Jonny: My Autobiography

by Wilkinson, Jonny

  In the Six Nations we are flying. We have already put 80 points on Italy and 40 on Scotland, but it’s a big question now whether five days will be enough to get me ready for France. The best person for an answer is Pasky. He describes it as a whiplash injury, the kind of thing you see in car accidents. He and Richard Wegrzyk, the masseur, want to treat it with constant physio.

  On the Wednesday, I have a go at training, but as my head movement is still so restricted, a few balls go to ground and more than a couple of passes miss the mark. But Pasky and Wegrzyk – who is known as ‘Krajicek’, as in tennis player Richard Krajicek, because no one can pronounce his name properly – are winning this battle. In an ideal world, we would have longer, and deep down I know I shouldn’t really play on Saturday, but I do. If it wasn’t France in the Six Nations, I’d probably be resting, but Pasky and Krajicek are very good at what they do. In an amazingly short space of time, they get me just about ready for international rugby. Physically ready, anyway. We score six tries in a 48–19 victory, but I spend the entire match protecting my neck, constantly in fear that I am going to take another hit on it.

  England are on the verge of another Grand Slam. The problem is that there is an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease sweeping the country and so our Ireland match is postponed. We will have to wait until October to see if we can celebrate.

  In European competition, our Tetleys Bitter Cup win means we qualify for the Heineken Cup next season, which is very prestigious. This year, we are in the European Shield, which is great but not quite the same.

  We have a fixture at Cross Keys, the Welsh team, and because their pitch is unplayable, we get shifted to the local park. There are no changing rooms at the new venue, so the players have to change on the bus. The Cross Keys chairman tells Rob not to worry because he has sent his second XV to clear off the sheep and his third XV to clear off the droppings. No one is too impressed, particularly Marius Hurter, our South African prop, when one of their forwards goes down on one knee and urinates in the middle of a lineout.

  But we take the competition seriously and finish up in a semi-final against Harlequins – again – at Headingley. It’s a fortnight since the France game and I am hoping that my neck is OK, but it isn’t. Five minutes into the first half, a heavy, accidental knee to head by their full-back, Ryan O’Neill, starts it off. I should probably come off but the game’s hardly started, and I haven’t even begun my work for the day. I stay on.

  I make a few more tackles and each impact seems to set it off again, the pins-and-needles heat firing down my arm. In the second half, Will Greenwood tackles me round the legs and again the electric shock shoots down from my upper spine to my finger tips. My neck is now so ultra-responsive that just the slight judder of hitting the floor sets me into spasm.

  By the last minute, I have had more than six stingers and the searing pain has started to spread down both arms, my back and my chest. The medics finally insist I come off and, given that I am starting to worry what the hell is going on, I can now no longer argue.

  This time, recovery is not quick. I am sent for nerve conduction studies, where they jab two needles into different parts of the arm and send electrical impulses between them. The results are not too concerning, at least not enough to make any impact on my approach to the game.

  It is, though, almost two months before I am ready to play again.

  HIGH on my list of goals is the desire to be a Lion. I am halfway there, on a long flight to Perth, where this new mission begins.

  I chat to Neil Jenkins. He is leaving behind a young daughter. I am leaving behind all that security and belonging that I have finally found within the England team. But that is the challenge for all of us. We have no common understanding, none of the momentum to pull you through that we have spent years building with England. It is time to start from scratch.

  What we do have, though, is a fantastic group. Off the pitch, the chemistry seems to work immediately – no cliques, nothing. Having played against Brian O’Driscoll over a number of years, it is nice to be on the same side for once. It is a pleasure, too, to get to know Ronan O’Gara and Neil Jenkins. Neil seems to be pursued wherever he goes by chants of ‘Neil-o, Neil-o’, even if he has been known to start them himself.

  The frustration is being stuck on the sidelines. In Perth, I am also stuck in a roomshare for the walking wounded. That’s Lawrence and me. He has a knee injury, I have a groin problem, and both of us are racing to get back in time to compete for places in the Test team. For me, at least, there is the comforting presence of Blackie, who is part if the coaching team, as is Dave Alred. It’s no surprise to me that the two people I believe to be the best in the world at what they do have been selected for this tour.

  From my watching position, three factors quickly become very clear. The first: we have two training sessions a day, so Graham Henry, our coach, has set out to work the boys hard. The second: to speed up communication and understanding, the coaches present us with an exceedingly structured game plan. We are having to digest tactics that sometimes work several phases ahead. The third: we are plagued with bad fortune. The injury attrition rate is phenomenal. Just as I am reaching fitness, others are already going home early. We lose Dan Luger, Mike Catt, Robin McBryde, Simon Taylor and Phil Greening. And that’s even before the Tests.

  Meanwhile, O’Driscoll is proving quite handy on the table-tennis table. We have a group game called Red Ass whereby the loser has to pull down his shorts and give the others a free shot with their bat. Predictably, when Austin loses, he does a runner before punishment can be meted out.

