Gareth Thomas tells it like this. It was Saturday 16 March 2013, the last weekend of the Six Nations, and England were playing Wales in Cardiff. England had won four Tests straight, so the grand slam was on the line. Thomas had not played a rugby union Test for six years, but after playing 103 of them he knew as well as anyone what it took to win the big games. And as he watched England warm up, he could see they didn’t have it. “I looked at England’s so-called match-winners, like Owen Farrell, and saw a bunch of boys,” he wrote later. “Their game faces were on, but I saw something else in their eyes, they weren’t prepared.” England lost, 30-3.
Six years, seven months later, and it is the World Cup semi-final at the International Stadium in Yokohama. The All Blacks, back-to-back world champions, have gathered into a pyramid to start the haka. In response, England have split into a V, two diagonal lines of 11 leading back to Farrell, their captain, at the centre. The camera cut to him standing, hands on hips. And what did we see in his eyes then, as the director moved in for a close-up, but a man who knew, who felt, with complete and utter confidence that he and his team were ready for what was in front of them.
You could have a good conversation with Farrell about leadership. Last year he wrote a 12,000 word dissertation on reflective learning as part of his degree course in management and leadership. But you won’t get him to open up about it in public. There isn’t a player around who is less interested in the trimmings of the game. He disdains his publicity. The only time you ever see him retreat is when there is a camera in his face. A photographer hired to take his portrait tells how Farrell spent their three-minute shoot refusing to look at the camera, and muttering “I fucking hate this” under his breath.
So you have that conversation with everyone else. “I think he’s been a captain ever since he was born, hasn’t he?” says Lawrence Dallaglio, talking at an event to promote Land Rover’s sponsorship of the tournament. “He’s probably heard moves even before he was born. From a very early age he’s walked around the pitch with his dad, and watched his dad lift trophies in every corner of the globe. He thinks that’s normal.” With Wigan Andy Farrell won six league championships, four Challenge Cups, two Harry Sunderland trophies – given to the Grand Final man of the match, two Man of Steel awards and one Golden Boot. But even after all that, there were a couple that got away.
Like this one: the Rugby World Cup. He was part of the squad that went on to lose 15-6 in the 2007 final, to a Springbok team coached by Jake White and Eddie Jones. Owen Farrell was there for that one too, babysitting Dallaglio’s children in the stands. A year later he joined Saracens, and a year after that, he made his debut for them. He was 17. And, in one of the many strange coincidences in this story, Jones was now his head coach. “About two years later we turned the TV on and my son went: ‘I guess he won’t be babysitting for me any more,’” Dallaglio remembers. “I said: ‘No, he won’t be actually. Sorry about that.’”
By 2012, Owen Farrell was playing for England. Stuart Lancaster picked him in his first match as head coach, against Scotland. Years later, all Farrell could really clearly remember about it were the mistakes he made, like two kicks he missed from the halfway line. Even back then he was mercilessly competitive. “I blame my dad,” he has said. “He never let me win at anything.” That first week Lancaster told him: “I need you to be yourself straight away, I need to hear your voice if you’ve got something to say.” Farrell was never shy about speaking up to his teammates, and didn’t need to be asked again.
But hard as he was in those years, and well as he played, it still felt like there was something missing. There were questions about his temper and his temperament and his technique. It felt telling that, picked for the 2013 Lions tour, he was unused in the first two Tests and only played 17 minutes of the third and final match of the series. You can’t demand respect. You have to earn it. And he was a leader, but never a captain, in an England team that often cracked in the big matches. That grand slam game, yes, and the World Cup pool matches against Wales and Australia in 2015. Jones took over as coach after that. He had different ideas about captaincy to Lancaster, wanted a leader with “a bit of mongrel” in him. Farrell had it. But Jones could see he wasn’t ready yet. He needed nurturing.
He chose Dylan Hartley. In the background, he was working on Farrell, too. And when Hartley first came down injured, Farrell was promoted to co-captain. For a year they shared the role. Jones even had them room together, so Farrell could learn every last thing from him. Farrell was a quick studier. He learned to change the way he spoke to the referees, learned to keep his temper in check, learned to change his tackling technique when it became a liability. And all of a sudden, the student didn’t need the teacher any more, and England didn’t need Hartley.
Jones had Jonny Wilkinson working with Farrell too. “I feel like his journey has been a journey of mostly letting go,” Wilkinson, another Land Rover ambassador, said. “He picks things up so quickly in terms of technique and understanding, that he is constantly challenging himself, asking: ‘Why does it have to be this way?’ In the beginning he was slightly more reactive, but now he is revealing more of his ability to make his own choices. And as a player that’s what you need, because if you’ve been on your line for 10 minutes, and then the other team score, the players are looking at their captain, and he has to say: ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ That’s leadership.”
It has got to the point, Wilkinson says, where there’s nothing much left he can teach him. Jones feels the same way. “I said when I first took over, my job’s to become redundant. And I’m almost redundant now,” he said. This is Farrell’s team now. Jones calls him the “father of the group”. Farrell still has that same mean streak in him, so pitiless on the field he seems almost supercilious. He wasn’t smiling at the All Blacks, but smirking at them. There are plenty of players who have tried to wipe that look off his face. USA’s John Quill tried it with one shoulder, Argentina’s Tomás Lavinini with the other. And Farrell was still up in time to watch them get sent off. But there’s more behind it now, something deeper, more authentic, like Thomas said, all those years ago, you can see it in his eyes.
