Phil Larder, the man who put the D in England, one of the few British coaches to have won a Rugby World Cup and the specialist who has turned Worcester Warriors into one of the Premiership’s toughest nuts, has lambasted the shambles that was this country’s most recent attempt to win the Webb Ellis trophy.
As if anyone needs reminding England, the most populous and wealthiest rugby nation on the planet, squandered that legacy in New Zealand this autumn with a sequence of sub-par performances that saw them match their worst ever showing at a RWC as they were eliminated in the quarter finals.
On the pitch the entire campaign never really left terra firma while off it Martin Johnson found his squad weakened by discipline breaches, internal politicking and administrative confusion at the Rugby Football Union – and the situation has only worsened since their return.
Johnson has stepped down from his post of team manager, Rob Andrew has been stripped of all responsibility for the Test side – and no little dignity – and what was supposed to be an internal review was leaked to the press in which players were revealed to be at odds with both their coaches and each other.
And Larder, who in 2003 was defence coach for Clive Woodward’s world champions, has made no effort to conceal his distaste at the way Johnson was let down by parties below and above him, as some England players and the RFU establishment turned what should have been a triumph into disaster.
Indeed, speaking for the first time on the matter, the 66-year-old believes the whole campaign was likely to fail before Johnson and his squad even stepped on a plane and he offers a telling contrast with the way things were structured eight years ago when Woodward was master of all he surveyed.
“The way it seems to have been run it was very difficult for Jonno to have been successful, things were stacked against him,” Larder says.
“I think Jonno had too wide a brief and was too inexperienced. He didn’t have a manager. We had a manager – Louise Ramsay, who was awesome.
“We [also] had Clive who was overseeing all the process and I get the impression Jonno, being Jonno, was getting sucked in more and more to working with the players on the pitch, doing the analysis and putting his tracksuit on. There was nobody standing back getting the bigger picture.
“Clive Woodward is the best person of anybody in any sport at seeing the bigger picture and managing it. That’s what Jonno isn’t. I don’t think the RFU gave Jonno the support he needed.
“I know that if Clive Woodward had been in charge of this set-up that wouldn’t have happened.
“Clive took on that role, his job was to advise us in the coaching, push in the right way as to how to play, manage us all and then step back and see the big picture. Nobody could possibly have been doing that over there [because] he would have nipped anything like that in the bud.”
The ‘like that’ to which Larder refers is the lack of on-field clarity to which some players alluded during the now infamous feedback process, which was supposed to be confidential but found itself into the pages of The Times.
Nobody, perhaps with the exception of scrum coach Graham Rowntree, emerged unscathed from the review that asked players to complete questionnaires and while the concept of a post-World Cup debrief is not a new, the vitriol of the their comments surprised Larder.
