Читать книгу Jason Leonard: The Autobiography - Alison Kervin, Jason Leonard - Страница 8

I always imagined that hearing I’d been selected to play for England for the first time would be special. I thought I’d answer the phone one day and the manager would grandly announce that I’d been chosen to represent my country, how proud I should be of myself and that he’d congratulate me. I even thought I might shed a tear. I never imagined that it would be Lawrence Consiglio, telling me that he’d read in the paper that I’d been selected. ‘Hello mate,’ he said. ‘It says in the paper you’re playing for England. You never told me.’

‘That’s ’cos I didn’t know. Thanks for telling me,’ I replied, and suddenly I was an international player.

After that call, there were loads more, as people saw the papers and talked to other people. I had relatives, friends and rugby mates on the phone, all congratulating me and telling me how pleased they were. I don’t remember feeling anything at the time except surprise. I was amazed that I’d had no letter telling me about my selection, and I thought it was odd that all these people knew before me. I had wanted to be the one to tell Mum and Dad, not the other way round. In the end, I thought I’d better go and check for myself, so I headed off down to the paper shop. Sure enough, the squad for the 1990 tour to Argentina was listed, and in the four props there was a J. Leonard from Saracens Rugby Club. It had to be me.

The day was full of phone calls and questions as everyone I’d ever known called up to say ‘well done’. I spent the whole day hoping for something from the RFU confirming it was true. I couldn’t believe that they weren’t going to tell me themselves. Was I going to find out all the arrangements for the trip and the Test team from the papers as well?

People think I’m exaggerating when I talk about what it was like back then, but it really was that bad. It was as if the selectors thought that their job was finished once they picked the side. I understand that if you’ve been selected, you’ll find out soon enough, but when it’s your first cap, it would be nice if they could mark it in some way by telling you before everyone else. Still, I suppose they knew the players would find out somehow, so they didn’t worry too much about telling us.

At least I didn’t get a ‘2p or a 10p call’ – that’s the way they used to tell players whether they were in the team or not in the early 1980s. The selectors used to sit round a payphone at the Lensbury Club (remember, these were the days before mobiles). In front of them, they would have a list of the players they had selected, and those players who had not been selected. If you were selected, they would call you using a ten pence piece, and explain to you why you had been picked and what the arrangements were. If you hadn’t been picked, it was slightly different – they would use a two pence piece and before you could ask why you’d been dropped, the pips would go, the phone would cut off and the selectors would go back to the list and ring the next person.

I eventually got a letter from the RFU which outlined the plans for the summer tour. We were going to Argentina, and would be the first English sports team to tour there since the Falklands War in 1982. No wonder the selectors didn’t want to tell me!

The tour was to be headed up by Geoff Cooke, the England manager, and would be seven matches long, with two Tests. They were taking four props and were going to rest Paul Rendall, who was about 107 years old by this time. The selectors were desperate to find a replacement for him, so all the young props on the tour knew that this was their golden chance. Rendall was a big character in the England team at the time – he was known as ‘Judge’ because he performed that role in the kangaroo courts on tour. These courts were a regular feature of tours back in the amateur days and would be held whenever the tour judge saw fit, to put any players who ‘misbehaved’ on trial. Misbehaviour counted as anything from talking to a female to not talking to a female, to wearing inappropriate clothes. Players who were called out late to tours would often be tried for arriving late. It was just a bit of fun, a nonsense occasion when we would all take the mickey out of one another.

Because Judge was left behind for the Argentina tour, I knew that I was in with a good shout for the England loose-head spot if I played the best I could. Jeff Probyn was chosen as the guaranteed tight head and Mark Linnett and Victor Ubogu were the other two. Vic, Mark and I were specialist loose heads, so we knew we were up against each other for the honour of filling Judge’s boots, and there is no doubt that Mark was in pole position as we left Heathrow, bound for Buenos Aires.

