My Life in Rugby signed off at Twickenham
MY LIFEIN RUGBY
It may sound strange coming from someone who ultimately was on the losing side, but the 2015 Championship final between Bristol and Worcester has to go down as one of the most exciting games I’ve ever played in. It was just a brilliant game of rugby (ending 59-58 to Worcester on aggregate).
At half-time in the second leg at Worcester, we were down a number of points and the speech from Peely (Dwayne Peel), who was captain at the time, will stay with me forever.
Normally the coaches leave the players to it at a certain point in the changing room in the half-time break but Peely kept Andy Robinson in there, and insisted he joined the circle. He made a ferocious, classic ‘come on lads, this is what we need to do’ speech. At the same time, he was ragdolling this old England legend all over the place, saying ‘we need to do it for this guy’. Andy Robinson was trying to keep his composure, we all were.
It got the reaction it needed, and we quickly went 14 points up. However, a yellow card and two tries later, Ryan Lamb kicked the promotion-winning conversion to snatch victory in the last play meaning we had to postpone the promotion celebration for another year.
Part of the reason I moved clubs during my career was to seek out high-pressure scenarios while also trying to better myself as a player. It’s the big games, the big stages and the big moments that stay with you – and those stirring speeches like Peely’s. Another I remember in my younger days at Harlequins was when we played Scarlets in what was their last-ever European match at Stradey Park in 2008. It was obviously a hugely emotional day for the Scarlets, and they looked set to bid farewell to their spiritual home with a big win as they led 19-3 at half-time.
A turning point came as Mark Jones, one of the fastest wingers in world rugby at the time, looked certain to score a breakaway try in the corner on the stroke of half-time, but a young Mike Brown tracked back and nailed him into touch. That moment lifted us, as did Nick Easter’s rallying half time call. The coaches said their bit and then were promptly thrown out by ‘Minty’. The gist of his speech was ‘forget the game plan detail you’ve just heard, this is England v Wales, that’s all we need to focus on’. And sure enough, we did – 29-22. What a result!
I was proud to pull on the famous Harlequins jersey when coming through the U19s and U21s to break in to the first team squad. We had a top academy set-up led by Collin Osborne and with the young crop stepping up you could feel the club were going places. Having been involved in some exciting seasons, I made the tough decision to move to Newcastle to find regular 1st XV rugby given the international talent we had at Quins at the time.
Newcastle is a special place because the fans and squad made you feel at home. We had a great first season under Steve Bates but the second season I largely missed to injury and I was offered the chance to move to Sale, who were putting together an exciting squad to compete at the top half of the Premiership.
We finished sixth in 2011/12 but qualification for the Heineken Cup proved to be a bit of a poisoned chalice. We were heading for the same fate as the relegated Quins in 04/05 and Northampton 06/07, rooted at the bottom of the Premiership because we didn’t have the strength in depth to cope with the dual demands of the Premiership and the step-up in Europe.
Having won only one game before Christmas, and going through two head coaches in the process (Bryan Redpath and John Mitchell), no other team had ever survived such a bad start to the season. The low point was a 62-0 thumping by Toulon in Toulon, boasting a backline of Michalak, Wilkinson, Giteau and Bastareaud.
Toulon supporters throw newspapers in the air when their side gets the bonus point try and I think that happened inside the first quarter of the match! Even so, it is always a brilliant experience to play in France. The fans are so partisan and passionate about rugby. After a long and painful debrief, we emerged from the bowels of the Stade Mayol Stadium to be met by hundreds of Toulon supporters who’d hung around in the cold and the dark to greet us and pick us back up. That’s what the spirit of rugby is all about.
Steve Diamond took back control of the team in the new year and oversaw a turnaround in fortunes that dug us out of the hole by keeping everything simple. Dimes didn’t like coaching much at the time, so when we won he gave the squad the Monday off and in that second half of the season we got a lot of time off ! In what was the most enjoyable period of my rugby career, our results were so good we would have made top four had the league started from January.
Latterly during my time at Bristol, I took a sabbatical at Cambridge University, where I studied for an Mst Social Innovation and won two Blues. In the first we ended Oxford’s sixgame winning streak and, in the second, I had the privilege of captaining the side and scored a try in a 20-10 win. We struggled with performances during the season but whenever we hit a low point, we always had the special memories from our tour to South Africa to draw upon. We had some great times ensuring the squad accelerated their ‘togetherness’ both on and off the field, culminating in a potjiekos (Afrikaans hot-pot cooking) competition that was judged by Andre Vos.
As for the Varsity match itself, it was my last big game. And what a place to play it! Twickenham has its own smell, and the pitch is raised up so you feel you are on a pedestal, you feel exposed. It develops this mindset that its do-or-die as there is no hiding place. Couple this with having to walk through the tunnel where many greats have been before, there really is no backward step and it frees you up to express yourself and enjoy the occasion.
Outside of the tradition and history of the game, the Varsity is unique in that you get top-class players playing alongside ones who’ve just come out of school; it is a race to see who can develop the best 23-man squad squad in effectively three months.
It’s a joy to watch the growth trajectory of the guys who are driven by one common goal and a burning desire to attain this lets you see some truly spectacular progression. In those games, it is always the players who you don’t expect anything from who step up and produce an amazing performance that will swing the game.
Playing the Varsity matches, along with the Worcester games and travelling the world with the England Sevens team are some of the best moments of my career. I had a great time finishing off with a couple of seasons at Rosslyn Park before retiring. I’m now an office jockey, working in the City for a bank, replying to emails all day. It’s a bit different to travelling the world and pulling on the England 7s jersey in a baseball stadium in San Diego or the Cake Tin in Wellington, but life goes on.
“Varsity match was my last big game, what a place to play it!”