It was the Australian delegate who said the words. Everyone knows where they were when “that” drop goal went over in 2003. He said it under the opulent arches and chandeliers of London’s Australia House in front of an audience of Australian rugby players of a certain age. They nodded and murmured and just about stopped short of weeping. So, it is not only the English.
You are likely to hear more of this over the course of the next month because it was 10 years ago, on 22 November, that England won the Rugby World Cup in Sydney with that last-minute-of-extra-time swing of a boot by Jonny Wilkinson that needs no introduction.
To mark the occasion, a team of Australia Legends will take on a team of England Legends at the Stoop on Thursday night, a couple of days before the latest instalment of the England-Australia saga is played out across the road at Twickenham. The roll call of luminaries in attendance from that fabled night in Sydney is extensive.
One of them will be Stirling Mortlock, Australia’s outside-centre in the final. “If you’re going to lose,” he says with a smile, “that was the way to do it. We knew we’d given everything. It went to overtime and a field goal by a freak off his wrong foot was the difference. The legend around that kick is phenomenal. That was a fantastic team, built over a long time and a year or so before that World Cup they were easily the best in the world.”
There was a fair bit of faded glory at the reception held by the Australian High Commission for Thursday’s match, most of it walking round swigging the Ambassador’s fine lagers. But one man who actually looks younger than he did in 2003 is Al Baxter, Australia’s tighthead then, who has lost 10kg since his playing days – “people double-take when they see me”, mostly from his neck and shoulders.
“I remember where I was when that kick went over,” he says. “Almost directly under it. We could just see it happening. One of the big things we’d talked about beforehand was keeping Jonny out of range but, with a minute to go, we knew the English forwards were setting up for it. Although Jonny’s name is forever attached to the kick, it was the forward pack who won that match.”
Surreal is a word that was mentioned more than once as Englishmen and Australian reminisced about that swirling, rainy night 10 years ago but what marks it out as so extraordinary, perhaps even more than its elevation to where-were-you-when legend, is how “happy” the Aussies seem to be to yield that one to the Poms, as if Martin Johnson’s team were above the usual needle that characterises the rivalry between the two nations. Contrast, for example, England’s surprise win in the World Cup quarter-final four years later and the thunderous looks and curses the memory elicits from Baxter and Mortlock. “Far more devastating,” says Baxter. “We had a shocker.”
Not that it was all sweetness and light. Richard Hill, England’s flanker, remembers a fraught week, unlike any other, in the buildup to the game, when Australians made it their business to take up residence outside England’s hotel in Manly. One woman parked her jeep under England’s team room, opened the boot and “played Waltzing Matilda and songs about kangaroos all day long”.
“She was dancing round,” he remembers, “and you’ve got nothing else to do – training had pretty much stopped by then – so you just watch her from the balcony. I suppose it helped to kill the time. It’s the nerves I remember most clearly. Nerves are an important part of preparation and sleeping is always hard the night before a game but on the Monday before?
“We knew there was a lot of support for us when we watched the Australia-New Zealand semi-final in the team room the previous weekend and heard the fans singing, Swing Low. That’s not even our game! And an indication of how big it was back home was the messages on my phone the morning after. These people would have gone into the pub at 10 on Saturday morning and by the time they left the message it would have been two or three in the morning UK time, so they’d been out about 17 hours. To this day, I don’t know who some of them were. They didn’t make sense.”
Nor did, to many, the sharp decline of so mighty a team. Johnson retired soon afterwards and Wilkinson was lost to the first of many injuries but otherwise the side was more or less intact for the Six Nations that followed.
“One difference we had: for every other team that won a World Cup it was the end of their season. They could get it out of their system. The blow-out, the celebration, the recovery, then the buildup into a pre-season. We flew back on the Tuesday or Wednesday morning. I was given two days off, trained on the Friday, then played on the Sunday. Against Rotherham. Saracens were 11th at the time, Rotherham were 12th and they wanted daylight. You do what you do and you get on with it.”
Ten years on, Hill sees parallels between Stuart Lancaster’s England and the side Sir Clive Woodward built, albeit, you sense, where the latter were circa 1999, when they could not buy a grand slam. “Quite clearly there’s been a shift in culture. Only 12 months ago, we saw one of the most complete performances by an England team. New Zealand clearly had issues in the buildup but that was England at their best. There were thoughts of what could happen in the next Six Nations and Wales was a bit of a wake-up call but sometimes you need that. If England can look back in two years’ time and see that as a catalyst, then brilliant.”
Either way, a special time is assured in 2015, when it is England’s turn to host the World Cup. If Australia could not spoil England’s party in 2003, they can vouch for how exhilarating it was to host, especially after the wildly successful Olympics they had staged three years earlier. Where Sydney went at the start of the millennium, London is to follow. “It’s similar,” says Mortlock. “You guys are coming off a massive Games, where the nation performed amazingly. Our country enjoyed a sort of sling-shot effect after the 2000 Olympics. By the time of the World Cup in ’03, it was just a phenomenal thing to be a part of.”
We are guaranteed at least one more World Cup encounter between England and Australia in 2015 but, even if it is won by a last-minute intervention from a Quade Cooper or an Owen Farrell, we are unlikely to be reminiscing over it in 2025. Wherever you were on 22 November 2003, however clearly or not, you remember The Kick, whatever your allegiance, it retains a special place in rugby lore, heightened and out of time.
Tickets for England Legends v Australia Legends, sponsored by Heathrow Express, are available here. Kick-off 7.45pm on Thursday 31 October at the Twickenham Stoop
England are not the only ones to weep over 2003 Rugby World Cup glory
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