White Gold Page 2

  ‘Steady breathing,’ said Alred softly. ‘And remember the follow-through.’

  Wilkinson tapped the end of his left foot on the turf, forcing his big toe tight into the corner of his boot, the pliable leather of his adidas Predator stretching tight against it. He tensed his foot, his toes stiffening as he curled and pressed down against the sole of his boot, the line from the tip of his big toe through the arch of his foot and up to his ankle locked solid.

  Two steps. Contact. The foot continued up after the ball, the leg extending straight, the toes of the right foot, which had just a moment before been set solidly into the ground, now dragging on their tips through the grass as Wilkinson’s centre of gravity followed the ball up and forward. He landed softly, his eyes still fixed on the target.

  The ball flew end over end, straight through the middle of the posts. It was so perfect that it might have been struck from just a few metres in front of the uprights. But in reality Wilkinson was on the left touchline, more than forty metres away, on a tight angle.

  ‘Well done,’ said Alred. ‘Next.’

  Up in the stands, the small group of coaches had remained motionless.

  Andy Robinson picked up the weather report that Alred had left on his seat. He studied it for a moment before passing it to his right, where the man responsible for masterminding England’s passage to this moment sat, steadily watching Wilkinson working through his repertoire. Clive Woodward had been England’s head coach since the late summer of 1997. Upon accepting the role he had become the figurehead of the largest and wealthiest rugby union on the planet. He had ascended to the position at a time when English rugby appeared in relatively rude health. From the late 1980s and through the early and mid-’90s, England had been the dominant team in the northern hemisphere. They had won three Grand Slams, contested the 1991 World Cup final and had reached the semi-final of the 1995 World Cup. Many of their players were considered the finest ever to have played for their country and a core of the team had just passed into legend after playing a central part in the British & Irish Lions’ successful tour to South Africa that summer. But for all this success, for all their supremacy in Europe and for all the riches and resources at their disposal, England had never dominated on the world stage. At no point had they been considered the most outstanding team on the planet. At no point had the traditional superpowers in the world game – New Zealand, South Africa and Australia – cowered at the prospect of playing the men in white.

  But over the six years of Woodward’s reign all that had changed. A left-field appointment in the summer of 1997, Woodward had come to the job with an ambition to turn the entire structure of English rugby on its head, to carve a new path for the national team and all its contributory tiers, and to unshackle the traditionally staid play of the English so that they could, at last, emerge from the shadows cast by their illustrious opponents in the southern hemisphere and make their own, indelible mark on history.

  But how had he managed to do it? How did he, his lieutenants and his players make such a fundamental shift in everything they did? How did they shake off ingrained styles, structures, expectations and deep-seated national and personal insecurities to discover a belief that they could be the best of the best – and establish the methods, support and environment to deliver on that belief?

  Let’s take the plunge.

  PART ONE

  GENESIS

  ONE

  THE ANATOMY OF A PHILOSOPHY

  ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’

  Lao Tzu

  CLIVE WOODWARD, aged thirteen, lay stretched out on his bed. He was fully dressed and on the floor beside him were two packed bags of clothes. Next to these, placed there as a last vestige of hope, was a mud-stained football. Woodward stared up at a poster above his bed. Alan Ball, Gordon Banks, Bobby and Jackie Charlton, George Cohen, Roger Hunt, Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, Nobby Stiles and Ray Wilson: England’s 1966 World Cup-winning heroes. He looked first at the face of Alan Ball and then at Geoff Hurst and recalled, as clearly as if he was again watching that history-making final on television with his father, Ball breaking away from the watchful eye of Karl-Heinz Schnellinger and crossing the ball towards Hurst, who thundered it against the underside of the crossbar for England’s match-turning third goal.

  Woodward had been only ten years old at the time but the World Cup final had seared itself on his memory and that goal, which restored England’s lead, held a cherished place in his heart. He could recall with perfect clarity every movement of the players on the pitch as they overcame West Germany 4–2. It had been a seminal moment in his young life, a moment when football had embedded itself in his soul.

  There was a creak on the stairs and Woodward blinked, his reverie broken. Another seminal moment was upon him.

  There was a tap at the door and his mother poked her head into the bedroom. ‘Your father says it’s time,’ she said softly. ‘Are you ready?’

  Woodward sighed and pulled himself to his feet. He picked up his bags and moved towards the door.

  Unable to bear the look on her son’s face, Joyce Woodward put her arm around him and squeezed.

  ‘I’m coming back,’ he said.

  ‘I know that. Of course you are.’

  But Woodward knew that she didn’t appreciate quite how soon he intended to be back.

  Outside, his father had started the car. Clive slung his bags into the boot, embraced his mother once more and then climbed into the passenger seat beside his father. They didn’t speak as the car pulled away but he forced a smile and raised a hand to the dwindling figure of his mother as she waved from the roadside.

  As the car turned the corner and the house disappeared from sight, Woodward tapped his feet in a light beat, as if he had a football at his toes, flicking it from side to side, curling an imaginary pass off the outside of his foot, bouncing a hundred keepy-uppies in a steady rhythm. He poured his thoughts into the game, shutting off the reality of what was happening. After thirteen happy years at home, he was leaving, off to fulfill an ambition that his father had long dreamed of for him: a private boarding school education.

