‘I feared my career was over – it’s a funny old world’
John Barclay has risen from the international scrap heap to captain Scotland’s best team in years. Daniel Schofield hears how he did it
John Barclay’s route from international exile to the Scotland captaincy began in a traffic jam on the M6 motorway. It was September 2015 and Vern Cotter had rung the Scarlets backrower to tell him he had not made the World Cup squad.
“Vern is not a man of many words at the best of times so he says: ‘It’s not a good phone call, we are going with some other guys’,” Barclay recalls. “I was absolutely gutted. My missus says that is the most disappointed she has ever seen me. Then I had to drive back to Wales. It was a horrible car journey. I got stuck in traffic and it took 12 hours on my own. I remember thinking: ‘This sucks so much...”
As devastating as it was to be cut, it was not entirely unexpected. After five years as an ever-present in the Scotland back row, Barclay was dropped without explanation in 2013. “That was the most disappointing thing,” Barclay says. “I played in the autumn and they told me that they would be in contact and then I literally did not hear from anyone for three years. Nothing. Not a phone call. I was like, wow, this is a bit bizarre, I was only 27. It was not like I was 37.”
A few days after that marathon road trip, Barclay was heading back to Scotland to play for the Scarlets against Glasgow Warriors. He had been given the weekend off, but volunteered to play and finished as man of the match. “That’s the best thing I could have done,” Barclay says. “It was a bit of a middle finger, at least in my head. In public, I tried to have a touch of class, not be bitter and keep playing well.” Nevertheless Barclay had resigned himself to the fact that his international career was over. “After the World Cup I thought that was it,” Barclay says. “Four months later I was starting in the Six Nations. Funny old world.” Barclay started every match in the 2016 Six Nations with what he later discovered were undiagnosed ruptured wrist ligaments.
Even though he was now taking over captaincy duties when Greig Laidlaw was substituted, he did not feel secure in his position. Cotter’s successor, Gregor Townsend, was the man responsible for showing him the exit door at Glasgow in 2013.
“I was shocked at the time because I had been part of that team for such a long time, I never really saw it coming,” Barclay says. “When Gregor announced the [2016] summer tour squad I thought: ‘Is he going to pick me
or totally change things up?’ ” Instead Barclay has resumed his role as a mainstay of the most exciting Scotland side in a generation. In the absence of the injured Laidlaw, he captained the team from the get-go during their hellacious autumn series in which they thrashed Australia 53-24 as well as taking New Zealand to the very last play of the game. “I would be lying if I say that I have not thought about that game or what the night out would have been like.”
Still Barclay was experiencing some familiar butterflies before the squad announcement for this year’s Six Nations. “Every time I am still a bit nervous,” Barclay says. “It is just the way I am now. It keeps me on my toes. It shows that it means a lot to me.
“It is easy to get blase about it, especially if you are in that bubble getting picked all the time. I really treasure every moment now that I am playing. I keep saying to some of the young guys this will fly by so keep working and keep improving. They are like ‘Nah, I’ve got this, I am smashing this old man’.”
The 31-year-old was once in that other camp, having being called up to a Scotland training squad as an 18-year-old fresh out of school. “When I got the call to say I was in the squad I thought it was for the under-19s,” Barclay says. “Then Matt Williams phoned me and I still did not twig. It was strange.”
Barclay is quick to emphasise how much he owes the Scarlets for his return to the international fold. He loves the region and his family are settled in a picturesque part of Swansea Bay. Finlay, four, attends a Welsh-speaking school while his younger brothers, Logan and new arrival Max, were born in Wales.
Joining Edinburgh at the end of the season will be a real wrench. “The Scarlets have made me a much better player than I was when I first came here,” Barclay says. “We play fantastic rugby. I have loved every minute of being down here. We could have easily stayed but Scotland is home and the attraction of going home to play rugby and also for life after rugby was huge for me.”
Barclay is far from the only player to benefit from Wayne Pivac’s all-court style with 10 Scarlets featuring in the Wales XV that will face Scotland tomorrow. Now confirmed as the permanent captain, Barclay is aware of the air of expectation around Scotland’s trip to Cardiff.
“You don’t get any Six Nations points for beating the Wallabies,” Barclay says. “Results are the only thing that matter. If we win games people will say this is a good team. If we don’t then people will say we are c--p. That’s the reality of it.”