Blindsided Read online

  Sadly, back in those fledgling professional days, there were more than a few players with a similar profile to me who turned up at clubs just to get paid and went home afterwards without putting in their best effort—‘Thanks very much, that’ll do nicely.’

  I never wanted to be lumped into that category. I was always thinking the opposite: ‘I’m not here for a free ride.’ It’s not a surprise then that nowadays every goal-kicker does what I did—it’s actually considered part of the job. Back in 1996, it wasn’t part of the job at all.

  BACK IN THE AMATEUR era, when I played the majority of my rugby, it wasn’t just goal-kicking practice that was taken a lot less seriously. Every aspect of the game was practised less. In the very early days, goal-kicking wasn’t something I worked on much and that itself was a problem I should have identified at the time. I was all about feel and—with hindsight—I probably always underestimated just how much natural ability I had. I relied on it and anything else—practice, mental preparation etc—was just a bonus. I wasn’t giving it more thought than most kickers, but with hindsight, I probably should have practised more.

  People always said I was too hard on myself. I don’t agree with that. Maybe I just expected—demanded—more of myself than most, and, looking back, it’s possible that I was aiming for things that simply weren’t realistic in terms of kicking goals. But I didn’t look at it like that at the time. As far as I was concerned, I was just doing my very best for every team I represented.

  As amateur rugby players, we worked all day in our real jobs or perhaps studied at university, as I did. The emphasis was completely different. Rugby was secondary then. After uni I worked in property and that didn’t leave a lot of time once I’d done my nine to five and then been to training in the evening. The last thing I wanted to do was practise kicking after I’d worked all day and then driven across Brisbane to train from six until eight-thirty at Ballymore. I could only do so much in a day.

  That said, on the occasions when goal-kicking wasn’t working for me, and there were certainly a few, I did try to fix the problem. But not in what you’d call a scientific way. I’d just stand in front of the posts and kick a few to see if I could get the feeling of knocking them over back. Even in games on the weekend, it was a case of just seeing how it went rather than knowing what to do and what to adjust. Thinking about it makes the task of kicking successfully even more stressful, because ‘feel’ isn’t tangible. There’s no reason why you have it one moment and not the next.

  So for the first three-quarters of my career, at Queensland and even for Australia, back in the amateur 1980s and early 1990s, a lot depended on unquantifiable things like ‘feel’ and momentum. Because I didn’t practise enough, most of my stress was brought on simply by my not knowing which me would turn up—the ace goal-kicker or the hopeless one. ‘I wonder how it’s going to go this weekend,’ was my persistent worry.

  I liken the feeling to stepping onto the first tee when you haven’t practised your golf for a while. You think things like, ‘God, I hope I don’t hook this out of bounds’, all the while knowing that hoping probably isn’t going to be enough. I’ve been in a few situations on golf courses where I could barely draw the club back on the first tee. I remember standing on the first tee at St Andrews, playing in the Alfred Dunhill Challenge with Adam Scott. It’s a huge fairway; it’s almost impossible to miss it. But if you haven’t been practising or have the yips, it’s easy to do. Just ask Ian Baker-Finch.

  When I finally poked it out there I said, ‘Thank God that’s over.’ Adam Scott said, ‘You’ve played in front of 80,000 people. What’s the problem?’ I said, ‘Mate, at least at Twickenham, I know what I’m doing. Out here, it can go anywhere.’ That’s a bit what it felt like being an amateur rugby player. By and large, my kicks could go anywhere.

  Everything usually hinged on my first kick. If I got a hard kick out on the touchline and missed it, all of a sudden I might find myself none from two, even if the second kick was from an easier position. From there I’d be behind the proverbial eight ball. Getting tense. Trying too hard. Probably making mistakes in an effort to get the scoreboard ticking over. Equally, if I slotted that first one from the touchline, I usually thought, ‘Okay, I’m in business. Here we go.