  After missing the first two games, I am finally given the chance to be a Lion against a good Queensland Reds side. I want it to go perfectly, of course I do. But when we get to the Ballymore stadium, there is a curtain-raiser game taking place, just like at Bloemfontein last year. So where am I going to kick?

  Dave and I find a training pitch behind the stadium, which would have been fine were it not for hundreds of supporters arriving from that direction. They all like to have their say. Yeah, Jonny, don’t miss it, don’t miss it. That kind of thing. It’s hard to maintain your standards and concentration when you have hundreds of people standing around, watching, especially when you have to ask some of them to move even though they are trying to talk to you. Still they come, streaming between Dave and me, sometimes even catching our kicks.

  The game goes well. Playing with people you’re not used to is our challenge, and I’m learning fast about Brian O’Driscoll and Rob Henderson. I enjoy playing with Keith Wood and Rob Howley. And I manage seven goals from eight; somehow the kicking doesn’t suffer.

  And of course, it feels great to have worn the Lions shirt. The race for fitness, though, is not one that Lawrence wins and he is soon on a plane home.

  We play the New South Wales Waratahs in Sydney and just about survive a physical, sometimes bloody, battle. But it claims Will Greenwood, another injury casualty. We are losing big-name players at a worrying rate, and are simultaneously being criticised in the Aussie press for being a violent team.

  We move to Brisbane for the first Test and, as the intensity builds, I find myself looking at Johnno, our captain, and wondering how he does it. He takes on so much and never looks as though he needs any assistance.

  Whenever I see Johnno, he stops me and asks Wilko, are you all right? And it’s not just a passing form of hello; he really wants to know the answer. I like that.

  In Brisbane, I go to the gym to do some training with Blackie, and Johnno comes along. It’s interesting seeing him introduced to training the Blackie way.

  This is rare but good time together. We both appreciate we are different characters, slightly different generations, and we tend to stick to different groups. But we seem to have a relationship of mutual respect, talking about the game, tactics, preparation. It’s just that he takes care of me way more than I do of him.

  I have some specific hotel-room rules:

  1 No rugby magazin
es. No rugby reading material of any kind if I can help it. This is definitely the biggest rule of all.

  2 At least one item of contraband confectionery in the room. Chocolate preferably. I often travel with a bottle of Heinz Salad Cream, although that’s not quite so illegal.

  3 Live out of your bag. Only if you are staying somewhere for weeks do you unpack, putting away clothes in cupboards.

  On this tour, as well as Lawrence and Will Greenwod, I have roomed with Dafydd James. He’s a great bloke, a worrier like me and always concerned about being late. He was slightly perplexed about the number of times I lost our room key.

  I have also shared with Neil Back, who is the tidiest man I know and cannot understand why anyone would live messily out of a bag. Whenever I threw some paper at the bin and missed, he’d be straight up to put it in for me the second it hit the floor.

  Now I’m with Rob Howley, who is also a great bloke, but a rugby junkie and an arch contravener of Rule 1. Like me, he keeps notes of moves and strategies, but while I jot mine down in a notepad for an occasional peek, he draws all his up and sticks them on our bedroom wall. There is no escape.

  Another of my rules is to make the night before a game as restful as possible. But the eve of the first Test does not go to plan. I am lying in bed in the early hours when I suddenly realise I’ve left my dad’s match tickets up in the team room.

  In a panic, I shoot out of the room and head for the lift. We are on the fourteenth floor. The team room is on the thirtieth. The lift won’t budge, so I take the stairs at a run. The team room is locked. I run down all the way to reception, literally counting the number of steps, trying to work out how much energy it’s taking out my legs, how much damage I’m doing and whether I’m losing the game for us there and then.

  For a pre-game panicker, this is not good. But at reception, they help me. We even get a lift to work. I get my tickets and eventually I get some sleep. Not clever.

  We wake to find a note from Blackie slipped under the door. It reads: ‘When you’ve worked so hard that you feel you may pass out and your body and mind seem to have been stretched to breaking point, and momentarily you think you’ve no more left to give, hear a voice remind you that there’s something far more important than anyone’s susceptibility to pain. It is the great tradition, belief and respect of what it takes to be a true Lion. It is then you will become a legendary Lion.’

  When you get the chemistry right, everyone on the same wavelength, the right connection between players who have been pulled from international teams because they’re good at what they do, the result is exponential and you get a kind of boom effect.

  That is what we get in the first Test. There are three minutes on the clock when we pick off a four-on-three down the left touchline, Rob Howley, me and Matt Perry with Jason on the end. What Jason does, one-on-one with Chris Latham and just a tiny amount of space – I love it. It brings me back to that training session at Pennyhill. I sympathise with Latham, who is left clutching the air exactly like I did.

  And I love Jason’s try celebration. Just pure emotion, no egotism. He celebrates for everyone. It fires me up, inspires me. Such an awesome try. His energy is infectious. And the crowd is very red and very noisy.

  We don’t drop for a minute. From a midfield scrum, we pull a move – ‘Pace’ – crafted on the training field to bring in our strike runners, Brian and Jason, and it works to perfection. Dafydd James finishes it and we are still in the first half.

