I want to tell the story of the 2007 World Cup as I saw it. There was so much going on during the weeks of preparation and then before and after that catastrophic first loss to South Africa that every player and coach will have their view on how things were. Probably the only thing everyone will agree on is that it was a pretty amazing achievement to reach the final.

I don’t want to be seen as the guy lifting the lid on the inside story because that suggests I have some kind of agenda, which I don’t. It pains me to say this but, given our preparation, getting to the final was a victory in itself and one that reflected great credit on some truly great players. The pain lies in the fact that second place should never be acceptable to an England player. We go to every tournament to win and if we don’t do that, we fail.

Having played in our first match against USA, I was dropped and left out of the 22 for the games against South Africa and Samoa, and then made appearances off the bench in the remaining four games. It wasn’t the way I had wanted to experience the World Cup and some will say it was a tournament too far for me. That is not my perspective at all. The allure of playing for England has always been too great for me to worry about the consequences. The glass for me has always been half full – I went to the World Cup believing, like 29 other players, that I would start all of England’s big games.

Given my opportunity in the USA game, I didn’t do what was required and I can’t point the finger at anyone else for that. You’re accountable for what you do when you’ve got that shirt on your back. Since my first cap 12 years before, I had been dropped once by England. That was the autumn of 2002. It hurt then and it hurt again when it happened in France. But unlike 2002, I could sort of understand why Brian Ashton left me out of the team for the South Africa game. Even though you accept the logic, it is still hard to take and I hold my hands up now and admit that I didn’t react in the right way for the first two or three days. You have to put the team first but initially I was angry and hurt and I didn’t try to hide it. Nor can I have any complaints about Nick Easter taking and holding on to the No 8 jersey. He played well. Nick is an affable bloke, a rugby player in the Dean Richards mould – hard, tough and a good player.

So I don’t want anyone to believe I came away from the World Cup embittered by what may well have been my last experience of international rugby. That is not the case. England got to the World Cup final and I played the last 15 minutes of the match. If it was my last performance in the international theatre, it’s not exactly leaving by the side door, is it? Though we had our good days and our not-so-good days at the tournament, there were plenty of laughs. When things aren’t going well, it often produces a kind of black humour among people. Rugby players are no different. In the early days of our preparation, there was a sign on the changing room wall at Twickenham that just said “STW”. For the life of me, I couldn’t work it out and neither could anyone else. Our head coach, Brian Ashton, had put it up and he wasn’t telling us. We lost two out of our three prep matches, and started the tournament with an average performance followed by a nightmare performance. Somewhere along the way, the Da Vinci code was cracked and “STW” was revealed as “Shock The World”. Everyone thought it was a pretty clever message.

Then Andy Farrell tapped me on the shoulder one evening and said: “Know what it should say?”

“What?” “SOS,” he said. “SOS?” “Yeah, Shock Our Selves.”

Welcome to the Steiner School

I KNEW Brian Ashton from the time he worked with England under Clive Woodward and thought he was a good coach. He was always considered a players’ coach, someone prepared to allow players to think for themselves. When he was appointed head coach after the departure of Andy Robinson in the autumn of 2006, I had just returned from injury and was still getting back to top form. It wasn’t a surprise that I didn’t get into England’s squad for the 2007 Six Nations Championship and the only contact I had with Brian’s coaching team was when the forwards coach John Wells came to Wasps and told me where I stood. The door wasn’t closed, he suggested, if I got my act together.

My form did improve as the season progressed, especially after Wasps got the Heineken Cup in their sights. After beating Northampton in the semi-final, we saw off Leicester in the final. Though I was playing with a knee injury, my all-round game was solid. I needed to get my knee done, though, and a few weeks after the final I went to hospital in the morning and walked, well limped, out in the afternoon. A few days later, a letter came informing me I had been selected in England’s preliminary 46-man squad for the World Cup.

“Great to have you in the squad,” Brian told me on the day we met up. It was the first time we had spoken since he’d become head coach seven months previously.