  When everything felt great, I could carry the positivity with me from there through the game. Kicks immediately seemed easier. Confidence definitely fuelled success. But, conversely, lack of it could consume me very quickly. It didn’t take much for the doubts to start creeping in.

  I’m sure I wasn’t alone in this situation. Back in the 1980s and ’90s it’s unlikely that any one kicker was doing a huge amount of practice. I know I wasn’t. There just wasn’t room in the amateur player’s life to dedicate to it and my perception was that I wasn’t doing any more than most. When I was at a low ebb, I used to occasionally wonder if anyone else was putting extra work in to gain an advantage. I used to lie in bed at night and think, ‘I wonder if Foxy’s putting extra hours in?’ I never asked him, though. I don’t think anyone really thought about it, far less discussed it.

  GRANT FOX, FORMER ALL BLACK FLYHALF: I wasn’t as diligent in the early days as Michael was. The danger of trying to seek perfection is that you tend to overthink things. You get paralysis by analysis. When you think about it, goal-kicking isn’t that hard. I tried to view it like that for the first few years.

  The result of this lack of focused practice and the associated confidence rollercoaster was that, unless all my kicks were right in front of the posts, a 70 per cent success rate was considered a good day for me in the early years. I’d be happy with that. In contrast, in my professional days at Saracens, if I’d kicked at 60 per cent, I’d soon have been sitting on my backside in the stand on weekends, watching someone else take shots at goal. My strike rate at Saracens was much closer to 80 per cent because I’d done all the homework I possibly could. I was an older man but I was a much better goal-kicker. I approached the discipline completely differently. But I’d started thinking about how I might do that long before I became a professional.

  AS THERE OFTEN IS, there was a specific turning point in my attitude to goal-kicking and how best to prepare for it—a single watershed event that triggered an ‘I need to rethink everything that I’m doing’ epiphany.

  It came a full seven years into my international career: at Eden Park, Auckland, on August 24th 1991. Australia had won the first game of the Bledisloe Cup series in Sydney 21–9. It wasn’t really as close as that. We’d played very well. Another win or, crucially, even a draw would be enough for us to regain the trophy.

  GRANT FOX: The game in Sydney is the only time in my entire career where I was standing there thinking, ‘We can’t win this game.’ I almost felt helpless. Even later, in the 1991 World Cup semi-final in Dublin, I always felt that we were capable of winning. But in Sydney I felt, ‘Christ we’re just hanging on here.’ We got beaten 21–9 and we were lucky to get that bloody close.

  I’d kicked five from five in Sydney. I had every right to feel pretty confident about how I was striking the ball. The positive momentum was there. I was right in the zone. While I knew full well that it wasn’t a permanent state, at least I was there. Not just that: there was a growing sense among the team that we’d crossed a line as far as the All Blacks were concerned. We felt that by beating them in Wellington a year previously we had removed an invisible ceiling. Of course they were still strong, by any standards. A bad All Black team is a contradiction in terms. But the 1991 All Blacks were an ageing team with several of their top players in the twilight of their careers. Guys like Kieran Crowley, Steve McDowall and Terry Wright were all great players, but closer to the end of their careers than to the beginning.

  Matching them physically was one thing, and we certainly did that. It was almost as if our forwards decided, after the disappointments of the 1987 World Cup, ‘Teams might be better than us technically, but we’ll dig deep and take it to them. Hard.’ Tommy Lawton, Simon Poidevin�
��they were big, physical presences who thought nothing of laying their bodies on the line on every possession. These forwards seemed to elevate their commitment to a new level and it was winning us games that we hadn’t been winning before.

  On the psychological side you also have to know that you can beat the All Blacks. It was always tough playing New Zealand. But if you competed with them rather than just accepting that they were the world’s best, they became frustrated and tensed up. But first their opponents had to get over the psychological hurdle of the haka and the black jumpers, which they used as intimidation factors. A lot of teams would be ten points behind the All Blacks before the game even started, especially after letting the haka get under their skin.

