‘I don’t like acclaim. I never have’
SO this is the famous Pennyhill Park Hotel, luxurious home to the English rugby squad in the years building up to the greatest day in their history, winning the World Cup in 2003 and location for my chat with Martin Johnson. Hard to believe close on 10 years have passed since Johnson and I sat down for a serious chat on all matters rugby.
Clive Woodward broke new ground with his attention to detail and the desire to make his English squad the best looked after in the game. Stories of England’s luxury surroundings made them the envy of other sides — four poster beds, Michelin star food and on-site rugby facilities.
Donal Lenihan: So why have you brought the squad back here, an attempt to recapture the golden era?
Martin Johnson: In a way it was strange to come back. We were here in Woody’s time. England had been out of here for a few years but you’re together so much in camp you need the right environment. When I came into the job the squad had been bouncing around the place, down at Bath and travelling back up. When we play games at Twickenham, and with Heathrow close by, this place, with all the facilities on-site, is the place to be. It just saves so much time.
Donal Lenihan: So the four poster beds are just a figment of the imagination?
Martin Johnson: No, they are here but it’s a comfortable bed and good food, that’s all you need. It works for us. We try to create an environment where you can have some fun and work hard. Winning obviously helps. People have a perception about me that I’m the big ogre but that’s not the case. We get to have fun at the right times and enjoy it. Let people be themselves and be characters.
DL: A feature for Ireland in this championship has been indiscipline. When you came on board with England in 2008/09, you couldn’t keep 15 players on the field. Yellow cards were a problem.
MJ: We had four against the All Blacks, two v Italy, two v Wales and two v Ireland. A bit of it was self-perpetuating because it was big news. It was almost like referees couldn’t wait to get the card out. But we had to end it, we had to stop a cycle. And we did it pretty quickly. We haven’t had a problem since then.
DL: How did you go about that?
MJ: We had to make guys aware... We now had a reputation and everyone wants to talk about it. I think some of them were harsh and was acknowledged so by the powers above. Perception is everything. I mean, Danny (Care) hit Ireland’s loose head prop (Marcus Horan) in a ruck and was shown a yellow card. I thought it was quite a good contact personally, for our little scrum-half to be knocking the loose head about, but you had that perception. When people use that word ill-discipline, that doesn’t cover all of it. Ill-discipline is those silly penalties where you just do something plainly wrong.
I think Ireland compete very heavily at the breakdown and the way the game is being refereed now, you have to know the risks you are running if you compete and that risk is of getting penalised. I don’t think it’s indiscipline; it’s what Ireland do at the breakdown. Ireland competes very well in that area as a team, it’s just the world has changed a little bit. What you could do 18 months ago, you can’t do now. I’m not one of those players who say ‘ah you’ve killed the ball, that’s not rugby’. That is rugby.
DL: You weren’t bad at it yourself...
MJ: That’s what I could do for the team. The game is not all running and passing. Yes, a lot of it is, and people want to watch that and enjoy it and I understand that. But the game is all those other things as well. Competing for the ball at the breakdown is vital. I played in a club team (Leicester) and got criticised every week for doing that. Then in England we got away from doing that and got overtaken by the southern hemisphere. People would say ‘Ah isn’t Richie McCaw great at the breakdown’. Yeah, he is, because he’s allowed to compete. The balance of that breakdown area to me is the most important thing in the game. If it goes too far either way, it has too big an effect.
Two years ago it was too hard to retain the ball and people were talking about ELVs changing the game. It wasn’t the ELVs it was in the breakdown, guys were getting penalised for sealing off; you were getting penalised more for having the ball than not having the ball. If you can’t keep the ball you might as well kick it down there.
The balance is crucial and it’s been tinkered too much by people not understanding. If you can’t compete that’s also wrong because you just get 15 guys lined across the field — I watched a game in England the other day and one team had 22 phases in the opposition 22 and couldn’t score. Now that wasn’t particularly exciting. You could look away for 10 minutes. The way that game was getting refereed just edged to the wrong side of the line. The game is competing for the ball, trying to win it and then doing something with it. You just got to get that balance right.
DL: With the World Cup looming and a public with an insatiable appetite for information, what is your view on the ever-expanding social media?