  Squadron Leader Ronald Woodward was a pilot trainer in the RAF, a respected and dedicated military man who loved his family and wanted the best for his children. He knew that his son was a talented footballer and he had heard the rumours that he was being scouted by a number of professional clubs, including Everton; but he also knew how few young prodigies actually make a successful career for themselves in football. What he wanted instead was a university education for Clive and a job as a lawyer or a teacher or a banker. Something with substance and longevity. He knew that his son was bright – but he also knew that he was being distracted by football.

  When Ronald voiced his concerns about his son’s errant behaviour at school to his commanding officer he had been advised that a position at the Welsh boarding school HMS Conway, on Anglesey, might be good for Clive’s education and advancement in life. It was a naval institution, but Ronald Woodward had been training naval pilots for several years and his CO knew that strings could be pulled. As an added caveat, there would be no fees to pay – a perk of being an officer. Ronald barely thought twice about it. He had ascended to the rank of officer without a public school or university education – an achievement of real rarity at the time. He had always dreamed of a better start in life for his children and now here was an opportunity for Clive, set out on a silver dish. He returned home with a masterplan and presented it to his wife. There was no chance for her to argue – everything had already been set in motion. And if she wasn’t to have a say about it, his son certainly wouldn’t.

  Clive Woodward was an intelligent young man but, as his father and teachers had noted, he struggled with a lack of focus. Flighty and impatient, his concentration often drifted off in class; all his attention was focused on his one great love: football. When thinking about, watching or playing the game, he would become utterly engrossed. H
e was already playing for the school under-15 side, a year ahead of his peers, and he was well aware of the rumours about the scouts. A life as a professional footballer was all he wanted in the world. But he also knew his father’s feelings about the whole thing. A football career was not the path envisioned for him. No, that was a scenario for other people’s sons.

  And so it had come to this day: Clive Woodward’s introduction to life at HMS Conway and a farewell to football – for at this all-boys institution there was no talk or thought of football. No, the game that ruled the hearts and heads on Anglesey was something else. It was rugby union.

  ‘The only experience I had of rugby was watching a bit of it on TV. But it had always seemed slow and overcomplicated and had never really interested me that much,’ said Woodward years later. ‘So there’s me, obsessed with football, and people saying I’m going to play for Man United and Everton and whoever, and that was all I wanted to do. I would sit in class and literally count down the minutes until I could be outside kicking a ball around. And the big thing that happened was that the headmaster at my school went out of his way to come to my house to see my parents and he told them that I was bright, but I was destroying my life because all I could think about was football. I was good but there was no family background to really understand professional sport, so what they heard was that I was ruining my life and they felt that they had to do whatever they could to change that. It was a tough decision to send me away, but they did it for my own good. My father was given a list of service schools that he could send me to and I think the reason he chose Conway was quite deliberate – they didn’t play football there.’

  The drive to Anglesey from their home at RAF Linton-on-Ouse, which was just outside Easingwold in North Yorkshire, took the best part of four hours and it was dark by the time the great concrete edifice loomed into sight.

  In 1859, after a petition by the Mercantile Marine Service Association requesting that a school be set up to train young boys for life at sea, the Admiralty had commissioned the ship, hms Conway, for this very purpose. It was originally moored in the Sloyne, off Rock Ferry, on the River Mersey in Liverpool. In 1941 Merseyside was targeted by Luftwaffe air strikes and the decision was made to sail the school ship to the Menai Strait in Anglesey. Twelve years later hms Conway was being towed to Birkenhead for refurbishment when she was caught up in a storm, ran aground and was wrecked. Temporary tented accommodation for the pupils was set up at Plas Newydd on Anglesey, the country seat of the Marquess of Anglesey, before wooden huts were constructed as a makeshift schoolhouse and living quarters. These were in place for a decade until the new building, which became known as the ‘stone frigate’, was constructed.

  While the original school ship had been a thing of beauty, the architects of the terra firma version had clearly decided that to emulate the ship in any way was undesirable. Instead they seem to have been inspired by the design aesthetics of the prison service. The main school was a large concrete oblong speckled with small windows. If Woodward had been dreading his induction to the school before, his anxiety went through the roof when he finally saw it. No home comforts, no football and now this: a prison block in the middle of nowhere waiting to embrace him in its cold, harsh grip.

  Woodward said goodbye to his father in the entrance hall to the boarding house – a firm handshake and a brief locked gaze between them. Then Ronald Woodward turned and disappeared out into the night.

  Clive was taken to his room on the third floor. As he threw down his bags he glanced out of his bedroom window and saw the twin red glow of his father’s taillights as they bounced down the road on their way home. He swallowed. What the hell was he doing here?

  It took only twenty-four hours for him to decide that enough was enough. If his initial thought had been ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ it had soon turned to, ‘What the hell is Hell doing here in the middle of Anglesey?’ He hated it that much.