  The second half has hardly started when Brian surges through the defence. He isn’t even looking in the right direction when he steps Matt Burke. A touch of exceptional individual talent and another try.

  I feel the buzz. It feels special, a privilege to be a part of it. There is no formula for it, you cannot just repeat it or reinvent it. It is what it is and then it’s gone. But for now it reads thus: Australia 13 Lions 29.

  We move to Melbourne for the second Test and the confidence remains with us. Again, we start well, even if this is not reflected in the score. We go in 11–6 ahead and it should be more.

  We charge straight back into the second half and the game turns. I throw a pass over the top, but Joe Roff manages to stick a hand out and bat it up in the air. He intercepts it and he is away.

  The scores may be tied 11–11 but that is nearly it for us. Australia score two more tries, we get a single penalty. I leave the field fearing a broken leg. Rob Howley is out of the tour with a broken rib, and so is Hilly with a nasty concussion. The momentum has swung and the initiative has switched hands.

  My leg is not broken, just severely bruised. The medics put it in a cast, tell me to keep it at 45 degrees and not to move for two days. So I do and I rack up a £250 room bill on films and room service.

  By the Thursday, I am able, at last, to join training and stand side by side with the other survivors of this seven-week journey. We aim to play more of a kicking game, to keep the ball in their half. We know it’s come down to this, the third Test, one last push.

  We wake up to another note from Blackie. He quotes from Rudyard Kipling, Albert Einstein and the world of sport – not a bad range. The message ends: ‘A great gridiron coach summed up the effect of determination like this: “Most players are about as effective as they make their minds up to be.” How right he was. Make your mind up and be the change you want to see.’

  When we arrive at Sydney’s new Olympic stadium, there is little doubt that our minds are made up. We go behind early this time, but punch back with a try from Jason. We go behind again, but we pull together with a penalty from my boot. At half-time, we are three points down.

  The second half starts well when I deliver my own try – a testament to the punchbag-dodging with Blackie, my own tribute to Jason Robinson. It has nothing of the same quality, but there is an element of the instinctive foot movement. I manage to step around Toutai Kefu and I am over.

  But then it slides. We are 29–23 down. Ten minutes to score seven points. We can still win this.

  Two minutes to go, the chance appears. We get a penalty, kick to the corner. This is it.

  We lose the lineout. But that’s still not it. The buzzer goes, we have possession, field position and good numbers, still a chance. Until an Australian hand disrupts a pass and that is it. So close to glory. And so damn painful.

  It takes me a while to change and put on my suit. I’m never quick to move on, but especially not tonight. I’d rather sit in rebellious protest. The result should have been different this time. I don’t feel like going anywhere.

  This is my question: why couldn’t I affect it? Why couldn’t I make it happen? Why, when my life’s work is preparing for this? What have I done wrong? What have I not done? And ultimately, what the hell is it all about? I am miles away from solving that one.

  Sometimes there are no real answers to any of this. You’ve just got to put it down as a lesson learned. As a response, though, that’s never been good enough for me.

  I do go out eventually. I go out with the boys – properly – and at eight in the morning I am delighted to discover that Brian O’Driscoll’s table-tennis game has finally imploded.

  You could call all this a drowning of sorrows, but overall I feel it was a great tour. I enjoyed it, which is a strange conclusion, given that we lost. On the day of the first Test, Matt Dawson had a diary column in the Daily Telegraph in which he was very critical of the management and the amount of training we’d been doing. He even said that some of the midweek players had been thinking of leaving the tour.

  I don’t know about that, and I guess I was fortunate to be in the Test team, but I think of guys who didn’t play in the Tests but really held their own, such as Ronan and Neil Jenkins. The chanting of ‘Neil-o, Neil-o’ as they came back, sometimes from a night out, tended to suggest that they were still enjoying themselves.

  As for the heavy training, I didn’t really get it. I was asking Blackie for extra training, not less.

  When you’re part of a team, every
thing you do has an effect on that team, no matter how big or small. That’s just the way it works.

  At Sydney airport, we are weary, waiting for the flight home. Colin Charvis has his head in a laptop and starts talking about a rugby website with a chatroom, which is getting loads of feedback. Foolishly, I allow my intrigue to get the better of me and take a look at it.

  I flick down through the comments. Some of them say I lost the series. A lot of them. My intercepted pass was the turning-point. That, apparently, is the view.

  Is this really the view out there? I tend not to listen but I never figured that was the tone of the conversation.

  It confirms a deepest fear, that when you’ve given your best, when you’ve given everything that you can and it doesn’t quite work out, there will be people who say don’t worry about it, and there will be others who think it’s just your fault.

  But I can’t regret what I did on this tour. I have beaten myself up enough times for my errors on the pitch, but not this time. If I had my 24 hour video camera and could review this tour, I think I could sign off my Lions life with pride.

  DAVE and I are at Middlesbrough football club’s indoor facility. Our topic, again, is what does being the best really mean and how do I achieve it?

  Dave says you need to get the same results with your goalkicking but from farther out. Other kickers have a greater range. I’m convinced that you can kick from farther away, too.