Why I feared for the Lions’ future
Inside the infamous ous tour of 2005
There is no doubt in my mind that
Sir Clive Woodward deserved to be in charge of that tour in 2005. He had led England to a stunning Rugby World Cup triumph in Australia in 2003, which had been building up because of the way his team had dominated everyone else in the world in the run-up to the tournament. And during his time as England head coach he had shown a vision and attention to detail that set him apart from other coaches and managers.
In many respects he was ahead of his time. So it was only right and proper that he was granted his wish to try to implement his methods and beliefs upon the Lions. I truly believed that – so much so that I accepted his offer to be in charge of the midweek side on that tour.
I would never have gone if I had thought for even a moment beforehand: “This is not right.” The challenge excited me. I wanted to be involved and I wanted to see if it could work. The crux of Clive’s thinking was that right from the start of the tour he wanted to have in his own mind the team who would take the field for the first Test. He then wanted to work with that team in preparation for that first Test. All the focus would be on that team. He therefore wanted two separate teams of players and coaches on the tour; there would be a Test operation and a midweek operation.
Clive had been a Lion himself in 1980 on the tour of South Africa and in 1983 in New Zealand, so he knew how important the midweek games were, despite there being a lot of calls at the time for them to be curtailed. But he also did not want his chosen Test players traipsing around the country for those matches. So there was often one squad in one place with one set of coaches, and another in another place with another set of coaches. It naturally meant that we needed more players, so the tour party began at 45 and ended with 51 players being used.
For the Test team Clive had with him Andy Robinson and Phil Larder, both from the England set-up, as well as Ireland’s Eddie O’Sullivan. I was in charge of the midweek team, along with Wales’s Gareth Jenkins and Mike Ford, who was then defence coach with Ireland. There were two tactical streams because no two coaches, even when talking about the same things, will deliver their messages in the same way. It was definitely confusing for the players, because they were being taught in a different way by coaches who saw the game plan slightly differently.
While I was very proud that the midweek team remained unbeaten, defeating Taranaki, Wellington, Southland, Manawatu and Auckland, the Test series was lost 3–0. We were up against a brilliant All Black side, with Dan Carter absolutely majestic, especially in the second Test at Wellington, where he scored 33 points in the 48–18 victory for the Kiwis.
There were other challenges. For a start, and indeed the very start, there was a match against Argentina at home. Lions games at home are a rarity, for very good reason. This match against Argentina in 2005 created a difficult situation. We only drew it 25–25 thanks to a Jonny Wilkinson penalty deep into injury time, and I felt it was a wasted week in Wales spent trying to prepare a group of players to play a game in isolation lation rather than getting the tactics and the specifics in place for what we wanted to build on over the next seven n weeks.
Then there was the challenge ge of how we were perceived in New w Zealand in 2005. Clive (far right) ht) decided to take Alastair Campbell bell (right), the former Labour spin doctor, as his head of communications.s. It was always an interesting move and d you could see the logic of hiring such ch a big hitter in that field. But I think he created the wrong impression for us in the eyes of the New Zealand public.ublic. In terms of the actual press dealings,ngs, he wanted to be in total control, so o every media session was exceptionally professional, but t it was too sanitised.
Campbell actually really impressed me with how he would know exactly what the questions would be in follow-up to your answers. He would give everyone who was doing a media conference a sheet of paper with answers already written on it, detailing what to say and then, if you said what he suggested, what the next question would be, and what your answer should then be to that. And he would always be right – I found that incredible.
But the press hated it because they knew they were being manipulated and as the tour wore on they became more and more irritated.
I also always think that it is best if players share rooms on a Lions tour.
In 2005 they had single rooms. Sharing a room is part of the bonding process. In 2005 we were staying in five-star hotels but we did not really have team rooms, centres that we could go to that were just for us. The places available were more like open lobbies, and even when in Auckland where we had an area that had table tennis tables, some seats and some computers, it was in a foyer. Meanwhile the medics were on the fifth floor in another room, so you were dividing the group all the time. I learnt the lesson that you needed one room for everyone.
