on the bench. It always takes a while to work your way into the affections of the England coach, so it was what I expected. Clive Woodward tended to be loyal to players whom he rated and wanted in his team, so I wasn’t in the least surprised that Darren came back into the side.
We followed up the 60-26 victory over Wales with a 34-20 victory over Scotland at Murrayfield and a 35-17 victory over Ireland, to put us second in the table behind France who had beaten us in that first game (the one that I had watched, terrified, from the bench). It meant we won the Triple Crown, and I’d been part of it, which was fantastic.
I was on the England coach’s radar now. Clive Woodward had seen me playing for England, and knew I’d coped well under pressure, so I hoped I would be given another opportunity to play soon.
Happily, that opportunity came in the summer of 1998. Sadly, it was on a tour that would always be referred to as ‘The Tour from Hell’ because of the absolute drubbing we received in every game we played. In a strange way it was the best thing that could have happened to the England team at that time, and could be regarded as one of the key reasons for England’s victory in the World Cup in 2003 because it shoved us right down to the bottom and galvanised us to fight our way back up again.
The benefit of hindsight - isn’t it a wonderful thing? I assure you that it didn’t feel like the best thing to happen to England at the time. The tour was good but the matches were awful.
When I was told I had been selected to play, I was obviously delighted, but there was no doubt that it would be a tough series. The itinerary was incredible: we would have to play four Tests in five weeks over three continents in the southern hemisphere. It was a crazy tour to have been slotted between a Lions series and a World Cup, and Clive Woodward was keen to point out that it was something he had inherited when he became England coach the previous year, and not the sort of tour that he would have chosen to set up himself.
It was a tough enough assignment for the most experienced of players, and in 1998 we were significantly lacking experience. I’m sure I was chosen because I had two working legs. Many of the country’s leading players, guys like Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio, Jason Leonard and Richard Hill, had picked up niggles over the season that they needed to get sorted in the summer, so they couldn’t tour. With a World Cup the following year, none of the top players wanted to go into the 1998-9 season with injuries.
So the big names pulled out, leaving Clive to assemble a group of everyone else. He tried to convince the southern hemisphere coaches that England had strength in depth, and that losing almost every top player would not stop the team from being competitive, but the reality is that, in every country in the world, if you take away all the leading players it’s hard to have a competitive team. In the end the squad that went on tour contained twenty uncapped players. It certainly didn’t please Clive that he had to select players with little experience, and it didn’t please the Australians either. To say they reacted strongly would be an understatement.
Dick McGruther, the Chairman of the Australian Rugby Union, attacked first, describing the England tour party as ‘probably the most underequipped group of Englishmen to be sent to Australia since the first Fleet’. The Australians like to mouth off about things, but McGruther seemed to be genuinely upset that England were sending a team that could not be described as a ‘best team’. England was accused of treating the southern hemisphere with contempt, and McGruther finished his attack by inviting all Australians to come and enjoy a ‘Pommie thrashing’. All of this, and we hadn’t yet stepped onto the plane. My first touring experience with England was clearly going to be a baptism of fire.
We arrived down under in late May, and realised straight away that McGruther wasn’t alone in the criticisms he was expressing about us. The newspapers were full of condemnatory articles in which Australian journalists were laughing at us, and dragging up former players to join in with the mirth. We just wanted to play rugby, and to be given the chance to prove that we were good enough to wear the England shirt. The newspapers reported that only six players in our tour party had more than ten England caps to their name. The average was fewer than four. I had one, which was one more than ten other forwards and ten backs had.
But the impact of all the negative comment in the press, and the sniping at the England team, was to bind the team closer together, and push us to rely on one another and focus inward on the squad. The result of all this was that the tour was actually great fun, and we bonded very quickly. I was so enthusiastic about it all and dying to get stuck into the Australians who were criticising us so much. I knew there was a great deal of raw skill in the squad and I was relishing the fact that I had the opportunity to be here in the southern hemisphere, about to take on some of the world’s best players.
The captain for the tour was Matt Dawson, who I got on extremely well with, and came to really admire. Daws is good fun but he’s also a good leader. He had a group of players who had hardly any experience between them, but he brought them all together and made them feel like they could win. I enjoyed working with him, and gained a lot of respect for him on the trip.
The first match was against Australia, and we went down to a humiliating 76-0 defeat, featuring 11 Australian tries. There were a few good things to take from the defeat, like the fact that we didn’t concede a try for more than half an hour, but there’s no getting away from the fact that we were annihilated, and the victory for Australia served to confirm all their pre-match rantings about us.
John O’Neill, the Chief Executive of the Australian Rugby Union, said after the game, ‘This is not what international rugby is about. It wasn’t a contest. Those poor players, as determined and proud as they are, were not Test players.’
John Mitchell, our assistant coach, had a different take. He took one look at us after the game and said, ‘If I had a gun I’d shoot the lot of you.’ He then said that we had a chance to come back after this first defeat, on the New Zealand leg of the tour. He didn’t want to see us losing any more matches, he said. The truth is that if we’d stayed down there for another ten years we wouldn’t have won a game. They were simply better than us.
I think the main lesson we learnt from the defeat was just how far the Australians had moved on since professionalism, and it was an important lesson for us in that respect. No one knew quite what changes would be brought about when the sport lost its amateur status -well, now we had our answer. We had a lot of work to do to catch up with them, let alone beat them.
I learnt a lot on that tour. I learnt what great characters the England guys alongside me were. Even though we were being defeated every time we stepped onto a pitch, the guys stayed upbeat; there was no terrible blame culture and no moaning.
After that first Test we headed for New Zealand where we would have two further Tests, and we stopped off in Queenstown to have a few days’ escape from the negative criticism. Clive said we could have a day off there to unwind and recover from the match and the terrible bashing we’d had in the press. ‘Don’t do anything silly,’ were his parting words, as he left us to our own devices. The words stuck in my mind. I was a new boy; I wasn’t going to do anything silly. The last thing I wanted was to lose my place in the side. Garath Archer was a different character altogether, though. That boy is a nutter, and the minute we were in Queenstown he was off to find where they did the first-ever bungee jump. He found the place, stripped naked and bungee jumped head first. I kept thinking, What if Clive finds out
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