Ex-England captain Lewis Moody and an insert of Courtney Lawes after the 2011 Rugby World Cup defeat to France.
This was the day Lewis Moody hoped to lift the Rugby World Cup as captain of England, before the wheels came off the chariot as never before.
The day New Zealand won the 2011 tournament and a Red Rose squad rated by Moody as better than the one which reached the previous final, was left to curse what might have been.
The fearless former flanker is spending this October 23 preparing to lead a 100-kilometre trek across the Sahara Desert in aid of the Lewis Moody Foundation brain tumour charity.
Truly a case of Mad Dog and Englishmen out in the midday sun.
But even now he can’t rid himself of the memory of an England campaign blighted by off-field controversy, one which brought an end to his international career.
“Thinking back on it still annoys me and, actually, it always will,” says the ex-Leicester and Bath star. “We had a more skilful side than we did in 2007 but the off-field stuff we allowed to derail us.”
From dwarf tossing to ball switching, inappropriate comments made by players to a female hotel worker to Manu Tuilagi jumping off a ferry, England’s tournament was a car crash from start to finish.
“I loved my playing career and I was really serious about it,” says Moody, the most conscientious of men. “One of the things I’ve really struggled to do is ever reflect on or share an entertaining story about 2011 because it mattered to me.
“For that to be the last involvement I had with England is a personal frustration. It’s part of my life I can’t change. Sadly you don’t always get the fairy tale ending.”
Moody, 46, won two European Cups and seven Premiership titles. He amassed 71 caps across a decade and represented the 2005 British and Irish Lions.
It was his line-out catch that led to Jonny Wilkinson’s extra-time drop goal and England being crowned world champions, the first of two World Cup finals he played in.
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His is a palmares others would give their eye teeth for, and the subsequent work he and wife Annie have done with the Foundation has raised well over £2 million for research into brain tumours and funding for vital support services for those impacted.
Yet the 2011 World Cup, which resulted in quarter-final elimination, team boss Martin Johnson quitting his position and the shameful leaking of confidential player feedback on the disastrous campaign, is an itch he is unable to scratch.
“I don’t ever talk about anyone else related to 2011 publicly, because I don’t feel that’s right,” he says. “I speak about myself, what I did and what I could have done better.
“As a captain, I was fiercely proud. Whether I was the right person to captain that England side is debatable. I went about doing as good a job as I physically could.
“2011 was just at the start of social media expansion and everyone having a camera phone. A Rugby World Cup in New Zealand was at the fore of it.
“I remember being in meetings where we were told about the level of media attention and scrutiny that would be focused on us: being England, Tinds [Mike Tindall] having just married into the Royal Family, etc.
“So we were aware of that and for things still to go wrong was enormously frustrating. More than that, it was soul-destroying.
“I look back and wish I could have been a better captain for that group. There were ways we could have communicated better, standards that maybe, because we were winning, we allowed to let slide a little bit.”
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Moody’s hope is that what happened in the autumn of 2011 now acts as a lighthouse to keep subsequent England teams from foundering on those same rocks.
That the Steve Borthwick team heading into autumn Tests against New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Japan are forewarned, so forearmed.
“It would be dangerous to think something like that could never happen again,” he says. “Players still need down time, they need to be able to switch off,
“More than ever they are under the spotlight, constantly. Seemingly held to a different standard than others. So while I do think lessons have been learned, they need to be reinforced regularly as it’s when you get too comfortable that things go wrong.”
Comfortable is not something Moody expects to feel on his upcoming Sahara trek. It was the same on previous expeditions to both Poles and when hit by a seven-hour tropical storm on an Amazon survival challenge.
That is okay by him as the cause is so close to his heart, inspired by meeting a 15-year-old boy living with cancer, by the name of Joss Rowley Stark, shortly after retiring from professional rugby.
Joss passed away the following year, prompting Moody and his wife to meet with The Brain Tumour Charity, discover brain tumours are the biggest cancer killer of children and adults under the age of 40, and set up their Foundation.
He might have fallen short of the prize in 2011, but the part his Foundation has since played in halving diagnosis time for children and young people with a brain tumour is an achievement of which he can feel rightly proud.
To donate to the Lewis Moody Foundation, visit TheLewisMoodyFoundation
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