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Huw Ricahrds
Twenty years on, the name still resonates. Talk of the Tour from Hell and there is rarely any doubt what is meant — England’s visit to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in 1998.
It lives on in more than the game’s folk memory. The Australia v England match at Lang Park, Brisbane on 6th June 1998 still sits in the record books. It was among the formative moments for a game still coming to terms with the acceptance of open professionalism three years earlier.
The outlines of this new world were emerging. At club level the Heineken Cup had just completed a third season and was facing its first English boycott, denying holders Bath their chance to defend the trophy.
The previous November had seen England define the model for what would soon become the standard autumn programme with four home tests on consecutive weekends, against Australia, New Zealand (twice) and South Africa.
That formidable schedule was the international bow for England’s first full-time coach, Clive Woodward, appointed on the basis of a relatively thin resume, but offering the advantages of availability and willingness to commit himself fully to the post. And under the rules of reciprocity, it committed England to a corresponding away programme the following summer. As well as the tests, England also agreed to play three midweek matches, against New Zealand A, Academy and Maori.
It was, Woodward reckoned, ‘The most gruelling seven-match series ever devised for an England team’ and ‘made even the fiercest Lions tour pale into insignificance’. It was, he thought ‘challenging but doable, if you had the players in great shape and time to prepare for it.’ But neither applied.
England had provided the bulk of the previous season’s triumphant Lions squad in South Africa. This was followed by a crowded domestic season which saw claim a Triple Crown while the game’s politicians battled for control in the corridors of Twickenham. Players had been in action more or less non-stop since September 1996. Some had played not far off 50 matches during the 1997-98 season.
Their need for a rest was blatantly evident. Star after star withdrew citing fatigue, injuries or both. England captain Lawrence Dallaglio, his back-row confreres Richard Hill and Neil Back, Lions leader Martin Johnson, centre Jeremy Guscott and all-but-indestructible prop Jason Leonard were only the biggest names on a long list of withdrawals.
Scrum-half Matt Dawson reckoned that ‘nobody was thinking about what was best for the players, it was all about what was best for the clubs, the RFU and England’. He thought of withdrawing himself, but admitted that he was ‘swayed by the offer of the captaincy’.
He was joined on tour by 36 other players. No fewer than 20 had yet to play for England, while only five had 10 caps or more. The Australians, who pointed out that they had sent a full-strength party north the previous autumn, were outraged.
Australian union president Dick McGruther, a gunboat diplomat even by the standards of Aussie officialdom, reckoned they were ‘probably the most under-equipped group of Englishmen sent to Australia since the First Fleet’ and invited his compatriots to Lang Park for a ‘pommie thrashing’. Mark Ella thought it ‘A joke and a waste of time’.
England did their best to accentuate the positive on arrival. Dawson managed to make a virtue of the crowded English programme, arguing that “The end of the domestic season wasn’t that long ago, so the boys are extremely match-fit.”
But Woodward admitted to being embarrassed at the long list of absentees, saying he hoped it would be a one-off. And he confessed in his memoirs to getting on the plane to Australia thinking that ‘this is what is must feel to be a crash-test dummy’.
With Dawson ruled out by injury, Woodward named a team with five new caps — Richmond wing Spencer Brown, Saracens centre Steve Ravenscroft, Gloucester scrum-half Scott Benton and two new back-rowers, Richard Pool-Jones of Stade Francais and Ben Sturnham of Saracens — led by another Saracen, ball-handling number eight Tony Diprose.
Full-back Matt Perry started at centre for the only time in a distinguished England career, while prop Phil Vickery and outside-half Jonny Wilkinson, making his first start only a few weeks after leaving school, were winning only their second caps.
They would, tour manager Roger Uttley acknowledged, have to ‘go out there and play their socks off. It is an enormous challenge.” And in the opening stages, facing a full-strength Australian team in a half-full Lang Park, it looked as though they might rise to it. Prop Graham Rowntree later recalled: “We were in the game for the first 20 minutes. We were doing quite well, if defending a lot.” Tackles by full-back Tim Stimpson, recalled after more than a year, thwarted Wallaby wings Joe Roff and Ben Tune.
It was 15 minutes before anyone scored, and only 6-0 after half an hour — the difference the two penalties landed by Australia’s Matt Burke while the 19 year-old Wilkinson missed what the agency report used on the BBC website reckoned to be ‘two comfortable penalty chances’.
Nor did a 30th minute try by no 8 Toutai Kefu seem to presage a landslide. But with both Ravenscroft and Pool-Jones having head injuries stitched, the Wallabies ran in three more tries in the last seven minutes before the break. A clear lead turned in those few minutes into a landslide, 33-0 at half-time.
