Jonny: My Autobiography (49 page)

So I try to make things work, but they don’t. We lose 9–15 and, again, the questions afterwards make it pretty clear who is going to be held responsible.

The following Tuesday, four days before the Ireland game, we are training at Bath University. Near the gym, before the team meeting, Brian asks for a word. He tells me he is going to play Danny at ten on Saturday instead of me.

I am not surprised. I knew there was a chance that the coaches would share the same opinion as many in the media and move me. Straightaway I find Danny to say well done, and I mean it. He is a good player with a
firm vision of the game. It’s thanks to my spiritual development that I am genuinely able to want him to do well.

This is the first time I have been dropped from the England starting XV since the World Cup quarter-final against South Africa in France nine years ago. It is impossible not to take it as a slur on my character. I try not to question it too much. I try to rise above it. But no matter what I have learned about life and how there is something far deeper than rugby, I am still in full competitive mode. Out of the blue, I receive an email from Kris Radlinski, the Wigan rugby league player I admire so much. I barely know him but what he writes is so supportive. I can’t believe you’ve been treated like this, he says. And that’s great, yet nevertheless, emotionally, I am still hugely rattled.

Watching from the bench at Twickenham, I am then given further food for thought when England come out and dominate in a way that they didn’t in any of our previous games. Ireland just aren’t as strong as they were last year at Croke Park, and our guys are able to play with the ball going forward and good powerful options around them.

Why couldn’t that have happened when I was there? That is one question I ask myself. But maybe that is actually the point. Maybe it didn’t happen because I was there.

Maybe somehow I’ve been getting in the way of the progress of the England team. Maybe, because of all the attention paid to me and everything else that goes with it, I have been affecting the dynamic of the group of players, so that they have found it hard to be who they are and express themselves to the full.

I feel pretty horrible about all this, but at the same time, I find myself thinking about Mike Catt and how he endured successive spells of being dropped from the England team. Catty would go through periods of more than a year when he wasn’t in favour, and he would go back to his club and
just get on with his own game. It’s all right for that to be the case. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

Anyway, it can give me a break. Ever since my neck injury, whenever a glimmer of fitness has returned, England have called me back in. I was called back without having played a game; I was called back in and asked to be captain.

For the first time in a long while, I have the chance to concentrate on myself and my own game. Maybe I can get some games together with Newcastle, get back on my learning curve, stop worrying about what England need from me and just work on getting better day by day with Blackie and Sparks.

Sometimes, when you are an obsessive perfectionist and never allow yourself to give in, it can backfire. This becomes the case on a road trip to Majorca.

I love soft-top cars, I love driving with the top down, and I’d really like a soft-top in Majorca. So I buy an old, soft-top BMW and persuade Andy Holloway and Pete Murphy to join me on the drive through France to Barcelona. The one rule is that, unless it is raining, we are not allowed to put the roof up. We play endless Oasis and Beatles CDs and we take shifts in the driving seat and it’s all great until it gets dark. Our intention is to drive through the night, but I didn’t realise how cold it gets, and under no circumstances will I sanction the roof going up.

For whoever’s turn it is to do a shift in the back, we have three pillows and a duvet, but even then, it’s ridiculously freezing. We put the heaters on full and it makes no difference.

In the morning, we stop in the south of France, near Montpellier, for breakfast and petanque on the beach. None of us has had much sleep. Andy
is particularly cranky because it is soon 30 degrees and his head is burning. But he knows the rule. I still won’t allow the roof to go up.

When I was young, I had a party trick. I could move my right shoulder out of its joint and then make it go back in, and when it clunked back in, it would make a hell of a noise, and that would make my friends at school recoil. Ugh, they’d exclaim.

If you put that natural defect together with all the years of hard tackling, you get to where I am now. I always used to feel strong in my shoulders, but for a good few years now, I have started to feel some pretty strong pain. It got to the stage where I was feeling it after every game. Just one hit and it was really sore. Recently, it’s been taking me until Thursday after a game before I can lift it above my head, and before I’m ready to do anything physical with it in training for the next one. Now it’s so bad that the shoulder feels as if it’s dropping in and out of position even when I’m just jogging in a warm-up.

The agreed solution is to operate on it during the summer. This means missing the England summer tour to New Zealand, but there is no alternative.

