Читать книгу Bill Beaumont: The Autobiography - Bill Beaumont - Страница 8
ОглавлениеChildhood, school and family life
If the meeting with Allan Hosie at The Drum and Monkey was fairly critical for the wellbeing of English rugby, the meeting between my parents and doctors at Preston Royal Infirmary shortly after my birth on 9 March 1952 was even more critical for the wellbeing of William Blackledge Beaumont. I had arrived somewhat prematurely by Caesarean section and, within days, had gone down with pneumonia. My chances of surviving beyond a few more days were deemed to be so minimal that I was actually christened in hospital as it was felt that I would never make it to a church. Not much of a vote of confidence for someone who, despite arriving a month earlier than expected, had still weighed in at a pretty healthy-sounding nine pounds.
The will to ‘hang on in there’ must have been pretty strong, even at that early age, because I confounded medical opinion by coming through the crisis, aided by a new drug so revolutionary that doctors had to obtain permission from the Ministry of Health in order to administer it to me. That wasn’t the end of my medical saga, unfortunately. Hospital staff expressed concern that I couldn’t keep anything down and was throwing up with messy regularity. If they were puzzled by this phenomenon, my mother certainly wasn’t. Having seen it all before, she was able to make an instant diagnosis: I was suffering from a hereditary condition – that had also afflicted her brother – known as Pyloric Stenosis, which occurs when a skin forms between the gullet and the stomach, preventing anything from being digested. A fairly simple operation rectified that little problem – my uncle had been less fortunate, spending his first 12 months being fed minute amounts of food on a tiny salt spoon.
My wife Hilary and I have three sons and, thankfully, none of them inherited the condition. Quite the contrary, they’ve never had a problem digesting anything and have been eating us out of house and home ever since!
So, after a longer than average sojourn in the hospital’s baby unit, I finally made it to the family home in Adlington to join my parents, Ron and Joyce, and sister Alison. She was two years my senior and brother Joe arrived four years after me.
Adlington was a working Lancashire village where everyone seemed to be employed at either the local weaving mills or at Leonard Fairclough’s, a large construction company responsible, at that time, for building bridges on the new motorways that were mushrooming all over the place. It was a small community and we were a tight-knit family with our own lives tending to revolve around the family textile business – a cotton and weaving mill founded in nearby Chorley by my great grandfather, Joseph Blackledge, in 1888.
My mother’s family, the Blackledges, had always made their way in the commercial world but the Beaumonts were academics. A succession of teachers, who had the unenviable task of trying to impart knowledge to a largely unresponsive pupil, would suggest that I leaned more towards my mother’s side of the family, despite the fact that my paternal grandparents were themselves both teachers. My grandfather, Harry Beaumont, had started teaching at Blackpool Grammar School – the Alma Mater of my old adversary and friend Roger Uttley – after the First World War and started a rugby team called the Bantams. He had been badly wounded fighting in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, and was awarded the Military Cross. My father carried on the academic tradition by winning a place at Cambridge University after serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He had been put in charge of a motor torpedo boat so maybe it was from him that I acquired my own interest in boats. It all started when the family owned a house on Lake Windermere, and I’ve been messing about in them ever since. When they sold the property some time later we rented cottages in the area for summer holidays, and Hilary and I still keep a caravan on the waterfront in the Lake District because the boys took up my interest in water-skiing, although I spend most of my time in the boat these days. I even ventured back into the world of learning that I spent so much of my youth trying desperately to escape from, in order to study navigation. Lakes are pretty straightforward but I fancy myself as something of a seafarer these days and I reckon it helps if you know what you’re doing!
My grandparents fully expected my father to follow them into teaching once he had graduated from Cambridge but he had other ideas. He chose to go down the commercial route and took a job as a sales representative with a company called Bradford Dyers’ Association, which was a great move from my point of view because he ended up endeavouring to sell his wares at the Blackledge mill in Chorley. He walked in one day hoping to secure a little business but secured a wife instead. My mother had joined the armed forces after leaving school and had experienced an ‘interesting’ war, working as part of the back-up team for our ‘foreign agents’, who would regularly be sent into occupied France and other theatres of the war. Once peace had been restored she had joined the family business and, as luck would have it, was there the day my father popped in.