My first impression was of a man determined not to follow the Clive Woodward blueprint. Clive was successful doing it one way and I admired Brian’s willingness to do it another. Of course, we still had to see how his way worked but it was very different. In one of his many meetings with the players, Clive got us to commit to certain standards of behaviour that we all agreed were appropriate for players on England duty. Time-keeping was sacrosanct. We agreed no player would use his mobile phone around the team hotel, no player was allowed to walk through the hotel in bare feet, you adhered to the dress code and lots of stuff like that. Clive, we would gripe, used to have meetings about having meetings, but then you always knew what the plan was, on and off the field.

For those of us who had come from this environment, Brian’s England was the Steiner School of Rugby – free will and free love for all. Everything was cool and you never had to worry about missing the next meeting because there was no scheduled next meeting. It was like, “You guys do what you want.” The empowering of players can be a very strong management tool and Brian believes in handing over the decision-making to those who will have to make the calls on the pitch.

But the time to our World Cup prep matches was short and I felt we needed more direction than we were getting. Rugby players need to have some structure, both in terms of their rugby environment and what they actually do on the training ground. And as you looked closer at our Steiner School, it was obvious all wasn’t well. Our three principal coaches were Brian, John Wells and Mike Ford. Brian was head coach, John worked with the forwards and Mike was our defence coach. You expected them to be singing from the same hymn sheet and supporting each other in everything they said to the players.

But I don’t think that was how it was. Not from where I was sitting. Right from the start, it seemed they had different ideas about what the team should be doing.

Brian wanted England playing with width and imagination, reacting to what the opposing team was doing, while John Wells had a very different view. He is the epitome of Leicester: great set-pieces, a bit of dog and a lot of efficiency. It could have been a marriage made in heaven, John’s pragmatism allied to Brian’s vision and wisdom.

But they didn’t appear to gel, something that players will pick up on in a millisecond. It seemed to me that the difficulty lay in Brian’s personality and the issue of whether he is particularly comfortable in the role of overall boss. He knows in his own mind he is the head coach and in his particular way, he tries to tell people, but the message is too low-key for players who are used to working with strong, sometimes dictatorial coaches. On the other hand, John is a strong character and was well respected by the forwards. But for a guy who was very confrontational as a player, and is very confrontational in the way he coaches, John was surprisingly nonconfrontational in terms of dealing with Brian. If he had reservations, he didn’t seem able to express them to Brian. Most of the players, especially the senior ones, picked up on the confusion caused by the lack of direction. Had a stranger walked in on any training session before the World Cup, he wouldn’t have had a clue as to who was in charge. There wasn’t one person who took control, who said: “Right, this is what we’re doing. This is how things are going to be from here on in. This is how we’re going to play. This is our vision. This is the way I see it.” That voice wasn’t heard. Without it, there was a vacuum. Before long, it was clear that pupils at the Steiner School were far from happy.

What’s going on?

OUR pretournament training camp was in Portugal, and Brian, John and Mike worked on different aspects of the game. However, their efforts didn’t seem to be coordinated and where Brian was concerned, players struggled to relate his training to what they would have to do in a match. Another complicating factor was the size of the squad. In my mind, 46 players was 10 or 12 too many. Guys want to train with those who are likely to end up alongside them when the World Cup begins. Partnerships need to be formed, patterns of play developed and practised. What normally happens is that the head coach takes a core group of players, explains to them his vision and uses those players to disseminate his plan among their teammates. This didn’t happen and as we drew closer to our prep matches, anxiety levels among the players increased. Not just the players but also the other coaches. They were tacitly encouraging us to do something with suggestions that we “needed to take control”.

When the onus was put back on them, the coaches would say: “It’s very difficult for us to say it, we’re not the head coach. You guys have got to do it.” Accustomed to a coaching team that worked in unison and laid down the law for the players, I realised something had to be done. Most players did. A few of the more experienced guys got together: Phil Vickery, Mike Catt, Jason Robinson, Jonny Wilkinson, Andy Farrell and myself. “Am I crazy or are we all thinking the same thing here?” one of the guys asked, and it turned out we all saw things in pretty much the same way. We had a head coach who wanted one thing, other coaches who wanted other things, and everyone was unsure about the overall direction, especially the players. The general feeling was that three weeks before our first prep game, we hadn’t a clue what was going on. We decided that we had to have a meeting with Brian and explain our problems and concerns, but it had to be done in a way that was tactful and respectful.