MJ: The game has got even more intense. Every game has got bigger; everyone wants a piece of you. There are so many different outlets. I did some media the other day. One of them was a chat like this which was fine; one of them was a camera to camera. Then you are doing internet media, web chat and Facebook stuff. Everyone wants to know your business. The beast needs to be fed.
That brought the conversation nicely to the recent debate in Ireland about the players using Twitter. I admitted to Johnno that I used his quote from last year when he captured my sentiments perfectly, declaring “the only thing I would post on twitter is – mind your own f*****g business”. Laughter all round.
DL: So what about Twitter?
MJ: Our generation don’t understand it because we have never been there. It’s also that you live in a world where people think ‘hey, I should express my opinion on this’. When I came into the England team, I didn’t talk for four years. By about 1996 I might have started speaking up occasionally. Now, the world is changing. We encourage everyone to speak. I sometimes think we shouldn’t have a mobile phone, never mind tweet, but we have to deal with it because it is there and some people do it. People have said I’ve banned talk of Grand Slams, I haven’t banned anything. I don’t ban them twittering (sic). I trust them to be sensible. When there are issues, you say to them — ‘mate, what are you doing, I’ve got to deal with this now’. We don’t need the hassle.
I suppose everyone wants to know what goes on, on the inside. That’s the beauty of sport. I want to know the inside about what’s happening in Liverpool now that Kenny Dalglish has gone back but I shouldn’t know because I am not on the inside. Some things have to be kept internal. Our guys understand that now. What we say in team meetings is not for public consumption because we need to be able to talk to each other.
DL: Going back to Dublin with a Grand Slam on offer invokes memories of 2003 and the red carpet affair. What are your memories of that incident eight years on?
MJ: (A big smile). That was one of the most bizarre, surreal things because we warmed up on that side of the pitch (South Terrace end) whereas we normally warm up at the other end (at the Havelock Square end).
First off, the atmosphere there was amazing that day because normally when we went to Ireland in those years, there was always that sort of, ‘Well, you’re England and you are going to win’ in the build-up. Of course, Ireland always try and take your head off in the match but with that game, the public behaved differently because Ireland were going for the Slam as well. It was the start of this very successful Irish team. We had always been in the same hotel and it’s lovely and quiet. As you would leave the hotel, the staff would all applaud you on to the bus. It was all a little bit too pleasant. On this occasion, however, everyone was screaming at us, so it was great for us. It was a good build-up.
We just lined up in front of the (West) stand and the crowd was baying for us. I remember looking around. Jonathan Kaplan was there and Brian O’Driscoll was looking at us a little bit sheepishly as he walked behind (where England had lined up)”.
To explain: England were on the right hand side of half way, facing the West Stand with the carpet on the left hand side of half way, now unoccupied.
MJ: “I’d like to put on the record that I never made President Mary McAleese stand on the grass because we had the red carpet in front of us. It was the Ireland boys (who didn’t have the carpet in front of them). If they had stayed where they were, then she would have been on the red carpet. I didn’t even know the president was coming to the game. It’s not what you are thinking about. We were do or die. That was as much a do-or-die game as you would ever have (England had lost three Grand Slam deciders). If we had lost that game... when your coach tells you there’s nowhere to go... we knew it already in our heart of hearts. There’s nowhere to go if we lose this game.
If Kaplan had said “guys shuffle up”, we would have shuffled up. I wouldn’t have thought anything about it. But this guy came out of nowhere to move us (current Ireland team services manager Ger Carmody).... I don’t know but it felt like it was just some random guy came out and said ‘move up’ and I just said, ‘Don’t tell us to do anything, pal’. And then, BANG, it was just such a huge stand-off and I had that thought in my head: what have we got ourselves into now?
I had Backy (Neil Back) next to me and he’s very cold, he’s just going, ‘You can’t move now’ and I’m thinking: ‘You’re right mate’.”
DL: So you’re blaming Backy now?
MJ: No, it was just one of those things. It was never pre planned and it was never intended. As I said, President McAleese, she walked onto the red carpet in front of us. Someone said afterwards it was their (Ireland’s) lucky side but I’m not fussed with all those things. You normally walk out the side that you warmed up on and that is what we did that day.