By that time my father had started playing rugby at Fylde, having also played at Cambridge as an undergraduate. I don’t think he had any great pretensions in the game but, like the majority of players, he was a great enthusiast for the sport and made it as far as the second team. The club played a lot of games in the Manchester area in those days and he used to call in to see my mother on his way back to Blackpool. She wasn’t over keen on rugby at that time and, after they married, he never played again. In any case he was busy because, when he asked my grandfather for my mother’s hand in marriage, he was asked, in turn, when he could start work in the family business. He really threw himself into the job and did a great deal of work on developing the sales side of the business whilst my grandfather and uncle concentrated on manufacturing. The job involved a good deal of travelling and I can recall times when he would go off to Australia on business trips that lasted as long as two months.
Apart from those trips we were always together as a family and, until the age of eight, childhood was an uncomplicated affair that revolved around playing football and cricket in the garden or on the rec with the local lads. We didn’t have a care in the world in those days and the only person who would get upset at times was my father, when our games of football and cricket made a mess of his pride and joy, his garden. He was a budding Alan Titchmarsh, and would spend hours pruning the roses, weeding and continually mowing the lawn – an activity I deemed a complete waste of time although, whilst not inheriting his green fingers, I have been known to tell off my own boys for doing a pretty good job of wrecking our garden.
It is a case of going full circle because the lads have always turned our garden into a rugby, soccer or cricket pitch, according to the season or inclination at the time, and you often can’t move for cricket bats, rugby and soccer balls and golf clubs. Our boys are of the fairly boisterous variety, now rapidly growing into men, and, as they are all into one sport or another, we are now the proud owners of two washing machines and two tumble driers because just one of each simply wouldn’t be enough to cope with the mountains of muddy, sweaty playing kit they manage to accumulate in just 24 hours.
The Blackledges were always heavily into cricket and the game dominates the summer months at the Beaumont homestead, whilst rugby league is a favoured activity in the winter when uncle Jack Partington, who used to play in either halfback position for Broughton Park, Fylde and Lancashire, happily joins in. He hasn’t any children of his own to wear him out so he turns up with boundless energy and goes through a sort of second childhood, which the boys take full advantage of. That takes the pressure off me, allowing me, unless I get roped in, to sneak off and read my newspaper.
The boys, Daniel (20), Sam (17) and Josh (11), have always been crazy about sport. I’ve never been a pushy father, preferring to let them pursue the sports that interest them and to find their own level. But I have always been there with support and advice when needed. Interest in, and an aptitude for, sport must be in the genes and they certainly take after me when it comes to size. At birth, Danny weighed in at 8lb 13oz, Sam at 9lb 7oz and Josh tipped the scales at 10lb 5oz. Like any father, I was just delighted that they were born healthy and that Hilary was fine. We were living in Longton, near Preston, when Daniel was born and I had a bad habit of driving around with nothing other than fresh air in my petrol tank. Hilary was convinced I would run out of fuel if I had to take her to hospital in a hurry, but fortunately we made it to Preston Royal Infirmary when Hilary went into labour, without running dry. It wasn’t the easiest of deliveries and, like many fathers before me, I sat around for hours anxiously awaiting his arrival and feeling like the proverbial spare part.
When Sam was born he looked just as he does now; his features haven’t changed at all. Both he and Danny had little hair at birth but Josh had a mass of black hair when he arrived on the scene, his brothers christening him ‘Bear’ – a pet name they still use. Despite being born the size of a three-month-old baby, however, he has still, unlike his older brothers, to graduate to the pack on a rugby field. All three boys took to the game immediately, Daniel developing as a front-row forward and Sam as a second row while Josh, who looks like being the tallest of the three eventually, is currently playing junior rugby at fly-half – a position his father once graced! They also play a lot of cricket, soccer, tennis and golf. It is a case of indulging in whatever is in vogue at the time. During Wimbledon fortnight, for instance, it is tennis, whereas when the World Darts Championships appears on television, I notice that the dartboard suddenly reappears.
