Scoring in Hell Fire Corner was great
SEEING Scottie Scheffler being presented with the Green Jacket for winning golf ’s US Masters last week reminded me of the time I was presented with a red one having played my 100th game for Redruth. It might not have the same kudos in the wider sporting world but, for me, it is a treasured item from my four years at the club. Redruth is a brilliant traditional rugby club and instead of Amen Corner and ‘patrons’, we had Hell Fire Corner and some of the best supporters around.
I’d played plenty of rugby up until that point pursuing my dream of becoming a professional but joining Redruth was the line in the sand for me in terms of full-time rugby. That dream first started as a schoolboy watching Gary Armstrong play for Scotland in the then Five Nations. I played for my hometown club Hawick at first and was in the same Scotland U18/19 set-up as people like Greig Laidlaw, John Barclay and Johnnie Beattie. I was also part of the Border Reivers academy until it got axed. When that happened, Edinburgh and Glasgow were full up so I went back to Hawick and it was while I was there that an agent by the name of Martin Longden scouted me and suggested I moved south to play in the Championship.
I originally went to Plymouth Albion to play under Graham Dawe. Graham being Graham said, you’ll come in as third choice and you’ll have to work your way into the side, past Nigel Cane and Ed Lewsey. I went there on trial, played in a couple of warm-up games, and was going to sign but Mount’s Bay, who were flying up the leagues, made me a very good offer and I went there instead. They had some good players: Ricky Pellow, the ex-Bath scrum-half was there, Lee Jarvis, the ex-Wales 10, was there. But unbeknown to me a lot of stuff was going on in the background and the club folded at the end of that season and I left to go to Coventry for a short period before heading back down to Penzance to join the Pirates.
Pirates had some team at the time, a lot of the players went up to the Premiership the following year. I was competing for the 9 jersey with Gavin Cattle, the standout scrum-half in the league at the time so as you can imagine, games were few and far between, which is why I took myself overseas to try something new, to France initially and then New Zealand. In France, I played in Federale 1 with a club called Figeac. We got into the Pro D2 promotion play-off final in 2011 but were beaten by Beziers, who had Andrew Mehrtens controlling the game for them at 10.
After that, I joined Sumner Rugby Club in New Zealand, which is where it all began for current All Blacks head coach Scott Robertson. He was doing his breakdance moves after we won games back then; he is absolutely mental – in a good way. I learnt so much from him across there and he took me into Canterbury NPC squad training. He stressed to me the importance of hard work and self-belief and said that if it was easy everybody would make it. It didn’t matter if you were a youngster or a top player, he always had time for you. At the time, the two scrum-halves in the Canterbury set-up were Andy Ellis and Willi Heinz, so I was in decent company!
I moved back to Cornwall when I returned to the U.K and stepped away from full-time rugby. Redruth were in National One then (the third division as was), and we had a good squad with people like Mark Bright, PJ Gidlow and Rob Thirlby in it. Unfortunately, the blazer I received on my 100th and final game wasn’t the only red thing that I saw that day because I was sent off. One of our players gave a penalty away, and I said something like, ‘you f ****** idiot’. It was aimed at him, not the referee, but the referee interpretated it differently and gave me my marching orders. It was a disappointing way to finish.
Even when I joined Chinnor in 2015, I couldn’t stay away from Redruth, as I’d be going back there twice a week for County Championship training.
That was a hell of a commute from Oxfordshire but it was worth it because playing for Cornwall was special and I got to win the County Championship twice with them, and twice later (in Division 3) as a player and head coach of Oxfordshire. Luckily for me, Chinnor’s main investor Simon Vickers was also my day-to-day boss at Rectory Homes and he allowed me to leave work early on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Scoring the 70-metre try in Hell Fire Corner that helped us beat Gloucestershire is one of my fondest memories. We were going to kick to clear but I saw a bit of a space down the blindside, did the little trademark dummy, which left us only having the full-back to beat, and I did a one-two with Lewis Vinnicombe to finish things off. There is a picture of people leaning over the barriers trying to give me high-fives and hug me that I never tire of seeing.
For the first three years or so I was the first-choice nine at Chinnor. But that ended when I was banned for four years (cut to two) for using a prohibited substance. We all make silly mistakes at times in life and that was one of mine. I bought a supplement from a shop, and I innocently thought it was okay to use and I took it like I would take any other product. I never expected it to end up the way it did. In reality, it cost me a season and a half.
I ended up getting heavily involved into Jujitsu and was training 5-6 days a week to keep myself active. It was literally the only thing I was allowed to do. It would have been easy to quit rugby altogether there and then, as I was 33 at the time, but I felt I owed it to myself and to the club, who stood by me throughout, to continue. Another motivation was to get to 100 games, but a few niggling injuries and my age – I’ll be 39 this year – has caught up with me and I am now officially retired from playing stuck on 97 appearances. Now it is time to try and pass my experience on and develop the guys around me as head coach of the U18s, the Falcons (Chinnor’s 2nd XV), and as skills coach with the 1st XV. Hopefully, I’ll still come across some of the amazing people I met as a player and who helped me in my journey now that I’ve crossed over into coaching.
Our 1st XV will be playing in the Championship next season, which is testament to all the hard work of our players and coaches. With Nick Easter as DoR, Craig Hampson as head coach and Tom Cruse as forwards coach, we probably have the strongest coaching set-up in National 1, which makes a big difference. If you have got some good rugby players amongst that you put yourselves in a good position to win the league, which is exactly what we have done. If we can keep the bulk of the squad together and bolster it with a bit of stardust, hopefully we’ll be okay and be able to do a Caldy and an Ampthill and find our feet in the Championship and stay up. But we’re under no illusions about how tough it’ll be.
“I treasure the red jacket I was given after my 100th game for Redruth”