This article, written by Peter Malcouronne, first appeared in Metro magazine in 2007 and is republished here with permission.
Thirty-six years ago, the All Blacks beat France 29-9 to win the inaugural Rugby World Cup. Peter Malcouronne was at Eden Park.
We arrived an hour and a half before kick-off. Dad got us a great park on Morningside Drive – “I’m not paying a buck to park on someone’s lawn,” he said – and we climb out of the Toyota Starlet and set off for Eden Park. By the time we reach Cabbage Tree Swamp Drive, we’d broken into a canter. Down Sandringham Rd. Outside the main gates on Reimers Avenue, fans buzz as the All Blacks’ team bus pulls up (though national diffidence means this is not met with a roar but with a muffled, mumbled “C’mon Black”).
I was 16. This will be just the third time I’d seen the All Blacks live (I’d watched us beat Fiji in an unofficial test sometime in the early 1980s; I’d seen Alan Hewson score a world-record 26 points against Australia in 1982). But as old-timers tell you, you don’t see rugby on television: you have to be at the ground to hear the slap of bone meeting bone, the ping of boot on ball. Television obscures the full canvas of the game; when you’re there, live, you might see, for instance, an attacking backline abruptly switch the point of attack, forcing panicked defenders to scramble to the other side of the ruck to mark up. You realise this is a beautiful game of lines, gaps and angles – of, as Charlie Saxton, captain of the famous 1945 Kiwi Army team, said, 14 players trying to make a yard of space for the 15th.
We sit in the now-demolished concrete terraces down the northwest end of the ground. These are the cheap seats – $24 for adults, $12 for kids (the most expensive seats, in the South stand, were $44). We’d got here in good time and once we tire of the brass band, we make our picks. I go for the All Blacks 22-18. My father, Brian, 48, has us winning by a point, my stepbrother Richard, a 21-year-old professional contrarian, opts for a draw. Only my younger brother Andrew, 14, is confident. All Blacks 35, France 15.
The All Blacks can’t lose, he says. They have the whole country behind them: Saatchi’s had put out a poster of the team standing under darkened, lightning-streaked skies and a TV campaign to the famous Ben E King song exhorted us to “Stand by the All Blacks”. Back then, before the Leni Riefenstahl excesses of the modern marketeers, such propaganda found willing ears: there was no need to tell us that our blood ran black, or that our team were supermen.
Because back then the All Blacks were everymen, albeit of a heroic stripe. They worked: the 1987 team consisted of farmers (Andy Dalton, Richard Loe, Bruce Deans, Albie Anderson, Kieran Crowley), policemen (John Gallagher and Murray Pierce), truck drivers (Alan Whetton and Joe Stanley), builders (Sean Fitzpatrick and Craig Green), as well as an investment banker (John Drake), marketing manager (Grant Fox), doctor (David Kirk), teacher (Warwick Taylor), student (Michael Jones) and navy man (Wayne Shelford). Sometimes they had to pull out of games, especially around lambing season. One year, captain Dalton, who ran a 1000-acre sheep and cattle farm in Bombay, had to go on family support.
They were more normal-sized then, especially in the backs: Kirk, Fox, Taylor and Green weighed less than my father’s 76kg. Smokin’ Joe Stanley, for whom the adjectives “bullocking” and “blockbusting” were mandatory, was 83kg. Only John Kirwan, nominally 92kg but rumoured to be over 100kg, was the size of the modern player.
They wore looser jerseys – none of the ClimaLite carry-on then – but the shorts, by God, the shorts were tight. Out of these poked mostly wintry white legs – 10 Pākehā, two Samoans, two Māori and an Englishman ran out on the field that day – but not even the team’s palest member would’ve thought to use a sunbed, or wear eyeliner or an Alice band.
But though no one really knew it at the time, this was the first modern All Blacks team. That 1986-87 summer they trained very differently to before: the “fitness guru” Jim Blair got the players off running roads and into the gym; Dalton, stuck out in the country, was instructed to lift wool sacks and run them from one corner of the woolshed to the next.
