Man Behind the Match: Grayson knew O’Gara could miss crucial kick
The 2000 final then, is off limits.
Four errant swipes of the then 23-year-old’s right boot saw Northampton clinch a match and a trophy they had no right to even be contesting, and, in doing so, Saints shrugged a 120-year-old monkey off their backs.
The under-achievers were almost at it again however. With just a minute remaining on the clock O’Gara had the simplest of kicks to put Munster 11-9 ahead. The 64,000 Twickenham crowd – a world record for a club game at the time – expected him to get it, and so did the players, all except one recalls Saints centre Matt Allen.
“Fortunately for us Ronan O’Gara forgot how to kick,” he says. “He had two penalties towards the end which he would have expected to score 90 per cent of the time but he missed them both.
“Paul Grayson talked about it afterwards and he said he knew that the wind at Twickenham would take the ball.
“He said he would have taken it a couple of yards further to the right and then let the wind bring it back.
“So when Ronan went up to take it, although it started off right it didn’t come in, and Paul was fairly sure it was going to miss. Someone with his technical knowledge could see that, but the crowd and the 29 other players on the field probably didn’t.”
Allen himself, had the most gut-wrenching seat in the house.
“I always remember my position was to be ready for the rebound so I had my back to the kicker and was just looking at the posts in case it came back,” he adds.
“I remember hearing the thud and then the groan and cheers of the crowd as it went over my head and hit the post. I had no idea where it was going originally, whether it was going over or not.
“There was nothing I could do about the kick other than wait. There were still a couple of minutes to play but we would have struggled to get back into the game.
“We wanted to be elated that he had missed it, but we couldn’t relax too much as we still had to play it back, then win the scrum and kick it out so there were still opportunities to lose the game. You had to be completely switched on.
“I struggle to remember much of the game but I vividly remember the scrum and when the whistle went it was a feeling of relief that we had finally done it.”
By rights, Saints had little claim even to be at Twickenham. They crashed to defeat away to Grenoble in the group stage and squeezed through their quarter-final against Wasps and semi with Llanelli – each time by just three points.
And this was long before European rugby became a squad game. Whereas Toulon could call on Gethin Jenkins if Andrew Sheridan limped out of last year’s final, this was a Saints squad of walking wounded, down to the bare bones but strapping themselves up for one last tilt at glory.
For months they had been off-colour, Wasps put them to the sword in the Tetley Bitter Cup final, Matt Dawson and Nick Beal couldn’t play due to injury, and both Allen and skipper Pat Lam certainly shouldn’t have with the knocks they were carrying.
By hook or by crook however, Saints’ exhausted forwards survived wave after wave of pressure from Munster’s Red Army, and incredibly got stronger as the match wore on.
Allen vividly remembers from where they drew their inspiration.
“Paul Grayson alone pretty much kicked us into the final,” he said. “It had been a particularly hard season for us. We had a number of players go down with injury.
“Matt Dawson had a broken leg, Nick Beal damaged his shoulder. We were really hanging on by our finger tips at the end. It was a case of getting the squad through.
“It had been a bit of a tough season. We were top of the league in January and then fell off a bit finishing in fifth or sixth. We had got to the final of the Tetley Bitter Cup Final and we were well beaten in that. Our squad was falling apart at the seams, it was do or die really.
“We stayed in a hotel the night before the Heineken final and Pat Lam gave an inspirational speech. He should not have been playing himself as his shoulder was in tatters.
“He sat us around in a circle and we talked about what it would mean to win. He talked us through the day and had us imagine two scenes.
“The first was we didn’t play very well and they won the game and he had us imagine the feeling of desolation.
“And then we imagined the same build up to the game but playing really well, playing together as a team and fighting for each other and winning.
“We talked through that feeling and what it would mean. I won’t ever forget that meeting.
“You hear of motivational team talks but for me, Pat’s speech just really struck a nerve.”
The match itself – the first European Cup final without a French presence – was largely forgettable, thunder, lightning, and torrential rain earlier in the morning was followed by sunshine for kick-off and Saints, written off in most corners, made a muscle-flexing start.
After just two minutes Paul Grayson kicked his side into the lead but while Northampton’s pack was on top, handling errors crept in – Ben Cohen among the chief culprits.
Lam, his shoulder holding out, was inspired, romping through tackle after tackle but Saints could not carve open a well-organised Munster defence and the Irishmen were galvanised when Jason Holland levelled the score with a drop-goal.
Talismanic is an often misused word in sport, but for Munster that day, Keith Wood was just that. He popped up on the right wing, rounded Federico Mendez and was collared just shy of the line. O’Gara soon fed David Wallace for the only try of the match on 32 minutes.
