Читать книгу Matt Dawson: Nine Lives - Matt Dawson - Страница 9

I can still see it now. The look on the faces of those Springboks as I feigned to pass infield that night in Cape Town. South Africa knew best. They were going to mash the Lions, send us home with our tails between our legs. Yet here they were buying perhaps the most outrageous dummy in rugby history.

South Africa, the world champions, were 1/5 favourites to win the series. A whitewash was the popular bet. In the eyes of the home media we were pussycats, not Lions. We could not buy respect. ‘There are only 47 people and their close family who believe that we’re going to win,’ said our coach, Ian McGeechan, and that was the size of it. None of the media thought we would, no one across the world thought we could. And as for me playing a pivotal role …

There were just seven minutes left on the clock in Cape Town when Tim Rodber turned to me and called the ‘Solo’ move which would change my life for ever. We were down by two tries to nil and the ‘told you so’ headlines were being prepared, even if there was only one point separating the sides on the scoreboard due to a combination of South African indiscipline and Neil Jenkins’s golden boot. Rodders was always ‘picking and going’ because our gameplan revolved around setting close targets. But he was getting munched all the time. So when we were awarded a scrum 35 yards out from the home line, he came over to me and said, ‘Daws, just go, mate. I’m getting bashed. Do a Solo. Do a Solo.’ It was a move we had rehearsed in training. The scrum-half would break blind and then have the option of feeding the winger on the outside or the number 6 inside.

To this day I remember the whole move in slow motion. Flanker Ruben Kruger had been constantly breaking his binding on the short side and I had been pointing at it all match to try to get referee Colin Hawke to penalize him. This time, perhaps sensing the ref’s stare, Kruger held firm. I saw my chance and went. I like to think I am a little bit quicker than Rodders, and I got round Kruger and then past their number 8, Gary Teichmann. Ieuan Evans was on the right wing, and he cut inside on a run I didn’t even see. He always ribs me that he would have been in under the sticks, but he went so early that I had no chance. Nor was Lawrence Dallaglio in position to take a pass. On my own, my only chance of avoiding being smashed into touch by either Teichmann, scrum-half Joost van der Westhuizen or full-back Andre Joubert was to throw a dummy and give myself a couple of yards to work with.

So I threw it – a theatrical, over-the-top number – to precisely nobody. As I did so I started slowing down, and to my amazement the Boks stopped. Even Joubert, coming across, hitch-kicked. I couldn’t believe they’d all bought it, the suckers. It was a score which won us the match, which convinced us all beyond doubt that we could win the series, and which, quite simply, stands as the single most memorable playing moment of my career. Even now people ask me about it. They know exactly where they were when I touched down, what pub they were in watching the game, how they reacted, even how drunk they got. And that is very special. To be involved in a game and then to create that one moment which triggers a memory that will stay with people for life is very, very special. I feel very privileged to have done that.

Yet at the time I scored that try it felt no different to scoring for Marlow under-8s. I had no perception of how big the game was, I think because I had been third choice, then second choice, then thrown in. It had all happened so quickly. I hadn’t had time to think ‘Oh my God, this is the biggest game of my life’. I was even quite relaxed and chilled before kick-off because I had very simple jobs to do and there was no weight of expectation on me.

My critics, particularly Austin Healey, will tell you I only made the tour party because Geech was my club coach at Northampton. I had been dropped by England the previous autumn, then ruled out of the 1997 Five Nations campaign by injury. By my reckoning I was at best third-choice scrum-half behind Wales’s Rob Howley and Austin. But as South Africa were to find out, Lions tours throw up tales of the unexpected.

I had known little of the British and Irish Lions until 1989 when a friend of mine, Phil Chamberlain, somehow got himself on a four-week trip to follow them in Australia. It sounded a good crack, but I didn’t really know what he was on about. I was a spotty teenager, mad for rugby, playing it all the time, but because you never saw Lions rugby on television in those days I didn’t really understand the concept. I thought it must be something like the Barbarians. I can’t even recall watching the matches in 1989. But I did rip a page out of Rugby World magazine which had the Lions motif on it, and stuck it on my pinboard.

By the time the next Lions tour came round in 1993 I was living with Tim Rodber, Paul Grayson, Brett Taylor and Nobby (Ian Hunter). Amazingly, given that I had never seen a Lions Test, even on TV, my name was bandied about as a possible tourist. There was quite a bit of press saying I should be New Zealand-bound, and I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even been capped at that stage. Anyway, it didn’t happen, and while Nobby was selected, Rodders and I went to Canada with England on a non-cap tour, both of us returning early with hamstring injuries.

