Blindsided Read online

  In my role as his on-rushing opposite number, I knew exactly what he was going to do. But knowing that and doing something about it were two different things.

  The sequence played out in slow motion. As Rob kicked, I was close to him but not close enough. I often wish that I’d just touched the ball a little bit to divert it off course, but no—I didn’t get there. Instead I was powerless—a mere spectator watching the final act of my international career playing out. I saw the maker’s name on the ball quite clearly—Gilbert—but I couldn’t stop it going past me. All I felt was the Newlands air. All I thought was, ‘Well, you did ask for a kicking contest . . .’

  ROB ANDREW: It was pre-planned from the lineout. We’d won a penalty in our own half and Mike Catt—who had a long boot on him—kicked for touch. On the way to the lineout, Dewi [Morris, the England halfback] and I were discussing that we should throw to Martin Bayfield and then catch and drive to see if we could get within range so that I could have a go. So by the time I actually received the ball from the drive, I was probably standing on the ten-yard line and when I struck it I thought, ‘That’s going.’ It was probably as sweet as I’d ever struck a ball. It started going towards the right-hand post and there was a little nervousness that it was going to drift, but it had the legs by a long distance. It just flew. If I hadn’t got it off the ground so quickly, Michael may well have charged it down.

  Then I remember turning around to look at where it was going.

  ‘Ah, shit, that’s never missing.’

  I wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t missing. It was quite a long way out but it was still rising as it went over—never even threatening to go anywhere but over—and at that moment I knew two things: (1) we were out of the World Cup and (2) I’d played my last match for Australia.

  BOB DWYER: We were as good as England. In fact, I left my seat in the stand and came down to the sideline to prepare for extra time. Then Rob Andrew kicked the field goal that gave England the win.

  ELEVEN

  RETIREMENT

  I’D ALREADY DECIDED THAT the 1995 World Cup would be the end of my international career, whether we won it or not. I hadn’t officially announced it in advance. I’d only mentioned it quietly to Bob Dwyer. It was a gut decision and I knew—and still do know—it was the right one. I had no regrets whatsoever. England just happened to be my last game.

  I’d been on the scene for my country for twelve years and that seemed like a pretty good innings. I’d played well, enjoyed it and had a legacy that I was extremely proud of. I felt powerful saying to myself, ‘This is it.’ Of course it would have been nice to go out with a World Cup win as captain, but when I think about it honestly, beaten quarter-finalists was about our level in 1995.

  It’s worth adding that I’m sure we weren’t alone in having some difficulty adjusting to the rapid expansion of support staff at the time. I’d be amazed if New Zealand and South Africa, at least, weren’t implementing similar programs. Maybe they were a little bit better at it. And maybe they were simply better teams and we just weren’t good enough to go any further. Still, in moments of deep, but largely unfounded, optimism, I used to say to myself: ‘Maybe we could have got to a semi . . .’

  But when I got a grip on myself and thought about it logically, the facts spoke for themselves. We’d already been beaten by South Africa. Were we better than New Zealand? Probably not. And—as disappointing as it was—we were beaten by England, who in turn were literally run over by New Zealand. Even I couldn’t really argue with those stats.

  Granted, we’d been carrying players who weren’t one hundred per cent fit, because they were deemed to be better than the alternatives left at home. There were tough decisions to make sometimes, and the toughest questions to address are those that don’t actually have an answer. For instance: ‘Is Timmy Horan at eighty per cent better than Player X at one hundred per cent?’ We decided that he was. Sometimes those decisions work for you.

  Additionally, there were quite a few young guys for whom this was a first World Cup and, on the flip side, there were a few of us who were grimly hanging on by our fingernails, determined to enjoy one more World Cup. Were we the best people to be playing? Was I? We’ll never know. But these were the kinds of questions that came up. While you consider all that, one last fact you can’t avoid is that nobody has successfully defended the World Cup. Maybe there are a few lessons in that, too. It’s very hard to win them back to back.

  BOB DWYER: In the final analysis, we went in as favourites but didn’t play as well as we could have. We’ll never know all the reasons, but there’s no doubt that certain players were not at their peak and that makes the difference when you’re trying to win at the very highest level. If we’d been at our best, we would have beaten South Africa in the pool match. Would we have beaten them in the final? I doubt it. Would we have beaten New Zealand in the final? I would say not.

  Almost as disappointing as our exit from the World Cup was the fact that I was more or less left to face the Australian media on my own. The touring party pretty much evaporated after the quarter-final. The rules of the tournament state that if you go out in the quarter-finals, you go home. If you wanted to stay on in South Africa with family or friends for a holiday, you had to pay for that yourself.

  A lot of players and coaching staff stayed for the finals. Bob Dwyer stayed. The team manager, John Breen, stayed. I was the most senior member of the party who went home and that added to the disappointment. Sure, it’s nice to have a holiday, see some elephants—I don’t begrudge anyone that. But I definitely felt a little let down. As far as I was concerned, my flight was booked and the ticket said ‘Sydney’ on it.

