The Cult: Martin Johnson

When Martin Johnson hung up his boots in 2006, there were many who heralded him as the greatest player England had ever seen. It was some compliment for a man who played at lock forward, hardly the most glamorous position in the game and one which is regularly overlooked for praise. A one-club man with Leicester, the Solihull-born giant spent 17 years at Welford Road, winning five Premiership titles and two Heineken Cups along the way. He was most acclaimed for his England career, however, which is hardly a surprise considering that he captained the national team to victory in the Rugby World Cup, also winning the Six Nations five times with two Grand Slams thrown into the mix.

Over the course of the nineties and the early noughties, Johnson secured his status as one of the most imposing figures in the history of rugby union. It helped that was was 6"7, well over 18 stone and had a head that wouldn't have looked out of place embedded in the earth of Easter Island, but his redoubtable standing amongst his peers was based on more than his physical size. From the moment he donned a white shirt with a red rose emblazoned upon it, he earned a reputation as an indomitable character and a leader of men, helped in no small part by his willingness to upset the opposition and shrewd use of sports psychology. He was a natural pick for the England armband, though he wouldn't assume full captaining duties until Lawrence Dallaglio gave up the honour following a drugs sting by the News of the World in the summer of 1999.

On the pitch, Johnson was a rousing presence, running what seemed like a one-man show in the scrum, the ruck and wherever else he was called upon to be. While he was usually aided by an able backing cast including Dallaglio, Graham Rowntree, Jason Leonard and the like, his talent for leading from the front made him stand out from an illustrious crowd. Ahead of the 2003 World Cup, during a warm-up tour of New Zealand and Australia, England claimed their first win against the All Blacks on antipodean soil since 1973. Johnson's performance in that game was instructive, in that it showed the heights to which he could lift even a flagging England side. Late in the game, with both Dallaglio and Neil Black sin-binned, New Zealand won a series of scrums mere yards away from the English line. Johnson famously told the remnants of his pack to "get down and shove," and sure enough they held firm against one of the greatest teams in the world.

Speaking after that particular match, England coach Clive Woodward said: "You saw Martin Johnson at his absolute best there… his leadership was just inspirational." Though Woodward was referring to Johnson's mustering of the scrum, those words could have just as easily applied to pretty much any aspect of his play. If Johnson's motivational skills were enough to overcome the most desperate of circumstances, the secret ingredient to his influence was perhaps his gruff and bearish sense of humour. Asked what was going through his head as the English scrummed down against the All Blacks, Johnson replied simply: "My spine."

During England's storming run to the World Cup final against Australia, it was Johnson's heroic showings which drove the team on. He was the engine room which powered the side both through sheer physical effort and in-game management, and he kept them chugging relentlessly towards the tournament decider. While that match will forever be remembered for Jonny Wilkinson's last-gasp drop goal, it was Johnson's performance at Number 4 which was arguably most impressive. Lifting the trophy, beaming with pride, the greatest of England captains was immortalised, as was all that his team had achieved.

How did it all go so wrong, then, when Martin Johnson went to the World Cup as England manager? According to Clive Woodward, the RFU failed to prepare their young head coach for the pressures of the top job. Johnson became manager only two years after his retirement as a player, and did so without any competitive coaching experience. Woodward suggested that Johnson could do with a mentor to help him through the process, but ultimately the England hierarchy failed to act on the recommendation of the coach who had presided over Johnson's own World Cup success.

Still, as a player who showed a firm grasp of strategy and tactics as well as good judgement, man management and general common sense, it's hard to identify exactly why Johnson the coach ended up falling so far short. In fairness, his three-year England reign wasn't exactly a complete disaster, with his team triumphing at the 2011 Six Nations even if Ireland denied them a Grand Slam. It was the World Cup later that year in New Zealand where things really unravelled, and Johnson was consequently forced to resign. In the bout of national soul-searching that followed, various reasons were put forward for his failure, though none of them quite seemed to hit the mark.