Fed up, the two of us went ever so slightly crazy. We spent pretty much every night of the summer in a bar in Northampton called Aunty Ruth’s. The night before Nobby’s first game, against North Auckland in Whangarei (a game in which he would last only 38 minutes before dislocating his right shoulder and being packed off home), we both went to bed battered only for Rodders to wake me up with the tune of the house, ‘Remedy’ by the Black Crows, blaring in my ear. He had rigged up the sound system in order to ambush me and had a speaker under each arm. ‘Come on, we’ve got to watch Nobby!’ he yelled. That was my introduction to Lions rugby.

Looking back now, I wonder whether 1993 would have caused the same furore as the 2001 tour to Australia had rugby been a professional sport. There were a few murmurs of dissent coming back. Will Carling, for one, didn’t really seem interested. Wade Dooley returned home following the death of his father and was then barred from rejoining the tour. If you do happen to have players who are unhappy, it does filter through. But 1997 was very much like 1989: everyone got on famously and it was just the most fantastic of tours on and off the pitch.

From the moment my name was linked with the Lions in 1993, I decided I wanted to be on the 1997 tour. The love affair had begun, and it has never gone away. For all the unhappiness in 2001 (more of which later), I would go on another one tomorrow. The Lions is the ultimate rugby dream. Playing for England is probably the greatest honour I’ll ever achieve – certainly captaining my country was – yet the Lions is the best of the best. It’s the history and the tradition, as Geech said on the eve of the 1997 tour: ‘What we have got is four countries playing as one. The mantle that you carry and the challenge that you have is to put a marker down in South Africa about the way we can play rugby. A Lion in South Africa is special. The Lions are special. The legends go with it.’ The Lions mean everything to me. That’s why I would stand by what I said in 2001. I’m that kind of person. If things upset me or I feel they could affect my squad, my family or my friends, I’ll speak out.

The 1997 tour passed by in a huge blur. I do remember having my head shaved bald by Keith Wood. He was only supposed to give me a number two, but sneakily he removed the grating and ploughed a stripe down the middle to leave me no choice but to have the lot off. I remember also Paul Grayson returning home with a groin injury after playing only one game. Grays’s injury was a big disappointment, and I did miss him. I’d lost my partner, and it was a cue to go and find myself a little bit. I was 24 and a little bit too reliant on the friends I had. It was time to stand up for myself if I wanted to make any impact at all.

I started only one game before the Test series began and assumed I was battling it out with Austin for a place on the bench, as Rob Howley was quite rightly in the number one spot. My aspirations were no more lofty than that, because at the beginning of the tour I had a feeling, from the way the practice sessions went and from his selection for the first midweek game, that Austin was ahead of me in the pecking order. Sometimes you just have to accept that. On tours like this you can’t get above your station and assume you’re going to be in, even that you’re going to be fit. That was the mistake Graham Henry made with the 2001 Lions, pencilling in his Test team before he left Britain. Look at the Test team in 1997. Paul Wallace – no one in their right mind would have put Paul in that team. Absolutely nobody. Jenks at full-back, Alan Tait on the wing, Jerry Davidson and Richard Hill in the pack ahead of Eric Miller and Simon Shaw. You have to stay open-minded. Yes, Geech played certain combinations, but he mixed things up so that at no time did the squad feel divided between the Test team and the midweek dirt trackers. From start to finish we were all in it together. We trained well, and there was great respect among not only the players but between the players and management. You’re never going to be best mates with everybody, of course, but the whole party was prepared to do absolutely whatever it took to make things work. If that meant Rob Howley wearing the number 9 shirt, so be it. A place on the bench would still be a massive achievement for me.

Then Rob dislocated his shoulder against Natal on 14 June, just seven days before the first Test. All bets were off.

It came down to being in the right place at the right time. Austin had made two starts to my one, in a 64–14 win over Mpumalanga on 4 June. I felt I’d played well in that game, done all the things I was supposed to do, been very busy and organized. I’d even scored a try for good measure. And I was on the bench in Durban when Rob’s shoulder went. One man’s misfortune is always another’s opportunity. And it was a huge opportunity. I had most of the game left to play. If I came through all right I would probably be playing in the Test team a week later. I was on trial as never before.

