Between us, Alex and I are currently on six caps!
There was a time, believe it or not, when I was known as Rob Lozowski and not Alex’s dad. My early sporting life revolved around football which I played 24/7 as a child and it wasn’t until the late 60’s that rugby started for me.
My brother Mike and I would skip over the fence into the park behind our family home in Ealing with a plastic rugby ball and pass, kick and try to step around each other for hours on end.
In the early 70’s he went on to Oxford University to play alongside Charles Kent while I headed to Gunnersbury Grammar School and was taken under the wing of my first rugby mentor and proper rugby coach, Bob Williams, a skilful and aggressive openside flanker from Cardiff, who persuaded me that I’d be better off playing at 12 instead of 10.
During my latter years at school I’d often pop down to Old Gaytonians RFC where I’d sometimes get involved in Sunday ‘beer’ matches and endof-season 7s tournaments. Gayts were an excellent junior club who regularly won the Middlesex Cup and thus gained entry into the old John Player Cup (soon to become the Pilkington Cup).
This was my first exposure to ‘grown up’ rugby and it was fun. I really enjoyed ‘social’ rugby, but it was my undoing when I went on an end-of-season tour to Barbados with a bunch of guys from London Irish where I broke my leg, the first of four leg breaks in my career.
Old Gayts were based in Sudbury, about two miles from Repton Avenue where Wasps were based. After leaving school I played a season at Old Gayts before deciding to give it a go at first class level so off I went, uninvited, to Wasps.
Joining at the same time as me in 1980 were my soon-to-be life-long friends and team mates Mark Rigby and Mark Rose. We all turned up at pre-season along with another, slightly more established, Wasps newbie in Roger Uttley!
The Wasps team at that time was led by the great All Black Mark Taylor who had stayed in England following the 1978 All Black tour of the UK. He, along with coach Alan Black, were the two major influencers in dragging Wasps from being an average mid-table London club to being the Courage League Champions in the late 80’s and both had massive impacts on my career.
I made my Wasps 1st XV debut in November 1980 at home to Moseley. I played in the centre alongside Taylor and we won unexpectedly. Moseley were a serious side in those days with Martin Cooper pulling the strings at fly-half. I think both Taylor and Blackie liked me primarily because of my defensive qualities, passing and ball-carrying. It certainly wasn’t for my pace!
My progress was curtailed when I broke my leg again during the 1981/82 season. The injury kept me out for around six months but on my return I was about to embark on a key period in my rugby life.
Wasps had become the place to be as a multitude of talented Cambridge Blues (and budding internationals) swarmed down the M11 to Sudbury. Rob Andrew, Mark Bailey, Simon Smith, Kevin Simms, Francis Clough and Huw Davies had all joined. The team were improving under Blackie and we, as individuals, were getting noticed. Much to my surprise I was selected for an England U23 tour to Spain with Mike Weston as manager and Blackie as coach. The tour went really well for me. The following September Mike Weston was installed as the Chairman of Selectors for the National side and I found myself in the full England squad.
I was on standby for the England tour to South Africa which, on reflection was a blessing because Danny Gerber and Co. destroyed England in the threeTest series. At the start of the following season an England XV took on a World XV to celebrate 125 years of rugby at Twickenham. This wasn’t a capped international, so the selectors were looking to try a few new combinations following the debacle in South Africa – and looking forward to the Wallabies tour of the UK that autumn.
I was in dreamland when selected to start alongside Clive Woodward in the centre with Stuart Barnes at 10. The World XV contained the vast majority of the Springbok team that had dismantled England two months earlier. We were well beaten but I managed to keep Gerber relatively quiet and was subsequently picked to play against the Wallabies a month later. The less said about that game the better. We were crushed by a brilliant attacking team containing some of the all time great rugby players: Campese, Ella, Gould, Lynagh, Farr-Jones etc. etc.
Whenever I see Michael Lynagh these days we have a giggle about the different directions our international careers took after we made our debuts opposite each other that day at Twickenham in 1984.
Injuries, loss of form and my brother’s wedding hampered my immediate international progress – he got married in Vienna on the day of the next international v Romania at Twickenham and I was his best man.
Club rugby, however, was progressing well with Wasps becoming a force to be reckoned with. The team included many internationals: Paul Rendall, Jeff Probyn, Nick Stringer, Steve Bates plus all the Cambridge boys and along with Bath we were at the top of the tree. My third leg break unfortunately happened during the John Player Cup semi-final at Not-
“I was in dreamland when selected to start alongside Clive Woodward in the centre”
“Watching Alex play, it’s great to go back to the old traditonal grounds and meet old friends”
tingham in 1986 which we won.
Sadly the 1986 and 1987 finals were against the brilliant Bath side of the 80’s and Guscott, Barnes, Hall and Halliday got the better of us. My final appearance in an England shirt was on the England ‘A’ tour to Spain in 1989 where I was lucky enough to share the field with some great guys: Jon Callard, Nigel Heslop and John Wells spring to mind. That same year I had the ultimate honour of becoming club captain at Wasps and also captaining the Barbarians at Swansea on the Easter tour.
After 263 1st XV appearances, I left Wasps in 1993 (coinciding with the birth of our first child Alex) and headed down to Bracknell RFC where my old mucker Paul ‘The Judge’ Rendall was coaching. I enjoyed a couple of seasons there culminating in a Berkshire Cup Final against Tony Brookes’ Maidenhead side. Bracknell won the Cup for the first time ever and that was my last competitive game.
The following year, with the game veering towards professionalism, another old mucker, John Kingston asked me to join him as a backs coach at Richmond RFC. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there with Ben Clarke, Scott and Craig Quinnell and Adrian Davies etc but time became precious with family and business commitments taking precedence and I left in 1997.
I disengaged from rugby for a number of years as family commitments grew and while Alex was playing football at Chelsea Academy. However, it was wonderful to get back into it when he was picked up by Leeds Carnegie while studying for an economics degree at Leeds University. Our daughter Natasha was at Hartpury College at the same time doing equine studies so everywhere I went I was surrounded by rugby posts!
Watching Alex play, first at Wasps and then Saracens continues to bring back some wonderful memories from my playing days especially at old traditional grounds like Welford Road, Kingsholm, the Rec and the Stoop. It’s great to go back to these places and meet old friends like David Trick at Bath and Peter Wheeler at Leicester.
And whenever anyone asks me that inevitable and embarrassing question about how many caps did I win, I’ll always give the same answer: “We currently have six between us” ...but there’s only one person who’ll (hopefully) affect that total … and it’s not Alex’s dad!