Every week, Pat and Inga show me that anything is possible. Every week, they inspire me to be the best.
In the weeks away from the England camp, being back in Newcastle feels like being back at home. I feel more at home in the team now, too, regularly playing at number twelve. And sometimes, I can even hold a five-minute conversation with a senior player. Playing twelve is a privileged place to be – outside Rob, the great controller, and inside Inga. You can give the ball to Inga in any situation. If Rob feels he really needs experience for a game, he brings Alan Tait off the wing and into the centre instead of me, but towards the latter part of the season, when we are making a charge at the league title, I mostly keep my place.
In April, with six games to go, we have lost just one league game all season. We play successive games in London, against Saracens, who beat us with a last-second drop goal, and against Wasps, who beat us by a single point. Our title hopes are in danger.
The Wasps game is tight and awkward. Towards the end, I’m not quite sure how to help. I don’t want to get in Rob’s way and it’s against my instinct to hide. The tension is killing. By the changing rooms afterwards, I meet Bilks and I can hold it in no longer. He is greeted with the same panic and tears he has seen so many times before. Have I let people down? I want to know. I feel so frustrated. I ask Bilks am I doing my job right? What else could I have done? I don’t feel completely clear about what I should be doing, about my role. What more can I do? Maybe the pressure is wearing me down a bit.
And I look at Rob. With a last-minute, long-range penalty, he had an opportunity to win the game, and he hit the post. How can he be so calm and philosophical? Why do I seem to feel it so much more?
We finish with three big games – Leicester and Bath at home and Harlequins away. If we win them all, we win the League.
I love having Blackie in the changing room before games. He gives the team talk, such is the standing in which he is held by the team. We are half shit-scared of him, and 100 per cent respectful, so there is no better person to deliver messages about commitment and honesty, and what makes a difference.
He asks us to focus on what we’ve trained on during the week, but he also talks about aggression in contact, and the fire in our performance, in our desire. He talks about inspiring each other, and our roles as players and leaders. When he speaks, it’s an aggressive, inspirational sound track pumping through the changing room, and we listen.
On a sunny Bank Holiday Monday, the Leicester side we face is full of the big names I have been hiding from in the England camp, plus Joel Stransky, South Africa’s World Cup-winning fly half. We play well. We run a perfect double-switch, Rob linking with me and then me with Pat. Pat runs his line so fast and close to my back that I feel his speed like a ghost going through the back of my shirt. He explodes through the hole at full pace, has just one defender to beat and out-gases him to the line. Great try from a great player.
We beat Leicester 27–10. Against Bath, I help us to build a lead and then watch from the bench as we successfully defend it, 20–15. Finally, on a hot mid-May Sunday in London, we complete the job at Harlequins, 44–20. I have been here one season and we are Premiership champions.
Naturally, this kick-starts a week of partying – serious, proper, night after night celebrating – which isn’t too smart, because at the end of the week, we are at Twickenham for the Sanyo Cup. The new league champions play a seriously classy Rest of the World team starring Chester Williams, Philippe Bernat-Salles and David Knox.
We start by playing like people who have been drunk for half the week. Inga’s first involvement in the game – beating three players, then a blind back-handed offload – makes it obvious that he is teetotal. Very quickly, we find ourselves 31–7 down, but we recover to 31–19 just before the break. And we want to win this. We pull ourselves back into it and the last half hour becomes the Pat and Inga show. We win 47–41.
But the point is this. I am on the receiving end of a lot of success at a ludicrously early stage in my career. And physically, I feel kind of invincible. This path is one I am finding a little too easy to tread. Harsh reality, however, is but a game away.
Off the pitch, life is moving fast, too. It’s clear I need an agent and Bilks and I are put in touch with Tim Buttimore, an ex-Leicester player who looks after Martin Johnson, Neil Back and Clive Woodward. That seemed a pretty decent recommendation.
I like Tim. He’s not like a lot of other agents – no fast talking, no promising this, promising that, just very supportive, genuine, honest. I feel comfortable that this is someone I can get on with.
