Dave Sims reveals the agony of his bitter exit from Kingsholm
EVERYONE says the ’98 tour to the southern hemisphere was an awful tour, the ‘Tour from Hell’ but from my point of view, it was just the best, because I got to emulate my grandfather Tom Price and play for England… finally! We didn’t have the superstars there, but I had quite a few of my Gloucester boys and we gave it everything we could – the spirit was amazing.
As forwards, we were superbly coached by John Mitchell, he was probably the best forwards coach I ever had. We’d have done anything for him, even run through brick walls.
I remember one training session in New Zealand and there was this old scrummaging/maul machine which was made up of old scaffolding poles with about an inch of padding on them. We all tentatively tried to find a slot to push it across the field and Mitch went mental. ‘You bunch of soft, English w ***** , sort your lives out!’ he screamed. ‘This is how I want it done.’ He smashed into it, you could hear bone on metal, and he pushed it six foot by himself. Then it was our turn to do it properly. You should have seen the bruises on us afterwards. He was that kind of bloke: he wouldn’t ask you to do anything that he wouldn’t do himself.
I was chuffed to bits to get my three caps and to get a letter from Roger Uttley when we got back home. His words were, ‘you’ve had a fantastic tour and we hope to see more of you in the future’. Unfortunately, I never heard from Clive Woodward again. Martin Johnson was the future, rightly so, and I wasn’t. He was captain of a fashionable club and I wasn’t. It is what it is.
Gloucester was everything to me. I was born and bred there and lived in the city before moving down to Devon when I joined the Chiefs, aged 31.
It was a hard time when I left Gloucester. I never wanted to play for anyone else but Phillipe Saint-Andre got rid of me. He still couldn’t justify it at the end and it’s still raw now. Myself and Tony Windo asked for a testimonial because we’d both been there 12 years and I got a letter from an official at the club basically saying I didn’t deserve one. It was like a massive knife in the back. To be honest, it destroyed me; I couldn’t believe it, and at the time my dad was dying of cancer, so it was a really bad time. All I wanted to do was to be at Gloucester until I dropped down dead.
I had progressed into the senior playing squad from the club’s really successful Colts side. A few of us were invited to go on the summer tour to Portugal and that was my first real taste of what it was like to be alongside characters like Malcolm Preedy and Marcus Hannaford, our captain. We were so well looked after and had such a laugh. Seeing (coach) Keith Richardson’s hotel bedroom rearranged on the roof of the hotel lobby was one of the funniest things I think I’ve ever seen; it still makes me giggle now. I wanted to keep that same spirit when I went on to captain the club, even in the professional era, and I think we did.
A measure of how much Gloucester meant to me was dashing from the maternity ward on the day my first son, Nathaniel, was born, at 2 o’clock on a Saturday, so I could make the 3 o’clock kick-off against Saracens. We smashed them 9-6.
I used to love playing in the big West Country derby games. Everyone bought into them and there was always an extra buzz about the place.
All the players knew each other, and the supporters really got behind their teams. At Gloucester, they could forgive you if you lost but not if you hadn’t done everything possible for the shirt. I even remember Malcolm Preedy dropping a goal down at Bristol, surprising everyone as he always did.
When I went back with Exeter for a cup match, I got such a fantastic reception from The Shed. I was just so chuffed to have them to still remember what I’d done and to have affinity with them still. I must admit there was a tear in my eye. I went back to Gloucester with my wife a couple of years ago and ended up doing a load of autographs.
When the game turned professional, we knew it had been coming for a couple of months. I’d finished working at Glanville tyres and was doing bits and pieces down at the club when it was finally announced. I was the first Gloucester player to sign a professional contract, on a two-year deal, not that any of us really knew what being a professional meant. We still trained twice a week for the first couple of months and then we just carried on like we were in the amateur days.
We didn’t know what to do, we’d either play the PlayStation or play golf and I was rubbish at golf. So, for me, it was just to go down to the club in the day and have a bath with Phil Greening while we waited for training to start. A young Phil Vickery and a young Trevor Woodman joined us a year later; lots of stories were told and lots of cider was drunk in that bath.
Then Richard Hill came in and introduced proper sessions and everyone brought into it. We had some great wins, like beating Leicester, who were flying at the time, under floodlights at home in ’98 with The Shed going absolutely mental. Hilly was chaired off the pitch. His knowledge and the way he could improve you, meant he was a great bloke to work with.
We went from having a team made up of local lads to one with some good overseas player in it like Terry Fanolua and Tombsy (Richard Tombs), who I’d played with in Australia as a youngster. We could see the difference they made and the way they put in the work, but they also bought into the crack and the mickey-taking, and Hilly has to take a lot of the credit for that. It’s fair to say I got on much better with our first overseas player than our first overseas coach.
I had a good couple of years at Worcester after I was told there was no place for me at Gloucester anymore, and was lucky enough to win the Supporters’ and Players’ Player of the Year Awards in the second season when I played 40-odd games. A lot of the squad I played with at Sixways went on to help the club win promotion. When Adrian Skeggs and Les Cusworth left, John Brain and Andy Keast came in and, for whatever reason, I wasn’t seen as the right fit and I played only a handful of games in that third and final season before Ian Bremner took me down to Exeter.
Ian had coached the National Divisions Select XV and I was captain in games against Australia and South Africa, which were both great occasions. Rob and Richie Baxter played in them too, and Rob had had a season at Gloucester, so it made a lot of sense to go down there. It also felt like the right fit, a proper rugby club.
The County Ground was great to play at, even if it was a mud-heap in the middle of a speedway track. They got £11m for it, which was a great bit of business by Tony Rowe. The only time I ever got banned was playing for Chiefs, against Plymouth away, another great West Country derby. Dawesy (Graham Dawe) knee-dropped someone in the face, as he liked to do, and that started a big punch-up. Me and Will James got three weeks for that, Dawesy got nothing!
Still playing well into my 30s, I finished my days in the old Division 1 with Launceston. I loved my time there and at Taunton and Wellington, enjoying unbeaten seasons at both clubs, before finishing off 29 seasons of adult rugby as player-coach at Witheycombe. We reached the final of the RFU Senior Vase against West Leeds, but on that occasion I didn’t get to walk up the steps to lift the trophy as I’d done with Gloucestershire in the County Championship; they were the better team on the day.
I loved every single second of my playing days, as I made some great friends and got to share the pitch with some big characters, none bigger than Doddie Weir. I just got sent a photo with me and him on the pitch together with his hand on my arse! It breaks my heart to see what he is having to go through.
“Leaving Gloucester destroyed me. All I wanted to do was be there until I dropped dead”