The rock band Oasis may have warned in the distant past about the perils of looking back in anger, but, evidently, England rugby boss Bill Sweeney wasn’t a fan.
How else can his long-time desire to prove Steve Hansen wrong be explained?
An evening with the former Wales coach more than a decade ago still raises Sweeney’s hackles when he thinks about it, seeing as the then All Blacks assistant coach offered up a withering assessment of English rugby.
Rugby Football Union CEO Sweeney was working for Adidas when he attended a dinner-date with Hansen and a posse of All Blacks. The get-together didn’t cheer the future England rugby chief and what Graham Henry’s then deputy said has since stuck with him - and is motivating him even today as he looks to show Hansen he was wide of the mark.
In an in-depth interview with the Rugby Journal magazine, Sweeney said: “Whenever the All Blacks were playing the northern hemisphere, they would send eight or nine players across to Nuremberg and they would be there for a week and they do product testing and marketing appearances.
“I would always deal with them and their favourite restaurant was a Japanese restaurant in the centre of town and I was there one night with the likes of Dan Carter, Ma’a Nonu and Steve Hansen.
“At one point Steve stood up, raised his glass and made a toast, saying: ‘You are the only Englishman in here and you won the World Cup in 2003, so fantastic, well done, but you will never win one again’.
“He basically said we didn’t have the systems in place for sustained success, we’re just not set up to continually win. We had a great set of players in 2003, but that’s it, we’ll never win again. And that’s what really stuck with me.
“I’d love to leave behind the best world-class, high-performance system in the world, one where we have always got a chance of winning a Grand Slam and we are always going to be in the last four at the World Cup.
“And then I can shove it up Steve Hansen’s…nose one day.”
England hope Conor O’Shea’s appointment as high-performance boss will further strengthen their structure and help give them the levels of consistency that Hansen suggested were absent in their game.
England reached World Cup finals in 2007 and 2019 but have won just one Grand Slam since 2003, with Wales winning four and France and Ireland claiming two apiece.
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