Grayson trimmed the deficit to 8-6 before O’Gara missed a penalty and a drop-goal attempt in a sign of things to come before half-time. Allen’s memories of this stage of the match are largely of survival.
“For half the game we were the better side but we did not score anything considerable,” he recalls.
“After that it was nip and tuck, it was very much a battle of attrition.
“I had injured the medial ligaments in my knee playing up at Newcastle and shouldn’t have been playing.
“It was strapped up and I was on painkillers. I probably did not play my best game but I was running on practically a leg and a half.
“There were a number of players who were the walking wounded. They were taking painkillers just to get them through the game and then worry about the pain in the following days.”
After the break, Wood again set off on one of his trademark scampers and only Grayson’s last-ditch tackle preventing a try.
Saints nosed themselves in front as the match entered the final quarter.
Both Grayson and O’Gara missed tricky penalties before the latter missed a simple one and, as the volume continued to crank up on the Fields of Athenry, so did the pressure on Northampton’s resistance.
“There were players playing their last games for the club and we knew that as a squad we would never be together again,” said Allen, of a side led by John Steele, but very much moulded by Ian McGeechan.
“We were a multi-national squad and we wanted to be able to bump into players wherever they may be in the world in the future and be able to look them in the eye and say ‘I won the Heineken Cup final with you’.
“It was there for us to win. Ironically, we nearly threw it away. In the quarter finals and semis it had been more a case of not deserving to win and the opposition throwing it away and we nearly did the same in the final.”
The final whistle was greeted with jubilation and an enormous sense of relief – owner Keith Barwell had finally delivered Northampton a first trophy in more than a century.
For Lam, the outpouring of emotion is what lingers most in the memory.
“As we were going up the steps to collect the trophy I turned around to Tim Rodber and asked him to raise the Cup with me,” he said. “Tim had been the captain for the previous five years, and he’s a legend in English rugby and especially Northampton.
“The whole day was just so special for people like Tim who had played all their rugby at Northampton.
“There was a lot of emotion, and everybody was ecstatic. The support for Northampton was just unbelievable.”
And soon the celebrations began.
“We went to the regular haunt for Saints, Auntie Ruth’s. It was a club and we hired out the entire bottom floor and held a court session,” said Allen.
“Keith Barwell had put a huge amount of time, effort and a lot of money into the club and it was an opportunity to reap what he had sown.
“He put his card behind the bar and I think the bar bill ended up running into thousands and people took a lot of drinks.
“That’s what winning meant to him. It was not about the money, it was just about him enjoying the whole achievement.”
Barwell makes few bones about his best signing for Saints. A firmament of stars passed through the Franklin’s Gardens gates under his tenure but World Cup-winning prop Garry Pagel was, in his words, the cream of the crop.
“Pagel was a great player, he was an animal,” recalls Barwell. “I remember going up to Sale and talking to Fran Cotton and Steve Smith and I happened to drop in that Pagel wasn’t playing.
“Their faces lit up with delight, Steve Smith ran off to tell the team straight away. That’s how much opponents feared him.”
Allen added: “The win was huge for the club. We went from not winning anything for years to winning the biggest prize there was and what was special was winning it with that team.
“Garry Pagel, who won a World Cup with South Africa in 1995 was so emotional afterwards. For him winning the Heineken Cup was a bigger achievement that winning the World Cup.
“We were playing with a squad of players you played with day in day out for three or four years rather than a load of stars who came together every now and then.
“It was a real family thing and he felt it was a bigger victory that the World Cup.”
Unfortunately for Barwell and for Saints it was not the start of a dynasty and it remains their last trophy – the following year they failed even to make it out of the group stage but Allen remembers that the 2000 final was five years of graft, blood, sweat and tears in the making.
“The squad had been building from when we got relegated in the 1994-95 season,” he said.
“People had played together for a number of years so to be able to win it for each other was the best feeling.
“We had just got into a mentality of keep going until you could not go any more. It was quite an attritional game with few open chances. There was not a great deal of open space, which probably suited me.
“I remembered training during the season at Harleston Forest.
“We would go for a long run and then do 30 second sprints and really accelerate all the way to the end.
“Each time the whistle went, it was about thinking, ‘right now I need to go again’.
“It was about teaching you that even when you thought we were finished, you could always find an extra bit of energy, and that was the attitude we had in that final.
“It was about developing that mental strength. It’s amazing what the body can do if you get the mind right.”
That stormy afternoon, when Saints pushed their bodies to the limit, remains one of the very few blots of O’Gara’s Heineken Cup copybook.
Unsurprisingly he has had his revenge – in November 2011, after five minutes of injury time and more than 40 phases of play he ruthless slotted a match-winning drop-goal to win 23-21 at Munster in the group stages.
Rewind the clock, however, and after the thunderstorms relented, Saints could bask in their day in the sun.