Argentina was a difficult place to tour – it was hard work, and there was enormous tension and a feeling of imminent danger all the time. We couldn’t go out very much, and when we did leave the hotel, it had to be in numbers – always twos and threes rather than alone in case we came across some group in a bar or someone who took exception to us being English. We couldn’t relax because we were forever looking over our shoulders.

Because there was nothing to do in the hotel and the players had started to feel a bit cooped up, Chris Oti and Victor Ubogu decided to go out one evening, coming back to the hotel afterwards, raving about this great bar they’d been to. ‘There were loads of women in there,’ said Victor. ‘No men in sight, just full of women. It was a great place.’

As you can imagine, the England players thought this sounded like heaven on earth, so, the next night, half the England rugby squad went along with Victor and Chris, to find this magnificent bar. We arrived there and all seemed well until we had to pass a 6′5″ doorman to get in. I thought that seemed a bit heavy-handed for a bar full of women, but we carried on inside and wandered up to the barman, who was also about 6′5″ but with the added attraction of having a huge scar down the side of his face.

By this stage, I knew that this was no normal bar. We went to buy drinks, and they were 50p each. Every other place we’d drunk in, in Buenos Aires, it was about 15p a pint – even in the hotels. It was still a really cheap beer for us, but it was three times the price of the other bars, so I knew something wasn’t right. Why would there be such a huge mark-up? When I looked around there were indeed just girls in there – all sitting round the edge of the bar. The man with the scar on his face told us that the girls weren’t allowed to talk to us unless we spoke to them, so we had to make the first move. I couldn’t believe it – it was obviously a knocking shop.

I told Victor and said we’d better go, but he didn’t believe me. ‘No, no, Jase, the girls aren’t like that, they’re nice girls,’ he said. ‘Are you nuts?’ I replied. ‘Just look at them.’

Victor looked around the room, and I could see that he was slowly realizing exactly what sort of place he’d brought us to. We all made a quick exit, with Victor running behind, still insisting that the girls had all seemed very nice and very friendly, and not at all like prostitutes. Yes Victor, of course. We believe you.

The tour began with a game against Banco Nación. It was expected to be an easy, warm-up match because Banco were just a club side, but it turned out that they were not just any old club side – they were Hugo Porta’s side, and Porta was the greatest player in Argentine rugby. He was a real hero and the club were the current champions. Still, you’d expect an international side to beat them. On that day, Mark and Victor were selected, with Jeff Probyn on the bench and me in the stand. Mark was in at tight head because he had been on the bench covering loose head and tight head the previous season. England were beaten 21–29 in that game and everyone really laid into the team afterwards. Loads of questions were asked and selection plans changed. Mark had got himself into trouble by saying that he could play on both sides, because it was obvious to the selectors that he was a much more natural loose head.

The next game was against Tucumán, a team with a reputation for turning over tour sides. I didn’t know too much about the team or the place before the tour, but in the build-up to the game, and certainly during it, I learnt a great deal about the area. Tucumán is, apparently, the place that took the greatest number of casualties in the Falklands War, so to say that feelings were running high would be an understatement. You didn’t dare walk around the streets. It was extremely daunting. We decided that we should stay in as much as possible, which I found difficult because even staying in the hotel was dull – there were no televisions in the rooms, nothing to distract you from the situation. It’s odd how much it mattered, not having any televisions, considering we wouldn’t have understood a word of what was going on anyway, but it’s still nice and somehow reassuring to have a TV on, and to flick through the channels and recognize the programmes – like the news, sports updates and game shows.

In the end, I decided to ask why there were no televisions. The hotel receptionist said that it was because the New Zealand team had been there a few weeks before us, and after losing a midweek game, they’d all gone nuts, got drunk and thrown the televisions out of the windows. They clearly thought that all rugby players would be of a similar temperament, so had decided that we couldn’t have them at all. It’s one of the very few times that I’ve been treated like a rock star on tour.

