SOME time around 1820, Mrs Gideon Mantell, wife of a country doctor and keen amateur palaeontologist, was walking in Tilgate Forest, West Sussex, when she made an unusual discovery. Among a pile of debris left by the roadside was a small brown object, a bit like a nut or a stone but patently neither.
Knowing her husband’s interest in fossils she took it home, where Mr Mantell identified it as a tooth from a large reptilian creature living in the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. He did not call it a dinosaur tooth for one simple reason; until Mrs Mantell returned from her walk, nobody knew that dinosaurs existed.
Unfortunately for Mantell, it took him a methodical three years to substantiate his theories, naming the beast as an iguanodon, by which time another dinosaur had been unearthed and the credit for this remarkable discovery had gone elsewhere.
Undaunted, Mantell continued his obsessive work with fossils, building the largest and most significant collection in Britain. He neglected his practice, which collapsed, as did his marriage, and by 1841 he was living a dismal existence in London when he was struck by a horse-drawn carriage, became entangled in the reins and was dragged down the street at a gallop. Now distracted by horrendous spinal injuries, other palaeontologists set about making claims to his research, most notoriously Richard Owen, noble creator of the Natural History Museum and, on the quiet, a nasty piece of work.
OWEN made sure that he received recognition for many of Mantell’s greatest achievements and when the pitiful doctor could stand no more and committed suicide in 1852, was believed to be behind a spiteful obituary that did not even grant him the honour of the iguanodon discovery. Mantell’s son, Walter, emigrated to New Zealand, where he donated his father’s fossil collection, including the tooth that remains arguably the most important palaeontological find of the modern age, to what is now Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand, in Wellington. It is kept in a box out the back along with other prehistoric relics, such as Sir Clive Woodward’s reputation and his tactics for the first Lions international against the All Blacks last weekend.
If a week is a long time in politics and 65 million years a long time in palaeontology, then 80 minutes is a comparative eternity in sport. Before breakfast on Saturday, Woodward was rugby union’s Sir Alf Ramsey and then in less time than it takes cold egg to congeal on a greasy plate he became its Graham Taylor.
It is hard to imagine a more spectacular and sudden fall from grace. Even the cursed Gideon Mantell, his genius suppressed beneath another man’s name or gathering dust in a curator’s office in the most remote corner of the world, suffered fewer humiliations in his lifetime.
The front page of The Dominion Post, the Wellington newspaper, yesterday referred to Woodward in passing as a laughing stock. The insult should not hurt as much as the casual way it was meted out. Under normal rules of engagement, even in the blowhard southern hemisphere, to brand the World Cup-winning coach a fool would be a controversial statement, requiring banner headlines, bold display and a lengthy justification. Here, it was slipped in almost as a sub-clause, an aside, as if the writer was not telling us anything we did not already know.
Woodward has little more than three days to alter this perception and, at best, can only break even on Saturday. Were the Lions to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in rugby history at the Cake Tin, it would hardly serve as vindication, considering that victory would almost certainly have been achieved with the basic team that Woodward’s critics said should have started in Christchurch. The best that could then be argued was that he was big enough to admit his mistake, with a final reckoning scheduled for Auckland seven days later. In all likelihood, the debate will not stretch that far.
After Sydney in November 2003, Woodward looked every bit this century’s Ramsey. He possessed a World Cup winner’s medal, a certain English aloofness and the singular nature of the confident, driven, successful man. So many observers made the connection that when Woodward expressed his intention to pursue a career in football there was genuine belief that this was a road that would end with him emulating Ramsey in a literal sense. No longer. The tour being overseen by Woodward has the hallmarks not of 1966 but of 1993 and the hapless Taylor’s foray into World Cup football. It is all there: rotten luck, the unsettling image of drowning men, gallows humour and a final, uncanny similarity between root vegetable and knight of the realm.
Taylor, to his cost, also believed that the media could be managed; before anyone had heard of Alastair Campbell, before Tony Blair was even Prime Minister, Taylor introduced English sport’s first spin-doctor. His name was David Teasdale and he helped to orchestrate the only World Cup qualifying campaign to be remembered mainly for its comic catchphrases.
Campbell is yet to come up with anything as instantly quotable as “do I not like that”, but if another Lions centre gets stuffed into the ground like a tent peg after 40 seconds on Saturday, give him time. In truth, Teasdale had no part in Taylor’s unintentionally funny exclamations as matches spiralled beyond his control, but he did encourage him to sing Buddy Holly songs during press conferences and gave him the odd prop, such as a giant alarm clock, to ease the tension of mounting disaster.
It was all nonsense, of course. Bursting into Raining In My Heart — “Oh, misery, misery,” Taylor sung to a room of mortified sports writers, “what will become of me?” — convinced the nation that not only were England still going out of the World Cup, but they were doing so with a pillock at the tiller. The clock, intended as a humorous response to complaints about truncated interview time, merely yielded photographs to accompany the headline: TIME’S UP, TURNIP! Woodward, whose record suggests no need for smoke and mirrors, does not seem to have been overtly influenced by Campbell, but has nevertheless suffered as a consequence of their relationship. A valid attempt to open debate around Tana Umaga’s brutal tackle on Brian O’Driscoll, the Lions captain, was fatally undermined by Campbell’s involvement because it allowed apologists for the All Blacks captain to devalue Woodward’s argument with baseless accusations of spin.
None of which reflects well on Woodward’s decision-making. His attempt to put pressure on the home team before the first international backfired as spectacularly as Taylor’s exhortation to “sit back and watch us win it” before the European Championship finals in 1992.
More dishearteningly, Woodward’s selection gambles with the Lions were no longer bold and intuitive but reminded of the times when a certain England manager would prefer Gordon Cowans to Paul Gascoigne and thought that the answer to the perennial problem on the left of England’s midfield was Carlton Palmer.
IT IS hard to conceive how Woodward went from getting it so right with England to so wrong with Britain and Ireland and how he can retrieve that situation in such a short space of time. A preposterously large victory over Manawatu yesterday was what the doctor ordered, but even running up a century of points, it was hardly a triumph for Woodward, with the buoyant performance of Shane Williams (taking into account the poor opposition) merely underlining that the head coach missed a trick when banishing him to Southland last week.
There was never going to be any shame in losing a Lions series in New Zealand, just as Taylor’s misdeed — failing to get out of Holland’s World Cup group, having been deprived of two of his best players, Alan Shearer and a sane Gascoigne, for many of the matches — does not seem so catastrophic in hindsight. As Woodward frequently reminds us, British teams have been returning from these islands with nothing but bruises as souvenirs since the days of teams comprised of nothing more than gentlemen, farmers and sheep-shearers.
For Woodward and Taylor, though, the manner of defeat is increasingly significant. The abiding memory of Taylor is a powerless little man, hopping up and down on the touchline, berating the fourth official for a decision that he did not make. “Thank your mate,” he said, gesturing at the referee. “Because now I get the sack.”
He did not mention that England were going out of the World Cup, only that his contract was going to be terminated. In that moment, it was plain that the England manager had lost all concept of what mattered. On Sunday night, armed with his QC, his politician and his video technicians, Woodward was Taylor’s echo. It is pointless analysing all elements of this tour to the finest detail if, by your own admission, you picked the wrong team.
In sport, as in science, margins are so tiny that one mistake, one bad day at the office, can alter everything. Ramsey to Taylor in one morning may appear harsh, but if Mantell can discover dinosaurs and end on a shelf in Wellington, Woodward can leave Britain a knight and come back a turnip.
- E-mail Martin Samuel at aogy90@dial.pipex.com