  ‘It was like bloody Alcatraz,’ he recalled. ‘The whole place looked like a prison, was run like a prison and it was out there on an island in the middle of nowhere. They were schooling boys who, by and large, were going to go on and serve out at sea, so the discipline was tough and everything was incredibly regimented. They wanted hard, tough cadets, so corporal punishment was high on the agenda – the teachers used to dish it out occasionally, but on the whole it was done by the senior cadets. If anyone stepped out of line in any way, they’d get beaten. And that whole culture of rough physical intimidation spread throughout the school. It was a tough place to be. They were the darkest days of my life.’

  He escaped from the school grounds and caught a train at Bangor. When he eventually made it home, his parents were there waiting for him, having been alerted to his absence by the school. His father shoved him in the car and drove him straight back.

  A few days later he tried again. This time Ronald drove him to York station and put him on a train to Bangor. A week later this round trip was repeated. Woodward was determined that he would break his father’s will with this continual show of defiance. But in the end it was his will that was broken. The headmaster, Mr Basil Lord, was so infuriated at Woodward’s insubordination that he ordered a senior cadet to unleash what was euphemistically called ‘the Teaser’ – a length of marine rope made of tarred hemp tied into a hard knot at one end; it was kept in a bottle of salted water and it was as hard as a metal bar. The thrashing was brutal and it was enough for Woodward to hold up his hands in defeat. He had to accept his lot. He had to try to assimilate.

  ‘I was only thirteen when I went there and it was a long way from home,’ said Woodward, ‘and I ran away not because I hated it as such but because I wanted to play football. My parents couldn’t understand it. They said, “You’re mad, we’re giving you the opportunity of a lifetime at a good school, don’t throw it away.” And was it a good school? It was an OK school – but it was tough because it had a military background.

  ‘My parents are both dead now, but if my Dad was here I’m sure he would say, “I can’t believe you are still going on about this. You’ve had an incredible academic, sporting, business and coaching career. Would you have done all of that if we hadn’t sent you away to boarding school?” And I don’t know. But I also don’t know what would have happened with my football career – and like any big question, it tends to linger with you. But because I was good at sports and because rugby was the main game at Conway I got into it. It makes your life easier if you’re good at the main game at a school – that’s how you get respect from your peers and your teachers. I think that because I wasn’t allowed to play football I wanted to show everyone that I could be the best player in the school at rugby. And that little niggle drove me – and it probably drove me through my entire career. In terms of motivation, I think every successful sportsperson has a drive in them that has been instilled by someone telling them that they can’t do something, that they are too small or too skinny or too fat or too slow – it can be the slightest of comments – and proving that person wrong drives them for the rest of their lives. Look at guys like Brian Moore, Andy Robinson and Neil Back – they were told they were too small to play international rugby and every time they pulled on a jersey they wanted to prove that that wasn’t the case and they did so with a furious, uncompromising will to win.

  ‘Being good at rugby made being at Conway liveable. I don’t think the school was much fun for kids that weren’t good at sport. It was a tough place to be.’

  It is little wonder that in an environment as oppressive as this Clive Woodward developed an instinct to rebel against convention and repression whenever he encountered it. It would be an instinct that would come to define him. As with many young children sent off to boarding school, he quickly learnt independence – and how to survive on his own wits. The psychological impact of his lost dreams to be a footballer cannot be underestimated. It was a crushing blow even more painful than a lash from the Teaser; and just as the corporal punishment was designed to h
arden and teach the young cadets, so too would this psychological wound form a bedrock in his psyche, ultimately coming to define significant aspects of his personality.

  *

  The day that Clive Woodward was born – 6 January 1956 – a schoolteacher in Perthshire, Scotland, stood up from the desk in his study in Patchell’s, one of Glenalmond College’s boarding houses, went to the window and looked out over Hockey Ground, the playing field at the front of the college.

  It was a grey morning and a heavy mist clung to the glen as it so often did at that time of year.

  Jim Greenwood raised a hand and wiped some condensation from the pane, the better to see the group of boys who were just appearing out of the haze in the distance. At this time of year many boys would go out running in preparation for the steeplechase, the school’s cross-country run, but these boys were not in training for that. Being out this early meant only one thing: they were miscreants from one of the other boarding houses and were being duly punished for whatever mischief they had caused their housemaster; upon completion they would be forced to wash in a cold bath before being allowed to take breakfast and continue their day as normal. Such punishment had been an institution at the school long before Greenwood had taken up the position as English and French master in 1954, but it was a convention that he had no issue with for not only did it give a base layer of fitness to every boy in the school, but it was an additional piece of training for his rugby players – and he could now identify in the ranks of running figures four of his first XV. Adding this to the rigorous circuit training that he had introduced as part of each rugby training session, he knew that his players would be among the fittest in the country. And in rugby, that could go a long way in deciding the outcome of a match.

  Greenwood had big shoes to fill when he rolled up at Glenalmond and took charge of rugby as part of his pastoral duties. One of his predecessors in the role had been John Gwilliam, who had taught history and French at the school from 1949 to 1952 and supervised the rugby programme – while also captaining Wales to Grand Slam victories in the 1950 and 1952 Five Nations.