Jonny: My Autobiography

by Wilkinson, Jonny

  But I overthrow the pass and it goes over Danny’s head, bouncing between him and Paul Sackey. Any sort of half-reasonable bounce would have been absolutely fine, but this one goes everywhere. We struggle to control the ball, concede a scrum and, a bit further down the line, they score a try.

  We are still ahead, but then Balsh has a kick charged down and another Welsh try goes in. Now the game has genuinely turned and we need people to help manufacture scoring opportunities. But there is a whiff of panic in the air and we have too many players committing themselves to rucks that we have already won when we need them to take responsibility elsewhere. We lose 19–26, and afterwards, the questions from the press to me are all about that pass. I think I can see where this is going.

  A week later, against Italy in Rome, Danny unluckily has a kick charged down and a good victory becomes a close one. And then, when we beat France in Paris, Jamie Noon has a great game at thirteen, but I win Man of the Match, and the press ask me was your performance today a kind of response to the criticism you got after the Wales game?

  The question is about as pointless as any you could ever get. The stories are already written in the journos heads and they are now just waiting for my permission so that they can go ahead and fill in the blanks. But I won’t play the media game; it’s like banging your head against a brick wall. I just tell them that I appreciate being given the opportunity to play for England. That might not be what they want but, on my spiritual pathway, it is genuinely how I feel.

  But if, in the public eye, I was up again against France, I am apparently down again after Scotland. We go to Murrayfield, where the conditions are terrible, the wind is shocking for the kickers and we struggle to assert any dominance. I don’t feel that our structure and game plan are troubling them at all. I try to manufacture something out of nothing but I’m forcing it. It’s what I do when I sense we are idling towards defeat. Someone has to step out of a structure that isn’t working, put his head above the parapet, and that’s what I try to do. What I’m trying to show on the field is that I’d rather take a few risks and win this than do nothing wrong and lose.

  So I try to make things work, but they don’t. We lose 9–15 and, again, the questions afterwards make it pretty clear who is going to be held responsible.

  The following Tuesday, four days before the Ireland game, we are training at Bath University. Near the gym, before the team meeting, Brian asks for a word. He tells me he is going to play Danny at ten on Saturday instead of me.

  I am not surprised. I knew there was a chance that the coaches would share the same opinion as many in the media and move me. Straightaway I find Danny to say well done, and I mean it. He is a good player with a firm vision of the game. It’s thanks to my spiritual development that I am genuinely able to want him to do well.

  This is the first time I have been dropped from the England starting XV since the World Cup quarter-final against South Africa in France nine years ago. It is impossible not to take it as a slur on my character. I try not to question it too much. I try to rise above it. But no matter what I have learned about life and how there is something far deeper than rugby, I am still in full competitive mode. Out of the blue, I receive an email from Kris Radlinski, the Wigan rugby league player I admire so much. I barely know him but what he writes is so supportive. I can’t believe you’ve been treated like this, he says. And that’s great, yet nevertheless, emotionally, I am still hugely rattled.

  Watching from the bench at Twickenham, I am then given further food for thought when England come out and dominate in a way that they didn’t in any of our previous games. Ireland just aren’t as strong as they were last year at Croke Park, and our guys are able to play with the ball going forward and good powerful options around them.

  Why couldn’t that have happened when I was there? That is one question I ask myself. But maybe that is actually the point. Maybe it didn’t happen because I was there.

  Maybe somehow I’ve been getting in the way of the progress of the England team. Maybe, because of all the attention paid to me and everything else that goes with it, I have been affecting the dynamic of the group of players, so that they have found it hard to be who they are and express themselves to the full.

  I feel pretty horrible about all this, but at the same time, I find myself thinking about Mike Catt and how he endured successive spells of being dropped from the England team. Catty would go through periods of more than a year when he wasn’t in favour, and he would go back to his club and just get on with his own game. It’s all right for that to be the case. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

  Anyway, it can give me a break. Ever since my neck injury, whenever a glimmer of fitness has returned, England have called me back in. I was called back without having played a game; I was called back in and asked to be captain.

  For the first time in a long while, I have the chance to concentrate on myself and my own game. Maybe I can get some games together with Newcastle, get back on my learning curve, stop worrying about what England need from me and just work on getting better day by day with Blackie and Sparks.

  Sometimes, when you are an obsessive perfectionist and never allow yourself to give in, it can backfire. This becomes the case on a road trip to Majorca.

  I love soft-top cars, I love driving with the top down, and I’d really like a soft-top in Majorca. So I buy an old, soft-top BMW and persuade Andy Holloway and Pete Murphy to join me on the drive through France to Barcelona. The one rule is that, unless it is raining, we are not allowed to put the roof up. We play endless Oasis and Beatles CDs and we take shifts in the driving seat and it’s all great until it gets dark. Our intention is to drive through the night, but I didn’t realise how cold it gets, and under no circumstances will I sanction the roof going up.

  For whoever’s turn it is to do a shift in the back, we have three pillows and a duvet, but even then, it’s ridiculously freezing. We put the heaters on full and it makes no difference.

