Stephen Larkham
The 2001 British & Irish Lions were flush with world-class talent: Wilkinson, O’Driscoll, Wood, Johnson, Henson, Howley … and after winning the first Test, the script seemed written for a series win. But, driven by Brumbies, the hosts had other ideas, and at the heart of it was Stephen Larkham.
In rugby folklore, it is received wisdom that Austin Healey wrote Australia’s team talk ahead of the deciding third Test on the 2001 British & Irish Lions Tour to Australia. In his pre-match newspaper column, Healey had attacked nearly everything about Australia. He raged about Wallabies lock Justin Harrison who he called a ‘plod’ a ‘plank’ and an ‘ape’. He moaned about the Australian media, the sporting public at large, even the Australian weather. Then he fired a broadside at Australian men at large. ‘What is it with this country? The females and children are fine, and seem to be perfectly normal human beings’, Healey wrote in his Guardian column, ‘but what are we going to do with this thing called the Aussie male?’.
It was spicy stuff, and rugby player columns – even ghost-written columns – haven’t been as explosive since. Probably because of what happened next.
Healey – due to start the third Test on the wing – was forced to withdraw due to injury. A major blow to the Lions at the time as Healey was one of the form players on the tour. In his absence, the Wallabies went on to win 29-23 and seal a come-from-behind series win. And ‘the plank’? He played a blinder, even stealing the lineout that helped Australia close out the match. Not bad for a debut. Not good for Healey, who was scapegoated in some quarters – including by his coach Graham Henry – for providing extra motivation for the Wallabies through his column.
“That [Healey’s column] was a big story within the team,” nods the legendary Wallabies fly-half Stephen Larkham who is speaking to the Rugby Journal in Canberra, home of beloved ACT Brumbies, whom he has coached since 2022, and for whom he played for the duration of his seventeen-year professional career. “But it was that Brumbies match that really revved us up, well it revved me up.”
‘That Brumbies match’ was played three days after the first Test, in which the Lions had humbled Australia 29-13. This midweek meeting was expected to be a steadying of the ship for Australian rugby. The Brumbies were the Super 12 champions and despite being shorn of their Wallaby stars such as Stephen, they were supposed to be giving the Lions a reminder of the hell they would have to go through in the second Test that weekend.
Instead, the Brumbies spurned a healthy half-time lead to lose 30-28 in the dying seconds, giving the Lions even more momentum heading into the second Test.
The Lion who roared the loudest that match was Austin Healey, scoring two tries including the match-winner to cap a brilliant team move with two dainty shimmies, the kind that only Healey could do. As Brumbies’ hopes faded away, tempers on the pitch flared. Justin Harrison tried to knee Healey in the act of scoring, then threw his scrum-cap at him. Others tried to knock into Healey as he walked back to the halfway line, under the protection of Irish lock Jeremy Davidson.
Watching on in Melbourne while preparing for the second Test, something snapped inside of Stephen. The first Test loss had chastened Australian rugby, and for the Wallabies’ contingent of proud Brumbies, such as Stephen, George Gregan, Joe Roff, George Smith, and Owen Finegan, this rubbed liberal amounts of salt into the wound. “We were hurting after the first Test, we were hurting a lot,” says Stephen. “And then we saw that Brumbies performance and losing at the end like that, and the carrying on and all that sort of stuff. That was Austin Healey wasn’t it, in that game?
“It certainly fired us up, yeah,” he concludes. “I think you’ll agree that we had the right attitude in the second Test.”
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Australia did return fire, winning the second Test 35-14, having been down at half-time. A pass from Jonny Wilkinson which was intercepted by Roff just after the break went a long way to putting Australia on the road to victory, but by the end of the match they had well and truly overpowered the Lions.
Again, rugby folklore has a strong view on this – especially the northern hemisphere editors of it – and places the Lions’ loss at the door of Nathan Grey’s elbow to the face of flanker Richard Hill, which ruled Hill out with concussion for the rest of the tour. Up to that point, so it goes, Hill had been keeping Wallaby flanker George Smith quiet at the breakdown. Once Hill went off, Smith feasted on Lions players at the ruck, swinging the Test match, and the series, significantly in Australia’s favour.
