Jonny: My Autobiography (38 page)

During the last week of the Lions tour, I phone Inga, who is now an Aucklander, and am invited for an evening with his family. We go out for dinner and have a lovely evening. Afterwards, Inga drives me back, and as we sit parked outside the Lions team hotel, I have the chance to ask his advice, as I’ve been wanting to do.

I tell him I’m really struggling here. I’m not enjoying this any more. I feel like I’m just trying to survive. Rugby, for me, used to be about what you can do and what you can achieve, but now it’s about trying to come back and meet expectation, and then carry on keeping your head above water to the end of your career.

It’s Inga I want to say this to because he’s the guy who had the smile on his face when he played. And he was different from me. He could try something on the pitch and if it didn’t go well, he could handle it. Some of what he did was jaw-droppingly good, but he didn’t feel a need to be perfect. And although he may not have had goalkicking duties, he still bore enormous pressure because Newcastle used to rely on him so much every week.

My world is now just confusing and frustrating. I’m used to chasing goals. And I’m used to a set-up where day after day, game after game, you just get in there, stick at it and things more or less turn out OK. Now I’m seeing it from a totally different point of view, and there doesn’t seem to be a moment when I sit in the changing room and smile reflectively upon my day’s work. So I’d value Inga’s opinion.

He tells me you can’t go on like this. This is no good, this whole no enjoyment side of things. You can’t afford to play rugby like that. He says to have faith in my ability and that I’ve got to go out there and show it to people and celebrate it with the way I perform on the pitch. That is what
rugby is for, a celebration of your skills and a chance to demonstrate what you are all about.

The thing is, I’m a perfectionist with an obsessive mentality, and after feeling like I had it all with the 2003 World Cup victory, I’m left with a fear of losing everything I’ve achieved. I’m never going to change anything.

ON holiday in Majorca, before I go to the beach each day, Chris Machin does his reconnaissance patrol. I’ve never asked him to do it, but he’s simply good at looking out for me. He walks up and down the entire beach a few times and then gives me his report. There’s a suspicious situation over that way, there’s a camera over there and there’s a guy with a long lens in the bushes next to the rocks, who has been taking photos.

Unfortunately, people are making money from waiting for me on the beaches. This is my holiday, my annual break with Sparks and some of the boys. We’ve been coming to Majorca for years, since Sparks and I were three and four, and it now requires a Machin patrol before we can properly chill. I can measure out the changes in my life by my Majorcan holidays. Step by step, my Majorcas have changed every single year.

On certain beaches in some of the busier resorts, we used to have competitions between the group of us – Sparks, Mach, Ian Peel, the Newcastle
captain, Pete Murphy and me – on the inflatable doughnut rings pulled along by a speedboat. We had to queue for the ride, and in 2002, it started to get a little awkward. Wearing just a pair of shorts, I felt self-conscious when a load of people I didn’t know started to stare. Worse still, I worried about what they thought of me. For some reason, their judgement of me really mattered.

Then, in 2003, pre-World Cup, the first of the cameras started turning up. Strangers stared more, alerting other people to me. I’d still stand in the doughnut queue, but I’d take off my shirt at the last minute, stand with my arms folded looking away from the crowd and then dive straight into the sea and hide as soon as the boat pulled up nearby.

Last year, I just didn’t bother to go.

Now I’m back, but we go to some other quieter beaches, really beautiful beaches that are frequented by Germans and Spanish, who are not so big on rugby. But we still need Machin’s patrol and, for me, the doughnutting is finished. If the boys want to go to the doughnut beach, they go without me.

Majorca has been great for me in many ways, one of those being that it provided me with the opportunity to meet Shelley. We’ve been in the same group of friends since 2003, but it’s now, on holiday in 2005, that we properly get to know each other. Sun, sea and sand provide the perfect setting in which to discover the truly best parts about someone, and it has become undoubtedly our favourite place to spend time.