It hasn’t been easy for the boys, because having a high-profile sportsman for a father can work against you and I feel that Daniel, in particular, has had a raw deal. He’s a bright lad but very sensitive and he has had to cope with the expectation that comes from the Beaumont name. He played at Fylde from an early age, turned out at tight-head prop for Lancashire Clubs’ Under-15s, and is now hooking at Manchester University where he is studying for a business degree, but he was largely ignored by school selectors and when he dropped the ball or did something wrong, even at the age of seven playing mini-rugby, he would have to put up with stupid comments such as, ‘You of all people should know better than that.’
Sam is the quiet one and, at the moment, the tallest of the three boys. He played for the Lancashire Under-18s A-team a year early and has a good knowledge of the game. That may come from the fact that the boys have accompanied me to World Cups, been taken on British Lions tours and used to join me in the commentary box when I was working for television. They have watched a lot of top-class rugby and had the advantage of being in the company of people who have played the game at the highest levels, so they have a better than average understanding of what is happening on the field.
I have always found having to stay on the sidelines and not get involved in the boys’ sporting activities at school frustrating, but I could see it being difficult for a schoolteacher being scrutinised by a former British Lions captain. So I stand back and try to help the school in other ways, such as fundraising so that the school team can undertake tours overseas.
At present young Josh seems to be least affected by the famous father syndrome. When his brothers were born, there was quite a bit of media interest and their pictures appeared in newspapers and magazines, to be followed later by happy family features. By contrast there was no fuss whatsoever when Josh arrived and he may well escape the goldfish bowl. In any case he is one of those annoying little characters who confidently take everything in their stride – in his case probably because of having to compete with older and bigger brothers – and he is naturally good at every sport he attempts. He captains rugby and cricket teams, and competes in the school swimming team as well, even though he hasn’t bothered joining the swimming club. He also regularly embarrasses both Hilary and me on the golf course! I remembering partnering him in a fathers-and-sons tournament at the Royal Lytham course in which we had to play alternate shots. Josh decided very early on in the round that I was the weakest link! At another time I had been due to play in a tournament during the festive season and we were sitting around at home with nothing particular to do so I said to Josh, ‘Come on, let’s go and hit a few balls down at the golf range.’ When we got there we bumped into Paul Eales, a PGA European tournament professional, who told me he had just been reading a new coaching manual but added that there was no point in lending it to me because I was beyond help. When I suggested that Josh might benefit he said, ‘I can’t do anything with him because he already has a swing to die for.’ Josh’s temperament is such that I suspect he will ride out any family references and cope with the inevitable question, ‘Do you play rugby and are you as good as your dad?’
The great thing is that, whilst they are all very different in character, each of the boys has inherited our love of sport. And, as parents facing the difficulties of modern society, Hilary and I take great comfort from the fact that they enjoy the ethos of rugby and cricket and socialise within that environment, just as we always did. It is an environment in which I have always felt comfortable because it attracts people from all walks of life and is very family-orientated. Family life is very important for Hilary and I and, whether playing football and cricket on an Algarve beach, skiing in France or water-skiing in the Lake District or at our home in Spain, the important thing is all being together. Our impromptu games of cricket and football on foreign beaches have often attracted other holidaymakers who ask to join in. They were always most welcome but we had to take care where we elected to play after inadvertently finding ourselves playing cricket on a nudist beach on one occasion. We were blithely unaware until a bather suddenly appeared between batsman and bowler. Sam’s eyes were like organ stops!
The boys have accompanied me on Lions tours and to World Cups. They also go to Twickenham with Hilary and I and join in the traditional get-together in the car park with Fran Cotton, Steve Smith, Roger Uttley and their families. (I remember how, during the last Lions tour to Australia, Josh had his face painted – they’d never seen anything like that before in the committee box!) Importantly, they aren’t blasé about this, always making a point of thanking us for taking them.