  In the morning, we stop in the south of France, near Montpellier, for breakfast and petanque on the beach. None of us has had much sleep. Andy is particularly cranky because it is soon 30 degrees and his head is burning. But he knows the rule. I still won’t allow the roof to go up.

  When I was young, I had a party trick. I could move my right shoulder out of its joint and then make it go back in, and when it clunked back in, it would make a hell of a noise, and that would make my friends at school recoil. Ugh, they’d exclaim.

  If you put that natural defect together with all the years of hard tackling, you get to where I am now. I always used to feel strong in my shoulders, but for a good few years now, I have started to feel some pretty strong pain. It got to the stage where I was feeling it after every game. Just one hit and it was really sore. Recently, it’s been taking me until Thursday after a game before I can lift it above my head, and before I’m ready to do anything physical with it in training for the next one. Now it’s so bad that the shoulder feels as if it’s dropping in and out of position even when I’m just jogging in a warm-up.

  The agreed solution is to operate on it during the summer. This means missing the England summer tour to New Zealand, but there is no alternative.

  Len Funk, my shoulder specialist, thinks I have a standard labral tear, which consists of a lesion in the cartilage that sits in-between the ball and socket of the shoulder joint. He thinks the operation should take about an hour and that he can put a couple of anchors into the joint to secure it.

  When he goes in though, what he finds is rather different. If the cartilage is a clock-face, I have lost the entire amount from two round to ten o’clock. The whole thing has been clean worn away. So the operation takes three and a half hours, he has to put in seven anchors, which he says is a hell of a lot, and it will take five months rather than three to recover fully.

  In other words, I have the whole of the summer to myself, and I intend to make the most of this gift. Once I can move my arm backward and forward, I can
run, and this becomes the focus of the summer.

  This is the new thinking coming in, influenced by the Matt Burke approach. I am no longer setting out to be the strongest and fittest in the world, the best at everything. I discuss it with Blackie. What am I happy with? More to the point, what do I really want to work on? What can I do that would make me better? Let’s be ruthless here. Where can we really make a change? Our answer is twofold – sprinting and my spiritual pathway.

  So, physically, we work on speed and nothing but speed. We get back to spending all our time together, working on astro-turf, on the track, in various different gyms. Everything physically is entirely concentrated on the one goal.

  Mentally, this is a great summer for me, too. When we work out at Blackie’s gym, he puts on videos of famous speakers, so I’m training while listening to some hugely impressive people. I discover spiritual and motivational speakers, such as Jim Rohn, Dr Wayne Dyer and Eckhart Tolle, who is rated as the most spiritually influential person in the world. Sometimes this spills over beyond training. Blackie and I sit in his spare room, watching videos of these amazing people, and then afterwards we discuss their message. We talk for hours.

  The result is that I find myself in an amazingly good place. I feel a genuine spiritual contentment. It resembles a sense of invincibility because, in this mood, there is no situation I find threatening. I have nothing to fight against. I am working with the world and not against it. I have had time out of England, I have my shoulder back, I feel refreshed, as if the new season represents a brand new start. There may yet be one more World Cup in me; now I can give it all I’ve got. My last shot.

  With my kicking I have a new approach, too. I discuss this a lot with Dave and decide at last to be ruthless. I have to control what I can control and let the rest go. It means focusing on my intentions, honing my mental application, and building faith in myself as opposed to getting too consumed in the stats and the results. In essence, the process takes precedence rather than the outcome.

  So my daily kicking sessions become a very concentrated warm-up and then eight shots at goal from wherever I choose. Just eight shots and then I go home. I don’t re-do any of them if they go wrong. I don’t get second chances in a game, so I start to train that way, too.

  By the start of the new season, I feel genuinely fabulous, and the new me is reflected in the new haircut. I always used to have the right haircut, the right image; it was important. But that doesn’t seem imperative now. I feel different, I see things differently and I have greater faith in myself. So now my hair is long.

  The start of the new season is about as enjoyable for me as rugby gets.

  My first game is against Northampton and I have a hand in everything we do and sew up the win with a big right-foot drop goal at the end to put us out of reach. We then get completely smashed at Saracens. Still, I score a try at the end and I feel good about my game. Tellingly, I manage to save another Saracens try by running down Kameli Ratuvou, their Fijian winger, just short of the try line and stealing the ball. That’s the speed work with Blackie paying off.

  I continue on this roll against Bristol. I really feel liberated, as though this is my chance and I’m starting to take it. It all seems to make sense now. I see the game playing out in my mind before it actually happens, and therefore I’m in the right place at the right time. I’m not afraid to try new moves and I haven’t missed a goalkick all season. I don’t feel I’m going to, either.

  But all that is fleeting. We go down to Gloucester and not half an hour into the game I get cleared out from the side of a ruck and my left knee is driven downwards. It feels as though the bottom half of my leg is pointing completely the wrong way. While I’m lying there, I get hit again, which straightens out my leg but feels horrible. I know this one is bad.

  I stay down until Martin Brewer is by my side. I can’t look at it. I tell him don’t touch it. Something is definitely wrong.

