Читать книгу Jason Leonard: The Autobiography - Alison Kervin, Jason Leonard - Страница 9

Argentina 1990 was a disappointment. The England team did not play well and many people believed that the tour should not have gone ahead in the first place. The guys had gone to Argentina off the back of a packed season, and there was the World Cup the following year. There was a feeling that the players would have been better off staying at home and getting some much needed rest instead of getting beaten up in South America! But for me, it was a personal triumph. The papers had been complimentary about me, I’d got on well with the other internationals, earning their respect, and I had an offer to join one of the country’s biggest clubs – not bad for a few weeks’ work.

When I got back to England, I had everyone ringing me up to find out how I was, how I’d enjoyed myself and what I thought of the other England players. All the Barking lads tried to get me out for a few beers and I have to confess I took them up on a few offers, but I knew that I had some important decisions to make – so I couldn’t go out partying and reliving the tour every night.

The most pressing decision concerned the Harlequins offer. The chance to join the club was very exciting, but I was determined not to get caught up in the flattery of the offer, and to make exactly the right choice for my rugby career. It wasn’t as easy a decision to make as it might appear for I felt great loyalty to Saracens and was safe and comfortable there – why change and cause myself more aggro?

I felt I needed to spend time thinking about what to do, but I knew I couldn’t hang around for too long because the Harlequins offer wouldn’t last forever – someone else would be brought in to the front row if I didn’t grab the chance. They needed a prop, and they would get someone else if I wasn’t interested. I sat down and thought about the pros and cons.

The pros were: it made perfect sense to leave Saracens and join the West London club because there were so many experienced players based there. I only had two caps, but I was already the most-capped forward at Saracens at the time and I knew that it would be harder to learn and progress if I wasn’t surrounded by players who were at the top of the game. If I went there, I would be playing at loose head, Brian Moore would be my hooker, Andy Mullins my tight head; Paul Ackford would be the second row behind me and Troy Coker the other side of the second row. Then there was Mick Skinner at blind side, Winterbottom on the open side and Chris Butcher at No.8. Where on earth would you find a better line-up than that? The choice between Saracens and Harlequins came down to the choice between playing for a pack where I was a big fish in a small pond, or a pack in which I was a small fish in a big pond.

But there were downsides to leaving – there was the fact that I really liked it at Sarries and after just a couple of seasons, I thought of myself as a Sarries boy at heart. I wasn’t sure how I’d get on playing for a different club on the other side of London – I didn’t know if Harlequins was really ‘me’. It was still an amateur game, so it was important to take into account the way you felt about your club, as well as what it might doing for your career. The other negative factor in joining Quins was all the travelling. I had been used to going to Saracens which was just down the road in Enfield. I could jump in the car from Barking and make it in around 30 minutes but it would take three times as long to get to Quins, and that was after a day’s hard graft lugging tools around and doing manual work. Then I’d have to be on the train back again and I’d get home at around midnight with a full day’s work to look forward to the next day. They were difficult times. I know many people look back on amateurism through rose-tinted spectacles and talk about how glorious it was. Well, not for the players it wasn’t. We all had to combine training, playing and working, and sometimes it was extremely difficult.

The other thing I had to consider was an offer that Saracens had made me when I returned from Argentina. They were aware that I was being ‘courted’ by other teams, and the Harlequins offer was well known, so the club officials had to think of something to do, to try and keep me. In the amateur days, it was difficult for a club like Saracens to keep a player from a major side because they couldn’t just make a counter-offer to a player and give him more money to stay – none of us were being paid in the first place. In the amateur days, clubs had to think of other ways to entice and keep players. Saracens’ way of keeping me was to offer me the vice-captaincy of the club. It was a flattering offer, but it simply wasn’t what I wanted to do. I was 20 years old and just wanted to be the best rugby player I could. What was the point of diverting my attentions and efforts to captaincy at that stage? The issue of captaincy has never bothered me in the slightest, anyway. I’m a player through and through. When, later in my career, I ended up being linked with the England captaincy, I found that other people became far more excited about the whole thing than I ever was. I know it’s an honour to be captain of a side, but for me, it’s a greater honour to be the best player in that side. Having said that, I was flattered by Saracens, offer, and the fact that they thought so highly of me was an enticement to stay at Bramley Road.

