Jonny: My Autobiography

by Wilkinson, Jonny

  Clive explains all this at length. He does it well, and although I feel massively disappointed, I have so much respect for Paul Grayson that I don’t feel horribly hard done by. I get the message. Move on, these things happen.

  I still don’t feel too emotional the next day in the team meeting. First Clive has an announcement. Jerry Guscott is injured and his retirement from international rugby is immediate. Next thing Clive does is flip over the flip chart to reveal our team to play South Africa and there it is – my name listed among the subs. Now I feel hot under the collar, embarrassed. I’ve been dropped and I feel people are looking at me.

  Afterwards, Neil Back comes straight over and puts his arm round me. Don’t worry about it, he says, there’s still three games to go. It’s not over. You’ll be back in there, so don’t let it worry you.

  He didn’t have to say that. It catches me offguard a bit and as we walk out to the coach to go to training, I keep aside from the others because I don’t particularly want them to see how emotional I feel. It’s not that I mind about not being in the team. It’s the thought that maybe, actually, some of these guys really care about me. For two years, I hadn’t felt as though I was fitting in. I felt that people didn’t really trust in me or want me there. And now Backy, a guy with all that experience, whom I respect so much, has just said that.

  On arrival, as we run out on the field for training, Mike Catt jumps all over my back. He’s on the bench, too. He’s great at putting the smile back on my face, and he knows when I need a little boost.

  That’s two guys now, guys I admire enormously and with whom I’ll play for crucial years to come, looking after me well. What a huge difference.

  I’m not very good at being on the bench. I don’t like it. Surely no one does. Sitting on the bench, watching two big, big sides going at it, and not knowing if you’re going on or not, is nerve-racking. All the time you’re thinking when am I going to come into it? When am I going to be a part of it? And, as a number ten, am I going to have to play a decisive role at the end?

  It’s a tight game, going one way, then the other. The problem is that every time South Africa get within range, they send Pieter Muller up the middle, a centre who is about as big and hard to tackle as they come. Their ball then comes straight back to fly half Jannie de Beer, sitting deep, and we can’t get close to him. He starts firing over drop goals and we can’t stop it.

  Joost van der Westhuizen scores a try for them just before half-time and we go in just behind. I come on with 25 minutes to go, and I can feel it. So frantic. But I feel I make an impact. My running game, I feel, creates opportunities, although we never quite manage to put them away. And de Beer keeps stretching their lead. He finishes with five drop goals. That is awesome. It’s also the end of our World Cup.

  A World Cup campaign is extremely intense and long, even if you don’t last into the final fortnight. From mid-June to October, it’s been day after day, non-stop, with constant pressure. Before the tournament started, we’d trained long and hard, intense physical work with lots of contact. Sometimes it feels too much. Clive likes to communicate with us by email and we have all been given laptops. At one stage, Garath Archer just handed his laptop in. That was his way of saying goodbye. Thanks but no thanks. He came back again, but it was a statement of what we had all been going through.

  So we go out, and this time I decide to go for it. I commit to getting stuck in. I need to blow away the cobwebs and lose my mind for just a little bit before the inevitable ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ mindset returns.

  I’m disappointed, we all are, but I feel a sense of achievement at having come through this massive challenge, aged 20. I was told to hold the reins, and handled the pressure of being the driver of an international team against some of the best in the world. And I’ve learned a bit about World Cups. They are so long, and clearly another step up.

  Yet as much as I may have taken a step up on the rugby field, it is off it where I have really moved on. All that convincing myself that nobody believes I should be there in the team, I’m letting people down all the time, and being beaten by New Zealand was my fault – I think that is maybe behind me. I can go home knowing that, actually, there are guys who trust me and perhaps even want to play alongside me.

  But my attempts to celebrate or commiserate, whichever it is, are not particularly impressive. This is a very rare encounter with alcohol. I find myself drinking with Dave Reddin, our fitness king, and I cannot match him. We also find ourselves, briefly, in the company of one or two of the England women’s rugby team, and drink for drink, I cannot match them, either.