  While I don’t blame people for staying and watching the final, and never said anything publicly at the time, on arriving in Sydney I was, in effect, the focal point of a losing Australian team. I saw the press gathered as I walked into the arrivals hall of the airport and I immediately felt, ‘I’m out on a limb here a little.’

  The press had every right to be lying in wait. We’d gone from defending champions to failures in what seemed like the blink of an eye, and I had to absorb the accompanying disappointment and answer all the questions. We’d held the Cup; now we weren’t even the fourth-best team in the world. I was there to be shot at, in a figurative sense.

  Really, they should have been shooting at all of us. What could I do but deal with the press, apologise to the fans and handle it all in the only way I knew: by taking it on the chin. I said something that amounted to: ‘We just weren’t good enough.’ And the press and fans knew me well enough to know it was true. It’s always better to be upfront.

  One thing I couldn’t help smiling ruefully about when I was doing the post-mortems was the fact that we, Australia, had analysed the mistakes the All Blacks had made between winning the World Cup in 1987 and going out in the semifinal in ’91. We logged their errors, came up with all kinds of measures and contingencies and then went and repeated most of the mistakes ourselves. When it came to it, we’d learned no lessons.

  NICK FARR-JONES: I had moved to live in Paris in 1995 and was working for Société Générale. I was watching the Australian preparation from a distance. They’d had a good 1994 season, had beaten New Zealand, but something definitely went awry between 1994 and 1995. The impression I got was that it wasn’t an overly harmonious team and I do know that they were distracted by the prospect of the game going professional and I think Bob [Dwyer] was very much central to that discussion.

  It was a tough time and I was as disappointed as anyone. I also felt there was pressure on me from all kinds of other angles. I’d just retired from a long career playing international rugby. It’s an emotional moment when you call it a day after so many years. I felt, ‘I’d like to savour this a little bit, reflect on what I’ve done.’ After all, I was actually quite content that my international career was over.

  The professional rugby scenario seemed to be coming to a head. It looked like there was major upheaval about t
o happen and the uncertainty was unsettling, even though I’d taken myself off the table in an international sense. Of no less importance, I had a fiancée on the other side of the world. I wanted to be with her, needed to be with her. A huge part of my life had just drawn to a close and I wanted to share those moments. Furthermore, we had a wedding to plan, and a whole lifetime beyond that.

  All these thoughts and pressures seemed suddenly to converge. I called Dad and said, ‘Let’s watch the semi-final somewhere.’ I was staying on the Sunshine Coast so he drove up from Brisbane to meet me. As always, Dad had the right kind of advice—‘You’ve had an amazing international career. Focus on that and what you want to do next, not anything negative in the past.’ Of course, he was right.

  ROB ANDREW: The Australians had obviously all gone, but at the World Cup final dinner, professional rugby was the only topic of conversation among all the players. I think, in hindsight, the general feeling has been that had they issued contracts in South Africa when they had all the players in one place, they would have got it off the ground. It was that close. The mistake they made was allowing everybody to go back home then trying to finalise things from a distance. That allowed the unions to get in to the various countries to disrupt it, which, in turn, allowed the IRB [International Rugby Board] to say, ‘Okay, the game’s open from August.’ My understanding is that the South Africans broke ranks first in that Francois Pienaar did a deal with their union to keep all their players tied to the SARU. Then all the other unions got their act together.

  I’D EVENTUALLY SAID A conclusive ‘no’ to delivering the players to the World Rugby Corporation as requested. As for my retirement, did the money I could potentially earn as a professional player with WRC tempt me to hang on a bit longer? Of course it did. But the most important factor for me was that I didn’t want to tarnish my whole career by being the guy who led his team into what could have been a short-lived breakaway circus.

  I felt my legacy, at that point, was good. I’d played for Australia for thirteen years. Not many people can say they’ve done that. I didn’t want to act in a way that would adversely affect the Australian Rugby Union. There was a principle there. I felt like I had bound myself to an unwritten code of loyalty, and I wasn’t prepared to throw it all away. Although the ARU had never paid me anything, they’d always been extremely good to me. Of course the money incentive to break ranks was good—and who doesn’t like money? But there were opportunities elsewhere that didn’t involve turning my back on the ARU.

  And I didn’t want to be the guy who said to my Wallaby teammates, ‘Come on and sign. This is the best thing for you.’ I didn’t want to be responsible for some of the younger guys never playing for Australia again, because it was a distinct possibility that they would be banned if they joined the breakaways. I didn’t want to be the leader of that. I was happy to lead them as the captain of Australia on a rugby field, but not in a situation where I was being paid to deliver them to somebody else. These were teammates, friends and human beings—not commodities to be traded for cash. I walked away from everything and said, ‘Count me out.’

  The WRC organisers said, ‘What will you do?’

  I said, ‘I’m going back to Italy.’

  They then said, ‘You’ve played in Italy for a while, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, we’ll give you the same amount of money to deliver the Italian team.’

  My response was, ‘Thank you very much; that’s very flattering. But I’m a guest in that country and I don’t want to be part of destroying rugby there either.’

  I knew that the time had come for rugby to become professional and that this movement might prove to be the catalyst. I just didn’t want to be a part of the process.

