So special playing for Wales alongside Scott
ILOVED playing the ‘pantomime villain’ role. It was weird, I was really hated by a lot of people – people who didn’t know me, they just hated me from playing rugby. When I moved to Saracens, I bought a house in London and while that was being done up I lived at the Travel Lodge in South Mimms Services. Peter (Deakin) who was chief exec of Saracens told me he had a mate who was going through a divorce who had a big house just outside of Watford, so why didn’t I go and stay with him.
He went to see this guy called Tony Fowler to ask if I could but when Tony found out it was me needing a place to stay he said ‘I’m not having him in my house!’ Peter told him he’d got me all wrong and urged him to meet me and have a chat, so he set up a lunch. As we were finishing the starters, Tony said to me, ‘Craig, when are you moving in then?’ I ended up living with him for three months and he’s one of my closest friends now.
People have these perceptions of you. I think people thought I was a bully and a thug, and I played up to it; it suited my character. But people who know me know that’s not who I am or what I am. Although, yes, when I’d go to Gloucester away and the Shed would be chanting at me and I’d just smile and wave my arms and goad them on.
I remember when Cardiff were playing Pontypridd at Sardis Road. It was a huge match, a local derby, and we’d just taken Martyn Williams and Neil Jenkins from Ponty. They were hated, we were all hated, and they were booing me and hissing me during the warm-up. We were doing a few lineout calls and I said to the boys, ‘when we do the next one, hold me in the air a bit longer’. I caught the ball and threw it back into the crowd. I can hear the noise now. They were trying to climb over the hoardings to get to me, and I thought it was brilliant.
When I first played for Llanelli, kids would run on at half-time as you sucked on your segment of orange out on the pitch and they’d pull on your bootlaces to beg you for an autograph. That obviously happened more once I was capped by Wales, aged 20, against Fiji in November 1995, having just missed out on the World Cup squad. Kevin Bowring was the coach and he told me to just do what I did at Llanelli and run off Nigel Davies, who I played with there. Trouble was Nigel got injured in the first two minutes and I didn’t touch the ball.
It was great to play in every game in the ten-match winning run under Graham Henry in 1999. I missed the Scotland game at the start of the final Five Nations, and we got bullied by them. Graham brought me back into the side and told me to front up. I was pumped up, thinking I was the enforcer, and took it too far and got shown the white/yellow triangle – an early sort of yellow card. Graham said to me at halftime, ‘I meant be tough, not front up like that!’
Wales’ first win in Paris since the 1970s was part of that amazing run and I achieved something my father (Derek) hadn’t – he’d done everything including being in five winning teams against New Zealand – but he’d never beaten France in Paris. We won 34-33 and it was the fastest game of rugby I ever played in. The try I scored came from a kick-off. My brother Scott took it up, we spread it wide, Dafydd James made a break and I went in at the corner.
That game was more special to me than the England game at Wembley that followed it. People still talk to me about my hand-off on Steve Hanley. He’d been billed as the English Jonah Lomu, but I ran over him, broke his arm, and he never played for England again. They showed the match on TV not long ago and people forget how difficult Neil Jenkins’ kick to win the match was. I bumped into him the other day when he was out coaching near me and I said to him, ‘I forgot just how good you were.’
After the final whistle, as we walked around the pitch to applaud the fans, someone threw a flagon of Strongbow in our direction onto the pitch. No sooner had I downed it than my number had been pulled out by the drug testers. Drug testing at Wembley was done in this room in a turret high up in the stadium. It was me and Martin Johnson, and he was obviously as sick as a parrot because they’d lost the match and the Championship.
I went out in Putney that night, with Nick Walne, who I played with at Richmond, and I introduced him to a girl from Llanelli who is now his wife.
Our winning run in 1999 came to an end against Samoa, at the World Cup. I was rested for it because of what Graham called ‘a multitude of sorenesses’. It was the most embarrassing reason ever given.
My time at Richmond also sadly came to an end that year. I think the three years I had there were the most enjoyable of my career. John Kingston was a super-clever coach who not only brought in some quality players but some great blokes too, who really fitted in with the spirit and the culture. We had a great team who could mix it up front or hurt teams in the backs because of the pace we had out wide with real flyers on the wing like Dominic Chapman, Spencer Brown and Jim Fallon. There was a good core of local boys in the squad too, guys like the Hutton brothers, who’d helped get the team into the Championship in the first place.
Back in my Cardiff and Llanelli days, we’d stop off on our way home for a few beers at the Deer’s Leap, on the outskirts of Swansea. But the first stopover with Richmond, after we’d played Blackheath away, was at the Vodka Bar in Covent Garden. I couldn’t help but think, ‘this is a bit different to the Deer’s Leap!’ Luckily, a lot of the boys worked in the City and must have had expense accounts as long as your arm as they put everything on their gold cards.
In 2000, I broke my back and the doctor gave me two options: to retire there and then or to have the operation and then decide what to do next. I had the six to seven-hour long operation. The surgeon rebuilt one of my vertebrae, fused three together and I had a bone graft off my hip. He said to me the next day that I’d have been in a wheelchair in three to four months had I not gone under the knife.
Looking back now, I should have probably called it a day as I was insured up to my eyeballs, but I was only 24, and I didn’t want it to beat me. I trained really hard from the get-go; I had a bike and weights in the house, and I got fitter and stronger than I’d ever been and was back on the pitch in seven-and-a-half months.
Unfortunately, I snapped my knee ligament a couple of years later in training before one of Wales’ games and had to have it removed. I should have probably got it fixed because I wasn’t ever the same.
Saracens never really worked out for me and I decided to retire from international rugby, aged 27. I went back to Cardiff Blues to enjoy my rugby, and I did just that for the last three seasons of my career. Then, when I did my neck in, a few months out from my 31st birthday, I knew it was time to call it a day and go back to the family business. I was unlucky with injuries, but then if you play hard, you get hurt and I only had one way – either go flat out or not bother.
When I sit down and think about some of the great players that I had the privilege to play with, too many to list here, it can be overwhelming at times. I made some great mates through rugby and travelled the world. To play with your mates is one thing but to play with family, in my case my brother Scott, was something else. – as told to Jon Newcombe
“If you play hard you get hurt and I only had one way - go flat out or not bother”