Jonah Lomu, a Giant Among Men by Niall Edworthy

Author:Niall Edworthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910859254
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2017-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

The All Blacks flew to the 1999 World Cup amid a frenzy of great expectations. As always, they were the team the others feared most. Even the Jumbo Jet that flew them to Britain couldn’t disguise its excitement – a giant image of the team’s front row was emblazoned across the fuselage. In the group stages, there was no warning of the crash that was to come. Wales were the nominal hosts for the tournament but most of the matches were played in England, Scotland and France. New Zealand were in Bristol for their opening game against Tonga and they won it 45–9 at a canter. The game itself was quickly forgotten by the rugby world but it would always be memorable for Lomu who was recalled to the starting line-up and scored two tries against his family’s country of origin in the first ever Test between the two countries.

A strong England side, skippered by Martin Johnson, gave them a hard game at Twickenham, but the All Blacks withstood the sustained assaults on their line and emerged victorious from the one game that might have tripped them up en route to their expected place in the final. Lomu was on the scoresheet again, with a try as good as any he had ever scored in Tests. The scores were locked at 16–16 deep into the second half when Lomu received a long, looping pass from Mehrtens 15 metres inside his own half. He used his pace to skip round Jerry Guscott and Dan Luger – both very quick men – and then turned on the power to drag himself over the line with scrum-half Matt Dawson and wing Austin Healey hanging off him like washing.

“When he scored his try in the left corner, about four or five England players failed to bring him down,” says Wayne Smith. “And in the replay you saw that these were absolutely top players who couldn’t stop him. The back row that day – Back, Hill and Dallaglio – was the one that helped England win the Cup four years later. Jonah Lomu was no flat track bully. He tended to save his best for the biggest games.”

Lomu added a further two tries to his tally when New Zealand marched on with a thumping 101–3 win over Italy at Huddersfield. The poverty of the All Blacks’ performance in a dour 30–18 win over Scotland at a rain-lashed Murrayfield in the quarter-finals was marked down as an irrelevant blip on the upward trend of the graph. No one in the world of rugby predicted the shock that was to follow at Twickenham a week later.

France had shown nothing special in their group matches or quarter-final to raise fears of an upset in the New Zealand camp. But France never give warning that they are about to play like gods.

France wing Philippe Bernat-Salles was Lomu’s opposite man that day. “Before the semi-final, I decided to stand in front of Jonah during the haka and I was soon

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