Jonny: My Autobiography (57 page)

But my biggest asset will always be my obsessive side, the fact that I cannot stop looking for more work to do out there. And in these games, I might be able to hit goal kicks, and I might be part of creating the odd opportunity, but I know that I am contributing because sometimes in
10 minutes of rugby, I am making six or seven tackles, plugging holes and taking on the responsibility to direct the team as much as I can.

Yet still I can’t pretend that it isn’t a struggle being on the bench, though my difficulty is hugely eased by the response I get from the Twickenham crowd. When I am running round warming up in the in-goal area, people shout and say really nice things, and the whole time I’m feeling, this is amazing. And, later, when I do go on to the field – to hear their cheers, that is an amazing experience too.

My preparation for Toulon’s Heineken Cup quarter-final pretty much sums up the end of our season. We are playing Perpignan in Barcelona, in the Olympic stadium, and on the morning of the game, as is always my way, I go to do some kicking practice. I go with Tom Whitford, the team manager, and we are able to practise in the stadium which is great.

Bear in mind all the places I’ve kicked in the morning before games, the playgrounds, the car parks, the farmers’ fields, the God knows what. Here I am on what is easily one of the most beautiful pitches I’ve ever stood upon in one of the most stunning stadia I have been in, and yet it’s the only place, while I am kicking, that I’ve ever trodden in shit.

I guess it’s a fox. And I guess the offending material gets sandwiched between my boot and the ball because I notice immediately afterwards that there’s a pretty horrendous smell. And then I look to see Tom take the ball fully into his chest, look at his shirt, smell his hands, and then quickly palm the ball off to one of the ball boys.

In the game itself, we get ourselves in a great position and then throw it away in the second half. Similarly in the league, we’re handily placed
and then lose it all in our final and most crucial game of the season, away against Montpellier.

It is a massively disappointing end to the season and a sad way to say goodbye to some amazingly good friends and truly world-class players, Fotu, George Smith, Felipe Contepomi, Paul Sackey. All of them are going.

For me, I am going too. To my last World Cup.

I roll into Pennyhill Park for what will be my last pre-season before my last World Cup. And I feel pretty good. I might have just had the opportunity to take a long break, to relax, I might have spent much of it in Majorca, but I have been working perhaps harder than ever before. This is an incredible opportunity, maybe my last, and it goes without saying that I want to make the most of it.

At Pennyhill, the England squad trains hard, Monday to Thursday, for six weeks. We have Friday to Sunday off and then start again. Except I don’t take the Friday to Sunday off at all. For each Saturday, Calvin Morriss gives us each a session to do on our own while we are away, not huge sessions, just something to keep us ticking over. But I put myself on a different schedule. Up in Newcastle, I get together with Blackie and Sparks and train Thursday night, twice on Friday, twice on Saturday and a final session on the Sunday.

For me, though, it is clear that this camp will be a test mentally as well as physically. The pressure and responsibility is cranked up on the number nines and tens. Especially the tens.

We have sessions in the morning, one back line versus another back line, with the number tens making all the calls, in charge of running the plays. And in the afternoon, it starts all over again but this time it’s the team session, one team versus another.

And then every morning, the tens have a meeting with Brian Smith in a small cottage by the team room just to look at the clips from the previous day’s training and talk about it. What are you thinking here? Why did you do that? How could you improve this?

It is intense and very competitive, you feel there is something riding on everything, me v Floody v Charlie Hodgson. Charlie is a very, very good player and easily one of the best passers of the ball around. The three of us work together and against each other, we feel we are accountable for everything. There is no let up, it is very tough but the rugby relevance of it feels priceless.

But where I am really struggling is with the wrestling. The squad is doing a lot of wrestling as a technique to improve the way we manoeuvre our body weight and use power more effectively. But this is a bit of a tricky one for me because I am supposed to be managing my body, playing the professional.

However, the last thing I want in pre-season is to be on the sideline. On the one hand, I don’t want to injure myself, not at this stage; on the other, I still don’t have the mental toughness not to be a team man and not join in. And it doesn’t help that the wrestling’s becoming a big thing. Some of the guys love it, especially the coaches who watch all the sessions. We have bouts and every bout is recorded and your scores go up on the board in the team room with Manu Tuilagi and Matt Banahan generally topping the charts. And then they start showing these recordings on the TV in the dining-room during lunch.