A kernel of debate exists around whether Grey intended to land his elbow on Hill’s face or whether it was a rugby incident.
Either way, that incident was one of many that underlined the fiercely competitive and physical nature of the 2001 Lions tour to Australia. Who can forget Duncan McRae’s assault on Ronan O’Gara in the match against the Waratahs?
Stephen himself fell victim to injury during that second Test, leaving the pitch with a trapped nerve in his shoulder, ruling him out of the final Test in Sydney. Yet those one and a half Test matches against the Lions have stayed logged in his memory bank. First and foremost is the memory of walking out at the Gabba in Brisbane ahead of the first Test and seeing a sea of red jerseys.
“The crowd ambushed us a bit,” chuckles Stephen. “Yeah, there was more support for the British & Irish Lions than there was for the Wallabies. The atmosphere was amazing but it was heavily tainted towards supporting the Lions. After that, Rugby Australia handed out gold scarves beanies to everyone in the crowd at the second and third Tests, so that we sort of evened up the colour.
“In that first Test Jonny [Wilkinson] was just on fire. He was on fire. Everything he did was electric in that game. He had time, he had space. His skills were sublime. Then there was [Brian] O’Driscoll at thirteen and who was the left winger? Robinson. Jason Robinson, every time he got the ball there was space. It was certainly entertaining to play in that game. And they challenged us a lot, and there were some really good tries.
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“We sort of weren’t expecting that, I guess,” he admits. “We had won everything that there was available to win in world rugby, so we were a little bit shocked by their performance. We were punched in the nose and a little bit embarrassed by our performance.”
Healey’s midweek heroics for the Lions came next, and the world champions came out a week later champing at the bit for round two. “Our mindset was we didn’t lose two games in a row. If we lost one, we learned from our mistakes quickly. It was one of those weeks where we woke up to ourselves a little bit, realised that this is not going to be easy and we knuckled down in training to make sure our performance the following week was where it needed to be,” says Stephen.
And what of the Nathan Grey incident? “Greysie epitomised our attitude. He was hard-nosed, no nonsense.”
Although Stephen was only running water for the third Test, the Wallabies’ victory meant that for him and for many of his team-mates, there were no rugby worlds left to conquer. Aged 27, he had won the World Cup, a Lions series, five Bledisloe Cups, and two Super Rugby titles with the Brumbies. A mighty impressive haul, especially as Stephen only started playing fly-half four years previously, in a 76-0 drubbing of England, infamously remembered by the English as the opening match on the ‘Tour from Hell’. In Australia, meanwhile, the match is feted as the start of the most successful half-back partnership in the history of rugby union: it being the first time that George Gregan and Stephen Larkham wore nine and ten together.
And it was instant alchemy. The Wallabies ran in eleven tries that night. Gregan and Larkham were a match made in heaven and from that day onwards, Australia’s attack took the world by storm.
Gregan seemed to have an innate understanding of where Stephen was about to be a few seconds ahead of his arrival; that allowed Larkham to spend his time outside Gregan gliding over the gainline, or playing in the rest of his backline.
The pair would go on the make 79 Test match appearances together, more than any other halfback pairing in the history of the game. So why did the dynamic work so well? “Well, George’s service was unbelievable,” says Stephen. “And we had this kind of surreal connection where sometimes I didn’t have to say anything, and he knew where I was moving to. He had great peripheral vision and he knew it was me. I had head gear on and was probably a bit taller than most, and a bit lanky, and he just knew how to find me.
“So I just had confidence to flatten right up and know that he was going to hit me flat and get my timing off that. Having George there and having George there consistently certainly helped.”
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The options outside of Larkham in the centres were often devastating as well. In his early days at the Brumbies it was Rod Kafer and Pat Howard, whilst with Australia it was Tim Horan and Daniel Herbert initially, then Stirling Mortlock came on the scene to offer more bristling physicality.
“These guys were all extremely intelligent, smart, great communicators. So they basically did all the talking for me, and I was given the liberty just to go and play what’s in front of me.