From then on, the only question was how many points Australia would score. The second half followed a similar pattern. England resisted for the first 16 minutes. Experienced Leicester centre Stuart Potter came on as a replacement, taking the number of debutants to six and wing Dominic Chapman, a prolific try-scorer in club rugby for Richmond, made it seven with Australia leading 47-0.
It was during the final 10 minutes that England caved in completely. The Wallabies ran in five more tries, with Tune and outside-half Stephen Larkham completing their hat-tricks. It ended 76-0, a new record for the heaviest defeat inflicted by one foundation union on another.
Diprose admitted post-match that ‘There are a lot of disappointed guys in the dressing room and we are all shell-shocked.” Rowntree recalled that ‘There was nothing funny about the dressing room aferwards’. Woodward argued that “This is not a humiliation, just a freak result.” He pointed out that “The Aussies lost by 60 points to South Africa last year and what this result means is that I’ve just undergone the biggest learning curve of my coaching career.”
Wilkinson, who had turned 19 only a few weeks earlier, recalled in his autobiography that ‘In the immediate aftermath of the thrashing, I felt desolate. ‘ There was a tearful phone call to his father, who ‘Waited for the sniffing to stop, then encouraged me not to let the disappointment beat me, but to get up the next day and come back stronger’. He remembered his father offering similar advice five years earlier after he was left out of Surrey’s under-14 team.
The BBC report speculated that some of the debutants ‘may feel that they never want to pull on an England shirt again’. They would not be offered much choice in the matter. Four of them never did, Sturnham won two more caps, Ravenscroft and Brown one apiece. None played for England again after the end of the tour. Their combined total of 11 caps was outnumbered by the 16 eventually achieved by Australia’s sole debutant, lock Tom Bowman.
England went on to lose 64-22 and 40-10 to the All Blacks before falling 18-0 to the Boks, also conceding 62 points to the Maoris. They ended their seven-match trip winless. Off-field discipline was not all it might be, with future England captain Lewis Moody delighted – if mortified looking back – to be crowned ‘best shagger on tour’ by his team-mates. As if all that were not enough, Woodward’s father died while the team was in New Zealand.
It was, Woodward recalled, ‘England’s worst rugby nightmare’. Nascent international careers were destroyed by being launched, journalist Stephen Jones argued, with ‘their true time at least two years in the future (if it was even then)’.
But as Rowntree argued, with England top of the world rankings in March 2002, ‘You’ve got to have those experiences, if not quite as extreme as that, and it is about how you move on.’ Wilkinson explained at the same time : “My motivation is making sure that I never feel the same way I did after the 76-0 defeat…All my preparation and work is a protection policy, if you like, to ensure that I never feel so powerless again.”
Jones argued that in the longer term there was an element of good fortune for Woodward, still in the tricky early stages of his England coaching career. Nobody blamed him for losing when so patently underpowered. Instead Woodward earned sympathy for his personal loss and admiration – from fans and players, if not administrators – for a pointed gesture later in the tour when he booked the entire party out of an inadequate hotel in Cape Town, putting the considerable bill for switching them into the swish Mount Nelson Hotel onto his own credit card.
England’s best team, Jones argued, would also have lost all four tests. All the evidence suggests that he was right. It was not just a matter of their best players being exhausted, but of the balance of power at the time.
In 30 matches matching the four home unions and the Tri-Nations between England’s defeat of holders Australia in the quarter-final at the 1995 World Cup and their ending of the Springboks’ 17-match winning run at Twickenham three and a half years later, the British and Irish quartet escaped defeat only once – England’s 26-26 draw with the All Blacks at Twickenham in late 1997.
And they weren’t just losing. Record hammerings, such as Ireland going down 63-15 to the All Blacks at Lansdowne Road and Scotland losing 68-10 to the Boks at Murrayfield the previous autumn, had become almost routine. The 76-0 hammering remains England’s worst, but retained its currency as the heaviest beating inflicted by one foundation union on another for only three weeks, until Wales, with a team as depleted as the English XV at Brisbane, went down 96-13 to the Boks at Pretoria.
Nor was there any shame in losing to Australia. Almost exactly the same team, with the return of David Giffin at lock in place of Bowman the only change in the starting line-up, was to win the World Cup by beating France in Cardiff in late 1999.
Half-backs Larkham and George Gregan were still around to contest another World Cup final in 2003. Then, on a wet night in Sydney, Vickery and Wilkinson — no longer a rookie miser of ‘comfortable penalty chances’, but the game’s coolest executioner with the boot — extracted full revenge for the misery inflicted in Brisbane.
Hell that earlier night at Lang Park may have been, but the damnation inflicted on Woodward and his team proved short-term, and arguably therapeutic, rather than permanent.