Clive Woodward has a repertoire of useful mantras, and one of them came out again in the immediate afterglow of Sunday’s triumph in Dublin. ‘We keep learning and moving on,†he said, finding one way to sum up the five years since he took over as England’s manager.
Just now he could be forgiven for pausing a while to savour an unforgettable moment before setting off on the next voyage of discovery. Having spared nothing in his quest to win the grand slam with England, Woodward need be spared no praise as he celebrates the achievement that will assure his team’s place in history, as well as sending them off to this year’s World Cup in good spirits.
‘If we’d lost today,†he said more than once after the 42-6 win over Ireland, ‘it would have been very tough for us to recover. The ramifications would have been huge.â€
But October can wait. For now, four years after Scott Gibbs ripped through the England defence to score the try that began Woodward’s long period in sporting purgatory, a clean sweep of the Six Nations tournament is more than enough to take back to Twickenham.
All that painstaking and sometimes snidely criticised preparation — the weeks spent in five-star hotels, the recruitment of a posse of world-class coaches, the overt seriousness that sometimes drew criticism from those who think rugby should be nothing but fun and frolics — paid off in 80 nerve-shredding minutes on Sunday.
As they gradually overwhelmed the brave Irish, Woodward’s players showed their true colours and seized a day they will never forget. As ever, Woodward was keen to emphasise the work done by his principal assistants, Andy Robinson and Phil Larder. Their attention to detail has produced a team whose members, as we saw in the autumn international series against the southern hemisphere triumvirate, are capable of confronting any kind of challenge.
Those three victories were at Twickenham, however, and no great prize was at stake. On Sunday Woodward’s England laid their two principal bogeys to rest at a single stroke: they won a big one, and they won it away from home. And, in the end, they won it in style, pinning Ireland back in their own half for almost the whole of the second half and racking up scores that turned the final half-hour into torture for the home side.
Yet this win was no cold-blooded product of the computerised playbook. It was a victory for rugby played with the heart and soul of men hand-picked by Woodward for the job of taking England to the very top of the rugby hierarchy. Men such as the majestic Lawrence Dallaglio, finally regaining the form he showed before untoward events cost him the captaincy. Such as Mike Tindall, the unsung hero of the three-quarter line, the scorer of a super-lative try on the hour who eight minutes later sacrificed himself with a tackle on Keith Gleeson that left him injured. And, of course, men such as Jonny Wilkinson.
On Sunday Wilkinson was colossal in everything he attempted. When nerves affected both sides in the opening passages, he steadied England not just through his nerveless kicking — notably the 30m drop-goal that silenced the crowd on the stroke of half-time — but with the astonishing impact and frequency of his tackles.
Time and again Geordan Murphy or Brian O’Driscoll thought they had burst through England’s cover, only to discover one pair of hands slowing them up. Wilkinson again, heedless of the cost to himself.
Early in the second half he went down with a recurrence of his shoulder injury. Within two minutes, apparently recovered, he was stopping O’Driscoll again and setting up a break for Martin Johnson. As the skipper thundered away with the ball under his arm, Wilkinson took a step back and put his hands on his knees.
He looked exhausted then, but he came back, and it was his flick-on to Josh Lewsey that helped create the final try for Dan Luger. Coaches around the country, and not just in the world of rugby, must envy the way Woodward gets Wilkinson and his colleagues to perform with such physical fearlessness and mental alertness. They seem to respond to the streak of unorthodoxy in the coach’s character. It seems funny now to think back two and a half years to the time when England’s players were about to go on strike, and Woodward was taking the Rugby Football Union side against their threat of industrial action. He took a risk then, as he has always taken risks, and it did not rebound on him.
He and the squad strengthened their bond and moved on. So now Scott Gibbs’s Wembley try can fade into sepia-tinted legend, along with the subsequent defeats in a cloudburst at Murrayfield and on a brisk October day in Dublin, and even that afternoon in Paris when Jannie de Beer drop-kicked England out of a World Cup on which Woodward had asked to be judged. Yesterday’s victory closed those wounds for good. —