“Once Stirlo [Mortlock] came on the scene, if there was nothing really in front of me as an opportunity, I would always just throw the ball out to him, or to a forward, or to someone with a bit of pace, and it became a really good balance between throw and crash. Eventually, once we got a bit of momentum then that’s when I would sort of step up a little bit and chance my arm more.”
Stephen’s description of how Australia played twenty years ago is notably free from the rugby jargon of the modern day, of attack systems, starter plays and forward pods. But Stephen feels that the uninhibited approach of his era is something which some teams are connecting with in 2024, including the Wallabies. “You certainly need a little bit more structure around these days,” he says. “But what I like about the Wallabies and a lot of teams are doing it, including the Auckland Blues – who won Super Rugby this year – they’re using shape in certain parts of the field but once they get momentum, then it’s just all go. They play on top of the opposition. So it’s quite entertaining to watch, because it is a bit of an arm wrestle, the attacks are not going anywhere for five, six phases and then all of a sudden there’s a little bit of momentum and then everything changes. There’s this sort of flooding. That showed throughout Super Rugby this year and I’ve certainly seen glimpses of that in Test matches over the weekend [we talk during the Autumn series that saw Australia beat England 42-37 at Twickenham].”
Although the future is looking brighter for Australia again, the Wallabies still have some way to go to return to the sport’s summit, which Larkham and co helped put them on 25 years ago when they won the 1999 World Cup – a drop-goal by Stephen from 45 metres out in extra-time in the semi-final against South Africa being one of the highlights of the campaign.
The Wallabies’ reign as rugby’s global force ended with a drop-goal as well, one from Jonny Wilkinson in the 2003 World Cup final.
That was a monumentally tough night for Stephen as – aside from the result – he was knocked out not once, but twice: the first time by the foot of Ben Cohen when Stephen tackled him off the ball, and the second time by Mike Catt running over the top of him.
And it wasn’t just Stephen who was in a world of trouble. Nearly half the Wallabies’ backline were dealing with a concussion. “This is before all the HIA and the precautions and all that sort of stuff,” he explains. “It was just sort of part and parcel of the game, but me, Flats [Elton Flatley] and Stirlo [Mortlock] had all taken head knocks, so we were all struggling. That was our 10-12-13 combination in that 2003 final that were all dazed. The only person who was coherent enough to make calls was George as the nine.”
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Amid the head fog of brain injuries, the Wallabies conceded their world title to England. In truth it was incredible that they’d even managed to take things to extra time.
But with that loss, the Wallabies’ dominance of the era was over. And they haven’t won a Bledisloe Cup, a World Cup or a Lions series since.
Stephen Larkham grew up on a farm in a northern suburb of Canberra called Higgins. His was a rugby household. His father had founded the Wests Rugby Club in Canberra and his earliest memories are of going to watch him play, acting as the ball-boy once old enough. He first started playing aged nine, a late starter, having satisfied his mum that he had grown big enough to play. His dad was his coach through to under-15s.
“Dad was a second rower and played three hundred grade games for Wests,” says Stephen. “He just brought a lot of passion and enthusiasm to our junior team. It’s like that with junior rugby, you have to swing by four houses on the way to the game and pick up four different kids. We’d rock up and play and then we’d have to take all the kit back and clean it.”
Stephen paints an idyllic picture of life at Wests, the club set amongst the naturally green parks of Canberra, where the local sports centre was the social hub all weekend for many sports, not just rugby. “Sports clubs in Australia sort of had everything, so Wests had a cricket team, and a tennis team too. You played your games and then you would generally come down to the clubhouse. There were big open spaces, multiple bars, meeting areas, restaurants and outside space where the kids would go and play. And all my team-mates’ families were there. We would go down there and play hide-and-seek, play with the game machines. At least twice a week we were down there. It was heaven for kids.”
With so many youngsters given the space to get up to their own tricks, Stephen’s competitive instincts began to emerge. “In any game that was out there, I was super competitive. Was I the best at everything? No, but I would find a way to win. It wasn’t pretty sometimes. Everything I played or did, I had to win, even in marbles. I’ve got a massive marble collection because I cheated!”