I was in this frame of mind – totally confused about what to do – when I went to Saracens for the first training session of the season, the first since I had returned from the tour.

In the end it was the events that occurred at that session which forced a decision out of me. I went along knowing that I’d be the fittest there by a long way because I’d just come back from a hard tour of Argentina. Most of the others hadn’t played since the previous rugby season so they’d be winding themselves back up, whereas I had spent the last few months being wound up to the maximum. The session was odd from the start, mainly because none of the Saracens first team coaching staff were at it – they had gone on holiday. All the players turned up at Bramley Road, where Saracens were playing at the time, and prepared for the session.

Saracens was a lovely little club back then – very friendly and full of familiar faces. But Bramley Road, the ground, was not so lovely. Whenever it had been raining, the pitch would be three feet of mud with loads of dog shit from the local dogs all over it. We would often find other little gifts on the ground from the neighbours too (most of whom hated the players because they said we made too much noise at nights and at the weekends). There were things like broken glass, nails and ring pulls. It meant that when you went down on a loose ball in training, you could come back up with a cut on your leg, arm, face or whatever part of your anatomy touched the ground. There were people at Saracens whose limbs went septic overnight after playing on the pitch and they had to be rushed to hospital to be pumped full of antibiotics.

Then, when there hadn’t been much rain, the pitches would have the opposite problem and they would be rock hard. It was like training on concrete, and if you went down on a loose ball you’d worry about breaking your shoulder.

It was the hard pitch scenario for the first session of the season and our coach for the evening, was a guy called Ivor Jones who, as far as I knew, had never coached anything higher than Hertfordshire first division. He had certainly never coached a national standard first team before, and it seemed to me that he had something of a chip on his shoulder about the standard of players he was working with. Being an old-style prop, he obviously felt most at home when talking about set-piece play, so he decided that we were going out to practice scrummaging.

I said that I thought this was a bad idea because of the state of the pitch, which was like concrete, and the guys would be better off doing some fitness work and ball handling on the hard grounds. It was the first session of the season – we really didn’t need to practise our scrums with any urgency, especially since there was no way we could even get a stud into the ground, it was so hard.

‘Look, we can’t scrummage on this pitch, mate. We can’t get our studs in,’ I explained, carefully and politely.

‘That’s OK. Wear trainers,’ he barked back. I was feeling slightly less polite by this stage.

‘What? How can we get any purchase on the ground in trainers?’

Ivor didn’t answer. He just led the way to where he wanted us to work and we followed him in our trainers, muttering about how ridiculous it all was.

The results were painfully predictable – every scrum hit the ground, every time. We just couldn’t get any grip on the turf at all. Bang – both packs hit the deck, face down in the dirt. Up we got and bang – back on our faces again. I can remember my nose smacking against the hard ground and wondering whether I’d break it by the end of the session. We were also putting real strain on our unprotected ankles and knees. It was all crazy.

In the end I said, ‘I’ve had enough of this. You’re a fucking idiot. We can’t scrummage like this’

‘No, no. It’s because you’re not doing it properly, that’s why it’s not working,’ he insisted.

‘Not doing what properly?’ I asked.

So he then started to go through my technique and tried to tell me exactly where I was going wrong. He said that, for starters, I was binding wrongly. I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, no one in the England team seems to think my binding is wrong.’ I just gave him a look which implied that I didn’t agree with him and for the next four or five minutes it was like something out of the old Harry Enfield sketch with the old git in the father-in-law sketch: ‘You don’t want to do it like that, you want to do it like this. Not like that, like this.’