When I heard that I had been selected for the game against Tucumán, I knew it was my big chance. Geoff Cooke decided to completely change the front row, and I would be playing with John Olver and Jeff Probyn, whom I’d played with in London divisional games. We’d worked well together, so I was optimistic. By this stage, I knew of the problems that we would encounter at Tucumán. I knew that at the best of times they were viewed as being the bad boys of Argentine rugby, and that the match against the All Blacks (the one that had led to all televisions being thrown out of the hotel) had been a fight from start to finish, with the game almost being stopped halfway through. So, I could only imagine what sort of treatment we would be in for, with the memories of the Falklands crisis to aggravate them even further.

Tucumán play in an orange kit and are known as the Clockwork Oranges. Indeed, oranges are a bit of a theme at the club – there are orange trees on the way to the ground, and the fanatical supporters pluck them off on the way to the game. To eat? What do you think? No. To throw at us! During the national anthem, we were standing there, singing our hearts out in order to be heard over the booing Argentinians, and oranges were flying past our noses. Just when we were starting to think we were onto a bit of a lost cause, we saw something of a commotion on the far side of the ground. When we looked more closely, we could see smoke and hear people chanting and shouting, then we could see what was really going on – they were burning the Union flag. They stopped the anthem halfway through before things got really out of hand.

Once the game started, the oranges kept flying. I remember being hit by them in the line-out, in the scrums and all over the field. The crowd was very close to the pitch – about 10 yards away – so we were covered with oranges all the time. And it was not just fruit missiles that we had to contend with. At one point during the game, Dewi Morris complained to the referee that he’d found a pair of scissors, an empty whisky bottle and a bath tap on the pitch. Who brings a bath tap to a rugby game?

The stadium itself was like a football ground, with barbed wire around the top of the fence to stop fans climbing over and onto the pitch – it was an intimidating place. When I first saw the barbed wire, I thought it looked awful, but by the end of the game, I was quite glad it was there to keep the supporters from us.

We played well in that game and we beat Tucumán 19–14, but to be honest, it had been little more than a brawl in places, and was like nothing I had ever experienced before. There was sheer bloody-minded violence going on – just nasty, vindictive incidents which were designed to seriously hurt our players. In the first ten minutes Wade Dooley was muscled up the wrong way (he really is the wrong person to punch and barge into) so he turned round and smacked someone, and that was it – the whole pack was in there. Suddenly, minutes into my first international game, I was about to get involved in my first international fight.

I don’t mind playing a hard game, and I believe there’s a place for that in rugby, but what we experienced in Argentina on that tour was completely out of order. What it did show me was how good it is having people who’ll stick up for you – I had Wade Dooley on one side of me, Peter Winterbottom on the other and Jeff Probyn a few feet away, so I never felt like I was going to be short of back-up. The opinion that the older players had of me after that was great – they thought I’d coped well, especially because I was only 20, hadn’t stepped back from anything and had given as good as I got. I had proved my worth and hadn’t backed down, which made me feel pleased that I could cope at this level and under all that pressure; and it also showed the selectors that I was tough and not afraid of confrontation. In games like that you can’t hold back and as I was a youngster with much to prove, I wasn’t going to be pushed about, so I was in the thick of it as much as the experienced boys.

Brian Moore later commented that seeing my contribution in that game was one of the highlights of the tour. He wrote: ‘The match at Tucumán, surely the most hostile place to play in the world, was a real test for the young players. It was patently obvious in that match that Jason Leonard, new to the squad at loose head, was going to be an outstanding player. He stood his ground. If the tour produced little of merit for English rugby, then at least it produced Jason.’

It’s great when teammates say things like that about you, but the truth is that it was the support of people like Brian, throughout that tour, that enabled me to perform so well. The pieces of advice I was given will stay with me for ever – I just ran around like a sponge for the whole trip, soaking up everything I could.

I remember, before that match, a lot of the players had told me to just concentrate on my own game. If you make a mistake, don’t harp on about it, forget it and carry on, that’s all you can do. I find myself saying that now to young players, because if you make a mistake in front of 70,000 people, you feel stupid. All of a sudden it can make you go into your shell and put you right off your game. I managed to follow that advice, and still do.

