Lancaster and the... SPIRIT OF 96
Coach calls on nation to back England like they did when the football team shone at the European Championships
If you can’t enjoy this, when will you enjoy anything? These will be the best days of their lives
LATE on a June afternoon in the summer of 1996, Stuart Lancaster was driving to Headingley for training with Leeds RUFC when people began spilling out on to the streets, celebrating and singing. A couple of hundred miles to the south, the England football team had beaten Spain in the Euro 96 quarter-finals and the country was going wild.
Lancaster had to turn back. ‘I couldn’t make it because the streets were rammed,’ he said, and the memories of the tumult came flooding back to the England coach this week as he finalised his side’s preparations for the rugby World Cup that begins on Friday when the hosts take on Fiji at Twickenham.
Lancaster has spoken before about his desire to reclaim a sense of pride in being English and to dissociate it from the arrogance it is often accused of fostering. But as the tournament approaches, he also made it clear he sees the fervour that the competition could generate as the weapon that might win England the World Cup.
‘I remember Euro 96 vividly,’ Lancaster said as he sat in the Ascot Bar at the England team hotel in Surrey last week. ‘I remember that sense of national pride. That’s what I would love to recreate. If we could get that level of public enthusiasm, it would be very powerful.
‘It was similar for the Ashes in 2005 and when the boys won the World Cup in 2003. We do have our moments when we get behind our national team. Not just England either. Great Britain. London 2012 was another example. This World Cup will be the same. I am hoping that if we get 50 million people behind the team it will make a big difference.
‘It came home to me during that game in Wales in March 2013 when we lost heavily in the Six Nations — I realised we weren’t just playing 15 Welshmen, we were playing the whole of the Millennium Stadium and the Welsh nation. The energy and the emotion in that team was incredible.
‘I thought about how Twickenham felt when we beat the All Blacks in December 2012. We had lost two games leading into that match but the energy that the crowd gave us and the sense of national pride when the anthem was sung, you could feel it in the atmosphere in the stadium.
‘That lifted the boys to a place they had never been in terms of performance. Since then I’ve said we need to be on the front foot about being English. We get accused of being arrogant as a nation so as a consequence I think people, for fear of being called arrogant, don’t say anything.
‘I have tried to get rid of the arrogant tag. I don’t think I or my coaching team are arrogant, I don’t think the players are. Once you have got rid of that notion, you can be more front foot about being English and talk about what we stand for. What does it mean to be English if you look through history and how does that relate to our team? Our belief is that one of the traits of being English is that you never take a backward step. If you go through history, we stand our ground. That becomes a key anchor of the team.’
Lancaster’s vision for this World Cup is not just an English victory but by a team worthy of the nation’s pride, not one that treats a World Cup like one long stag night.
That has been an integral part of Lancaster’s overhaul of the national team since he took over from Martin Johnson after the 2011 tournament that went so badly wrong off the pitch. He sees his players as role models for children and makes no apology for it.
He has rebooted the team and its culture. Every coach faces a nearconstant battle between principle and pragmatism and Lancaster has been fearless in sticking to the principles that underpinned his rise from being a schoolteacher in Wakefield to a man leading his team into a home World Cup.
Some have criticised him for refusing to pick Manu Tuilagi and Dylan Hartley after they fell foul of disciplinary issues. Many have said his intransigence will cost England as they seek the extra elements of class to compete with New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
But, on the eve of the tournament, Lancaster remains unrepentant. He is not self-righteous about his policies but he will not swerve from them. He does not believe that principle is more important than winning, necessarily, but there is something of the puritan in him and he does believe that winning is the son of principle.
‘You can’t win a game of rugby if you don’t have a strong team spirit and a sense of trust within the team,’ he said. ‘In a sport like rugby, commitment and physical characteristics and character are hugely important to getting a win. I think you can win in other sports with a talented individual but rugby is not like that.