In the end, I just looked at him and said, ‘You are so fuckin’ wrong.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that. I know what I’m doing – I’m the coach. Listen to me,’ he replied. As if the fact that he was calling himself ‘coach’ automatically meant he deserved respect. By then, I’d had enough. ‘I’ve just spent the summer with the best hooker and tight head in the world and that’s how they like me to fucking scrummage. If it’s good enough for them, then it’s fucking good enough for you.’ I flounced off the training pitch like a prima donna – it was all high drama stuff! As I left, I could hear him asking, ‘Who the fuck’s that?’

When he realized who I was, I think he must have been mortified, but it had taught me a lesson – I needed better than this. I wanted to be somewhere where quality training was taken for granted. It might sound a bit over the top to say it, but the training session at Saracens was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I could suddenly see, with crystal clarity, that I wanted to be with the best players and the best coaches in the country. The barrel-shaped boy from Barking was going to sign for the poshest club in the world.

My first move was to ring Will and Pete to check they were still interested. They were. ‘Any chance of coming round, just to see what the club’s like? Can I come to a training session or something?’ I asked. They said that wouldn’t be a problem, so along I went. Dick Best was the coach at the time – one of the best coaches in the world, and several notches up from what I’d experienced in my last session at Saracens. I enjoyed every second of it and from that point I knew that I would leave Saracens and join Quins.

So I had to go back and explain to the guys at Saracens that, despite their offer of vice-captaincy, I was going to join Harlequins. They were so disappointed because they had hoped that the lure of captaincy would keep me at the club. At one point I had most of the Saracens hierarchy in my flat, desperately trying to convince me to stay. They had all returned from holiday by this stage and couldn’t believe that I was off. I had everyone including the club president in my flat, trying to persuade me to stay. I can still picture them all piled into my tiny front room in their Saracens blazers, urging me to stay. But I had made up my mind by then. I knew what I wanted to do. By this stage, what had happened in the training session was behind me. The officials had heard about the pre-season training and they kept assuring me that nothing like that would happen again, but it wasn’t about the session – it was the fact that I had enjoyed watching Dick Best training the boys at Quins and felt confident that I could build a better future for myself there. Slowly, I got the Saracens guys to realize that this was the right move for me – it wasn’t an impetuous decision based on one dodgy training session, but a considered approach to my future. I ran through the players at Harlequins, and – to their credit – they all accepted that it was a good move for me and wished me luck. Saracens still retain a special place in my heart to this day. They are good people and no one was more pleased than I when Nigel Wray stepped in and sorted out all their finances for them.

The only problem I encountered after leaving the club was with a committee man who was particularly upset that I was leaving – I think he saw it as a personal betrayal. It practically broke his heart. He used to drive round to my flat and sit outside in his car, trying to get me to change my mind. Eventually he realized that nothing was going to change and his car disappeared.

It was time to move on. I have to admit that I was worried about joining Harlequins. Despite the reassurances of the players on the England tour, I knew it had a reputation of being run by gin-swilling former public schoolboys and I had heard all the rumours about players being paid to play and being given good jobs in the City. I didn’t really know what to expect.

Rugby was going through a difficult time back then. The sport was in a period of vast change. Many called it shamateurism because the steadfast ways of the amateur players were being eroded. We were allowed to capitalize on our rugby skills a little by being paid to give talks or attend evenings, but we couldn’t be paid specifically for playing on the pitch or for anything to do with the playing side of the game. This led us into all sorts of awkward corners because none of us was sure where playing started and stopped. We were only famous because we were players, so our fame was playing-related. If we capitalized on fame, were we capitalizing on rugby? At one stage, the RFU responded by saying that it meant we could not appear in any promotional literature in our England rugby kits but, for example, it would be OK to appear in England football kits. That’s how ludicrous and unsophisticated the distinction had become. Even lawyers, like Brian Moore, had no idea what the complicated and fast-changing rules of amateurism meant any more. What chance did I have?