During this particular trip, a group of us decided to venture out to a pretty town called Deia. Our aim was to find a brand new beach on which we could eat our freshly packed picnic. In the end, we found a beautiful but
stony one with an enormous rock protruding from the sea for jumping off. The next day, Mach brings home a copy of the
Sun
and opens it up to find, clearly displayed in three photographs, snaps of Shelley, some of the boys and me. Although they managed to find us at our idyllic hideaway, they didn’t get a photo from the right angle to show the nasty Eighties ponytail I was sporting that day as a joke.

The
Daily Mail
went one better and there, on page 3, is a big picture of us all playing cricket in the shallow surf. Shelley, fielding at silly mid-on, I believe, seems to have acquired a speech bubble saying ‘Hands off him, he’s mine!’ Another of our group, Anette, also has a speech bubble, which says ‘No, he’s mine! I saw him first!’

This is a good early lesson for Shelley, allowing her to see the reality of life in the public eye. It was also a good one in collateral damage for Anette, who was simply offering up her own version of Norwegian left-arm medium pace.

I’m still not signing my name on England shirts, but progress has been made and Trading Standards officers have been round to my house to see me.

They have recently made a raid on Sporting Icons, a high-street shop in Chester. Apparently, so many items were seized, there was enough to fill two transit vans. And they found a bunch of photos of me signed, another batch unsigned and a felt-tip pen on the desk with the lid off.

They want to show me some of the stuff to verify whether the signatures are genuine and I am slightly concerned that, when I see them, I may not be able to tell. But I should not have worried. Unless I signed these while drunk, with my wrong hand and my eyes closed, then there’s very little chance of them being my handiwork. It is just ridiculous.

A new season approaches and, as with every new season, I go into it with fresh hope and the same uncontrollable ambition.

For our pre-season, Newcastle go on a mini-tour to Japan. Not long after arrival, I do a kicking session at the end of which I get my weirdest autograph request to date. I have, in the past, been sent pictures of some guy posing naked with my head superimposed onto his shoulders, and asked to sign them. I have been sent pictures of other people to sign – Iain Balshaw, Josh Lewsey and even Michael Owen. Here in Tokyo, though, at the end of this kicking session, I am asked to sign someone’s dog. I refuse to sign the dog. I don’t think I could ever sign a living creature, and anyway its hair is too long. I don’t see how I would ever get the writing to line up.

That night, though, is notable. We go out as a squad for an evening of exploring the city and end up in a trans-sexual bar. Interesting. Then, early the next morning, we are woken up by the sensation of our hotel shaking due to what we later discover is a full-on earthquake. And then, most significant for me, by breakfast time I am carrying a shocking stomach pain that I cannot shake off.

I shuffle down to the dining room half bent over, feeling terrible. That morning I just about struggle through a press conference with John Kirwan, the Japan national team coach, who is a hero of mine, but afterwards it is clear I need to get to the local hospital.

There they do a scan and the diagnosis is that I have ‘compacted stool’. I am fairly hesitant to explain to my teammates the news that this is what I have been making such a song and dance about.

However, the tablets I’ve been given don’t work. Two hours later I’m back in hospital asking for further help. They do a CT scan and then tell
me look, we’re really sorry, we’ve misdiagnosed it completely. You’ve got appendicitis.

By the start of the league season, though, I am just about recovered. A course of antibiotics was deemed a preferable solution to surgery for my appendix and I am now ready to start the new season where we are away at Sale.

We play well, so well that the last play of the game is a kick from the left corner to win it. This is what all the training is for. These are the moments that will stick with me for the rest of my life. So the pain of missing is desperate. I hate missing it. I want to rewind time; I want to take it again. I stay outside on the field for as long as I can in silent protest, but the truth that I can never seem to accept is that it’s done and that’s it. Move on.

After the game, I travel down to London to meet Shelley. This is the first time I have seen her since Majorca, yet the thought of that final kick remains twisting and turning in my mind. As soon as I’m back in Newcastle, I’m outside at Kingston Park, putting myself through an impromptu, soul-purging kicking session, taking every single kick from the left-hand corner.