I didn’t have the same opportunities for travel that my boys have enjoyed throughout their lives but I had a very happy childhood nonetheless – the carefree routine only being broken when I started attending the Council School in Adlington and adopted a stance that was to stay with me throughout my scholastic career. I took very little notice of the bookwork and thought only about getting into the playground with a ball. Lessons were merely an unwelcome distraction but I was about to be doused in ice-cold water – metaphorically speaking. When I was eight I was packed into the car and driven to Kirkby Lonsdale, on the edge of the Lake District, to be introduced to Cressbrook Preparatory School, which was to become my home for the next few years. To say the experience was a shock to the system would be putting it mildly. It took me a long time to settle in and I was very homesick. Years later I can recall asking my mother how she could have sent me away from home like that but it wasn’t easy for her either. She said it had been the worst week of her life because Alison, who was ten at the time, went off to boarding school in Harrogate on the Thursday, I went to Cressbrook on the Friday and my father flew to Australia on business the following day. From having a house full of people she was suddenly left with just four-year-old Joe to look after.
I don’t think our three boys would have appreciated a boarding-school regime, and anyway Hilary and I always enjoyed them being at home with us so that we could sit down together to chat and find out what they had been up to. Of course, things were different when I was young and, by sending my siblings and me to boarding school, my parents were only doing what was the norm for people in their social circle. As I say, I wasn’t happy at first but you get used to it and there was the saving grace of sport being available to me almost on tap. Another good thing from my point of view was the headmaster, David Donald – a great guy.
Interestingly, the head boy at the school was someone I would come to know very well through rugby in later life: former England centre John Spencer. He subsequently had no recollection of me because he was in his final year at Cressbrook before going on to Sedbergh, but those of us in the first year knew who he was because of the position he held in the school’s pecking order. Since then, of course, we have become good friends and have worked together for many years in rugby administration.
Arriving at Cressbrook was certainly traumatic. We slept in dormitories and it was lights out at 6.30 p.m., followed by the cruel wake-up exercise of a swim in the freezing pool at 7.15 the following morning. Little wonder, then, that I hated the countdown to returning there after our very occasional holidays. I was so determined not to go back one term that I hid in a tree!
Unlike the local schools my pals attended back in Adlington, we had few holidays and our parents were only allowed to make three visits each term, although they were permitted to turn up to watch us play for the school at soccer, rugby or cricket. Being a boarding school, the routine was very different from most schools. A typical day, for example, might comprise lessons in the morning, sport in the afternoon and then more lessons at four before supper and bed. The sporting routine in my first year was soccer in the winter and cricket during the summer months. Fortunately, I enjoyed both games.
Cricket was probably my greatest love and I still like nothing better than sitting down to watch a game, whether it is a Test Match at Old Trafford or just a knockabout on the village green. The game was in the blood; my maternal grandfather was such an enthusiast that he was one of the founders of the Northern League. My uncle, Joe Blackledge, was not just a good cricketer but also Lancashire’s last amateur captain, taking on that role for the last time in 1962, by which time he was probably past his prime and his timing was not as good as it had been. I remember Dad picking me up from school and taking me to watch him play at Old Trafford but Uncle Joe ducked into a ball from Butch White of Hampshire and was knocked out. To add insult to injury the ball fell on to his wicket, so he was out in more ways than one!
Uncle Joe played at our local club, Chorley, and that’s where you would find me during the school holidays. I was a wicketkeeper and opening batsman, and played quite a lot of my league cricket in the same team as both the father and the uncle of former England fly-half Paul Grayson, who also had a spell playing cricket at Chorley. Another cricketing pal was Paul Mariner, who went on to play soccer for the Chorley Town team before moving on to Plymouth Argyle, Ipswich Town, Arsenal and England. As the youngest players in the team, we tended to knock around together. Paul ended up coaching in America and we have rather lost contact, but I still bump into his parents when I am out and about in Chorley.