We decided we had to agree on what we wanted to say to Brian and that we should get the other coaches involved as well. I suggested we head off to dinner and formulate our thoughts on where we were as a group. We agreed to meet in the bar of the Vilamoura complex at which we were staying, at around eight o’clock in the evening. It did feel a bit cloak-and-dagger-ish as we were keeping our voices down.

We had been there about 10 minutes when Brian Ashton walked in. It was perfectly obvious we were in a meeting that had not been authorised and his body language conveyed just how uneasy he was with what he saw. It was pretty awkward for us, too.

Brian must have been thinking, ‘There’s a conspiracy happening here’, and you couldn’t blame him. Any coach would have thought the same and it doesn’t take much for unease to turn to paranoia. So I got up: someone had to do something. “Look, Brian, it’s not what you think. Don’t worry. All that’s going on is that a group of us are talking about a few issues, stuff that we want to talk about with you and the other coaches.”

“Shall I sit down and join you?” Brian asked.

“No, no,” I replied. “Just give us a bit of time and we’ll come and sit down with you.”

It was difficult because we almost had to tell Brian to leave the bar. Among the players in our group there was a lot of frustration. Jason Robinson said he needed to know who he would be playing alongside in the team, especially the guys he would be linking with, the wings and centres, and that he wanted to start building relationships with them now. But we were light years away from knowing what the starting XV might be.

The general view of the players was that you need to have a structured approach for the first few phases of possession and after that, the possibilities open up. Brian isn’t big on structured rugby and in trying to have this dialogue with the head coach, we felt we were doing what the other coaches might have done.

I was uncomfortable about my own involvement as I still wasn’t 100% fit and had been on the outside for over a year. But the easy thing would have been to sit back and do nothing.

I hope I’m not going to lose a friendship over what I say about Brian, who was a good coach who I believe was in the wrong role. Head coach of the England team demands management skills that, in my honest appraisal, Brian doesn’t have. He could have brought someone in to make sure it got done or he could have taken it on himself. He did neither and the whole squad found itself in a kind of limbo. We did meet with Brian and the coaches but I felt we never really moved things on.

Most of the teams and environments that I’ve known involve constant analysis and an ongoing dialogue between the coaching team and senior players. Typically, coaches want to know if they’re getting their message through to the players and they need to know if players have issues. We didn’t have any of that interaction and as a result, players start talking among themselves or going off and speaking privately with one particular coach. You start to hear the same question over and over, “What the f*** is happening?” I’ve seen other coaches in the situation where players are asking that question – Clive Woodward on the 2005 Lions tour is a good example.

Generally speaking, when that question is asked no one knows the answer.

Selection would be a constant area of debate among the players as the tournament progressed and a lot of the time we couldn’t make sense of it. I felt Joe Worsley had to be picked for the South Africa game because he is the best tackler in the Premiership and one of the most destructive tacklers in world rugby; the one certainty against South Africa was that we would be doing a lot of tackling. Shaun Perry was close to man-of-the-match in our three warm-up games, had a bad match against South Africa and was then discarded. I didn’t see how he could go from being No 1 to No 3 after one disappointing performance.

The team captain Phil Vickery got suspended for two weeks after the USA game and was made to feel like a leper. Then he’s brought back for the Tonga game but only on the bench. If you’re good enough to be captain of England two weeks before, what’s changed? If I had been Phil, I would have been incensed. You needed to take just one look at the two tightheads in the squad; Phil is the starter, Matt Stevens is the better impact player. For that Tonga game, I think Martin Corry was almost embarrassed by being named captain.

Trials and tribulations

AS I’VE said, I accept the reasons for bringing Nick Easter into the team after the USA game. I hadn’t delivered but what pissed me off was the way Brian handled it. On the morning the team was announced for the South African pool game, I got a text from Brian. Something like: “Can you meet me downstairs? I’d like to have a word.” My first thought was that this wasn’t promising. I met Brian and he told me I wasn’t in the team or replacements. A player needs a little time to adjust to news like that, especially someone like me who had played so many times and was going to be deeply disappointed. But the team meeting was due to start 45 seconds after Brian spoke to me. I was furious. I didn’t want the other players to see my disappointment but with so much anger, I couldn’t disguise it. How the hell can you be cool and supportive of your teammates less than a minute after you’ve had news like that?