  So Dave puts me to bed and when I wake up, I see he has put a couple of Lucozades to hand. I have that ‘Oh dear, this isn’t good’ sensation, and it only gets worse as I swing my feet out on to the carpet, and some digested food – chicken and rice, by the way – pushes up between my toes. Definitely no excuses from my end, I have overdone it this time.

  That’s how my World Cup ends – heading to the airport, feeling a little better about myself, sitting in the team coach, vomiting into a paper cup and being laughed at by my team-mates.

  MOST people probably go to the pub or to a party on New Year’s Eve. On New Year’s Eve 1999, to see in the new millennium, Sparks and I go kicking.

  The thing is, because I do so much kicking at the club on my own, I have been given a key to turn on the floodlights on the back pitch. The other thing is that we know the club will be open, because the bar will open for punters. So we also know that, if we can get into the changing rooms, we can get into the main tunnel out on to the first-team pitch and that is where the lock is to turn the lights on. Perfect.

  The floodlights are half working, the back pitch appears to have been ploughed, so it’s not in the best shape for kicking, and hail is falling lightly. Conditions I am used to. We stay out a fair while, nearly two hours, before we look at the time – 11.30. We get back home in time to see in the millennium with an Indian take-away and Eurotrash on the TV.

  The freedom of Kingston Park is a luxury, and I make the most of it. Any time of the evening, I go there – eight, nine, ten o’clock – flick on the lights and kick. Not another soul around.

  It’s another luxury having Sparks here. He is well versed in my ways. The following year, I will have him down here on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And the year after that, I will have him down here on Christmas Day in the snow, standing under the posts, freezing his backside off and knowing full well that when I say we’re going to kick a few balls around and have a bit of a laugh, it’s inevitably going to turn into a fully fledged, very serious kicking session.

  And he knows exactly how my mind works. He knows that I always like to finish on a set of six perfect kicks, and that if I mess up the sixth, I’ll start again. He knows that if I’m hitting a set of twenty drop goals and the last two aren’t absolutely perfect, I’m going to say sod this I’m doing twenty more. I can see that Sparks is thinking oh my God, that’s another thirty minutes on the session, and I had plans for tonight. I’m quite likely to say to him right, mate, you go. You take the car. I’ll find my own way home. And he knows I mean it. But he never leaves. He stays and helps and kicks the ball back. Actually, it pisses me off a bit that there am I practising and practising, and he won’t practise as much even though he has a natural ability to strike the ball as well as pretty much anyone I know.

  When the obsessiveness does kick in and I won’t stop, I am kind of split in two. I feel guilty, a terrible brother, for having him stay, but the other side of me is saying there’s absolutely no way I can leave here until I get this right. This actually makes my head worse as I start to panic, rushing to get my kicking right.

  And he understands. He can see when I’m struggling with myself. If I start getting mad and I hit a ball that goes somewhere I don’t want it to go, we both know that he’ll run quicker to get it and kick it back because he knows that I have to erase that with a good one.

  What all th
ose hours together have done is create the lifestyle for me to succeed. Yes, it’s a selfish adventure, because I’m focusing on myself and my own performance so much. And yes, I wish I had more to give back to him.

  This is the way my mind works. I like to imagine myself, my life, as being under permanent surveillance from a video camera. The camera is switched on, following me 24/7. It never stops.

  That’s not because I like being in front of the cameras; quite the opposite. It’s because I want to think that I could play back the tape after any day or week, or at the end of my life, and be able to sign off on it, 100 per cent happy with what I see, totally content that it shows a good representation of who I am as a person and as a rugby player.

  It is about being strong in professional terms and having values that never slip. That’s why, when it’s raining and windy, or things aren’t going too well with my kicking, I can never say screw this, I’m going in. I believe everything I do has to make a difference. So I want to do things better than everyone else, not just on the field on a Saturday afternoon, but every day of the week, and off the field, too.