Sometimes you need quiet moments on a tour to appraise where you are and what has been happening, and I was lucky to have such an opportunity late in the tour with Bill Beaumont, the tour manager, who was the ideal man for such a chat. During the last week of the tour, just a few days before the final Test in
Auckland, we took the
40-minute ferry from Auckland to Waiheke
Island so that we could talk. We had some food and then we went for a walk.
We were laughing and joking but there was a very serious side to our talking, too. Both of us knew that this was crunch time for the Lions. Bill and I have always got on really well. We have always loved talking rugby and that was something I had missed on that trip. There had simply not been enough of it.
I had been worried in 1997 about the Lions, because professionalism had just arrived and had we not won there in South Africa, or at least given a good account of ourselves, then you do wonder what might have happened. And I was worried again now – probably more so.
But both Bill and I were adamant that we must be positive and that the Lions must not just survive in the professional era, but that the concept must thrive. We talked about the good things and the bad things from the tour. But we kept coming back to the overall view that this group of Lions had not really felt what a magnificent experience a Lions tour should be.
They had not really got to know each other, they had not experienced the country of New Zealand as they should have done, and in truth they had not got to realise what being a Lion in New Zealand could give them – in other words that, even in the professional era, after all the hard work and the pressure, you can enjoy yourself, have a drink at the appropriate times and savour a unique experience with some special team-mates.
As Bill and I talked we came to realise that we were very much of the same mind, that certain things were important and had to be a priority for future Lions tours. Clive Woodward was disappointed with how things panned out. I am pretty sure that if he had had the opportunity to take charge of another Lions tour, he would have done it very differently.
One of the key things Bill and I talked about was the relationship between the coach and the manager, and how roles had to be clear and interlink. And over the course of our chat Bill did mention that I should consider being manager of the next tour to South Africa. It was a surprise because at that stage I had never contemplated going on another Lions tour. So the final Test came and went, with a 38–19 defeat in Auckland. And once the tour was over I was asked to help John Feehan, who is still the British and Irish Lions’ chief executive now and had just taken over, in making a tour report, which was unusual because I was only an assistant.
But in that report I was able to make all the points I had mulled over with Bill on Waiheke Island, as well as throw my hat in the ring as a possible manager for the 2009 tour. But as time wore on, it became clear that the Welshman Gerald Davies, who was already on the Lions committee and had toured with the Lions as a superb winger in 1968 and 1971, had also put his name in the ring to be manager. Having given it some thought, I told my old Scotland colleague, full-back Andy Irvine, that Gerald was the ideal choice and that I would not put my name forward.
In 2007, though, I received a call from Andy, who was by then chairman of the Lions board. He asked whether I might consider being head coach of the Lions for a fourth time. It was a shock, to say the least. Thinking about being manager was one thing, being head coach again was quite another.
But it was not as if I was out of the coaching loop. I was coaching Wasps at the time and felt that I was coaching as well as I had ever been. I thought long and hard about it, and then asked my wife, Judy, what she thought. “If you really want to go for it, then go for it,” she said.
I think Bill Beaumont had spoken quite a lot to the board about the things we had talked about on Waiheke, so I was confident that they were well aware of how I felt and what I would want to do as coach. I knew how hard a task it was to be head coach of the Lions, but I also felt there was a real opportunity here, given the state of the game and the resources available, to drive the tour in exactly the way I wanted.
So I went for it and in May 2008 I stood before the Lions board and gave what might be termed my sales pitch. I told them that there were certain principles that I considered vital for a Lions coach to work to. As mentioned, the overriding theme to them was togetherness. Everything had to be as one: the squad, the coaching team, the medical team and the management team. I said to the board: “If you don’t agree with those principles, then, for goodness’ sake, don’t pick me as head coach, because I am not going to change my values. I am not prepared to compromise. These are fundamental principles that I think have to be in place if you are going to have any chance of being competitive in the Test series with a new group of players.”
A couple of days later Andy Irvine phoned to offer me the position of head coach.
In The Daily Telegraph tomorrow: My blueprint to safeguard Lions’ future.
This group of Lions had not really felt what a magnificent experience a Lions tour should be