When I first walked into the Twickenham clubhouse, I was pleasantly surprised. It was nowhere near as stuffy as I thought it would be. Of course, there were a smattering of regimental types and most people associated with the club had been educated in all the ‘right’ places, but there was a warmth and a community spirit at Harlequins that, I admit, I had not expected. I felt welcome immediately, and all my fears about how I would cope drifted away.

I never felt out of place at Quins – not at any stage. Obviously I came from a more working-class background than the traditional Harlequin, but there were many other players like me. I was aware that, under normal circumstances, I’d never have come across some of the city slickers, but I thought it was good that rugby was bridging the gap and expanding both my, and their, world.

I remember when I first got there, some old guy shook my hand with great gusto and asked, ‘What school did you go to?’

I told him and he looked at me blankly as he repeated, ‘Warren School, Chadwell Heath, huh. Where’s that, then?’

‘It’s in Chadwell Heath,’ I replied, adding, ‘It’s a comprehensive.’

‘Oh really,’ he said.

That more or less killed the conversation, one that I must have had around a hundred times in my first few weeks. The people at Quins were accustomed to being able to converse with one another by exchanging school information. The question was asked of newcomers to the club as soon as they’d exchanged weather details. But after a few weeks, they realized that it wasn’t a conversation that got us very far and so they stopped asking.

I’m reluctant to be very critical of those amateur officials that ran the sport back then, though. Although they could be frustrating at times, and many of them had a narrow outlook on life, they meant well, and they effectively ran the club. I had no problem with them.

Indeed, the only difficulty I had in those early days was the awful travelling – from one side of London to the other, three times a week. My work was still in east London, so I had to be over there during the day – I didn’t want to move or sacrifice any part of my working life because I had no idea how long I would end up staying at Harlequins. I was worried that one injury or a drop in my standard and I’d be back at Barking. If I’d started working in Twickenham, I’d be in a mess. I was also enjoying working with Dad, and the bunch of lads that I’d got to know. So I made the long journey across London every Monday and Thursday for training, and on Saturdays to play. Even if we were playing away, the bus still went from Harlequins, so I still had to get over to the other side of London.

I did eventually move a little bit closer – not all the way because I was still concerned about my future with the club – as far as Battersea. This made life easier on several counts, mainly because Paul Ackford used to drop me off at home as he went past my place in Battersea on his way back to Clapham. After a few weeks, it became a ritual. I’d jump in the car with Ackers and he’d tell me some tales about life in the police. He was a police superintendent in those days and I remember him telling stories about disarming bank-robbers – they were all colourful stories and I often wondered whether he made some of them up. If he did, it was good practice – he’s a leading journalist now.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been interested to see how ‘amateurism’ was interpreted at Harlequins, and many of my rugby mates at Sarries and Barking kept asking whether I used to come back into the changing room to find my boots stuffed full of money. There were so many rumours about Harlequins flouting the amateur regulations – but the answer was ‘no’. Despite Quins’ reputation for throwing money at players, they didn’t break the rules of amateurism – the only thing they did was to offer big City jobs to players. These jobs allowed players the flexibility to get to training sessions but they always had to succeed on their own merits. They weren’t handed a job on a plate – they had to be good enough to achieve the standards required. I appreciate that giving out jobs was not in the strict spirit of amateurism, but it was not contrary to the laws either.

The idea of a big City job never appealed to me – I’m not a desk job sort of guy. Besides, some of those guys used to work very hard, putting in 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. days, then rushing back down to The Stoop to train in the evening. I never felt it was the best preparation for the game – how can you ask your players to put in a good training session when they’re working such long hours? I’m sure that there were lots of financial perks if you were involved with a big City job, but it never interested me in the slightest.

Instead, the club tried to help me by getting me work near the ground and through the membership. There was a note put up in the club, and handed out to some of the members, saying that if they wanted any building work done, they should contact me. I got one old woman who was a Harlequins member who wanted me to fix her gate. That was it. It makes me laugh now when people talk about the old shamateur days and how we were all raking in the money. My only experience of shamateur sport was fixing some old dear’s gate, and I was too embarrassed to charge her!