It was a disappointment too that John Wells didn’t feel he needed to say anything to me. Maybe that’s his style, I don’t know, but as a coach I don’t think you can operate like that. Surely you need to talk to the players directly under your charge. It wouldn’t have taken Einstein to work it out. “This guy has 80 caps, he’s hardly ever been dropped, he’s going to be naturally disappointed, I need to go and have a word with him.”

Back from the abyss

Watching England get beaten 36-0 by South Africa in the World Cup hurt me more than anything I’ve seen on a rugby field. I wasn’t playing and it still felt like a knife through the heart watching teammates who had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. After such a heavy defeat, I thought there would have to be a lot of changes and felt I had a chance of getting back into the team. But Brian told me he thought Nick was one of England’s better players against the South Africans and he wanted to stick with him. That was fair enough, a coach has the right to make that call and as the tournament went on, Nick didn’t let anyone down. But part of me was beginning to wonder what I was doing at the World Cup. Why was I picked in the first place? Wouldn’t it have been better to select my young Wasps teammate James Haskell, who has great potential and would have benefited from the experience of being at the World Cup?

The 36-0 loss brought the team to crisis point. There has been a lot of talk about the meeting we had the next day and it was a brutal, no-holds-barred, what-the-f***-is-happening meeting. I felt this was almost the showdown the other coaches had been wanting three or four weeks before but it hadn’t happened then. People started getting up and offering their opinions on why things had turned out as they had. One guy offered his take, then another guy his and as the meeting moved on, more and more guys started to say what they really felt. A lot of valid points were made and at some stage, every player put up his hand and said what he was thinking. They didn’t know what was being asked of them, but at last the confusion was out in the open.

Mike Catt said the team wasn’t playing the way Brian had always preached the game should be played. Catty felt if we were going to go out of the World Cup, we should at least go out trying to play some decent rugby. It was a tough meeting for Brian, something you realised when you heard Olly Barkley, who had worked with Brian at Bath, say: “Look Brian, no one’s got a f****** clue how we’re supposed to be playing here. If you ask the 15 guys who played against South Africa to write down the game plan, you’d get 15 different answers.” It was harsh, but it was true. What was generally agreed was that we needed some structure to the way we played. At times we needed to pass the ball more, other times we needed to kick it more. We also needed to generally know what we were doing from first-phase possession, and from second and third phase and after that, we could be more spontaneous.

It made me think of the time we had spent in Portugal, practising stuff that had no relevance to a match situation with players who were not going to be in the squad. It was decided that the decision-makers on the team, the guys who played at 9, 10 and 12, would go away, have a talk among themselves, and come back and tell us how they felt we should play and we would then spend the five days before the Samoa game practising what the decision-makers were preaching. Breaking up from that meeting, there was a sense of having taken the first step back from the abyss.

The games against Samoa and then Tonga were ideal for England because on both occasions we were staring down the barrel and that’s what we needed. There were moments in both games when we were under pressure but we came through and the experience turned us into a battle-hardened team.

A siege mentality had also developed within our squad. That was mostly a reaction to the scathing criticism from outside but it was also a response to the feeling within the group that we weren’t getting a lot of direction from our coaches. I don’t want to be too harsh on this point but when you’re not clear about what’s going on, when the messages you are receiving don’t have the clarity you need, there is a natural inclination for players to pull closer together, a survival instinct that tells them that unless they do it themselves, they’re going under.

Australia underestimated us. They just didn’t recognise that we had a core of strong characters who wouldn’t lie down. Yet, I have to admit, I was surprised that we beat them. Victory changed everything. I had looked at Brian Ashton in the days after the South Africa game and seen the face of a man who seemed ready to jump off the nearest cliff. Martin Corry compared us to the Jamaican bobsleigh team from that excellent film, Cool Runnings, and when Mike Catt was asked how he felt about being selected for the Australia game, he said the coaches had to pick him because there was no one else left. Mike Ford, our defence coach, gave an interview in which he said we were short of world-class players and at this point in his career Andy Farrell didn’t have the pace for union. We heard this and thought: “Thanks, mate.” It was unbelievable. Somehow we’d managed to turn our World Cup campaign into a Monty Python sketch – called The Life of Brian?

