Dodgy wine cost me England cap!
IPLAYED senior rugby for Berry Hill at 14 and I stayed there until I was 19, at which point I got selected for England U21s and Dick Best said I had to switch clubs so I joined Bristol. I didn’t agree with some of the coach’s selections there and I went back to Berry Hill for a couple of seasons until Crayton Phillips, a former teammate at Bristol, got me up to Coventry.
The U21s were in Romania with the senior party, and our game was the same day as the main match when Jerry Guscott scored a hat-trick on his debut. It was definitely a different experience being out in Romania because poverty was huge and everywhere was so drab. Every car was a Lada! Jason Leonard was on the bench with me, what a good bloke he is, and Neil Back, Phil de Glanville, David Pears, Paul Hull and Tim Rodber were also on that tour and they obviously went on to get full honours, as did Rupert Moon, but with Wales.
I always felt I was unlucky not to go on and get a cap myself. On the trip, I fell ill, possibly through too much dodgy wine, and one of the alickadoos, Micky Booth, said I would never play for England again. Whether he was serious or not, I don’t know, but the fact is I didn’t. But England weren’t badly off in the back row – Hill, Back and Dallaglio were brilliant players.
In my early years at Cov, we dropped down to the old Third Division but Derek Eves came on board and that’s when the team started to change and we finally gave the Cowshed what they wanted – some good, winning rugby. We had a very vocal and knowledgeable crowd at Cov.
My dad came to watch virtually all of my games and when he spoke up, everyone else almost fell silent to let him have his say, he was so well respected.
Zinzan Brooke turning up at Cov was massive. When you admire somebody and have them on a pedestal and you then get to play with them in the back row, words couldn’t describe how I felt. There was one moment though that showed he was a mere mortal. Everyone remembers his drop-goal for the All Blacks against England in ‘95 but the one he attempted up at Rotherham was the most pathetic thing I have ever seen! Lee Crofts brought it up in the changing room after and everyone just wet themselves laughing.
In a game up at West Hartlepool, I hit Tim Stimpson with everything I had, and knocked myself out in the process. Later I was told that I had swallowed my tongue, and the physio, Jackie, had to get a pair of scissors to pull it out. Stimpson went on to play for Newcastle when they had stars right the way through the team. The game against them at Coundon Road, 25 years ago, was the best I ever played in 249 appearances for the club because of everything that went with it. John Bentley got sent off after punching our winger, Andy Smallwood, but he was an irritable little sod! Newcastle had been destroying teams, they put 150odd points on Rugby Lions that season, but we just had this feeling all the way through the week that we could do them. We were a good team, a very good team, and finished third that season, only just missing out on promotion to the Premiership via the play-offs.
I’ve got the programme of the match in a frame on the wall. Even now, when I speak about it, I have goosebumps. Rob Andrew’s kick-off went to me and I was able to get into the game straight away which helped get rid of a lot of pent-up nervous energy. If there was a brick wall in front of me, I’d have run through it.
My last-ever game for Coventry was also a memorable one in that we beat Rotherham, the Division One champions, at the football ground (Millmoor), in the last game of the season. It was supposed to be a celebration for them but we ruined the party with a match-winning penalty deep into stoppage time.
Stourbridge wasn’t the best two seasons I had. The worst thing was when we got drawn against Cov in the Cup. They were being coached by Mike Umaga and they were running dummy runners in front of the ball carrier. Their back rower, Mike Buckingham, ran into my tackle line so I hit him. He stayed on the field for ten minutes and then went off, with what turned out to be a broken jaw.
The RFU banned me for four weeks, but the worse thing was that he took a civil case against me. This was after a criminal case had been dropped. I’d been arrested at Staffordshire police station and was told by my solicitor I was up on a Section 18. I asked him what that was, and he told me it was one worse than manslaughter. Thankfully, the CPS said there was no further action to be action. When I heard those words, the weight lifted off me. The civil case still went through though, and he was awarded £30,000. Luckily, I had legal cover on my house insurance. Stourbridge was more like a golf club than a rugby club, the chairman dropped me like a lead balloon and offered no help whatsoever. But I must say Neil Mitchell, the DoR, was a big help.
Winning the County Championship with Gloucestershire was a good moment. We had a lot of old heads in the side, like Dave Sims and Tony Windo, and we beat Cheshire in a close game at Twickenham. A young David Strettle was playing for them.
After Stourbridge, it was back to the Forest, initially with Drybrook, and I coached there until returning to Berry Hill, where I belonged, I suppose.
“I was arrested and told I was up on a Section 18... worse than manslaughter”