I’ll tell you another thing. As we went to line up to receive the kick-off the crowd sang The Fields of Athenry and that was... I’ve only had that once when the hairs actually stand up on the back of your neck… and that was it. The noise that came off the terrace was immense, because it was so much more condensed and it was a heck of a battle.
We had a mind-set going into that game that if we win with a deflected drop goal in the ninth minute of injury time, then we could be the happiest people in the world because we just needed to win.
People talk about, ‘Ah, you’ve got to win but you got to win in style’. In this championship people are talking about scrappy games. Ireland, France and Scotland would have loved to win a scrappy game last weekend.”
DL: The last game you ever played for England was the World Cup final. Is that the best decision you ever made?
MJ: I didn’t do that because I wanted to leave a legacy or anything like that, but I knew at the time it was the right decision. I had played a long time and I didn’t ever want to on the field going through the motions. I got letters from ex-players saying ‘don’t give it up’ and I understand now why they said that. But it was the right decision.
I HAVE since thought I should have stayed for the Six Nations in 2004 and try and keep the ship a bit steady because it was a tough time because we had played so much rugby. We had three weeks off after the summer tour in 2003 (which produced excellent wins over New Zealand and Australia) but just as we were splitting up at the end of the tour, the fitness guy says, ‘Right lads, here is your fitness schedule for the three weeks’, and chucked us a phone book full of material. I went on holiday with Backy and we trained every day, but we loved it because we were winning. We were hanging on to get to the tournament so that was it.
DL: Was this the only role in rugby that would have enticed you back into the game?
MJ: I didn’t have any ambitions to get involved with England. I got into the game to play. I wanted to be a player. I did that and I was so lucky. I played with the same players with Leicester for virtually my whole career. I was great to be able to do that. The team wasn’t always changing, same with England. We were strong because of that.
What was a bad season? With England we never lost more than one game in the championship in my whole time. We just couldn’t win a Grand Slam. With Leicester a bad year for us was finishing third or fourth in the Premiership.
DL: The month before you took over, England had a horrible tour to New Zealand with a considerable fallout from off-field issues also?
MJ: English rugby was at a pretty low point. A lot of young players had been thrown into an unstable team and I had grown up with an England team like that in the 1980s, guys getting chucked in, chucked out, no success. It becomes a very difficult place to play. Successful players come in to a stable environment, guys around them who have experience who know what they are doing and then they can go and play.
The first thing I had to do when I came in was to create a bit of continuity. I don’t want to use the word ‘comfortable’ — you should never be comfortable about your place — but you have to have that understanding. You want to walk into a room and know a dozen of the players.
Look at the Ireland team. They have a core of players who have been around forever. If you come in to that team as a young player, you don’t need to be told what to do. I’m following these guys, they are leading the team. We needed that.
DL: When you took the England job in 2008 after three years in exile, was it not a problem that the man on the street believed that because you are now in charge, everything would now be fine. How did you deal with that?
MJ: That’s one of the reasons I got out of the game a little bit, because when you lose the criticism is too much — and you know that — but also when you win, the acclaim is too much. With the same people who lost a game the year before we were not suddenly gods.
I have been around elite rugby a long time. Whoever the player or the coach is, you know the deal, they are all human beings. There is no one coach who is the be-all and end-all amongst all people.
But people don’t want that in sport. People want their super heroes. I like that too. We all get into sport, there’s that mythology in sport that we love that this guy is untouchable but there has never been that man. I still have my heroes.
DL: Like who?
MJ: Well, the guys I played with England in 2003. I have got huge admiration for a lot of those players, guys like Hilly (Richard Hill) — when you say a player was consistent, it always sounds like he was ok, but Hilly was always bloody world class. Backy was incredibly consistent, Wilko (Jonny Wilkinson), to see what he has done.
DL: What would winning this game against Ireland mean to you?
MJ: This isn’t about me. I want the players to be the heroes. That’s the one thing Clive Woodward said when he came in: I want you guys to be the heroes for the next generation.
If we are successful, I am very happy to go home and have a cup of tea and let the credit to the players and the coaches. That’s the ideal for me. I don’t like acclaim and I never have; I’m not here for the ego trip. There are a lot of things you could be doing that are a hell of a lot easier than this job. If we win Saturday I will be happy for English rugby. That’s all.
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