Colin Herridge, a great friend of mine, was the secretary of Harlequins at the time, and he would try to find me jobs in the Twickenham area on Mondays and Thursdays, so that I wouldn’t have to leave work ridiculously early to get to the club. Colin hated to see me running in to training, already late, and having come from a tough day’s work on site followed by a trek across London. But he appreciated that I couldn’t leave my job early because I was paid by the hour, so if I left early, I got paid less.

As I became better known as a player, Colin would get me to do personal appearances in local pubs and clubs to help earn me some money so I had enough petrol for the car to get around town. It was an odd time when I first began at Quins in 1990/91. I was just starting to make it in international rugby and my face was in the papers, people were beginning to recognize me and I was being asked to go on television shows – it must have looked as if I was earning a fortune when in fact I was just trying to make ends meet.

Luckily money and material possessions have never mattered much to me and they didn’t matter at all in the early days when I was young and loving the way my rugby career was going. All I wanted to do was improve on the field and at Harlequins I was in exactly the right place to do that. The guys really looked after me in that first season and they all took a hand in improving my technique immeasurably. I developed more in the first season at Quins than I had at any other time in my career. It was great.

There would be Brian Moore on one side, advising me on my binding, Paul Ackford working with me on my technique in the line-out and Winter-bottom talking to me about my movement around the park. And, above all that, there was Dick Best.

Best has become a bit of an enigma – there are a million and one stories about him and how hard he is on players, but no one really knows him very well. I feel I got to know him through my time at Quins, and my time with London Division, and he is the most astute, forward-thinking coach around. Having said that, he has a temper that you wouldn’t believe – he didn’t get the nicknames Sulphuric and Beast for nothing. Having said that, I never got one of the tongue-lashings for which he was famous. I just got cold stares and sarcasm when I upset him – I’m not sure whether that’s worse!

I first met Dick when I turned up to a London Division U21 training session. I was still at Saracens at the time and arrived with a few of the boys who’d been drinking with me till the early hours of the morning. I was in a terrible state and had slept all the way to the session, which meant that the guy who’d been driving us had got lost and delayed us even further – not exactly what you want to do when trying to impress a new, well-respected coach.

When we walked in the changing room, Paddy Dunston, one of the guys I was with, went straight up to Dick Best and apologized, whereas I went to get changed. It wasn’t because I was being rude but I just wanted to get ready and get out on the park. Also, there were several guys who I hadn’t seen for ages, so I wanted to catch up with them. By the time I got out onto the pitch, most of the players had had their meeting, warmed up and were about to start training – I was a good hour late. I walked past the training pitch, past Dick, and towards where the players were gathered.

‘Last time I saw you, you were pissed in Newcastle,’ I said to one guy, patting him on the back. ‘Ah, and how are you? I hear you’re not with the missus any more. Sorry about that,’ I said to another. It was all just light banter. But the players I was talking to were looking nervously over my shoulder. I couldn’t work out what was wrong. Then I turned round to see a face like thunder.

‘Hello, I’m Dick Best,’ said the guy.

‘I’m Jason Leonard, nice to meet you, mate,’ I replied and shook his hand, smiling, politely.

‘Get one thing fucking straight – I ain’t your fucking mate,’ he said. ‘Now go and train.’

Dick was a tough coach, and he made my life hard that day – but he was fair. I was late and stinking of booze, so what was he supposed to do – congratulate me?

But by the next year, when I broke into divisionals, he’d become more vicious. I remember turning up late to one of his training sessions then, with Jeff Probyn. We got changed at record speed and ran out onto the pitch.

‘Hello, Dick. We’re here,’ I said.

‘No good to me. Just run round the pitch till I call for you,’ he replied, without even looking round.

‘Which way do you want us to run?’ I asked, determined to be as awkward as possible.

‘I don’t fucking care which way you run. Just run.’

