Jonny: My Autobiography (43 page)

Yet afterwards, I feel great. I’m sat down under a bright light in the dentist’s chair in the physio room, where I have fourteen stitches in my face, and I feel great. That’s partly due to the anaesthetic but also because this is the best moment in rugby. The brief aftermath in the changing room when you’ve won feels good. The pressure of the week is gone, it’s been a good day and now I can just sit here and have my face stitched and embrace it. I don’t need to worry about the next game. For a few hours, I don’t need to worry about anything.

The media want to call it a dream comeback. They want this to be my day, my headlines. So they ask me was that a dream comeback? Could it have gone any better?

But I won’t have any of that. I never, ever buy into that, because if you buy into the good headlines too much, you have to buy into the bad ones.
If you’re a player, you’re just a pawn in that game. You have little choice and less power. You can’t change anything, you just get blown around by the wind. All you can do is play the best you can and then afterwards tell it like it is, tell it the way you always tell it. It was the whole team who just beat Scotland, not me.

Dream headlines can be so fleeting. Three weeks later we are facing the most passionate Ireland performance I have ever had the misfortune to come up against. We are blown off the field.

My preparation is not exactly helped by the hamstring I pulled the previous weekend while playing for Newcastle. I spend the whole week unable to do much at all, and I go to bed the night before the game with the words of Simon Kemp in my head: To be honest, I don’t think you’re going to be able to play, but we’ll have a look tomorrow.

I try to convince myself that I am going to play. I need to do that; otherwise mentally, I won’t be anywhere near prepared.

The next day, at 9am, I am on a training field behind the match stadium with Pasky, and Simon, doing drills and some sprints, to see if I’m OK to play. Incredibly, I pass my fitness test and so I travel to Croke Park with the rest of the team. We are full of confidence. We followed the Scotland game with an average performance against Italy and we feel we have learned some lessons that we are keen to show against Ireland. But we are physically dominated, and when that happens, all bets are off. It’s like playing against a seventeen-man team. We are under siege and we cannot lift the pressure. They are fiercer, more physical, more everything.

So you think, OK, no worries, let’s kick it long and get out of here. But
where do you put it? They have every single blade of grass covered, which means that every kick becomes a bad kick. We are 23–3 down at half-time. We have to change something. We have to find some kind of an answer.

As soon as we come off I say to Brian I think we need to work out how to change the momentum in this game because we’re getting beaten up front.

Brian looks at me but, understandably, he is not happy. This is rubbish, he says. He is talking about the game, not my comments, but then he walks off to talk to his coaches. As a key decision-maker, I was hoping to have a chat about how to change the tactics but it seems that will have to wait.

Some of the guys start saying we need to get down their end, we’re playing too much time in our own half. It’s not often that I interject but I look across and reply well, tell us how. How are we going to do that?

Silence, but I was being serious. People are happy enough to say what they want, but they’re not happy enough to go to the next level. The number ten has to take on that pressure, and afterwards, when it’s being analysed, it invariably ends up being his fault. It helps when other players think in greater depth, and take in the bigger picture. It’s terrific when players who see the game through your eyes, such as Catty, or Dave Walder at Newcastle, offer up options and solutions. I could do with some of their help right now.

On the board in the dressing room, Brian writes his key messages: ‘field position’ and ‘keep the ball’. This is one step short of writing ‘win the match’. The important question is not what we need to do but how we are going to achieve it. What’s missing is what often goes missing under pressure – the how to.

That’s the point of rugby – we’re all interconnected. If we are to kick down their end, we need first to threaten them, to show them that we’re capable of attacking from deeper in the field and that we mean it. This will persuade their wingers and full-back that they can’t just stay back and leave
us space to run into. We need to make sure that we are not committing greater numbers of players to the breakdown than they are, and recycle the ball quicker, which again means their back three can’t sit so deep. Then we can kick and our kicking will be effective.

But we don’t take the conversation that far and so nothing is changed, which is why the second half is as painful as the first. It isn’t helped by Ireland scoring a long interception try just at the end. Standing under the posts, you know this is a disaster, and that you’ve got to sit in that changing room and deal with it all.

THE England summer tour to South Africa is going to be tough. We’re going to have a depleted team and I have just been injured, so there is an argument for suggesting that I don’t really need to go. It might be better to stay at home and rest. Why not miss it?