You needed superior fitness to play the fast-tempo game that All Blacks coach Brian Lochore and his assistants Alex Wyllie and John Hart devised. It was 15-man rugby – total rugby – where forwards and backs were integrated as one. Instead of the old-style trench warfare where clumps of forwards bashed upfield metre by metre, this team would move the ball around, constantly shifting the axis of engagement. The All Blacks intended to run opposing teams off their feet.
This was a style that covered up the team’s weakness – a perceived lack of forward power – while making best use of its talents: mobile, running tight forwards (Steve McDowell, Fitzpatrick and Gary Whetton); athletic loose forwards (Shelford, Alan Whetton, Jones and Zinzan Brooke); and robust backs (Kirwan, Stanley, Taylor and Green) who could run into defences yet recycle the ball. But this style relied upon superlative support play: the All Blacks appearing in more numbers, more often, than their opponents. You had to be bloody fit.
Against some of the pedestrian northern hemisphere sides – poor Wales were dispatched 49-6 in the semifinal – the All Blacks’ game looked unstoppable. But France were another matter.
Just seven months before, they’d annihilated the All Blacks 16-3 at Nantes. A week earlier, they’d beaten tournament favourite Australia 30-24 in the other semifinal. Their backs – Philippe Sella, Denis Charvet, Serge Blanco et al – were conjurers; their forwards, men like Pascal Ondarts, Jean-Pierre Garuet and the unfortunately named Jean Condom, were hard as nails. Throw in the requisite “Gallic flair” – their panache, elan, joie-de-vivre etc – and you’ll understand why I was so tense I hardly remember the first quarter of the game.
Most of it was down the other end of the field anyway. In the 12th minute, Fox, a squally wind at his back, drops a goal. Five minutes later, he tries another. It skews off the face of his opposite number – and into the arms of Michael Jones. He scores. Just glides over. How the hell did that happen? No one down our end can work it out.
Only now the French grind their way back. They call a short lineout 30 metres from the All Blacks line: halfback Pierre Berbizier throws to Condom who takes the ball two-handed, then thrashes forward five, six, seven metres, before he’s ridden down. The ball bobbles out to Berbizier, who scurries down the line, passes to hooker Dubroca, who’s stopped by Kirk, the All Blacks’ smallest player. But it’s a French scrum. Five metres out. Here. Right here in front of us.
The chant starts coyly – “Black, black, black”. Berbizier puts the ball in. Our scrum holds but crumples on their second shove – we’re lucky not to concede a penalty try. Now the French backs have the ball. Franck Mesnel skips Charvet, slings a ludicrously languid Hawaiian hula hip-swinger to Sella, to Patrice Lagisquet, who has half Eden Park to get around John Kirwan. He’s the fastest man on the field – but Kirwan clatters him into touch just five out.
“Black, black, black” implore 46,000 voices, but I can’t look now and instead gape at my feet, at forgotten untouched chips, and try to convince myself that the All Blacks can’t lose.
In 1986 the All Blacks lost three times. They lost the last time they played at Eden Park – flogged 22-9 by Australia (so becoming the first All Blacks team since 1949 to lose the Bledisloe Cup at home). And they lost their last test before the World Cup at Nantes. France were madmen that day – wired on speed – and Buck Shelford’s scrotum was famously ripped asunder. Said coach Brian Lochore afterwards: “They were ruthless. They overran us in the forwards.”
For someone who used to wear All Blacks pyjamas, this was tough to take. I’d been steeped in All Blacks supremacy from birth: I’d read the old books – Men in Black was my bible – and memorised the minutiae of the great tours. I could tell you that the 1905 Originals scored 830 points in 32 games while conceding just 39 (and that Bob Deans did score). If I was a little sniffly and fancied a day off school, I’d be reminded that Colin Meads played against South Africa with a broken arm.
The Boks! Above everything hovered the spectre of South Africa and my father, a mild-mannered Methodist minister by day, became unhinged when talking about the old enemy.