I have never tired of watching cricket and, fortunately, our boys developed the same avid interest in the game although Hilary thinks it is akin to watching paint dry. I had to explain that cricket is a wonderfully social game, just as rugby was when I was a young player. It is also a very unforgiving game, cruel almost. More than any other team game, the spotlight is on the individual, and luck can play an important part in success or failure. Some guy might be dropped five times and go on to score a century whereas the next guy could be out first ball to a brilliant catch.
When I first started playing rugby at Fylde I continued opening the batting at Chorley in the summer months, usually in the second team, but all that stopped when I got into the pattern of touring every year, either with England or the British Lions. I did make my ‘cricketing comeback’ a number of years ago, however, when we went to live in Wrea Green, a pretty village not far from Blackpool. It is the archetypal English village, complete with church, pub and houses surrounding the village green and duckpond. The captain of the village cricket team was my neighbour, Richard Wilson, and he persuaded me to turn out for them even though I protested that I hadn’t swung a bat in earnest for years. When I dug out my old bat it seemed about half the size of everyone else’s and the same could be said for the kit, which was so tight it almost gave me a squeaky voice, although I did just about manage to squeeze into the flannels! (There was, however, one memorable occasion when I split my trousers and had to nip home for running repairs, holding up play for about 15 minutes. Then it started to rain so the lads claimed they would have won the game if I hadn’t forced the fabric!) It may have been beginner’s luck but I took a catch in the gully off the third delivery of my ‘trial’ game and took another later when fielding at deep midwicket. We lost the game but I made 51 not out and they thought they had discovered another Ian Botham! The Grapes pub served as the clubhouse and, in the euphoria of getting a few runs – and a bravado fuelled by a few pints – I signed up to play for the team on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I never played quite so well again but at least I could walk to the ground from home … and the clubhouse was always a considerable attraction!
My playing days, apart from in the garden and on the beach, are definitely over now but I enjoy watching our youngest, Josh, playing for the Under-lls side. Golf is more my game these days although I don’t profess to be very good. I got into the game because that’s how rugby players traditionally pass the time when they’re away on tour and aren’t involved in training. Even now, it’s a good excuse to get away with my pals for a few days, although when it comes to competitions I leave Josh to represent the family. As I said earlier, he is something of a natural with a golf club in his hands and won the Royal Lytham Under-17s Championship when he was only ten.
Daniel and Sam are also good golfers, so I never have any shortage of partners, though that proved costly when I played in a competition with Daniel last year. He wanted a car and I had been planning to buy him a very basic model. Young men have their own ideas, however, and he was keen to have one of the new breed of Mini. As I was pretty confident that my pocket wouldn’t be at risk, I wagered him that he could have the Mini if he beat me in a club competition. My pre-round confidence evaporated on the sixth hole when it took me 12 shots to get out of a bunker. Unsurprisingly, Daniel ended up with the Mini. To my pals at the golf club that sand trap is now known as Mini Bunker!
My interest in soccer developed through being taken by a neighbour to watch Blackburn Rovers, and my first major sporting outing was to Wembley to watch England beat Scotland in the days when the two nations met on an annual basis. It is a pity that the old cross-border rivalry isn’t given an airing on the field of play these days, as it is in rugby union, but I suppose the opportunity for rival fans to cause mayhem is a good enough reason to have called a halt.
Even though my father had played for Fylde, my main interest in rugby as a boy, living in Lancashire, was limited to rugby league. Wigan was just a few minutes away so I was more interested in the feats of Billy Boston than in what was going on at Twickenham, although we did watch the internationals on television and I also have a vague recollection of being taken to watch Fylde. While in my final year at Cressbrook, in 1964 I was also taken to Edinburgh to watch England play Scotland at Murrayfield, though I little thought at the time that I would one day lead England to a Grand Slam at the same venue. For all of us it was just a great weekend away from the confines of the school. Sport provided me with many opportunities to escape the academic life. I was a typical lad in many respects, and lazy when it came to school-work. Deep down, I expected to end up working in the family business, so there was no academic incentive, despite the efforts of my grandparents when Alison and I went to stay in their bungalow in Blackpool for the summer holidays. They had turned the front room into a small classroom, complete with three desks, and they gave private lessons. I remember being there one summer when Sir Stanley Matthews’ son, who developed into a good tennis player, was having lessons.