I hadn’t believed we would beat Australia, but the French were different. Mike Ford produced a comprehensive assessment of how France would play against us and it proved spot-on. The game became one long battle for territory. In the end, it came down to mental toughness. They brought on Freddie Michalak in an attempt to do I don’t know what. He was an ideal replacement against the All Blacks in the quarter-final because France needed a try. Against us, they just needed a penalty or a drop goal. What they didn’t need was Michalak. A Jonny penalty and we were in front. Paul Sackey and Toby Flood then tackled Sebastien Chabal into touch, a few words were exchanged, Chabal reacted with his elbow – penalty, lineout, Corry take at the back, Jonny drop goal.

Brian had done what so many coaches had failed to do; he’d taken his team to the final of the World Cup. He’d achieved more than his Australian counterpart, John Connolly, more than Graham Henry and the All Blacks. Even Monty Python would have struggled to come up with this script.

One hell of a ride

MAYBE it was that our preparation caught up with us in the final because the courage of the team meant we had a lot of possession, especially in the second half, but we didn’t have the slick teamwork that would have produced scores. The calmness we had against Australia and France didn’t desert us but we weren’t as controlled against the Springboks. This point shouldn’t take away from South Africa’s victory. They were the better team. Most of all, England had to get in front and force the Springboks to consider the possibility of losing. We never did that and it hurt us. The refusal to award a try to Mark Cueto was one of those decisions you could argue about. That would have done a lot for us. We weren’t a side equipped to chase a game and the statistic that says we scored just one try in the knockout stages of the World Cup is one you can’t ignore.

When the final whistle went, it was a horrible feeling and no matter how many people tell you that you’ve done well to get as far as we got, the pain of losing a World Cup final is one you take with you for the rest of your life. Sure, I would have felt it worse if I had been in the starting 15 but what I felt was bad enough.

In the end, I started to get used to my role on the bench. I never liked it but there was a gradual acceptance of the situation. I think I had more to offer in this World Cup but you can only give what you are invited to give. There is disappointment when you can’t influence things as much as you would like to.

What this tournament has told me is that there isn’t much wrong with English rugby. Out of adversity, we became strong. Out of the chaos, the lack of direction, the lack of leadership, we grew as a team and I have enormous admiration for a group of players who refused to lie down.

The thought strikes me that our achievement in getting to the World Cup final may have been because we were at such a low ebb. At times we felt like a pub team and from there we knew our only chance was if everyone, players and coaches, stayed united.

This has been about a group of people who went through a lot of s*** but stuck together. I was particularly pleased for guys like Martin Corry, Andy Gomarsall, Mark Regan and Simon Shaw who were on the periphery of the team in 2003 and were central to the effort in France. I may be envious but did I deserve more from this tournament than them? Definitely not.

In the end, your body or your soul gives in and you can’t do it anymore. My body has been tested to the limit, broken down and built back up again. It has aged in the last couple of years. After winning the World Cup in 2003, people told me it would be a good time to quit. Get out at the top, they said. I was 31 and the lure of playing for England still overwhelmed everything else. The thought of international retirement didn’t even occur to me. I have had one hell of a ride. I know there are many who believe I stayed around too long but that view doesn’t bother me in the slightest. What they don’t understand is that when the England flame goes out for me, the rugby flame goes with it.

Soon after we arrived home from Paris, there was a letter from the Rugby Football Union and a comprehensive questionnaire regarding every aspect of England’s organisation and performance at the World Cup. We were asked to assess the team’s preparation and the contribution of our various coaches. The assessments and comments could be made anonymously if you wished. The first thing I did was to write my name on the top of the form. Anonymity is not something you can afford in Test rugby.

Extracted from It’s In the Blood: My Life by Lawrence Dallaglio to be published by Headline on November 1 at £18.99. Copies can be purchased for £17.09 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

NEXT WEEK

- My punch-up with Dean Richards

- Singing with Barry Manilow

- Agony and ecstasy with England

- Clive Woodward and me

© Lawrence Dallaglio 2007