By the time of the 1981 Springbok tour, my father might’ve been expected, like most men of the cloth, to stand against it. But just as the tour divided the country, it divided Dad, and it was Captain Ahab who’d win. Same for his 10-year-old son.
A communistic grandfather told me about the iniquity of apartheid – and so I cheered on the protesters and thought Marx Jones’ flour-bombing Cessna was marvellous. But then I’d leave the lounge in tears when, at 22-all in the third and deciding test, Naas Botha lined up the conversion.
And I understood why, in 1986, the Cavaliers – the All Blacks team selected for the cancelled 1985 tour to South Africa (minus Kirk and Kirwan) – had toured the republic. They had to go. Dad and I stayed up all night by the radio as they went down three “tests” to one. Would we ever win a series there?
Dad lived in hope: “I don’t want to go to the promised land until we’ve beaten the Boks – in Bokland!”
When they returned home, the Cavaliers were suspended for two matches. In their stead, the Baby Blacks – a team including 11 debutants – famously beat France at Lancaster Park before losing the first Bledisloe Cup test by a point. Ten Cavaliers returned for the second test, won by the All Blacks by a point, before that third test drubbing.
The next month the All Blacks left for France but this was a team at war with itself. Sean Fitzpatrick recalls Mark “Cowboy” Shaw and Baby Blacks captain Kirk going at each other “hammer and tongs”, once arguing through the night over Kirk’s withdrawal from the Cavaliers. In his autobiography Black and Blue, Kirk talked of an All Blacks’ drinking session after the Nantes loss so spiteful he retreated to his room and sobbed.
And yet here was Kirk, whose fresh face melted every mother in the land, captaining the All Blacks in the first-ever World Cup. After a wretched start to the campaign – the team’s original captain Andy Dalton tore a hamstring and would never take the field – the All Blacks cantered through the early rounds dispatching Italy 70-6, Fiji 74-13 and Argentina 46-15.
While the inaugural World Cup had an unpromising genesis – the Australian and New Zealand rugby unions had just two years to organise a tournament that the Seagers-soaked old farts of the IRB would’ve happily seen sink – the opening match on Friday, May 22, featured 10 of the most sublime seconds the game has seen.
Italy’s Rodolfo Ambrosio kicks off deep into the All Blacks 22 to Kirk. He passes inside to Fox but look behind the five-eighth and you’ll see Kirwan winding up so that, when he takes the pass off Fox’s left shoulder, he’s already at full speed. He feints left and then surfs to his right, straightens, swerves right again, cuts inside, slows fractionally, then veers to his right once more. He runs 90 metres in all, evading seven tacklers who may not have even touched him.
Fox: “I think I got to halfway and just stopped in awe of what I was seeing. I’d tried to trail him for a little while but I gave up on that because he was going all over the place – I had no bloody show of keeping up with him.”
Says Dalton who was watching from the stands: “I stood there just shaking my head – I couldn’t believe it. It was, quite simply, the best try I’ve ever seen – better even than all of Jonah’s.”
It was, indeed, a transcendent try but with one problem – I didn’t like John Kirwan. Like half the country, I hated the Auckland rugby team – and Kirwan was the archetypal Auckland wanker. He was a pretty boy; he was a poseur and wuss who couldn’t tackle.
I was a Southern man then, boarding at Wesley College from where I’d write fevered letters to my father full of fantasy All Blacks teams. I championed players like Alan Byrne, a lumbering Southland lock I’d never seen play but who Rugby News said was a comer. The Otago Baby Black Greg Cooper was my starting fullback with Brent McKenzie (Southland) his understudy. My All Blacks halfback was Brett Kenny (Otago) because of “his massive punts from behind the scrums”; my halfback reserve was a 19-year-old Southlander called Jamie Flynn who I once saw score a good try on the news.