For some reason the family also had the habit of staying at Blackpool’s Norbreck Hydro for three days every year; a massive treat, because it had an indoor swimming pool. My father would travel with his garden spade in the boot of the car and we would take it on to the beach and spend all day building dams. Those breaks were always over far too quickly, and then it would be back to Kirkby Lonsdale and the school routine.
Initially, soccer was the winter sport at Cressbrook, and I played in goal. I suppose it linked very well with my wicketkeeper role when playing cricket. I don’t think we won many matches but I was just happy to be involved, preferring the sports field to the classroom. We weren’t allowed to neglect our studies but I had little thought of cap and gown at that stage in my development. So it was perhaps a little ironic that I ended up, much later in life, with two honorary degrees – one from Manchester University and the other from the University of Central Lancashire. I couldn’t help wondering as I received those what my father would have thought could he have seen me standing, resplendent in gown and mortarboard, before 500 students and their parents, while someone delivered a eulogy outlining why Bill Beaumont was being honoured with a degree!
After initially concentrating on soccer we switched to rugby at Cressbrook and, although I started out at prop, I quickly made a dramatic move to fly-half. They didn’t have anyone else and I fancied my chances because I had quite a good boot on me. I wasn’t that big in those days, only starting to grow rapidly from my mid-teens, but I can’t claim to have been the quickest fly-half in the business. I did have my moment of glory, however, shortly before leaving Cressbrook, when I dropped a goal against a school side that hadn’t conceded a point for two years. I was quite proud of that!
Most of my contemporaries when they left Cressbrook went to Sedbergh, Will Carling’s old school, but my father had other ideas. The plan had been for me to go to Repton, but that was a soccer school so father opted instead for Ellesmere College in Shropshire, where the headmaster was Ian Beer, who had been at Cambridge University with him. Ian, of course, had a distinguished rugby career and represented Cambridge on the RFU committee for many years, being honoured with the Presidency in the 1993–94 season. From Ellesmere he went eventually to Harrow, where Roger Uttley was the rugby master. I spoke at a dinner in Ledbury for Ian many years later, and when he introduced me he dwelt more on my lack of academic achievement than on my sporting triumphs. In response, I observed that this didn’t say a lot for the teachers. Touché.
By the time I moved to Ellesmere College I was used to life as a boarder but it still came as something of a shock because I switched from being a big fish in a little pool of 90 pupils to a small fish in a sea of nearly 400 boys. Most of them were older and bigger than I was. Ian Beer’s later comments on the study front were fully justified because I found academic life a real drag and simply couldn’t be bothered with learning unless it was a subject in which I had a particular interest – which usually meant one involving a ball! I enjoyed my rugby at Ellesmere although I had no thought initially of pursuing it seriously. If I indulged in boyhood dreams, they involved opening the batting for Lancashire at Old Trafford. Indeed, I took so little interest in rugby that the only name that meant anything to me was Richard Sharp, the England fly-half. Yet I knew all I needed to know about our leading cricketers and also vividly remember watching England win the soccer World Cup in 1966. Apart from Fylde I wasn’t aware of other rugby union teams but was always keen to discover how Blackburn Rovers and Blackpool had fared in the Football League.
The sporting facilities at Ellesmere were excellent and that helped me through my school years. If you are into sport then, wherever you are – at school, college or just generally in the community – you will always have mates, and in my time at the college we were a pretty mixed bag. Because we were very close to the border there, quite a few of my rugby mates came from Wales and one of those was Mark Keyworth, who played his club rugby with Swansea and got into the same England team as I did in 1976. We suffered a whitewash in what was then the Five Nations Championship and that was the end of Mark, unfortunately. Those were the bad old days of English rugby when players came and went, often without trace, with frightening regularity. A lot of my fellow pupils also came from abroad – the sons of servicemen, diplomats and businessmen who were based overseas – and I recall one boy staying with my family in Adlington for a month in the school holidays because he wasn’t able to join up with his parents. I suppose I did a lot of growing up at Ellesmere as well as involving myself in the usual pranks that healthy, energetic teenage boys get up to. We used to sneak out of school, I remember, to visit the local pub. Fortunately, it had three entrances, so we had our lookout and our escape route all worked out in case a master walked in and caught us supping ale. There was also a girls school not far away, which now and again joined ours for the occasional concert, but we tended to regard girls as though they had arrived from another planet. The problem with boarding schools in my time was that they were almost monastic in some respects. The interaction of a mixed-sex school is, I think, far healthier.