  Like many of my ideas, the camera comes from Blackie. He says it’s part of kaizen, a Japanese philosophy that he follows, about daily improvement. The camera means you cannot switch off. It’s not as though getting better is something you do at work and then stop when you get home. Getting better is something you live all the time.

  It makes so much sense to me.

  Back at home, meanwhile, the toilet keeps blocking and it seems to take the repair man a while to come out for the lovely job of fixing it. Sparks and I find ourselves having to make quick, regular shuttle runs by car to Kingston Park to use the facilities there instead.

  That may be mildly amusing, but when you’re a nervous 20-year-old who gets particularly tense before games and needs his pre-match preparation to go absolutely perfectly, it doesn’t really work. This is just one of many reasons why I feel I need to move house. So I sell up and, having paid solicitor’s fees and the rest of it, I blow all the profit in one go – a home-delivery curry for two.

  Next stop is a stunning house in Corbridge, a quiet country hamlet. This really excites me. The house is a converted set of stables, full of character, with big arch windows.

  We fix it up into a bit of a bachelor pad with a big air-jet corner bath in the bathroom and a few more boys’ toys. My favourites are the big, black-leather recliner chairs we buy for watching TV. These are not just any old leather chairs, but chairs with a telephone installed under the arm-rest cushion, a heat facility and a vibrational facility for an in-chair massage.

  We have a daily pattern. Train to the point of exhaustion, drive back, stop at the Corbridge Larder, the country farm shop, then home and feet up, Playstation, TV. This really suits me. Spending quality time with your best friend isn’t bad, either. I know I am fortunate; it’s a taste of the good life. But, foremost, I feel the pressure of rugby life so strongly, it just feels great to be able to come back home and shut the door on it all.

  Besides having Sparks at Newcastle, the team around me is ideal for a young man trying to perfect his trade.

  I am now seen as the first-choice ten, and I have Inga outside me, loving his rugby, and forever calling moves that he has just dreamed up.

  Inside me at scrum half, I have one of the toughest players in the world. We call Gary Armstrong the Junkyard Dog. He is so hard, he doesn’t understand the concept of a pain barrier. He will play on with cracked ribs, a fractured eye socket at one point, a jaw problem. He takes huge hits and never lets you see that he is hurt.

  For me, he’s great because he looks after so much. I’ll be looking around from midfield, searching in vain for options, wondering what to do next, and when he sees that, he just breaks off and takes the responsibility himself. Gary doesn’t care about making mistakes. If it doesn’t go right for him, he just gets on with it, and looks for another way to win the game.

  In a way, he plays number nine like Mike Catt at twelve. He doesn’t force you to create something out of nothing; he shares the responsibility, allows you to make the right decisions.

  I am forever grateful to Catty, for the way he welcomed me in those early England days and made me feel good about myself, and spoke so positively about me in meetings. On England duty, we are now roommates and he has become both friend and kind of a mentor. He loves board games – plays endless rounds of backgammon with Matt Perry – but when I get back from my kicking practice, those hours in our room are often spent just chatting idly about rugby and life.

  Through Catty, I learn more about how it’s done. He’s like my learning aid. I rate him so highly, he is such a damn good player, so great to play alongside, so ready to share the load and help drive a team forwards. I envy him for his relaxed, laid-back demeanour, and I admire his strength, which he needed to come through some harsh media criticism. But what I really like is his rugby philosophy and his attitude to the game. He knows how he wants to play, that’s how he’ll do it and he’s not going to change.

  On the night before our first game of the Six Nations, I share with him some of my thoughts, my anxieties, and mention how bad I feel the night before a game. I tell him about my three-hour kicking sessions, and how my struggles with sleep are so bad I sometimes get close to four hours a night. Please, I say, please tell me that dealing with it all gets a bit easier.