  But when I do look down, it looks normal. Martin says do you want to get up and have a run? But there’s no way I’m doing that. I’m helped off, as usual, by Sparks and then sit below in the changing room, listening to the cheers of the crowd as we slowly lose touch with the Gloucester team. By the end of the game, my knee has swollen up massively. It suddenly looks grotesque and throbs madly.

  The next morning, I get a call from Graeme Wilkes, who has the results of the scan. He asks if I’m sitting down. Yes, I reply, surprisingly enough I am.

  Unfortunately, it’s not good, he tells me. You’ve dislocated your kneecap, which isn’t that uncommon, but your kneecap has sheered away from everything on the inside. It didn’t dislocate and come back – it completely tore away.

  The reason it felt as though my leg was back-to-front was because the kneecap went round the side of my leg. But in the second impact in that ruck, the kneecap had been pushed to the front again.

  Graeme isn’t finished. When the kneecap returned to its usual position, a large piece of cartilage, the size of a 50 pence piece, was sheared away from the back of it. This is the worst piece of news by far. The early prognosis is an operation and then four to six months out.

  A few days later, I’m in with Rob Gregory, the specialist at the Washington Hospital in Newcastle, who operated on Andy Buist. He explains that it’s not straightforward. We can stitch your knee back, he says, but the cartilage is the problem. We can nail the cartilage back in to the kneecap, but whether it takes, whether it rebuilds a blood supply so that it regrows and attaches itself – there is no guarantee.

  Basically, if the cartilage doesn’t take, my career is over.

  I’ve heard that before, with my neck injury, and my reaction is the same: It’ll work out, the cartilage will take. I barely even stop to consider that the three and a half games I have just played may be my last. I am still enthused by how well they went. I’m convinced I’m moving forward, that my whole new approach has made a difference. I may be injured but I know I am a better player now than I have ever been.

  Normal service is resumed, but not for long.

  A day or so after the operation, I’m round at Blackie’s, working out in his gym. My knee is held firmly in a brace, so I’m doing upper-body work, and a bit on my right leg, to keep me feeling positive.

  This is all very well for six weeks, but then this long window of rehab seems to offer a good opportunity to sort out a problem with my left shoulder. It requires an operation and, with my shoulder in a sling, I can’t work my upper body, either – and that is not good for me. Being completely unable to work out, to channel my energy into improving myself in some way as a rugby player – I hate that.

  The achingly slow progress that my knee is making doesn’t help much. I work regularly with Salwa, a caring, talented and diligent physio at Newcastle, trying to get the bend back into my knee. There is a certain point beyond which it will not go and it is up to Salwa how far we try to force it, but the pain of doing so is so intense it makes me want to vomit. Every day, I turn pale-faced as I sit on the edge of the physio bed, dangling my legs over the side, while Salwa tries to work the knee-bend a little bit more. It’s the most painful rehab I’ve ever undergone and I make a deal with myself. If I ever have to go through this again, I’ll pull the plug and retire there and then.

  The daily pain reminds me how big this injury is, as if I needed to be reminded. Usually, with an injury, there is a beginning, when you get yourself sorted and start planning the rehab, the middle, when you just soldier on, and the end, when you’re concentrating on the specifics of coming back to play. But after three months, I’m still stuck in the middle part and no end is in sight. No light shines at the end of the tunnel. I’m so far from playing, I can’t even jog.

  The club, of course, is full of people doing the things I can’t do, and I start to feel awkward. I don’t go to the meetings, and I find watching the games a depressing reminder of what I’m missing and what has been so natural to me for so long.

  So it is a great relief when I
am sent, at the suggestion of the England medics, to Vermont to spend three weeks with a knee genius, Bill Knowles, who has already helped mend the knees of Richard Hill and Charlie Hodgson.

  You find Bill in Killington, a ski resort at the top of the Green Mountains, ninety minutes from the nearest airport, but, as far as I’m concerned, a million miles from anywhere. Here I find isolation and the chance to immerse myself completely and utterly in my knee.

  By day, while Shelley hits the slopes, I work out in Bill’s gym, and by night, we can relax. Here, I can push my trolley round the local supermarket and not a soul knows who the hell I am. After a week, Shelley leaves so I can attack completely solo. When I go to watch Gran Torino at the Killington cinema, I can relax, knowing that there is no danger of having to leave before the film starts.

  I love working with Bill. I love his methods and his positivity. By the end of our time together, I’m playing football-tennis and doing indoor gymnastics around an obstacle course. He makes me feel like an athlete again. He makes me feel that the Six Nations and the 2009 Lions are back within reach.

  There’s no point in pretending that I’m hugely politically tuned in, but nevertheless, one particular incident at the BBC’s Television Centre is not my greatest moment.

  I’ve just come down in the lift with Tim, after a radio interview, and we are exiting through the foyer when Gordon Brown comes past the other way with a small entourage.

  Obviously, I don’t stop and say hello. I mean, he’s the Prime Minister, isn’t he? And God knows what kind of pressure he is under. But one of his aides comes after us and asks have you got a couple of minutes for a chat?