I continued to concentrate rather more on my cricket than anything else but also played for the school team at rugby, usually at fly-half or full-back. There were no invitations to take part in county or international trials but I somehow don’t think I would have made the grade in the back division, so I’ve no grumbles on that score. But, since I have started to take note of what goes on, I can’t say that I have ever been greatly impressed by schoolboy selections. Some youngsters are pushed all the time by their masters, and if the latter also happen to be selectors you know who will get into the teams. I was interested to read in The Daily Telegraph how Ben Cohen, who has developed into a tremendous wing, played in England schoolboy trials but never got a look-in because he didn’t go to the right school.
Some schools, invariably those in the independent sector, have a tradition of producing rugby talent and, over the years, some senior schools have offered scholarships to promising youngsters based on their sporting, rather than academic, ability. With regional and national selectors being drawn from leading schools, there was always a feeling that their own pupils had an unfair advantage in the pecking order. Today, fortunately, boys from schools that are not as well established in a rugby sense can still progress through the club structure now that we also have regional and national age-group sides drawn from clubs as well as schools.
Selectors also seem to ignore the fact that some players are late developers, this being an aspect that worries me about the current academies, valuable though they are. Not everyone plays top-class schoolboy rugby and, despite what we achieved later, neither Fran Cotton nor I ever played for Lancashire Schools. Fran did make it to a trial in his final year at school but that’s as far as it went, although, knowing Fran as I do, I’m pretty sure this provided him with a goal to aim at. I have also found that some players peak early. They achieve a great deal at schoolboy level but can’t cope with not being top dog when they progress to the senior game, so they simply drift away. The door has always got to be open for players who don’t make it into the academies.
At club level things have changed. When I played the game the county side was the avenue in the North towards national recognition, whereas in the Midlands clubs like Coventry, Moseley, Leicester and Northampton provided the route to international status. Now, however, international players are likely to be drawn from any of the 12 professional clubs in the Zurich Premiership, and, whereas clubs like Bath and Leicester dominated almost unchallenged for long periods, enabling them to attract the best young talent, there is now a far better spread of talent throughout the entire Premiership. Any player performing well in that competition is going to attract the attention of the national coaches and, with England selection being down to head coach Clive Woodward, there is none of the horse-trading that I suspect went on between selectors from different parts of the country in the old days.
Since I was a youngster, much more has been done through the clubs in terms of developing players, largely through the introduction of mini- and junior rugby. That was essential because of the way team sport was discouraged at many schools simply because someone had the daft idea that life shouldn’t be about winners and losers. They didn’t want youngsters to feel either the elation of victory or the pain of defeat but, whatever they say, life is competitive and I feel sorry for those kids who will grow up with no real knowledge of the concept of team sports. I have a real passion for such sports because I believe they mould you for life generally. You learn how to work together, how to show humility in success and how to cope with setbacks. Regardless of what some of the politically correct brigade might desire, we are not all equal and never will be. And, wherever you go in life, there will always be someone in charge.
I left Ellesmere when I was 17, with no inkling of what the future held for me. At that time I assumed I would work in the family business, play cricket for Chorley and perhaps play rugby at my father’s old club, Fylde. Occasionally I have to pinch myself when I think back to how I was suddenly pitched on to a rollercoaster ride that brought its share of joy and heartache but one that, despite the dips and the empty feeling in the stomach these brought, I wouldn’t have changed anything.