Len Funk, my shoulder specialist, thinks I have a standard labral tear, which consists of a lesion in the cartilage that sits in-between the ball and socket of the shoulder joint. He thinks the operation should take about an hour and that he can put a couple of anchors into the joint to secure it.

When he goes in though, what he finds is rather different. If the cartilage is a clock-face, I have lost the entire amount from two round to ten o’clock. The whole thing has been clean worn away. So the operation takes three and a half hours, he has to put in seven anchors, which he says is a hell of a lot, and it will take five months rather than three to recover fully.

In other words, I have the whole of the summer to myself, and I intend to make the most of this gift. Once I can move my arm backward and forward, I can run, and this becomes the focus of the summer.

This is the new thinking coming in, influenced by the Matt Burke approach. I am no longer setting out to be the strongest and fittest in the world, the best at everything. I discuss it with Blackie. What am I happy with? More to the point, what do I really want to work on? What can I do that would make me better? Let’s be ruthless here. Where can we really make a change? Our answer is twofold – sprinting and my spiritual pathway.

So, physically, we work on speed and nothing but speed. We get back to spending all our time together, working on astro-turf, on the track, in various different gyms. Everything physically is entirely concentrated on the one goal.

Mentally, this is a great summer for me, too. When we work out at Blackie’s gym, he puts on videos of famous speakers, so I’m training while listening to some hugely impressive people. I discover spiritual and motivational speakers, such as Jim Rohn, Dr Wayne Dyer and Eckhart Tolle, who is rated as the most spiritually influential person in the world. Sometimes this spills over beyond training. Blackie and I sit in his spare room, watching videos of these amazing people, and then afterwards we discuss their message. We talk for hours.

The result is that I find myself in an amazingly good place. I feel a genuine spiritual contentment. It resembles a sense of invincibility because, in this mood, there is no situation I find threatening. I have nothing to fight against. I am working with the world and not against it. I have had time out of England, I have my shoulder back, I feel refreshed, as if the new season represents a brand new start. There may yet be one more World Cup in me; now I can give it all I’ve got. My last shot.

With my kicking I have a new approach, too. I discuss this a lot with Dave and decide at last to be ruthless. I have to control what I can control
and let the rest go. It means focusing on my intentions, honing my mental application, and building faith in myself as opposed to getting too consumed in the stats and the results. In essence, the process takes precedence rather than the outcome.

So my daily kicking sessions become a very concentrated warm-up and then eight shots at goal from wherever I choose. Just eight shots and then I go home. I don’t re-do any of them if they go wrong. I don’t get second chances in a game, so I start to train that way, too.

By the start of the new season, I feel genuinely fabulous, and the new me is reflected in the new haircut. I always used to have the right haircut, the right image; it was important. But that doesn’t seem imperative now. I feel different, I see things differently and I have greater faith in myself. So now my hair is long.

The start of the new season is about as enjoyable for me as rugby gets.

My first game is against Northampton and I have a hand in everything we do and sew up the win with a big right-foot drop goal at the end to put us out of reach. We then get completely smashed at Saracens. Still, I score a try at the end and I feel good about my game. Tellingly, I manage to save another Saracens try by running down Kameli Ratuvou, their Fijian winger, just short of the try line and stealing the ball. That’s the speed work with Blackie paying off.

I continue on this roll against Bristol. I really feel liberated, as though this is my chance and I’m starting to take it. It all seems to make sense now. I see the game playing out in my mind before it actually happens, and therefore I’m in the right place at the right time. I’m not afraid to
try new moves and I haven’t missed a goalkick all season. I don’t feel I’m going to, either.

But all that is fleeting. We go down to Gloucester and not half an hour into the game I get cleared out from the side of a ruck and my left knee is driven downwards. It feels as though the bottom half of my leg is pointing completely the wrong way. While I’m lying there, I get hit again, which straightens out my leg but feels horrible. I know this one is bad.

I stay down until Martin Brewer is by my side. I can’t look at it. I tell him don’t touch it. Something is definitely wrong.

But when I do look down, it looks normal. Martin says do you want to get up and have a run? But there’s no way I’m doing that. I’m helped off, as usual, by Sparks and then sit below in the changing room, listening to the cheers of the crowd as we slowly lose touch with the Gloucester team. By the end of the game, my knee has swollen up massively. It suddenly looks grotesque and throbs madly.