The relationship starts well when Tim tells me he can bring in a boot sponsor. Adidas? I’d almost sell my soul to be with adidas. Ever since Dave Alred gave me that first pair of Predators, I’ve worn nothing else.
So I get a little bit of money, all the kit I could possibly need, and boots. My excitement when that first pair of boots arrives from adidas is like a child’s at Christmas.
The day after the Sanyo Cup, I join the England squad for the Tour from Hell. At this stage, we are just a young group, excited to be going on a long England tour of the Tri-Nations countries. We don’t know yet that this is the Tour from Hell. That name is applied five weeks later and sticks for ever more.
What is clear at the start is that we do not have anything approaching a full-strength England team. Many of the senior players have been advised to use the summer to rest, but at least we have Neil Back and Stimmo. Stimmo is one of the best physical specimens I’ve ever seen on a rugby pitch. But on the morning we meet up, Backy has a quick chat with Clive and suddenly goes from the squad list to the injury list. When you see a guy of that quality walking back to his car with his bag, that is a big blow.
We train on the Twickenham pitch, a particularly hard, physical session with John Mitchell, the forwards coach, screaming at the shirtless forwards, telling them individually how fat they are. Off the pitch, Clive stresses the point by asking Josh Lewsey to take his shirt off.
What? Josh was not exactly expecting this.
Take your shirt off, Clive tells him.
Josh does what he is told and Clive points at him and tells us that, if we are serious about playing for England, this is what we all need to look like.
Somewhere hidden in this act, genetics aside, Clive may have the semblance of a point. I am getting more used to his interesting ideas. To improve communication, he once had the Under-21s back line training with pillow cases over their heads. Also in the Under-21s, he has tried playing Paul Sampson, a phenomenally fast winger, at number ten because he wanted to see what it was like to have the quickest number ten in the world.
His other idea for this tour is to start me at number ten. The result is that pretty much the minute we get to Brisbane, I am being sat on a park bench having my photo taken and being interviewed by Australian journalists. Naturally, I try to play it straight and I go on about the enormous respect we have for the country we are visiting. Nevertheless, ‘The Boy Wonder’ is what they call me in the papers the next day; they big me up as England’s young hope and I feel massively uncomfortable with it. Look, I say, I’m 19, just walked off the plane, never played number ten for England before, only played five minutes of international rugby at all and that was on the wing, and when I was here this time a year ago, it was on a schoolboys’ tour. But the Boy Wonder tag sticks. This was what the Australian media were going to write whatever I said.
In a park in Brisbane, Dave Alred does something incredible. For my kicking, he is trying to focus my approach on hitting the target. Rather than trying to kick the ball through two posts, the idea is to start aiming for the middle of the middle. It’s like darts – rather than aiming for the board itself, you aim for the bullseye. And the more you practise, the better you get at hitting it; the more precise you get, the more the margin for error is reduced, and the easier it becomes.
The park in Brisbane is littered with palm trees, so we do a lot of kicking over the t
rees. Then we start goalkicking and he turns to an electrical pylon with six hexagonal panels round it, 20 metres away, which we’re going to use as our bullseye. He’s got a ball set on his kicking tee and, from the back of his run-up, he is talking body position and bodyweight. He is halfway through his sentence when he sets off and kicks the ball in front of him. The ball flies smack into the central panel and rebounds along the same trajectory, straight back at us; he traps the ball with his right boot, a foot from the kicking tee, and continues his sentence without pausing for breath. Genius. As if I needed any further affirmation that this is a guy I need to listen to!
When the flood gates open in rugby, sometimes the water rushes through so fast you get swept away. This is what happens against Australia. This is what happens when an understrength team, such as ours, plays against probably the best in the world in their own backyard.
On the touchline are four local players who have made a charity commitment to do press-ups to match the total points on the scoreboard every time Australia score. They don’t know what they have let themselves in for.
