Jonny: My Autobiography (17 page)

A World Cup campaign is extremely intense and long, even if you don’t last into the final fortnight. From mid-June to October, it’s been day after day, non-stop, with constant pressure. Before the tournament started, we’d trained long and hard, intense physical work with lots of contact. Sometimes it feels too much. Clive likes to communicate with us by email and we have all been given laptops. At one stage, Garath Archer just handed his laptop in. That was his way of saying goodbye. Thanks but no thanks. He came back again, but it was a statement of what we had all been going through.

So we go out, and this time I decide to go for it. I commit to getting stuck in. I need to blow away the cobwebs and lose my mind for just a little bit before the inevitable ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ mindset returns.

I’m disappointed, we all are, but I feel a sense of achievement at having come through this massive challenge, aged 20. I was told to hold the reins, and handled the pressure of being the driver of an international team against some of the best in the world. And I’ve learned a bit about World Cups. They are so long, and clearly another step up.

Yet as much as I may have taken a step up on the rugby field, it is off it where I have really moved on. All that convincing myself that nobody believes I should be there in the team, I’m letting people down all the time,
and being beaten by New Zealand was my fault – I think that is maybe behind me. I can go home knowing that, actually, there are guys who trust me and perhaps even want to play alongside me.

But my attempts to celebrate or commiserate, whichever it is, are not particularly impressive. This is a very rare encounter with alcohol. I find myself drinking with Dave Reddin, our fitness king, and I cannot match him. We also find ourselves, briefly, in the company of one or two of the England women’s rugby team, and drink for drink, I cannot match them, either.

So Dave puts me to bed and when I wake up, I see he has put a couple of Lucozades to hand. I have that ‘Oh dear, this isn’t good’ sensation, and it only gets worse as I swing my feet out on to the carpet, and some digested food – chicken and rice, by the way – pushes up between my toes. Definitely no excuses from my end, I have overdone it this time.

That’s how my World Cup ends – heading to the airport, feeling a little better about myself, sitting in the team coach, vomiting into a paper cup and being laughed at by my team-mates.

MOST people probably go to the pub or to a party on New Year’s Eve. On New Year’s Eve 1999, to see in the new millennium, Sparks and I go kicking.

The thing is, because I do so much kicking at the club on my own, I have been given a key to turn on the floodlights on the back pitch. The other thing is that we know the club will be open, because the bar will open for punters. So we also know that, if we can get into the changing rooms, we can get into the main tunnel out on to the first-team pitch and that is where the lock is to turn the lights on. Perfect.

The floodlights are half working, the back pitch appears to have been ploughed, so it’s not in the best shape for kicking, and hail is falling lightly. Conditions I am used to. We stay out a fair while, nearly two hours, before we look at the time – 11.30. We get back home in time to see in the millennium with an Indian take-away and
Eurotrash
on the TV.

The freedom of Kingston Park is a luxury, and I make the most of it. Any
time of the evening, I go there – eight, nine, ten o’clock – flick on the lights and kick. Not another soul around.

It’s another luxury having Sparks here. He is well versed in my ways. The following year, I will have him down here on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And the year after that, I will have him down here on Christmas Day in the snow, standing under the posts, freezing his backside off and knowing full well that when I say we’re going to kick a few balls around and have a bit of a laugh, it’s inevitably going to turn into a fully fledged, very serious kicking session.

And he knows exactly how my mind works. He knows that I always like to finish on a set of six perfect kicks, and that if I mess up the sixth, I’ll start again. He knows that if I’m hitting a set of twenty drop goals and the last two aren’t absolutely perfect, I’m going to say sod this I’m doing twenty more. I can see that Sparks is thinking oh my God, that’s another thirty minutes on the session, and I had plans for tonight. I’m quite likely to say to him right, mate, you go. You take the car. I’ll find my own way home. And he knows I mean it. But he never leaves. He stays and helps and kicks the ball back. Actually, it pisses me off a bit that there am I practising and practising, and he won’t practise as much even though he has a natural ability to strike the ball as well as pretty much anyone I know.