  In 1985, when I first faced it, I was a little intimidated by the haka too. But then I realised what it was and after that I don’t have any real memories of it. I told myself, ‘You know what it is: a dance, admittedly a war dance. You know they’re going to do it and there’s not much you can do about it.’ You can either get worked up about it or you can let it happen.

  I remember sitting on the bus with Nick Farr-Jones on the way back to the team’s hotel after that first Bledisloe Cup match in Auckland in 1985. We’d lost the match 10–9. I looked at him and said, ‘Mate, we really should have won that game, you know.’ Nick agreed. Beforehand I’d been all worked up and nervous, thinking, ‘But it’s the All Blacks . . .’

  I realised only afterwards that they were just like anyone else. There was no need to get overcome by their aura. They used that aura and their traditions very well. I don’t know if they’re trained in it, but they do use it and it works if you let it. Nick and I agreed right then that we’d never bow to the fear factor again. We jointly thought, ‘It’s just a game of rugby; let’s go out there and take them on from now on.’

  To beat the All Blacks, you have to feel that there’s no longer that aura to contend with, and all the team felt that we’d finally reached that place even prior to the first 1991 Bledisloe match in Sydney. I certainly thought, ‘We might just have your number now, boys.’

  But regardless of the psychological battles you win, you’ve still got to go out there and do it, on the pitch, and often in their back yard. That’s never easy. It’s all very well saying, ‘We’d like to win this.’ But you’ve got to think more about the small goals along the way. What area of the game did we need to focus on to achieve that ultimate goal of winning? Equally, which aspects of the game did we need to steer away from? It all had to be considered. And statistics said that we hadn’t beaten the All Blacks at Eden Park since 1986 when a 22–9 victory in Auckland had given us a rare series win in New Zealand.

  UNLIKE 1986, WHEN PLAYING conditions had been merely damp, Auckland was a wet, windy and pretty miserable place for rugby in August 1991.

  It was a tense, disjointed match, attritional and nonexpansive, with lots of dropped passes. There was frustration on both sides. Some pretty pedantic refereeing didn’t help, if memory serves me well. There was so much on the line. Not only was the Bledisloe Cup at stake, but the winners would also carry considerable momentum (and likely favouritism) into the World Cup, to be held in the UK a couple of months later. That was the theory, anyway.

  Unlike in Sydney, we were using what would be the World Cup ball. It was an early attempt at a synthetic ball and from the start it seemed as if each one behaved completely differently from any other. One would fly one way and the next would do more or less the opposite. No matter where on its surface you kicked it, the ball seemed strange. It was a goal-kicker’s nightmare.

  Consequently, the stats don’t make great reading. Grant Fox missed a few kicks that day—that’s unusual. Foxy was as close to a machine as you could get and knew Eden Park like his own front room. I was off target with a few too. But with less than a minute remaining—fifty-seven seconds, to be precise—we got a penalty, ten metres in from the left touchline. We were 6–3 down. This one would negate the missed ones. It would tie the game at 6–6 and give Australia the Bledisloe Cup. Most of the Wallaby team had never even touched the cup before.

  GRANT FOX: We both had issues that day. It was wet, swirling winds—crap conditions, really. These were the early days of synthetic balls and they weren’t the best balls to use. In those days, the home team got the last look at the ball, and if memory serves me correctly we over-inflated the ball that day—probably by a pound or a pound and a half. With the benefit of hindsight, the bloody thing had no hope of flying properly. We just had this thing that floated terribly—no forgiveness in it whatsoever.

  Conventional wisdom suggests that the left side of the field is the favourable angle for right-footed, round-the-corner kickers. That was true for me. There was no technical reason to support that, though. It was more about comfort. The left side was just a more comfortable position from a visual perspective in that it looked natural for a round-the-corner kicker. No matter where I was on the field, though, I always tried to set the ball up exactly the same way before each kick, in spite of the fact that back in the days before kicking tees there were a lot more variables.