The problem for me, because of my competitive side, is that it hooks onto me, begins playing on my mind, becoming very important, irrationally so, and I start to get anxious as I feel I am massively losing my standing within the group. My win-loss record is a dismal two bouts, two defeats. It feels as though everyone is beating me. We come out of one session with most of the guys laughing and joking and I walk away just feeling low about myself. When I don’t compete well, it can really get to me, so much so that I feel I may as well just walk out altogether.

It seems to me we have to be careful here. Take someone like Mike Tindall for example – big, powerful, strong centre on the field and a senior man in the squad. But if he gets beaten in the wrestling too many times by Manu or by Matt Banahan or whoever, you start to mess with perceptions, you mess with the aura that he has built up. On the team room board, we don’t post the weights that everyone is lifting, so why are we being reduced to wrestling facts and figures which aren’t relevant on the field?

So I have a meeting with Brian and mention what I’m thinking. I think we need to be aware of what we may be doing here. I definitely get the impression that there are other players who feel the same. We’ve already had Ben Youngs injure his knee doing it. I am a proud person and if you are going to show these recordings during lunch, then I’m probably going to eat somewhere else.

But even so, all this is still killing me. Because this wrestling is right there in front of me. It is a challenge and one that I’m definitely coming up short in.

What I need is another focus, something to work on, see some results in and feel good about. I settle on the Team Fitness Test, just like in 2003. It is exactly what I need and first time out, I do it in 216 seconds, which just about lands me in the top five of the backs.

But now this is my goal. I work with Blackie and my brother on it every weekend, hammering out regular, good sessions. Big sessions, sometimes
an hour or two without stopping. And the night before the next test, I am on the phone to Blackie, talking about my preparation, telling him how nervous I am about it, but also telling him how I am going to smash it. It just means that much.

The following day, I run it in 203 seconds, about seven or eight seconds faster than anyone else in the entire squad.

In the middle of the camp, we have a week off and I need to pop back to Toulon. So I go with Blackie and Sparks, we arrive in the evening and fit in a late night session in the dark. We then have to go to Germany to see the people at the adidas headquarters. We break off the meeting in the middle of the afternoon so we can do another training session. We carry on like this all week. At the weekend Shelley and I head down to Bristol for her sister’s wedding, and then I am back at Pennyhill again, awaiting the final test.

And in that final test, I get my time down to 201 seconds, still six or seven seconds better than everyone else. Whether or not these final results are posted on the team room board, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t need other people to know about the good things, I just don’t want them to know the stuff that is bad.

More importantly, I then get a phone call from Brian to say he’s going to play me in the first Wales game. That is something I’m really excited about.

Sometimes you look at people like Sonny Bill Williams and you feel you see the future of the game. Against big teams, he runs hard and is able to throw offloads without any concern for his body, no matter how hard the tackle. He creates tries for fun. It takes the rest of us ten bloody phases and an hour of the game to make a try, but this guy can do it in one go.

These kind of guys are going to be where the game goes next and England have found one in Manu Tuilagi. I’ve played with guys like him before – Sonny Bill, Inga, Epi Taione – but Manu’s very young and to be that good when you’re that young is exceptional.

When I started as a professional, I tried to find a niche by being able to master all the skills in the game but to a higher level and from the first to the last minute. Now the elite game is also about size and strength and power. And Manu certainly has all that and the rest.

We play three warm-up games. Against Wales, at Twickenham, we win a tough game. We then lose to Wales in Cardiff and finish up against Ireland in Dublin where Manu is outstanding, big and strong and intimidating, a real weapon to have on your team.

As for me, I start in two of the three games, my first start for England for well over a year. But I am very hesitant to get too self-indulgent, to read anything into the team selections. I just have to see it as an opportunity, a fleeting moment where you think great, I’ve been picked to play. Whether I’m first or second choice or whatever, I am starting for England again.

And I think we go well, particularly against Ireland who beat us earlier in the year in the Six Nations, 24-8. We manage to put a few good things into practice that we’ve worked on, we defend well, we come away with a 20-9 win. Not a bad launch-pad for the World Cup.