Raging Bull: My Autobiography. Phil Vickery

and push us to rely on one another and focus inward on the squad. The result of all this was that the tour was actually great fun, and we bonded very quickly. I was so enthusiastic about it all and dying to get stuck into the Australians who were criticising us so much. I knew there was a great deal of raw skill in the squad and I was relishing the fact that I had the opportunity to be here in the southern hemisphere, about to take on some of the world’s best players.

      The captain for the tour was Matt Dawson, who I got on extremely well with, and came to really admire. Daws is good fun but he’s also a good leader. He had a group of players who had hardly any experience between them, but he brought them all together and made them feel like they could win. I enjoyed working with him, and gained a lot of respect for him on the trip.

      The first match was against Australia, and we went down to a humiliating 76-0 defeat, featuring 11 Australian tries. There were a few good things to take from the defeat, like the fact that we didn’t concede a try for more than half an hour, but there’s no getting away from the fact that we were annihilated, and the victory for Australia served to confirm all their pre-match rantings about us.

      John O’Neill, the Chief Executive of the Australian Rugby Union, said after the game, ‘This is not what international rugby is about. It wasn’t a contest. Those poor players, as determined and proud as they are, were not Test players.’

      John Mitchell, our assistant coach, had a different take. He took one look at us after the game and said, ‘If I had a gun I’d shoot the lot of you.’ He then said that we had a chance to come back after this first defeat, on the New Zealand leg of the tour. He didn’t want to see us losing any more matches, he said. The truth is that if we’d stayed down there for another ten years we wouldn’t have won a game. They were simply better than us.

      I think the main lesson we learnt from the defeat was just how far the Australians had moved on since professionalism, and it was an important lesson for us in that respect. No one knew quite what changes would be brought about when the sport lost its amateur status -well, now we had our answer. We had a lot of work to do to catch up with them, let alone beat them.

      I learnt a lot on that tour. I learnt what great characters the England guys alongside me were. Even though we were being defeated every time we stepped onto a pitch, the guys stayed upbeat; there was no terrible blame culture and no moaning.

      After that first Test we headed for New Zealand where we would have two further Tests, and we stopped off in Queenstown to have a few days’ escape from the negative criticism. Clive said we could have a day off there to unwind and recover from the match and the terrible bashing we’d had in the press. ‘Don’t do anything silly,’ were his parting words, as he left us to our own devices. The words stuck in my mind. I was a new boy; I wasn’t going to do anything silly. The last thing I wanted was to lose my place in the side. Garath Archer was a different character altogether, though. That boy is a nutter, and the minute we were in Queenstown he was off to find where they did the first-ever bungee jump. He found the place, stripped naked and bungee jumped head first. I kept thinking, What if Clive finds out