Carl Hayman, flanked by Richie McCaw and Tony Woodcock, in Cardiff for the All Blacks disastrous Rugby World Cup quarter-final against France. Photo / Photosport
In this abridged extract from Carl Hayman’s autobiography, Head On, the former All Blacks prop reveals how a late tactical change introduced by coach Graham Henry combined with an uncertain players’ leadership group to derail the Rugby World Cup campaign in Cardiff.
GAME PLAN TWO
Those three words are all you need to say to trigger a flood of memories. There’s a few of us of a certain vintage who still keep in touch and when the All Blacks are struggling a bit, one of us will invariably send out a message along the lines of: ‘Looks like they’ve gone to Game Plan Two.’
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. By now, you know the result of the 2007 RWC quarter-final, and you might even have come to terms with it. It’s sometimes crazy to think as I write this: that match is 15 years in the past. A lot has happened since then, both in my life and the life of the All Blacks. Two victorious World Cup campaigns in 2011 and 2015 is no small thing — not that I’d play a part in either of them.
In the intervening years, a lot of blame has been apportioned for New Zealand’s, to date, worst showing at a World Cup. There was ‘rest and rotation’, a well-meant but ultimately flawed idea that failed in its objective to keep players fresh for the tournament in France. There was playing people out of position, a mistake we swore we wouldn’t make after Christian Cullen and Leon MacDonald, both fullbacks, were shoehorned into centre in 1999 and 2003 respectively.
We ended up making it anyway. There was, of course, referee Wayne Barnes, the latitude given to France at the breakdown in that second half and that infamous forward pass.
Somehow, Game Plan Two has escaped scrutiny. By my reckoning, it hasn’t warranted enough attention. That, for me, was where an otherwise good, well-thought-out campaign came crashing down. It was a lesson that sometimes even the best-run teams can overthink things; how even the strongest leadership groups can, through fatigue as much as anything else, fail to provide leadership when it’s most needed.
That was a squad that you could say deserved better, but in the end, we got what we earned — a notoriously early exit in the quarter-final and a whole bunch of misery. Some found redemption four years later, but for many, like myself, it stayed with us a bit longer. Perhaps it was never truly rectified.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t sit on my boat reliving those 80 minutes, but there’ll be times when I’m catching up with old teammates, or sometimes just at random moments, when those three words — Game Plan Two — will pop up. I can laugh about it now, but it took a while to see the funny side.
So how did a campaign that was meant to end with a glorious push into Paris end in Cardiff?
* * *
We’d only experienced three defeats in the previous three seasons, but one of them was a 15–20 loss to the Wallabies in Melbourne in World Cup year and it spooked Ted. We had a leadership group meeting just prior to the World Cup, and the coaches expressed concern that the rest of the world was catching up to our plan of playing with pace and width. They decided we needed Game Plan Two (GPT).
GPT was going to hinge around forward-dominated, mauling, pick-and-go rugby. It would be exactly what I ended up playing at Toulon. It would only be used for the knockouts, when the rugby tightened up and became more about avoiding mistakes. During pool play, we were continuing to play with speed, to beat teams with footwork, and employ an intensity other teams couldn’t live with. We had a strong set piece and tactical nous at first-five from DC and Nick Evans, who was such an underrated No. 10 — perhaps a player who in any other generation would have played a lot more games. We could run from everywhere, but we had a strong kicking game, too.
We breezed through Italy in Marseille and put 100 points on Portugal in Lyon. That game saw me come off the bench and play lock, as we were a bit short in the second row. After the game, the Portuguese took on our dirt trackers in football and gave us a right towelling, putting at least 10 goals on us, so a bit of balance was restored.
We crossed the Channel to play Scotland, who chose to run a virtual 2nd XV against us, which was disappointing, and then were too good for Romania in Toulouse. We won our pool convincingly, which set up a bizarre quarter-final with the hosts, France, who had lost their opener to Argentina to finish second in their pool. Unbelievably, the game would be played in Cardiff because, to guarantee their votes to host the Cup, the French organising committee had promised matches to Wales and Scotland. There was already chatter in the media that the French were going to suffer the indignity of being knocked out of their ‘home’ World Cup on foreign soil, which was presumptuous in the extreme.
With pool play done and dusted, we prepared to radically change our game plan, a move designed to catch our opposition by surprise. All it really achieved was to muddy our own waters.
We were going to play a French team in a mauling game that is the bread and butter of their Top 14 club competition.
