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Shelford: The perfect motivation for victory
12 JUNE 2007
By Karen Bond
With less than 90 days to go to the start of Rugby World Cup 2007 in France, we relive the inaugural tournament through the eyes of an All Black legend in Wayne 'Buck' Shelford.
It may be almost 20 years to the day since New Zealand won the first ever Rugby World Cup final, but for Buck Shelford the memories of the 29-9 defeat of France at Eden Park in Auckland is one he will never forget.
“It was fantastic. It’s very hard to describe it, it’s very personal. Everyone has got their own way of describing what it was like to be a world champion. It is quite humbling to be a world champions,” Shelford told Total Rugby.
“To win a Cup at its first format was even bigger, because everyone will remember the first World Cup. In 100 years everyone in New Zealand will remember the first World Cup was won by the All Blacks.
“Winning that first World Cup, no one can take that away from us. You saw the joy that it gave the people [of New Zealand], not so much the rugby team because we were pretty tired afterwards, but the joy the people got from us winning it.”
Automatic choice
A latecomer to the international stage after making his Test debut for the All Blacks a month before his 29th birthday on an end of season tour to France, Shelford went onto win 22 caps for his rugby mad nation.
Shelford was a hard and uncompromising forward, his reputation cast after famously undergoing surgery pitch side to reattach a testicle on that tour of France that ended in defeat back in November 1986.
By the time the inaugural Rugby World Cup came around the following summer, Shelford was an automatic choice at number eight and played in five of the six matches, the exception being the 46-15 defeat of Argentina in the pool stages.
“’87 was a great era and I think the football we played that year was superb. It was ground breaking rugby, so far ahead of the rest of the world then with the ideas of Brian Lochore, Grizz Wyllie and John Hart,” recalled Shelford.
“We wanted to be the fittest team at the World Cup, we would run people off their feet, be the strongest at the set piece, win our lineout ball, win our scrums and play a brand of rugby which was based on reaching excellence really.
The perfect motivation
“Those were our goals and we set that by going all the way.”
Shelford scored two of New Zealand’s eight tries in a 49-6 defeat of Wales in the semi finals, a match the All Blacks were fired up for having seen Serge Blanco’s last gasp try for France see them beat Australia a day earlier.
“We didn’t have to have a team talk, we knew what we had to do and went out there and just blitzed them. We scored quite a few tries and put a big margin on them. I don’t think they realised what they were in for when we fronted up in that game.
“The motivation within us was huge to make that World Cup final and because we knew it was going to be coming back to Eden Park as well. We walked off that field, we were happy to win but we knew the job wasn’t over, we had 80 minutes still to play.”
The final proved a game too far for France, but that is not to detract from a dominant performance by the All Blacks, determined to become the first nation to lift the Webb Ellis Cup and be crowned world champions.
No coming back
“Watching those two tries we scored in quick succession in the second half [through captain David Kirk and wing John Kirwan], we knew we had won the World Cup. All we had to do was batten down the hatches and keep solid and stop them from getting the ball.
“They came back and scored a try in the dying minutes but we knew we had won the World Cup in the first 20 minutes of the second half. Scoring those two tries, we knew we had won the World Cup, we knew the French would never come back from that.”
“It was great. Once the World Cup was over and the final whistle went, the greatness of winning it, the joy was fantastic, but also we were pretty bloody knackered. It was great to have it all over, because there was a lot of pressure on us that year.”
Elevated to the captaincy after the World Cup, Shelford presided over a 14-match winning streak which lasted three years before being unceremoniously dropped in 1990 in favour of an up and coming Zinzan Brooke.
The popular number 8’s omission from the All Black squad sparked a nationwide campaign to ‘Bring Back Buck’. He never did return, but Shelford had left a lasting legacy with his part in the World Cup victory and the ritual of performing the Haka.
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