That’s the advice I am getting from Tim, my dad, Blackie and plenty of others besides. They’re playing devil’s advocate. Do you really need this?

After the Ireland game, that hamstring counted me out for the rest of the Six Nations. Rest would, indeed, be good for me. But the decision whether or not to go isn’t exactly hard. Your decisions speak volumes about you and I don’t want to be someone who stands aside because the situation might not be ideal for me. I have an opportunity to play for England. I’ve never seen myself as above the England team, or in a position to make a call on whether or not I want to be a part of it. So I am on the plane.

And yes, it is tough, but I enjoy it. I enjoy being with a new group of young England players, I enjoy getting to know Dave Strettle and Roy Winters, I enjoy playing outside scrum-half Andy Gomarsall, and in the hotel I enjoy retreating every evening with Matthew Tait, Toby Flood, Jamie Noon and Dan Scarborough for our nightly shot of the TV series
Entourage
.

What I really enjoy is the backs-against-the-wall spirit in training. We all seem to pull together, and then the most god-awful stomach virus starts picking us off, one by one. Strets gets it so badly that it takes all his effort just to crawl to the phone to call the doc. So he has to go to hospital – and the assignment becomes even harder.

We lose the first Test 58–10. The scoreline looks horrible but we play hard and, for periods, we play well. And I get crunched in the worst collision of my career. I try to dive in to stop a certain try, but Roy Winters has the same idea and I get the full weight of Roy’s shoulder on my nose and the impact goes through my back so hard that it feels as though my spine inverts and my feet are going to flip over my head.

A week is not long enough to recover from a hit like that, but I’m not only playing in the second Test, I’m captain for the day. Two and a half years after being made captain by Andy Robinson, I finally get to do the job. Again, we are not close on the scoreboard. We lose 55–22, but that scoreline doesn’t reflect how we stepped up to the challenge. It doesn’t say that we are ahead at half-time.

That’s the story of the entire tour. We give a hell of a lot to it and are heavily beaten. There’s no denying it, but we can feel kind of proud. Collectively, we met the challenge, we fronted up, and I’m really glad I didn’t walk out on the experience.

With the World Cup on the horizon, we know where we stand. We’re not kidding ourselves. We’re going into this World Cup rather differently from the way we went into the last. In our dressing room at Twickenham, big new signs read ‘STW’, which we discover stands for ‘Shock The World’. But the southern hemisphere teams right now will be anything other than shocked.

We go to Portugal for a training camp, but a nagging feeling persists that we are not fast-forwarding at all, and, in fact, we are trundling along a bit too slowly. Forty-six players are here, which maybe is too many. Time is the crucial factor. We need to start forming bonds with the players we’ll be linking with, and putting things in place structurally. We need to complete repetition after repetition. Everything we do has to be so ingrained that, when the pressure comes, we have inbuilt behaviours that we can rely upon. But we don’t seem to be getting it quite right. With this many players, we are working more on selection than fine-tuning.

Mentally, I am not in the best place, either. After all the injuries and my time away, I’m not totally convinced that I deserve a place among this group of players. In our World Cup warm-up matches we beat Wales well, but lose twice to France. We will be travelling to this World Cup in different circumstances from those of four years ago. That much is clear.

The day before we leave for France, the general opinion of England’s chances at the World Cup is summed up at the Scrum In The Park event. This is an open day, a celebration, a meet-the-fans occasion, at which we are also expected to do some media interviews. The questions are not forgiving.

Is it a bit unrealistic to think you can win this? I come up with an answer and move on. Being a player, this kind of attitude makes no sense to me.

Next question: would getting into the quarter-finals be a good result for England? I come up with another answer and move on.

Another question: you’re eighth in the world at the moment, in world rankings. How high do you think you can finish? I come up with another answer and move on. I am trying to be polite and positive.

Another one: you haven’t won many games recently, so isn’t the World Cup a bit unrealistic? Thanks.

No one actually says come on, admit it, you’re no good and you’re going to lose, which maybe shows great restraint, but they have all as good as said so anyway. It’s as if I’m being accused of lying, and I find this tiring. It makes me feel hot inside. I don’t understand this negative mentality. This is a squad that has faced some of the most ruthless environments in world rugby. Just because we’ve had a couple of difficult results doesn’t mean we have to set our sights low.