So how do you cheat the streets in marbles then? “In marbles you had to dig a hole in the dirt, and then you would line up somewhere, and you had to toss your marble and try to get it in the hole. And it was about how many shots it took to get your marble in. If you got a marble in using fewer marbles than your opponent, you won their marbles. And you were often allowed a practice, so I would say ‘practice’ under my breath and if I got it in I wouldn’t say anything because I had said it so softly. But if I missed I would say, ‘but I said practice’ and get the marble back.
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He pauses, before adding: “Yeah I don’t think I’m coming out well from that story but that was sort of the nature of my childhood, I guess. I was very competitive with all of that sort of stuff.”
On the rugby field his competitive streak came through just as strongly. In his first game of rugby, which his team lost, he couldn’t fight back the tears. “I cried and cried and cried, and people were hating me saying, ‘okay, you are embarrassing us, just stop’.
“I just couldn’t get over it. I had tried to do everything I could to win.”
As soon as rugby got going for Stephen he did start to win things, and got noticed for them too. He was part of all the representative teams in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), but as a scrum-half, not a fly-half. “I kind of knew that I was good at school but I didn’t think that I was the best. I just thought I was very competitive. I felt I always had to fight to get on the rep teams. But whatever it took to pass the ball, to kick it, however much energy was required, I would just put it in and I sort of had, underneath everything, an innate desire to win. And then aged nineteen I had a massive growth spurt and all of a sudden I had a bit of size and I had a bit of strength, and I could do all the things that I used to imagine I could do. And that never really ended, all through my playing career, I never really stopped being competitive.”
It was at this stage that Stephen met George Gregan for the first time. Gregan was the ACT representative scrum-half for the year above, so Stephen looked up to him as the man whose shoes he wanted to fill, and because Gregan was taller than Stephen at this stage. An image you can’t easily conjure. But as Stephen grew, he moved at first to outside centre and then to full-back.
It was the then-new ACT coach Rod MacQueen who spotted Stephen’s talent and honed it with the Brumbies from 1995 to 1997. Queensland were the fancy dans of Australian rugby at the time, but the Brumbies were moving up on the rails with the likes of Larkham and Gregan (although the two weren’t paired at half-back yet) and Roff making headlines.
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By the time MacQueen moved on to coach the Wallabies in 1997, Larkham had already made his international debut against Wales, in 1996 as a replacement for winger Ben Tune. MacQueen initially selected Stephen as a full-back for the injured Matt Burke, but when Burke returned to the international fold, MacQueen performed his masterstroke and turned Larkham into a ten, without ever having selected him as a starting fly-half before. “Rod said to me at the time, ‘don’t worry about being the perfect five-eighth, you just go out there and play pretty much what’s in front of you’. Because I had that attacking mindset in the back of my mind as a full-back, I would look for the opportunity to run and try and take the advantage that the other guys had set up.”
Now, in 2024, Stephen is in one of Rod MacQueen’s old jobs as the head coach of the ACT Brumbies. Since taking on the role in 2022, he’s led them to consecutive Super Rugby semi-finals, and signed a two-year contract extension.
He’s also got the small matter of the British & Irish Lions dropping in to Canberra to play his Brumbies on 9th July next year. And at ten days out from the first Test in Brisbane, it’s likely to be a full-throttle affair, unlike in 2013 when an experimental Lions team turned up and lost to the Brumbies 14-12. Stephen was the attack coach at the time, but on this occasion he will be front and centre, with the players, fans and media looking to him for inspiration and for answers.
Twenty-four years after he watched on forlornly as his Brumbies were undone at the death by Austin Healey and co, Stephen will be in as much control as any one man can be of a rugby team’s fate.
It’s currently 1-1 between the Brumbies and Lions. Taking a 2-1 lead in this rivalry may lead Stephen towards another of MacQueen’s former jobs one day.
But that full circle can wait. For this dyed-in-the-wool man of ACT, keeping the home fires burning always comes first.
Story by Jack Zorab
Pictures by Getty Images
This extract was taken from issue 28 of Rugby.
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