I knew nothing about rugby but did a good trade in received wisdom and anti-Auckland bile. While I graciously granted Kirwan a reserve spot in my World Cup squad (behind Wellington’s Mike Clamp who, evidently, possessed “extreme pace”), kept Fox ahead of Frano Botica for his kicking and moved Joe Stanley into second-five (“Stanley won’t jink his way through a gap like Pokere but rather smash his way through like a tank”), there would be no place for Kirk (“He, like John Kirwan, has had rather too much made of him”). At least there was one prescient selection: “Michael Jones runs like a cheetah and tackles like a lion.”
These really were preposterous letters, the work of a son trying to impress his father. But why the rabid anti-Aucklandism? After all, I’d lived in West Auckland all my life, bar 18 months as a baby in Bluff: supporting hapless second-division strugglers Southland seemed a peculiar act of teenage rebellion.
I suppose it came out of a desire to be different – to be an outsider – but in loathing the Big Brother, I was just joining the pack. While Aucklanders may not have been cellphone-toting latte-sippers back in 1987, they were guilty of wearing mirrored sunglasses, polo shirts and boat shoes. They went “overboard on the smellies”, drank White Cloud wine and were always chasing the deal. They were “bloody yuppies”.
There was some Big Smoke envy going on here but, looking back, you can see why the rest of New Zealand disliked Auckland. By the middle of 1987, the country was in the manic grip of the Rogernomes who flogged state assets, slashed subsidies and tariffs and laid workers off by the hundred thousand.
The New Right told us the pain was necessary. That There Is No Alternative (unless you were, blah blah, a dinosaur who wanted the country run like a Polish shipyard blah blah). But while the small towns were getting hammered, Auckland was doing nicely. In the battle of the Heartland against the Moneymen – those who produced wealth versus the paper-shufflers – the provinces were swimming against the tide. It was the end of old New Zealand: Goldcorp, Equiticorp and Judgecorp were the future.
The 1987 sharemarket crash was just four months away but, at that moment, Auckland’s economic hegemony seemed total; as dominant as its all-conquering rugby side.
But, God, I hated them. The whole country hated them. We hated their arrogance. We hated their “professionalism”. We hated them for the fiction that they’d poached all their good players.
The way they played the game stuck in the craw. There was an intelligence to the Aucklanders’ play; they were encouraged to express themselves creatively on the field. It was all too airy-fairy pooftah for the Heartland, who clamoured for a return to the good old days. They wanted hard yards, they wanted mongrel; they wanted a bit of “slipper” – some Taieri tapdancing or the Te Kūiti two-step – and, if need be, a bit of “claret”.
But most of all, I think Auckland were hated because they were good. Far too good. The pity of this was that, until that try, I couldn’t see the brilliance of Kirwan (who, incidentally, was a butcher’s apprentice who’d gone to De La Salle College in Mangere and whose grandfather played league for the Kiwis).
But that was old news. Now something entirely unexpected was happening: the nation was falling for a team whose starting XV included 10 Aucklanders. Coach Brian Lochore noted: “For the first time in years the All Blacks were playing for all New Zealand, and not just a part of it.” Lochore took the team to the people, even billeting them out in the farmhouses of Pirinoa, a small south Wairarapa town, before the game against Argentina. Of course, it helped that the All Blacks were winning – and winning gloriously.
Wrote Kirk: “There had been a goal of winning the World Cup. It changed to become a larger one – the goal of playing the best rugby in the world. This distinction may have seemed slight at the time but it ended up becoming a whole new philosophy of play. We stopped playing to win; we stopped playing against our opponents. We began to play against the game itself, pushing back the boundaries of what was considered possible.”
Such talk courts hubris but here was a team without weakness. At fullback, the English-born John Gallagher, whose searing entries into the line set up the wings, Kirwan and the gritty journeyman Green. Inside them, the midfield rocks, Stanley and Taylor, neither of whom ever played a bad game for the All Blacks. Fox and Kirk, intelligent, methodical, analytical, called the shots.