In the aftermath of England crashing out in the quarter-finals, some suggested that Johnson had been better suited to managing from the middle of the park, with his tactical adaptability on the sidelines inferior to his quick thinking on the pitch. Others postulated that he lacked the same influence with younger players as he had with his contemporaries, while some put forward the idea that he was too reliant on familiar faces from his playing days. For some, the same indomitable stubbornness which had made him as a player was a managerial disadvantage, leaving him inflexible when it came to the critical junctures in a match. An alternative theory, and perhaps the most convincing, is that several of his players behaved like dickheads and trashed his best-laid plans for the World Cup. While the media frenzy surrounding the squad certainly didn't help matters, there was little Johnson could do once the extent of the charges' self-sabotage became known.

So, not long after England arrived in New Zealand, it emerged that captain Mike Tindall had been out on the town with a former girlfriend, with his night out culminating in him drinking in a bar where a 'dwarf-tossing' contest was taking place. While this was doubtlessly not the worst misdemeanour in the history of England rugby tours, it became seriously problematic when Johnson came out and backed him publicly, only to find out that Tindall had misled him as to certain aspects of the affair. This, combined with an unsavoury incident in which Chris Ashton and James Haskell made inappropriate comments to a female hotel worker, tarnished the campaign in indelible fashion and whipped up a whirlwind of unflattering press.

It was this same whirlwind which tore England's campaign to pieces, with rumours soon circulating of widespread infighting and collapsing morale within the squad. In the bitter inquest after England's exit, Johnson denied that the collapse had been total, saying: "I've been speaking to the players and a lot of them are horrified by the way this is being reported… we are talking about extreme views written in extreme circumstances." Whatever the truth of the matter, the campaign was embroiled in hopeless controversy, even if this doesn't entirely vindicate Johnson. He was responsible for picking the players and for judging their temperament, character and mentality. He failed to rein them in sufficiently and to enforce watertight discipline, and the consequences were such that the press had a field day. It was a tabloid editor's wildest dream, and the discord it sowed within the squad ultimately proved too much to overcome.

If Johnson was a man mountain as a player, then, he crumbled away somewhat as a manager. He remains an icon of English rugby, but the brilliance of his playing days is now caveated with what came afterwards. While his coaching career has been harshly judged in some quarters, he was undermined by the players he trusted. In the end, the England team failed to show him the same discipline and commitment that he had shown them for so many years.

Though he would go on to be an indispensable player for England, Johnson's first cap for his country was down to a stroke of good fortune. It was January 1993, and a young Johnson was due to play in a B-team international on the same night that England took on France. Late in the day, there was an injury to lock forward Wade Dooley, and Johnson was hastily summoned to Twickenham to start the match against Les Bleus. He was largely unfamiliar with the team's set plays, and had to be given a crash course in the lineout calls just before the game kicked off.

If that sounds like schoolboy stuff and a potential recipe for disaster, Johnson certainly showed his maturity once his debut match began. Despite a thunderous clash of heads with French prop Laurent Seigne early on, Johnson managed to stay in the game and indeed more than hold his own. It was an embryonic Johnson performance, and his individual influence impressed coaches and the press alike. England went on to win 16-15, and Johnson the player never looked back.

As for Johnson the manager, however, memories of that first ever match against France must have felt rather melancholy in hindsight. With his World Cup preparations half buried, it was Les Bleus who hammered the final nail into the coffin of his doomed coaching career. In the quarter-finals, having lumbered through the group stage, England came up against a dynamic French side spurred on by a group of mercurial attacking talents. Facing the feints and combinations of Morgan Parra, Vincent Clerk, François Trinh-Duc and Maxime Médard, England's defence was submerged in a blue deluge and came apart like wet tissue paper as a result.

To Johnson's personal credit, he refused to deflect the blame for the defeat. He resigned three days later, even making a generous mea culpa and saying of his players: "I haven't been let down." Those words rang a bit hollow, of course, especially considering that Manu Tuilagi had been fined £3,000 for jumping off a ferry the day before Johnson announced his resignation. Were he being totally honest, he would have admitted there were several members of his squad who compromised his legacy as England coach. Instead, a leader to the last, he decided to fall on his sword with good grace.

"You do what you think is right at the time, that's all you can do. We could all say we'd go back and change things."

– Martin Johnson, speaking about the 2011 Rugby World Cup.