  To be honest, he tells me, laughing in a comforting, knowing way, it probably gets worse.

  And that was from the guy I thought was laid-back and took it all in his stride. He is just very good at making it seem that way.

  England seems a little different now. New players have come in – Mike Tindall and Iain Balshaw, my old teammates from Under-18 days, and Ben Cohen, a hard-running wing with the power of a forward and footwork that makes him lethal. It’s no bad thing having players such as these running off your shoulders.

  And we have moved. With the World Cup behind us, Clive sees everything as a fresh start and part of that means shifting us out of the Petersham Hotel, where England have been based for so many years. Our new home is a hotel in Surrey, the Pennyhill Park. Comparatively, it is luxury, but the real point is it will soon have its own rugby pitch just three minutes’ walk down the drive. Ideal.

  It already has a good room for football-tennis, even if that’s not exactly its purpose. Since I come from Newcastle, farther away than most, I tend to arrive on Sunday night rather than Monday morning, when the other players get in. So I check in, meet Dave Reddin in reception and we clear all the furniture from the big room upstairs. The football-tennis in there lasts hours.

  But the surroundings, the personnel and the football-tennis are not the only differences here. Our attitude to decision-making and risk-taking is different, too. We have confidence to take it to the next level.

  We just explode on to the Six Nations championship. We play Ireland first, my first senior international with Brian O’Driscoll on the opposition, and we notch up 50 points. But it’s not all fancy stuff. In Paris, where England haven’t won since 1994, we find ourselves in a very different, monumentally physical game.

  I am standing outside Lawrence in defence when Pieter de Villiers, their prop, takes the ball off nine and runs straight at him, one on one. The sound of the collision is chilling and I fear immediately for Lawrence’s left shoulder, but both players just shake it off and carry on as though nothing has happened. It’s that kind of game. I put in a few decent tackles of my own, including a belter against Emile Ntamack, their wing. I catch him just right, accelerating into a tackle, beating him to the hit, so he’s not quite prepared.

  We all have an explosive energy and aggression. For the last 15 minutes, we defend our slim lead with resilience and tenacity. This is pure survival. We dog it out and it feels great against a team such as France, in their backyard. It feels great for our sense of togetherness, our identity as a team.

  And, for me, it feels great when we come off the pitch and
Neil Back puts his arm round my shoulder. He talks about my defence and my lack of consideration for my own safety. You’re a man after my own heart, he says. I like that.

  We beat Wales at home and then Italy in Rome. The culmination is again a Grand Slam match, this one in Edinburgh, where we find ourselves fighting the weather as well as the Scots. We get off to a decent start but our lineout really struggles. We know that, in this rain, we need to play a territorial game, so we kick long. But Scotland are happy just to smash it back downfield and off the park, and with them then stealing pretty much all our lineout ball, they reduce our options, making our lives hell.

  Meanwhile, their driving lineouts are working. They get one well-earned try and with it the lead, and they throw over the security blanket. We need territory, but, because of the weather, our attacks are unthreatening. They don’t need their wingers up in defence, which means our kicking game isn’t working because there always seem to be three Scottish players in the back field covering.

  We try to open up a bit, and at least into goalkicking range, but in such horrendous conditions, every tackle has the potential to knock the ball out of our hands. Scotland don’t move the ball at all. They just sit tight in the driving seat, and as the weather deteriorates, that is a great place to be.

  Thus, in freezing conditions, another Grand Slam slips by. We shake hands with the Scottish guys and congratulate them. They did deserve to win. But then we leg it to the showers because we are simply so miserably cold. We miss the Calcutta Cup presentation, which is understandably seen as a snub by bad losers, but it isn’t at all. It’s just a case of not knowing protocol, and an intense desire to get warm and forget about a terrible, terrible day.

  We are also judged by the media to have played the wrong tactics in the rain, running the ball too much. That is plain rubbish, just a case of lazy, oversimplified criticism from people who have either never played the game or forgotten what is was like when they did.