace were forthcoming.
“Instead of saying, ‘Thanks for your efforts’, he said, ‘Lads, this is never going to leave you’,” Nick Easter, who started at No8, recalls. “We were like, ‘Thanks mate, that’s really helped the situation’.”
In the fullness of time, Easter came to recognise that Andrew was correct in his assessment. “It does stay with you,” Easter says. “It is a final. You get one shot at it and we didn’t do it. Maybe it was too much for a group who really had to get on a run after that loss [also to South Africa] in the group stage. But it will never leave you. How often do I think about it? Not every day. It does crop up in your memory when you look back on your career and think, ‘If only’.”
How Eddie Jones’s England squad wrestle with those two words will largely define the outcome of their Guinness Six Nations Championship campaign. Does that pain and frustration fuel an all-consuming desire to conquer all before them? Or was their 32-12 defeat by South Africa the start of a slow decline of a team who had peaked in the semi-finals?
Jones is fully conscious of that danger, despite the age profile of the team allowing another World Cup cycle. He pointed out this week that the last four teams to have lost a Rugby World Cup final were eliminated in the quarterfinals of the following tournament. The twin dangers of increased expectation and complacency lurk just around the corner.
Hence Jones’s bullish message, repeated by his coaching team all week in Portugal, that England need to become “the greatest team that the world of rugby has ever seen”. According to psychologist Jeremy Snape, who has previously worked under Jones, this statement is a means of instantly resetting the squad’s goals and putting the World Cup behind them.
“Leaders have to create an inspirational vision which pulls the team forward,” Snape, a director at Sporting Edge, said. “It needs to redefine the way the team will be perceived and the way the players perceive themselves. With the resource, depth and skill that England have, this is not only inspirational, but it is possible. Delivering a successful era means many things, but more than anything it calls for sacrifice and suffering.”
Of course, individuals manage their disappointment in different ways. Flanker Tom Curry says that he forgot about it pretty quickly once he was home, while full-back Anthony Watson said this week, “I don’t think I’ll ever get over the final until, hopefully, I get another crack at it.”
For Snape, players often fall into two camps. “When we think about setbacks, those who see their failure as affecting their whole identity, enduring forever and fixed, have the hardest time recovering, while those who can rationalise or distil the setback to a specific skill at a specific time, and a skill which can be improved on, have the ability to rise from the setback,” Snape said.
“For example, type 1 says, ‘I’m a loser – forever’. Then type 2 says, ‘I lost and a key mistake was in my line-out jump timing in the 24th minute – I can work on that’. The second shows a rational and
specific review and a controllable improvement – much healthier than the global belief that they are ‘a failure for life’. Often it’s these pain points which drive our persistence and motivation.”
The experience of England’s 1991 World Cup finalists illustrates Snape’s argument. All manner of conspiracy theories have been advanced as to how captain Will Carling changed his team’s tactics in response to Australian taunts that they were boring – “complete rubbish”, according to wing Simon Halliday. Their mistake was their failure to mix up their tactics against what was a great Australia team.
Yet some members of that team still struggle to process that defeat. The story goes that Brian Moore and Mike Teague threw their runners-up medals into the Thames. Teague has never watched a replay of the game and when contacted by
The Telegraph this week, said the experience still felt too raw to discuss.
Halliday is more sanguine, reflecting on England’s progress through the tournament, from beating France in
Paris and Scotland at Murrayfield. It helped that in the amateur days the whole squad returned to jobs on Monday morning.
“I got back home on
Sunday morning with more than just a hangover and on Monday morning at 6.30 I was standing outside UBS offices,” Halliday said. “It was surreal. I walked into the trading floor and there was a sympathetic round of applause and a massive pile of research on my desk that I hadn’t seen for three months. That helps you to forget pretty quickly.” After the 2007 World Cup, England let slip a 19-6 lead to lose to Wales for the first time at Twickenham in 20 years. Meanwhile, in the 1992 Five Nations, England opened their campaign with a record 25-7 victory away to Scotland and would go on to secure a second successive Grand Slam. “So actually we responded very well,” Halliday said. “Obviously we were all crushed by losing a home final. We knew a lot of failure in the lead-up to 1990. We suffered again, but managed to park it and perform more than OK in the following Five Nations.”
The message all week from the warm-weather training camp is that the disappointment has been processed and the players are raring to go. Yet when asked whether Eddie the Exorcist has eliminated all the ghosts of Yokohama, Jones replied: “You never know.”