We start OK. We don’t get much ball to attack with and we hold our own for quarter of an hour, but we fly round like maniacs just to keep our heads above water. God, is it hard work. I throw myself into every tackle and get a huge hand-off in the face from Matt Burke as my reward. He just palms me to the ground. The Wallabies are clinical. Their organisation, their precision, is just bang on. Their plans and their roles are executed so well.
The strength of a team shows in its collective resilience when things don’t go well, in how you manage to stop the rot, how you change your plans, how you adapt. But we don’t have the ability to do this. After 30 minutes the score is 6–0; by half-time we are 33 points down.
We come out in the second half trying so hard, but we leave ourselves more open and we have nothing left with which to defend the odd ball we turn over. The game gets crazy very quickly. Ben Tune and Stephen Larkham score a hatful of tries. I have two kicks at goal. They are close, but I miss them both. The final score, 76–0, is the biggest defeat ever in the history of the England rugby team. The Australian fans jeer in a manner I will never forget. Even the press-up brigade have to call it quits and revert to sit-ups instead.
In the changing room afterwards, I catch Stimmo’s eye and we allow ourselves a wry smile, as if to say what the hell was that? Did that really happen?
That is the last smile for a long while. At the post-match function, the embarrassment starts to kick in. I can’t look the opposition in the eye, not at all, not after that. I feel shame rising in me, the shame of not being able to hold my head up, of being totally second class in every single way. It’s done and I can’t change it, and the thought sets my heartbeat soaring. I need to get out of here.
I am suddenly desperate to get into my own space to let it all out. I thought I was on this perfect path – I’ve scored a try with my first touch in the Premiership; I’ve been in the England team aged 18; I’ve won the League with Newcastle; I’ve won the Sanyo Cup. What happened to that invincibility, to my perfect path? All ruined, all gone. It’s almost too much, now, to carry on. What will people think of me now? How can I ever recover?
This devastation has a faintly familiar feel about it. It’s the same as that fateful kick of the turf at school, except that was in front of a handful of parents; this one was in front of 26,000 people, and it was live on TV.
I am rooming with Austin and when I return, it is a good thing he is not back. I start walking round the room, crying, shouting my frustration, panicking. Planning on being the best in the world! Who am I kidding? Those dreams were all a pile of shit. I’m a joke, I’m pathetic.
I want to hide. I want the ground to swallow me up. I don’t want to have to face anyone. I just don’t want this to have happened.
I am still in tears when I get through on the phone to Bilks. From the other side of the world, he can recognise the tone of voice and the state of mind, and he is straight with me. He would have known this call was coming. His response has a big effect.
Look, he says, what’s in the past you can’t change. The only thing you can decide now is how you move on. You’ve got to decide very quickly. What are you going to do about it? Because if you don’t like it, you can stop. Do you want to stop now? And go out like this?
What he shows me is a massive fork in the road. He pulls me from my torture, my self-denigration, and appeals to that other person in me, the person who plays with pride, the one who is competitive to the finish. What am I going to do about this? One thing I know for sure is that I’m going to struggle to live with 76–0, but I’ll struggle to live with myself a lot more if I bow out just because it got a bit tough a bit early and I couldn’t take the strain.
Then I get it. That 76–0 is a bit like kicking with Dave Alred. Dave shows you what being the best is; he makes you realise how much work you have to do and how far you have got to go. The Australians have just done the same. They have shown me what being the best looks like. They’ve shown me what I want to look like too, and how much work I have to do in order to be that way.
And now that I know, I make a promise to myself – I am never going to feel this way again. I’m never going to feel so helpless, never going to feel so second rate, never going to allow myself to feel as unvalued as that. Never. The day we were defeated 76–0 is one of the worst and most important days of my life.
The pain does not just evaporate. Usually, the day after a match, we do our recovery session in a hotel pool, or in the sea, a stretching room or a gym. But Clive tells us that today we are going to do it in the park outside the hotel, right out there where everyone can see us.