  WITH ME OUT OF the picture, a few other senior players in Australia took over at the forefront of the negotiations with the WRC. Phil Kearns was one and I think Rod McCall was another. He’s now Chairman of the Queensland Rugby Union. Rumour has it that there was pressure exerted on the younger Wallabies to sign. It’s said they were brought into the WRC office individually and told, ‘You’ve got to sign. We’ve got to be united, we’re all in this together.’ In the end, thanks to the money waved around and the coercion, there were just three players, I believe, who’d been part of the World Cup squad who refused to sign the letters of intent: me, Tim Gavin and Jason Little.

  Jason always liked to present himself as this naive, grass-chewing country boy from Toowoomba. He is a very bright fellow, always was, but he’d perfected the persona of someone who didn’t quite know what was going on. He’s a lovely guy and is now doing very well in his chosen field.

  Everyone was battling over him in 1995. He said no to rugby league, said no to the rugby circus and instead became the poster boy for the Australian Rugby Union. They gave him a huge amount of money to become their first professional rugby signing. It was a smart move on Jason’s part—he played each of the three parties off the other and got what he wanted. It was a no-lose situation for him, when you think about it. He was staying with the established body, getting paid and not jeopardising his international career.

  As it turned out, the planned circus didn’t happen anyway. All the other guys signed letters of intent with the WRC, but then it fell apart because in August 1995 rugby was declared an open (and professional) sport by the IRB. That put an end to the need for a breakaway. That’s the short story.

  At the same time—and I knew this was going on too—SANZAR (formed by the New Zealand, South African and Australian unions) signed a deal, under the name SANZAR initially; it would later become the Super 12 and then the Super 14 competitions. It was a US$550 million deal for ten years’ worth of exclusive broadcasting rights. It was to start in 1996. It sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it? But at the time, I was thinking, ‘Hmmm, I’m not sure how far that money will actually stretch.’

  I remember sitting with Leo Williams, who was Chairman of the Australian Rugby Union. He has now, sadly, passed away. He was saying, ‘I’ve negotiated the biggest deal in Australian sporting history’ and all that kind of thing.

  I said, ‘Leo, let’s just look at the figures.’

  It was US$550 million over ten years. That’s US$55 million each year. Then you divide that by three countries. Within each of those three countries there were four teams that had to be sustained. When you look at it like that, it’s not that much money. I’d say that News Corporation got an absolute bargain. But it saved rugby by preventing a big split, and saved a few players from going down the route of rugby league.

  I’m sure I’m not generalising when I say that most rugby union players wouldn’t particularly choose to go and play rugby league. They are two different games and two very different worlds. The main incentive to go to league was always money, but the professionalisation of rugby union levelled the playing field somewhat. I never had anything against league; I followed it and always caught up with a few guys I knew who played for the Queensland teams. Because it was so popular, you couldn’t really avoid it. It was and is a much more popular code in Australia than rugby.

  I even had a few offers from rugby league over the years. I remember one in particular. I can’t remember the exact year; it was sometime in the late ’80s.

  I was sitting in my office in Brisbane one morning when the phone rang, pretty early—‘Good morning, Michael Lynagh speaking.’

  There was a lady on the other end with a pretty thick accent, clearly from somewhere in the north of England. She said, ‘Is this the office of Michael Lynagh? Do you have a fax number?’

  I said yes and gave it to her and she said that a Mr Joe Pickavance of St Helens rugby league club wanted to send a fax through to me. Of course I knew who he was because he was in the news a lot. St Helens were a big team at the time and a few Australians had gone over to play there.

  So this piece of paper came through. For the time, it was a pretty amazing offer for a five-year contract. This guy had never even spok
en to me, so it was obvious that this was merely an opening offer—something to test the water. I thought, ‘Jeez, I need to think about this pretty seriously.’ I can’t remember how much it was, but for those days it was a lot of money, with more potentially waiting. I spoke to my father about it—‘This could set me up for life.’

  At the time I was captain of Queensland and vice-captain of Australia, doing well at work, and enjoying living in Brisbane, going surfing every weekend in the sun. Life was good. Dad said, ‘Do you really want to give all that up to go and live in the north of England and get beaten up every week?’ When he put it like that, the decision was easily made. And it didn’t involve me signing for St Helens. Some things are more important than money, I realised. It’s a belief I would stick to.

  TWELVE

  A CINDERELLA STORY

  HAVING GONE BACK TO Italy for one last season after the 1995 World Cup, I was enjoying life without the pressures of international rugby. I yearned for very few aspects of it. I missed the guys, but certainly not the training or the tension before games. The frayed nerves. The feeling sick, worrying about whether the kicks would go over.

  Instead of stressing about training, fitness, injuries and captaining a team, I was enjoying making plans with Isabella. We were engaged and planned to marry in July 1996. My arrangement at Treviso would soon be over, so we were pondering questions like, ‘Where would we like to live?’ It seemed as if, almost overnight, someone had removed my shackles. I was thirty-two years old and starting life all over again with a blank canvas. We were toying with the idea of moving back to Australia to live, but we had no firm plans. We were happy trying to map out where life might take us.