Because that first game had gone well for me personally and we had won it, I started to relax and enjoy the tour a little bit more. I’d got in one good game, whereas my two oppos had had a bad one. It meant that there was no reason to drop me, and I kept my place for the Test matches. In some ways it wasn’t very fair on Vic and Mark because they didn’t get back into the side then, and that was just because of one game on the tour. Anyone can have a bad game but they were quite harshly punished for theirs. I played in one more game after Tucumán, before the first Test – against a Buenos Aires team called Cuyo Select. We lost 21–22 but I felt I played pretty well, so I thought I might just make it into my first Test team.

The morning that Geoff Cooke was going to announce the Test team, I felt a little nervous. When I’d left for the tour, I never thought I would be in contention for a Test place, but now that things were looking so good, I was very keen to make it. I remember sitting there in the team room at the hotel while they read through the list, through the backs, and then the forwards – number one, Jason Leonard. Yes – I was in. The players congratulated me, as did Victor and Mark, and I sneaked out of the room to call Mum before we started training.

I was one of four new caps chosen for the first Test – Dean Ryan, David Pears and Nigel Heslop being the other newcomers. Together we participated in the dirtiest game imaginable. Punches and boots were flying and we took the brunt of it all in the front row. Jeff Probyn, playing at tight head, got a kick in the face. It was quite unbelievable. We won the match 25–12, and I crawled off the pitch, having had a real baptism of fire as a Test player.

The penultimate game of the tour, before the second Test, was against Cordoba and was captained by John Olver – a big schoolkid who is second only to Mickey Skinner in the practical jokes department. They spent the whole tour trying to hit each other in the face with cream cakes, or tipping buckets of water over the balcony at each other, like seven-year-old boys on a school outing. In the Cordoba game, like in most of the matches on tour, there were local referees who were very biased. At one point in the game, Olver felt the referee was offering our players no protection at all, and they were getting lumps kicked out of them, so he turned to the referee and said, ‘I’ve had enough of this, if you don’t sharpen up, I’m taking my players off the pitch,’ and walked away.

I was on the bench for the match and was standing on the sidelines at the time. I remember thinking to myself that Olver’s words might calm the situation down a bit, when all of a sudden Olver ran in and deliberately kicked one of the Argie players – the whole crowd went mad. We couldn’t believe he’d done it, but I think he’d got so sick of the whole thing that he decided to take the law into his own hands. Even us players on the bench were shouting ‘Get him off, get him off’ along with the crowd, because we didn’t want to look like tourists – we were scared for our lives. But somehow he managed to stay on the field and England won our third victory of the tour.

We lost the second Test 13–15, meaning we’d tied the series which was a massive disappointment. That second Test was the first time that Argentina had beaten England anywhere – so it was not great to be part of that particular record breaker.

Once the rugby was over, we all started to relax a little bit, and although we still couldn’t go out and about on our own, we were able to see some of the countryside in the organized trips that the RFU had set up. Argentina has some wonderful countryside and a traditional, rural lifestyle. Someone in the England team management decided that it would be good to see this lifestyle from the backs of horses.

We arrived at the foot of this enormous mountain at some ridiculously early hour and were given our horses. I took one look at mine and knew I’d have problems. It was clearly an unmanageable horse that objected to having 16½ stone on its back. The theory was that the horses would take us up to the top of the mountain where the views were beautiful, but my horse didn’t want to go anywhere. So everyone jumped on their horses and click, click off they all went up the mountain. Except me. My horse refused to move no matter what I did – talk to it, coax it, kick it. I tried all the things you see in those old cowboy movies but nothing worked – not a thing.