  For example, contrary to how it probably looks on TV, pitches don’t all have the same depth of grass cover. Where Twickenham might have had four or five inches of lush, green grass back then, somewhere like Ballymore in Brisbane—where they often had to drain the pitch with a pump because of the nearby creek and low water-table—might be bare in places, clumpy in others. That makes a big difference to not only how you create a platform upon which to place the ball, but also how your foot needs to connect with the ball. On a deeper surface, you need to make sure you get underneath the ball, whereas on a bare surface you can just kick it off the top.

  Then there was the amount and consistency of the sand that was brought out to you by the ball boy to consider. If there wasn’t enough, it was hard to build a sufficiently tall mound. If the sand was too dry and powdery, the kicking platform would simply fall apart and spread all over the grass. You never really knew what you were going to get and there were no rules to stipulate such things. So kicking was much less of an exact science than it is nowadays, when a plastic tee that’s been tailored specifically for you means that, no matter where you are on any field, you’re always kicking from exactly the same height. There’s a lot less left to chance today.

  Regardless of all the variables, I always tried to draw an imaginary line through the seam of the ball, and then tried to kick the ball right down that line towards the target. I suppose it’s similar to how a golfer might imagine his swing path through the golf ball and towards the green or the hole. I’d visualise the path of my foot through the ball and extend that through its trajectory towards the posts. In theory, it’s simple. In practice, it’s less so.

  Incidentally, that visualising approach went back a long way to conversations I’d had with my dad. He’d taught me the principles of mental rehearsal way back when I was a teenager. ‘Think what you want to happen. Actually see it in your mind’s eye.’ That’s what he’d tell me, and this was when sports psychology was in its infancy. ‘Then when you’ve seen it, go and do it.’

  IAN LYNAGH, MICHAEL’S FATHER, PSYCHOLOGIST: I didn’t do a lot of formal stuff with Michael, but the early ’80s was the early stages of sports psychology becoming a regular thing within high-profile sports. In 1983, I’d been made a consultant to the Australian Institute of Sport, and I also ran a private practice in Brisbane. This was when Michael was just starting his rugby career so the two coincided very well. Goal-kicking lent itself to quite a lot of mental control and mind-management strategies. I also helped with how to prepare mentally for a game. Michael quickly developed a whole routine of preparation and mental rehearsal for games and I know that he continued to run them his whole career. But this was very early days, particularly in the sport of rugby.

  I always took Dad’s advice very seriously. It worked for me. Even as a teenager I’d lie with my eyes closed in a warm bath at exactly 11am every match day, re
hearsing in my mind what I was going to physically do later that day. It formed part of my ritual and it became an invaluable means of relaxing and allowing my mind to focus without interruption. Unbelievably, sports psychology was still an emerging concept in the early ’80s.

  Once I’d completed the visualisation process on the field, as my dad had instilled into me, I’d take four steps back and three to the left. Then came the calming words I said to myself over and over, hundreds of times.

  Slow . . . rhythm . . . through.

  Those words were important cues. First, they were my signal to clear my mind of peripheral thoughts. Secondly, they reminded me to switch over to the mode I needed to be in to kick effectively. I’d realised that most of the kicks that I’d missed in games had failed because I’d tried to execute too quickly. When you think about it, kicking requires fine motor skills, but the combination of pressure and intense physical contact and exertion prior to the kick inevitably elevates your heart-rate and makes you speed up—it’s basic physiology. So when starting my pre-kick routine, it was always important to remind myself to slow everything right down, almost to the point of exaggeration as if I was operating in slow motion.

  Having gone through this tried and tested routine in Auckland, I stood motionless with that big grandstand behind me along the touchline, ready to kick the crucial three points. I’d seen it, now it was time to execute the vision.