But rugby is won up front: inside a year, Wayne Shelford would be the most feared forward in the world and his ferocity complemented the athleticism of Jones and work ethic of the Stakhanovite Alan Whetton. The moustached locks, the toiler Murray Pierce and the more flamboyant Gary Whetton, were seldom bested; the front row – McDowell, Fitzpatrick and Drake – was the most mobile the game had seen.
However, there were two players, besides Kirwan, who now enthralled me. Fox was another Aucklander who’d polarised the country – he kicks too much, moaned old bores who’d hark back to golden times when the All Blacks won tests 3-0. They lionised “The Boot”, Don Clarke, yet they distrusted this intense perfectionist who played his rugby with forensic cool. Young bores felt much the same: we wanted the imaginative Frano Botica in the side ahead of the machine.
The boring boot. Fox kicked 126 points in the World Cup, almost twice as many as the tournament’s second-highest scorer, Australia’s Michael Lynagh. Only now, belatedly, I recognised the tactical genius of the man. Fox was more than an automaton: in 1989 the French named him International Rugby Player of the Year, averring, “He has marked and will continue to mark the countenance of modern rugby.”
If the dogged first-five exemplified the virtues of hard work, Michael Jones was a glorious declaration of natural talent. Perhaps fortunate to be in the side – recurring concussion forced incumbent opensider and captain Jock Hobbs to retire at the start of 1987 – Jones was, until his knee ligaments were shredded in 1989, the world’s most complete rugby player.
“I have two really vivid memories of the World Cup,” Fox remembers. “One is JK’s try, the other is a moment in the Fiji game with Jones. They showed it at an All Black reunion dinner recently and you have to see the video to understand what I mean. We got the ball back from a ruck. I passed it out to Joe Stanley who had a crack at the line; Michael loomed up on the inside, took Joe’s pass and just put the hammer down. He quietly drew the fullback, passed it out to Craig Green and basically waved him on to the tryline. It’s unbelievable to watch ... just poetry in motion.”
Recalls Dalton: “I’d never heard of Michael Jones when he was selected. But I remember the first full training run we had – we had some of our forwards opposing the backs to get our defensive lines right. Our loosies were running off the back of the lineout. Gary Whetton was running as the opposition centre – he fancied himself a bit with the ball. Bang. Michael Jones just cut him in half – I’d never seen a tackle like it. And I thought, ‘Wow, that boy’s got something.’”
At halftime in the final, after first use of what Dad says is a 10-point wind, the All Blacks hold a tenuous 9-0 lead. Kirwan seems to be limping a little: there’s a rumour around the ground that he’s done his hamstring. But on the field – the halftime break of five minutes left no time to duck into the dressing rooms – the All Blacks felt confident.
With coaches barred from the pitch, captain Kirk did most of the talking. “We just had to continue working hard,” he remembers. “We were tackling bloody well – they were using their big forwards to run at us close in – and we were smashing them down right on the advantage line. It was about that physical confrontation in the forwards. France had a bloody strong forward pack, but our view was if we did the basics for longer and harder, the game would open up in the last 20 minutes for us. And that’s exactly what happened.”
In the 62nd minute, the All Blacks have a lineout on the French 22. “We called a strange move,” says Kirk. “I moved Alan Whetton to the back of the line and brought Michael Jones up to number six. The idea was for the French to think we were going to throw to AJ [Whetton], but instead we’d throw to Michael” – (the All Blacks had a series of moves to counter “The Three Giraffes”, the three French loose forwards who were all over 6ft 5in).
“Unfortunately,” Kirk continues, “[Dominique] Erbani, their tallest lineout [loose] forward, didn’t move to the back. But it doesn’t matter. Michael soars and taps the ball down; I pass to Foxy who passes to Warwick [Taylor], then to Joe Stanley who takes it – crunch – into midfield. We win the ball – I go blindside, short pass to Foxy who turns it in to Michael Jones who accelerates, stretches the defence and then rolls a pass in to me. I knew as soon as I got the ball to go for it. Once you’ve taken two or three paces you know you’re going to go awfully close. Then there’s that moment where you’ve only got to take one more step and you think you’re going to make it. You’re diving – you’re waiting to hit the ground.
