MY LIFE IN RUGBY

To have started, and ended, my career working for Steve Diamond must be some kind of sadistic record! The first five of those came at Saracens before moving north to Sale in 2009.

I owe a lot to him and to people like Richard Hill; I couldn’t have asked for someone better to learn off in those early years. I was running around like a headless chicken, like all young guys do, covering five times the amount of ground he’d be covering but doing a third of the work effectively. He taught me which battles to fight and which ones to leave.

I had gone from playing for Chinnor to playing in front of 40,000 in the first London Double Header at Twickenham, it was the stuff of dreams. I’d been with Chinnor since the age of five and did two years in the first team. After the first season I played for Oxfordshire and we got to the final of the County Cup at Twickenham which raised my profile a bit.

The following season I had an option to go to Henley Hawks because I went to college in the town. Chinnor said stick with us and we’ll try and do everything we can to get you to the next level. So I was loyal and stayed. One of the coaches knew Mike Hynard, the academy manager at Saracens, and I played a couple of Monday night games for their A team, and they offered me an academy contract on the back of that. I did well in a preseason game against the Lions in South Africa and that was that.

During my time at Sarries I played for England U21s at the JWC in Argentina and for England Sevens. In the space of a few months, we won in LA and Hong Kong, after a last-gasp conversion from Ben Gollings, reached the final of Singapore and won the silver medal at the Commonwealth Games.

In terms of Saracens memories, I’ll never forget Ben Russell squaring up to Martin Johnson at Vicarage Road, when we beat a Leicester side containing half the England RWC 2003 team.

I played under Kingsley Jones and Mike Brewer before being reunited with Dimes at Sale. I was injured when he arrived and out of contract at the end of the season, but knowing how he works and seeing the kind of staff he was bringing in – people like Nigel Ashley-Jones and Adam Grainger – made my decision to resign with the club easy.

Dan Braid’s arrival probably coincided with my best spell of rugby. Despite both being vertically challenged, we worked well together in the back row and seemed to have a second sense as to what the other was doing. It was easy to see why he was an All Black, his knowledge of the game is second-to-none.

Highlights of my time at Sale include beating Bath away and putting 50 points on Exeter at their place. Not many teams do that and, you can probably guess, the bus journey home was a very enjoyable one. The Bath result was special because it’s not an easy place to win at the best of times – let alone losing players of the calibre like Dan Braid and Mark Cueto to injury just before kick-off. Getting to the final of the LV Cup was a nice feeling too, although it’s a shame we couldn’t go all the way. In 7s I played in quite a few finals and won but, in 15s, a winner’s medal was hard to come by.

It would have been nice to have made the step up from Saxons to senior honours, and there were a couple of times when my name was mentioned, but it never happened.

I was really fortunate to have had 14 years of Premiership rugby and over 200 games and go through virtually my whole career without a major injury. For someone who is pretty small, even by 2004 standards, and plays in a position where you take a beating, I have to be thankful for that.