Yet another storm in a T-CUP, then. Thinking Correctly Under Pressure, Sir Clive Woodward’s buzzword forever associated with Jonny Wilkinson, 2003 and all that, should long ago have been filed alongside other motivational quotes in a twee gift shop somewhere.
Instead, it has been much in evidence in recent weeks, as have the other ghosts of the Woodward era. It is as though the spectre of Sir Clive, which still hangs so heavily over English rugby despite (or perhaps because of) the 12 years that have passed since that magic Sydney moment, has preserved his buzz phrases in aspic too.
Woodward, perhaps inevitably, has loomed heavily over England’s bitter Rugby World Cup disappointment. Omnipresent on the airwaves and in print, yet another campaign appears to be under way to return him to a position of power within the RFU.
Yet, as has already been pointed out elsewhere, he has effectively been out of the game for eight years since that calamitous Lions whitewash in 2005 against New Zealand. His brief, unsuccessful flirtation with football at Southampton and an expensive, unfulfilled experiment at the British Olympic Association followed.
Now it is the Rugby Football Union chief executive, Ian Ritchie, who must maintain his nerve and avoid the disappointment over England’s exit turning into a wider crisis as he negotiates the rocky shallows of his post-tournament review.
After striking the wrong note immediately after that shock to the system against Australia, when he appeared oddly haughty and out of touch as he insisted that any review would not touch on his decisions but only on the performance of Stuart Lancaster and his England coaches, his stance since has felt noticeably more inclusive. While it still feels unsatisfactory that the review will not consider whether it was the right to offer six-year contracts to Lancaster and his coaching team, or to reconsider the overseas players rule, or to consider wider structural issues, there is an argument that to do so would risk review creep and that a more focused approach is the practical choice.
Martyn Thomas, the former RFU chairman who took the organisation to the brink, this week popped up to say I told you so about Lancaster. “Before I left, I warned the RFU board that Stuart was not the right man for the job,” he said.
Yet it was Thomas who insisted on installing Martin Johnson in an unsuitable coaching role and was the architect of much of the chaos that followed on and off the pitch in 2011. Will Carling offered up a succinct verdict on Twitter, calling Martyn’s comments “poisonous” and “vengeful” and decrying the “horrific state” he left the RFU in. It was interesting, too, to hear John Steele, Ritchie’s predecessor as chief executive who lasted barely a year in the role thanks to a power struggle with Thomas over whether Woodward should return as performance director, say that English rugby should look forward, not back.
For all that England’s exit in the pool stages smacks of a massive opportunity missed, at least the RFU feels more able to withstand the aftershocks than it did four years ago. As all and sundry offer up their prognosis for the future of English rugby, Ritchie has resolved to take his time. The process has begun with players’ feedback going through the so-called leadership group and Premiership clubs are being encouraged to chip in. Then a panel of wise men, which is expected to include at least one independent voice, will be unveiled in the next week or so.
They will sift through the wreckage of England’s campaign, the mass of data proffered by the analysts and the wide and varied opinions of all those consulted.
The target date for the review to be finished is 17 November, the next scheduled RFU board meeting. But there remains every chance that Lancaster will, after walking out his trauma in the Lake District, resign. If the gut feeling on the morning after the Australia defeat was that Lancaster would lose his head coach role but remain within the RFU in a development role then that still feels by far the most likely outcome.
It is understood that Ritchie has resolved not to approach any other candidates while the review is ongoing. That – while morally correct – also potentially leaves the RFU in a bind. If it decides that Lancaster must move on, then it will be going into a market that does not offer many obvious options. If one or two of those candidates turn the job down, things could get trickier still.
As with the England football and cricket teams, the obvious response to failure is to immediately rush to the other side of the ship and plump for the opposite choice. So the Football Association lurched from Kevin Keegan to Sven-Goran Eriksson to Steve McClaren to Fabio Capello to Roy Hodgson, alternating not only between styles and levels of experience but between foreign and English managers.
The temptation for England will be to throw out all of Lancaster’s patient work with the development pathway and the wider game in favour of a hired gun who offers the tantalising prospect of guaranteed results. Things never quite work out that way and Ritchie’s task – apart from the almost impossible job of maintaining confidentiality while the process continues – is to marry the best of both worlds, building on the lessons learned over the past four years while injecting some steel and big-game nous into the setup.
Forgiveness will be in short supply if something is not gleaned from a miserable autumn that promised so much more.