“And then I felt the tryline pass under me ... [what] an intense feeling of satisfaction and joy. I just knew at that moment we’d won the World Cup.”
My father isn’t so sure. “Never underestimate the French,” he says, reining in my exultation (this is a favourite mantra of his along with “The only thing predictable about the French is their unpredictability”).
But Kirk’s playing a blinder. The French kick off. Our forwards take the ball in, rumble it up. Back to Kirk. “I go blindside to kick it high for JK to chase, but they’re ready for me – Erbani and Berbizier – going for the charge down. So I pull the ball back in, duck underneath them and come out the other side. And then it just opens up in front of me.” Kirk scampers 40 metres downfield but is smashed by Blanco. Shelford’s there. He picks the ball up, flicks it to Kirwan, who scorches down the touchline to score, the corner flag splintering as he dives.
My father’s grin says it all. “That’s it – it’s ours.” The All Blacks win 29-9.
We were too far away during the presentation ceremony to see the slight sadness in Kirk’s eyes, something you can see on TV while he waits for an IRB windbag to say his bit. “There was a touch of melancholy,” Kirk would admit later. “It must be how people feel at the top of Everest. They only have 20 minutes there and won’t ever be back. The only way back is down.”
Kirk held the cup up, kissed it twice, then grabbed hold of a tracksuited Dalton. The team’s non-playing captain was reluctant to join the ceremony. “I would’ve preferred not to be there, to be honest,” he says. “I was quite happy to just disappear into the earth. My job had been done.” He’s old school, Dalton.
Go on, mate – get up there. The cup. The two captains standing together: this is the best day of my life.
I was back to school on Monday. Dalton returned to the farm and the next Saturday played for the Bombay club. Kirk played once more for the All Blacks, retired aged 26 and took up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. But the team marches on to immortality, going 50 games without defeat.
Was this the greatest-ever All Blacks side? I reckon. So does Nick Farr-Jones. In his foreword to photographer Peter Bush’s book Pride, Power and Pain, the legendary Australian halfback writes: “As long as rugby is talked about, the 1987-91 All Black era will dominate conversation and memories.”
Pre-match
Grant Fox sat in his usual spot in the dressing room – inside the door, to the left, one in from the corner. “I can remember being incredibly nervous before the game,” he says. “I was dry-retching on the bus on the way to the ground. But when I hit the dressing room, I felt much calmer.
“It was very quiet. The guys were pensive – they were very focused on the job we had to do. I remember going for a wander around the ground before kickoff. While I knew Eden Park pretty damn well, I had a scout around. It was bloody windy – I needed to process the information about the weather and store it away.”
Back in the shed, Kirk talked to his players. Sometimes, Fox says, Kirk could be intense; he was moved to tears before the quarter-final against Scotland. But the captain was unusually calm that day. Recalls Kirk: “We just felt good. We were fit, we were ready – we knew we were good enough to win. We were appropriately nervous but there was no carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders either.”
Meanwhile, Dalton worked the room. While he never played, Dalton remained captain and had a central role in the team’s preparation. Says Dalton, “JK always needed encouragement even though his ability was outstanding. You’d never know what Craig Green was thinking. The front row – Fitzy and Steve McDowell – well, I used to get them wired up a bit. But I remember Michael [Jones] was lying on the ground, seemingly asleep. While Michael never said boo anyway, he was just on another planet. He’s very much a family person and so I went over to him and just said, ‘This one for the family’.”
Gary Whetton and Shelford said a few words. One of the forwards growled: “Remember Nantes.”
Said coach Brian Lochore in his biography: “I needn’t have bothered with a team talk – the people of New Zealand were saying it all. It was out there for all to see and hear. The players knew – they were playing for the people outside the hotel, the people in the streets, the people outside the park, the people inside, the people at home watching television. They were playing for all New Zealanders everywhere. They couldn’t let them down. They wouldn’t let them down.”