The deal is that Phil Pask will take us for a run. Pasky is one of the team physios, a truly great one, but more to the point, he is a former Northampton player turned Iron Man fitness freak, and he appears to have no concept of how fit he is.
We go out in our England-branded training kit and we are soon being heckled, taking abuse from all sides. It doesn’t help that we can’t keep up with our physio and are slowly strung out in a long line behind him. We get abuse for that, too.
Life doesn’t get any easier when we arrive in New Zealand. In Dunedin, the All Blacks await us and their team is full of my schoolboy heroes, including Walter Little, who would have a good shout at making my all-time dream team, Michael Jones, who was a big hero of Sparks’s too, Andrew Mehrtens, Jeff Wilson, Josh Kronfeld and, yes, Jonah Lomu.
I don’t have long to think about how I am going to deal with Lomu because, surprise surprise, we are hardly into the game when he takes a pass from the base of the scrum, running straight at me. This first time, I hit him full on with all I’ve got, fairly high on the ball, just enough to halt him for a second for everyone else to dive in. On the second occasion, I have no time to prepare myself and am not so successful. We’re five metres from our line and I know that if I go high, he’ll carry me over and score anyway, and then probably toss me into the crowd, so I sink down low to try to get round his legs and I just get smashed. He knocks me on to my back and runs over my chest.
But I don’t play well. I’m short on confidence – would you believe it? Halfway through, my leg gets trapped and I’m lucky to escape a serious break. I get away with strained ankle ligaments, but that’s me injured and out of the game. We lose 64–22. My tour is over – well, kind of over.
We move on to another defeat in Auckland and then another in Cape Town. Hanging around on crutches, just watching and soaking it up, is a horrible experience. You hear what people are saying about you, what they think of you, and they don’t seem to respect you. Maybe this is exactly what I need. There was I a few weeks back feeling kind of invincible, and it couldn’t be clearer now how mistaken I was.
NOW I have seen where I want to go and where I need to be, I want to get stuck in as soon as I can.
Back at Newcastle, I have a wish list, both on paper and firmly ingrained in my mind. The obsessive
switch is flicked on, and all my energy is focused in one direction. I want to take the whole thing by storm; I want to follow Pat and Inga’s example and tear up the field with ball in hand; I want to lead games by my decision making; I want to be the completely reliable, machine-like kicker; and I want to smash people in defence. That’s really what I want to do. I want to smash people.
At the end of the Tour from Hell, I was taken aside by Roger Uttley, the team manager, who told me we appreciate this has been a really difficult tour, we don’t want you to feel you’ve let anyone down or failed or anything, and with regard to future selection, we’ll take that fully into account. I appreciated the chat, but I’m not kidding myself, either. I sense that I’m now bracketed as too young, not quite ready.
When the next England squad is announced for the autumn series, my name is not on it. Actually, it gives me a certain freedom about the task in hand. I’m so fired up, working so hard. Blackie, sadly, has moved jobs to work with Wales, but we remain in very close contact. I so need to continue working with him.
Out on the pitch, I am so determined and so passionate that I start getting carried away and mouthy with the opposition. It’s not a conscious decision and I hate myself for it afterwards, but I can’t seem to help it. My pre-game anxieties and nerves are as bad as ever, and when I’m caught up in the game, they manifest themselves in impulsive comments and aggressive taunts.
I love putting in the big hits, but I start following up with some back-chat on the ground: How do you like that? Or one of my most cringeworthy: Take that, served first-class delivery for you! It’s weak, disrespectful and not very clever, but I can’t seem to control it.
We play London Scottish away and I am angry, frustrated. The game isn’t going well, the Scottish boys seem a little cocky and I start having an ongoing exchange with their back-rower, Simon Fenn. We run our double-switch move and I block the player defending me so he can’t get to the next tackle. I am right in Fenn’s ear, letting him know all about it, shouting: It’s a missed tackle, your missed tackle, that’s your man and it’s your fault.
Jonny: My Autobiography Page 7