A fully functioning, mature leadership group, the sort that emerged in the years to follow, would have put the kibosh on it, but if I remember correctly, only Aaron Mauger expressed any real concern, and I’m not sure he did that with the coaches present.
I know I didn’t think it was a smart move, but I didn’t want to rock the boat. If I had my time again, I would have said what I felt, namely that we should have the alternative game plan up our sleeves and change for short periods during a game, but then come back to the width and space game. It seemed extraordinary to me that we’d been so successful for three and a half years, yet we were pinning our World Cup on an unproven plan.
The odd feeling, the sense that all wasn’t right, bled into other aspects of the week. During pool play, we didn’t do a lot of contact training, but leading into the Cardiff quarter-final, guys like Xavier Rush, who was playing in Wales, came in with some others and we had a full 15-on-15 contact training.
This is totally my reading of it, but even Smithy seemed befuddled by what was going on. He was always so precise and pinpoint, but his expertise was nullified by these tactics. His video presentations were always excellent and engaging, using contemporary footage to perfectly illustrate the point he was making. That week, he was using footage from years previous and the points he was making seemed less razor sharp than normal. It seemed so un-Smithy-like.
Again, this isn’t all on the coaches. If the leadership group was working the way it should have been, we would have aired our concerns and been more forthright. But because we’d been so successful, nobody wanted to be the one who questioned the direction we were heading. The concept had worn so thin by then and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that a lot of the guys in the group were gone at the end of the World Cup.
There was also an arrogance in the selection. I mean no offence to the people who were selected, because they were all there on merit, but Keith Robinson hadn’t played a full game of rugby for a long time yet here he was being picked to start at the sharp end of the world’s biggest tournament. Unless you’re Jonah, you can’t do it, especially if you’re a forward.
After Tana’s departure, we still hadn’t picked our man at centre. Conrad Smith was there, but he was fairly inexperienced, so when it came to the quarter-final we picked Mils Muliaina at No. 13. I’ve since heard that Wayne Bennett, the legendary league coach, was involved in the tournament debrief and one of the most pointed questions he asked was why you’d pick one of the best fullbacks in the world at centre. It was a question he could have asked in 1999 and 2003 as well.
World Cup-winning sides are stable. Aaron Mauger was in the stands, as was Chris Jack. Chris had been a big part of the team for a long time, and he was completely forgotten about. They wanted Keith’s physical edge against a team like France that could push the boundaries, but it’s hard to provide that when you haven’t been on the field.
I can only remember patches of the game and even those patches aren’t in sharp focus. It was heartbreaking. Three years of work and you could sense it slipping away.
People got stuck into Anton for his war analogy — he said that the post-match dressing room had the stench of death, like a World War I battlefield — and although the imagery sounded over the top, I knew exactly what he meant. To call it a hollow feeling wasn’t enough. I’ve never been in a dressing room like it before or since.
I didn’t know what to do, so I called my dad. He was on a flight from New Zealand that had just landed. He was there, like hundreds of other New Zealanders, for the semi-finals and final.
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some bad news. We lost tonight.’
‘You get another go, don’t you?’ he replied.
He knew how the tournament worked, but right at that moment he couldn’t comprehend it.
My mum and sisters were holidaying around France. We were all meeting in Paris that week. All our plans, shattered. Everyone in the team just wanted to dig a hole and disappear. I felt sorry for Richie having to face the media while we just slunk around in our own misery.
Talk started to bubble away about the ref, Wayne Barnes, but I didn’t hold anything against him. I did question how he got the game, because it was obvious he was very fresh and couldn’t make a decision, but it didn’t alter the fact we were poor.
We couldn’t get out of the country until the following Thursday. It was a nightmare for Shandy, dealing with 36 angry and devastated footy players who had their eyes set on doing well for their country but who ended up feeling they were the worst team ever. Doug Howlett hit the headlines for jumping on cars at Heathrow while he was pissed, but there were a lot of guys letting off steam in unhealthy ways.
I ended up flying back into Christchurch and the next day my grandfather passed away. Dropped dead on the farm. I said to Nana that he must have been pissed off with our performance. I was in an emotional fog and his death quickly put things in perspective. He was the rock of the family in many ways. Mum and my sisters had to cut their holiday short to come home. The end of that trip was vastly different to what they’d bargained for.
Meanwhile, Sky was showing endless reruns of the game.
I avoided them. I didn’t need to see Game Plan Two ever again.
Head On: Rugby, Dementia and The Hidden Cost of Success
By Carl Hayman
Published by HarperCollins New Zealand
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