We ran around that bloody pitch all evening. All evening. We were talking most of the time as we went round – telling bad jokes and gossiping about everyone. Then, at the very end of training, Bestie called us over to do this thing called the Tunnel Of Love that he does at the end of every session.

First, he put us into two lines, with each of us holding tackle bags. The remaining players had to run down the tunnel of bags to the other end. You had to try and do it without either being knocked down through the tunnel or knocked off your feet. There are around 15 bags each side in the tunnel, so it’s a chance for everyone to knock seven bells out of everyone else. Guess who went through the tunnel first? Yep, me and Jeff, after we’d been running non-stop for about two hours.

I think Dick was quite miffed that we both managed to get through without being dumped, because he’d specifically instructed the boys to knock us over. But we made it through.

Dick has his moments and he can flare up, but it’s usually when he feels his authority is being undermined in some way. As a coach, he is absolutely superb and his coaching skills have played an enormous part in my growth and development as a player.

He is extraordinary at retaining information about players. He once did a team talk, before one of our games at Northampton. I said to him, ‘Do you want to say a couple of words?’ and he said, ‘No, not really.’

I managed to persuade him just to say a few words about the opposition and what we would be in for that afternoon until eventually he agreed, whereupon he gave a short talk which was the most incisive piece of analytical summary of the opposition I’ve ever sat in on. I think he realized that a lot of the boys were tense that day, so he put us at our ease. First he went through Northampton’s star players, telling us where they were going wrong. He started with Ian Hunter and said, ‘Great player, great runner, great defender, one of the original big English backs, apart from injury he would have had a lot more caps. He plays on the wing and full back, sixteen stone and fit as you like, a superb athlete. If you run at him, he’ll cut you in half and knock you over, but he has his weaknesses – for example, he’s weak going into the comers. If you kick the ball into the corner, away from him, because of his height, he finds it quite difficult to bend down and pick it up.

‘That’s when you’ve got to strike him. You can’t wait for him to have picked the ball up because he’s a very precise kicker. You have a very good chance of charging him down if you go for his feet while he’s about to kick to touch, because he takes so long.

‘Also – just a quick warning for you – if you see him tuck the ball under one arm, he’s going to run. He’s not going to pass, he’s going to run.’

Despite playing in the England team with Ian Hunter and playing against him for Quins, it wasn’t until Dick actually said all that that I realized how he played. When Dick had said it all, I realized how astute he was. I thought, ‘Jesus, I play with this bloke all the time and I’ve never noticed before what he does.’

He added lots of comments about other players as well, some insights into the way they played and some funny stories about players to lighten the mood – most of them rude. We ended up going out and beating Northampton at Franklins Gardens. It was great.

But while Dick had a real talent for understanding rugby and remembering exactly what he’d seen in a game, his man management was never very good. He is an emotional sort of bloke, which he admits himself, and does tend to wear his heart on his sleeve. If he believes something’s right, he will say it there and then rather than wait for a quiet moment. If he doesn’t agree with something, he stands up and says he doesn’t agree straight away, sometimes without thinking things through properly.

Sometimes he’d start having a real go at players – I’d urge him to calm down and not fly off the handle, but his response was always the same: ‘Why should I?’ Some players had a very difficult time with him and, ultimately, that is why in my view he left Harlequins. I’m sure he partly blames me for what happened, because I was a senior player, but there was nothing I could do to save him at that stage – the rest of the club had decided they couldn’t work with him, and that was the end of it. I respected him enormously and know I’m a far better player for having worked with him. He’d give me new ways that I could train and play and he was always right. He made life easier and never wanted thanking or pats on the back – he just wanted to get on and do his job. Sometimes I’d go up to him after training and say, ‘Cheers, Bestie. That worked really well.’

He’d just be standing there, taking a drag of his fag, nodding his head and rolling his eyes. I really enjoyed my time with Dick for Quins, England and the Lions. One thing was for sure – there was never a dull moment.