When the obsessiveness does kick in and I won’t stop, I am kind of split in two. I feel guilty, a terrible brother, for having him stay, but the other side of me is saying there’s absolutely no way I can leave here until I get this right. This actually makes my head worse as I start to panic, rushing to get my kicking right.

And he understands. He can see when I’m struggling with myself. If I start getting mad and I hit a ball that goes somewhere I don’t want it to
go, we both know that he’ll run quicker to get it and kick it back because he knows that I have to erase that with a good one.

What all those hours together have done is create the lifestyle for me to succeed. Yes, it’s a selfish adventure, because I’m focusing on myself and my own performance so much. And yes, I wish I had more to give back to him.

This is the way my mind works. I like to imagine myself, my life, as being under permanent surveillance from a video camera. The camera is switched on, following me 24/7. It never stops.

That’s not because I like being in front of the cameras; quite the opposite. It’s because I want to think that I could play back the tape after any day or week, or at the end of my life, and be able to sign off on it, 100 per cent happy with what I see, totally content that it shows a good representation of who I am as a person and as a rugby player.

It is about being strong in professional terms and having values that never slip. That’s why, when it’s raining and windy, or things aren’t going too well with my kicking, I can never say screw this, I’m going in. I believe everything I do has to make a difference. So I want to do things better than everyone else, not just on the field on a Saturday afternoon, but every day of the week, and off the field, too.

Like many of my ideas, the camera comes from Blackie. He says it’s part of
kaizen
, a Japanese philosophy that he follows, about daily improvement. The camera means you cannot switch off. It’s not as though getting better is something you do at work and then stop when you get home. Getting better is something you live all the time.

It makes so much sense to me.

Back at home, meanwhile, the toilet keeps blocking and it seems to take the repair man a while to come out for the lovely job of fixing it. Sparks and I find ourselves having to make quick, regular shuttle runs by car to Kingston Park to use the facilities there instead.

That may be mildly amusing, but when you’re a nervous 20-year-old who gets particularly tense before games and needs his pre-match preparation to go absolutely perfectly, it doesn’t really work. This is just one of many reasons why I feel I need to move house. So I sell up and, having paid solicitor’s fees and the rest of it, I blow all the profit in one go – a home-delivery curry for two.

Next stop is a stunning house in Corbridge, a quiet country hamlet. This really excites me. The house is a converted set of stables, full of character, with big arch windows.

We fix it up into a bit of a bachelor pad with a big air-jet corner bath in the bathroom and a few more boys’ toys. My favourites are the big, black-leather recliner chairs we buy for watching TV. These are not just any old leather chairs, but chairs with a telephone installed under the arm-rest cushion, a heat facility and a vibrational facility for an in-chair massage.

We have a daily pattern. Train to the point of exhaustion, drive back, stop at the Corbridge Larder, the country farm shop, then home and feet up, Playstation, TV. This really suits me. Spending quality time with your best friend isn’t bad, either. I know I am fortunate; it’s a taste of the good life. But, foremost, I feel the pressure of rugby life so strongly, it just feels great to be able to come back home and shut the door on it all.

Besides having Sparks at Newcastle, the team around me is ideal for a young man trying to perfect his trade.

I am now seen as the first-choice ten, and I have Inga outside me, loving his rugby, and forever calling moves that he has just dreamed up.

Inside me at scrum half, I have one of the toughest players in the world. We call Gary Armstrong the Junkyard Dog. He is so hard, he doesn’t understand the concept of a pain barrier. He will play on with cracked ribs, a fractured eye socket at one point, a jaw problem. He takes huge hits and never lets you see that he is hurt.

For me, he’s great because he looks after so much. I’ll be looking around from midfield, searching in vain for options, wondering what to do next, and when he sees that, he just breaks off and takes the responsibility himself. Gary doesn’t care about making mistakes. If it doesn’t go right for him, he just gets on with it, and looks for another way to win the game.