By this stage, the rest of the guys were really motoring, and had got halfway up the hill. Because the horses do this all the time, they just follow the backside of the one in front, so they were all off in one long line. But not my horse. I ended up dragging it up the mountain, swearing to myself as I went. I eventually got to the top about an hour after everyone else, and they were all killing themselves laughing. I’ve got a video of the whole thing somewhere because Terry Crystal, the team doctor, and Kevin Murphy, the physio, videoed me walking up the mountain pulling this horse behind me. They were laughing so much that the video shakes when you watch it.

By the time I got to the top, I was soaking wet with sweat and exhausted, but the trouble was that the rest of the team had been standing there for an hour, so by the time I made it to the peak, they were ready to go back down. I like to think that they assumed my horse would be OK going down, or they wouldn’t have left me. Unfortunately, my horse was far from OK going down and refused to budge, so I had to drag him back down the hill again. I’ve never seen a group of grown men laugh so much as when I got back down to the bottom, having pulled this horse all the way up, and all the way back down again. Everyone else had had such a pleasant afternoon, and had taken lovely pictures of the beautiful landscape – I was just completely exhausted.

The tour to Argentina was also where I was first introduced to the delights of the international players’ courts – one after the first Test, and another after the second Test. At the first court, Mark Linnett was judge in Rendall’s absence, and Carling was court artist for the trip. He was ordered to whiten the faces of Paul Hull, Chris Oti and Victor Ubogu and that’s how they were made to spend the evening following the first Test. After the second Test it was decided that revenge should be taken on the court artist, Will Carling, and it was with a painted black face that he walked into the dinner that evening. Geoff Cooke was not impressed. Five minutes later Carling was in the toilets, scrubbing the ink from his face. Cooke felt that the captain should behave more responsibly. It was the first time that I came across the expectations that people had of Carling how he was always expected to stand apart and be a leadership figure, yet in order to gain the respect of the guys had to get involved with us to a certain extent and not be seen as Cooke’s man. I think he was in a very difficult position.

The tour to Argentina was a real breakthrough for me, but it was a dire trip in every other respect. We’d drawn the series, been mauled wherever we’d gone in the country, on the pitch, and felt threatened wherever we’d gone in the country, off the pitch.

When I look back, it was a fascinating time in which to begin my rugby career. I was young and surrounded by some of the toughest rugby players around. I learnt so much, so quickly. It was also interesting because we were all still true-blue amateurs – we had to beat the Argentinians before we could go back to our day jobs. I had to take time out from chippying and I was absolutely broke when I got home. There was much talk in the papers of the increasing pressures on players and how unfair it was on them to have to train harder and play harder, but there was no real talk of anything ever being done about it. I really thought the sport would stay amateur for ever – we seemed so far away from anything professional at the time, being given just meagre expenses and absolutely no payment. The RFU took it for granted that you would lose money to play for England.

At the time, and through the early part of the 1990s, I was seen as one of the new, young, ‘professional’ breed of players who worked hard and trained hard. I was focused on fitness and was just desperate to be the best I could. Some of the older players like Paul Rendall and Jeff Probyn had grown up in an era where you only trained if it was forced upon you, whereas I never felt like that. I enjoyed training because I wanted to be a good rugby player.

Some of the players at Harlequins noticed how enthusiastic I was, and how much I wanted to improve my game, which I think appealed to them because Harlequins were a strong, ambitious team at the time. Players like Brian Moore and Peter Winterbottom started talking to me about the possibility of me leaving Saracens and going to Quins. Will Carling also asked me if I’d be interested in getting involved and said he thought it would be good for me because of the strength of the pack I’d be playing in – with Moore, Ackford, Winterbottom and Skinner. I knew Will was right and that my game could improve dramatically with those boys. But I told them I’d think about it and wait until I got home to England.

There was a rumour at the time that Will told me that if I didn’t move to Quins, I’d never play international rugby again. Like most of the rumours about him, it wasn’t true. He told me he’d love me to go to Quins, as did some of the other players, but I was never threatened and Will never suggested that I would or wouldn’t play for England based on which club I played for. The talks I had with the players in Argentina were interesting, but I still wasn’t sure as I headed back to England to think through my options and to start pre-season training with Sarries.