‘My belief is culture comes before performance, not the other way round. You don’t get high performance and then tag culture on the end. From my observations of the 2011 World Cup, under the microscope of a World Cup and the scrutiny and the pressure on the team, your culture has to be rock solid.
‘For that you have to have good people you can trust who have got good characters. People might say “it’s just about winning” but, if you build that foundation right, the next layer you need to build is your identity and what your team stands for.
‘I need the right players who I can trust. It’s like a pyramid. The culture is the bottom bit, the next layer’s your identity and being England and being more front foot about being English. Then, there is something beyond winning. The World Cup is a massive goal but our major one is to create a high-performing team way beyond 2015. With the young players in the team, we should go way beyond 2015.
‘You can only do that with firm foundations. If all my focus had just been on winning this World Cup and there was no thought as to what’s going to come after it, if I had allowed poor standards of behaviour to creep in and erode the team, I think we would have less chance of winning than more.
‘Journalists and rugby supporters would say that the thing that makes rugby special is its core values: respect, discipline, teamwork, sportsmanship. People value those qualities. That’s why mums and dads take kids down to mini and junior rugby clubs on a Sunday morning.
‘They want to say, “I like the values of the games played, I like the way the sport conducts itself, the way you speak to the referee, its discipline, the way you clap the team off”. The England team has to represent that.
‘You don’t go to your kids and suggest role models. They look for them. My son, who is 14, was a massive fan of a player from a certain sport and he was photographed doing something he shouldn’t have done and my son was gutted. He was
devastated his hero, someone he looked up to for motivation and inspiration, had done this thing. That brought it home to me that, although the England rugby players are young men, they are role models because young people do look up to them.’
When Lancaster named his final 31man squad, he was open about the fact he had cried when he told centre Luther Burrell, who he has known since he was 14, that he had missed out to rugby union novice Sam Burgess in the most controversial and highprofile selection of all.
‘Luther was difficult for a variety of reasons,’ he said. ‘When you know how much a player has put in to chasing a dream they have strived for all their life – whether it be Luther or someone I have coached for two years – the pain of taking away their dream was hard. You would have to be pretty hard for it not to hurt you. But it hurts the player more.’
Part of the reason for Lancaster’s distress was that the teacher in him runs deep. He was a PE teacher at a secondary school in Wakefield for a decade and if one thing has driven his career, it is the idea of working with people to try and make their lives better.
That did not stop when he ceased being a teacher but when he thought back to his days at Kettlethorpe High School (motto: Labor Omnia
Vincit or Work Conquers All), he admits he gained particular satisfaction from making an impact on the lives of pupils who appeared to be going off the rails. ‘Being the England coach is a special job,’ he said, ‘but it’s equally as special being a teacher when you have a kid you can see drifting down the wrong path and you can change that path and get them back on to a successful start in life and career. I found that very satisfying.
‘I could easily go back into it. I would still enjoy it. What drives me as much as anything is helping individuals get better and building teams. Teaching gave me the opportunity to do both and it was a wrench to leave when I was 30.
‘I can still remember key individuals I helped make a difference to. I can remember ones I didn’t make a difference to as well. There was a kid in Year 10 who was spending more time out of school than in.
‘He was not academic but he was a talented rugby player, a winger. I saw something in his character. He was a team player. And I got him helping out, coaching the Year 7 rugby team. That ignited a fire in him and a sense of responsibility.
‘We took the team together and his attitude to school changed and he gained an academy contract at a rugby league club. From having no self-worth, he realised he could make a difference.’
Those days seem long ago now as Lancaster prepares to lead his side into the cauldron of expectation and hope. But maybe the old teacher’s experience of life beyond the confines of professional rugby will help give his players the sense of perspective they need as the nation swings behind them.
There will be, Lancaster said, one last message from him to the men carrying the country’s hopes before they run out at Twickenham. ‘If you can’t enjoy this,’ he will tell England’s best rugby players, ‘when are you going to enjoy anything? These are going to be the best days of your lives.’