Rob’s wife, parents and in-laws had flown out to see him play in a Lions series, and he was inconsolable in the dressing room afterwards. ‘Rob dissolved into a fit of despair’ was how Dr James Robson described his immediate reaction to the news that his tour was over. But at the time he left the field I had no way of knowing how bad his injury was. I just had to get on with it; there wasn’t any time for me to get emotional or to flick two fingers in the direction of Jack Rowell and Les Cusworth for dropping me from the England side without explanation. I was playing against Natal with a Test jersey at stake.

This was another match the Lions were expected to lose, yet we ran out 42–12 winners, which made the reference to us as ‘pansies’ on newspaper flyers in the Cape Town area on the day of the opening Test all the harder to fathom. Funny that they weren’t reprinted for the Monday edition. All of a sudden the debate was about whether a 2–1 series win for the Boks could really be termed a success.

Geech had said at the start of the tour that the 13-match itinerary was akin to playing ten Five Nations games and three World Cup finals. His lieutenant, Jim Telfer, used another analogy. ‘This is your Everest, boys,’ he whispered. ‘Very few ever get the chance in rugby terms to go for the top of Everest. You are privileged. You are the chosen few. Many are considered but few are chosen. It’s an awesome task you have, an awesome responsibility. They do not rate us. They do not respect us. The only way to be rated is to stick one on them. There’s no way we go back. We take every step forwards. Nothing, nothing stops us hitting the fucking maximum.’

We did that at Newlands. We stuck it to them. The downside was that the second Test in Durban a week later would be nothing short of ferocious. The Boks knew that, Geech knew that. He primed us for the onslaught but assured us that if we absorbed the best they could throw at us and stay patient, our time would come, and we would go for the kill. ‘We have proved that the Lion has claws and teeth,’ Geech said. ‘We have wounded a Springbok. When an animal is wounded it returns in frenzy. It does not think. It fights for its very existence. The Lion waits, and at the right point it goes for the jugular and the life disappears. Today, every second of that game we go for the jugular.’

What unfolded at King’s Park was probably the toughest encounter I’ve ever experienced. But it did not cross the line between fair and brutal, unlike the way South Africa played at Twickenham in autumn 2002. They weren’t cheap-shotting, but they were certainly throwing their bodies around. The surge of power that came our way was unbelievable. As had been the case in the first Test, the home side lost it in the fourth quarter through indiscipline. Amazingly, given the end result, we didn’t threaten their line once. In fact, we got nowhere near it. They scored three unanswered tries and Jenks kicked us to victory from our own half. Yet tactically we were fantastic, not only to amass 18 points with the limited ball we had, but to shut them out in the last half-hour. Admittedly their goalkicking was so shocking as to be almost unbelievable, but let that not detract from one of the greatest defensive displays of all time.

We knew the home side would be like men possessed after blowing up in Cape Town, and that if we got too loose they would punish us. So we set out to frustrate them. We had John Bentley and Alan Tait chasing my box kicks down the touchlines and smashing into the receivers, while on the occasions we did run it, Scott Gibbs blasted up the middle. Time and again South Africa would let frustration get the better of them; we would then kick the penalties to touch and drive upfield from the set-piece, where the Boks would kill the ball and Jenks would kick the points.

With four minutes to go, and the scores locked at 15 apiece, Gregor Townsend drove for the line and the ball came back to me. The last thing on my mind was a drop goal. It hadn’t been mentioned. You tend to either hear the call at the previous set-piece, or a trigger call from your fly-half in behind you. But we were driving and driving and I thought it had to be on out wide. Someone must be open. So I was looking for a wide ball to a first receiver. Instead I found Jerry Guscott getting ready for the money shot. It was a case of, as he would say, make it or break it. He made it. After a score I’m usually the first to yell ‘Concentrate!’ but when that ball soared between the posts we all went absolutely nuts. We had to somehow regroup, slow our pulses and refocus on defending our line. There was still plenty of time for the game to be lost.

It was then that we drew on the inspiration provided for us by the midweek boys, who had scored 52 points at altitude against Orange Free State four days before. The Test team had not travelled to Bloemfontein for the game, and I watched it in the room I was sharing with Gibbsy back in Durban. It was an awesome display, described by our team manager Fran Cotton as ‘one of the all-time great Lions performances’, and it gave us all a massive lift. The feeling was that if they were playing rugby like that we had to live up to their example. Here was a team that had flown to altitude on the day of the game, had endured the sickening loss of Will Greenwood to an injury which could have cost him his life (‘James Robson thought he had lost him,’ Fran admitted. ‘He thought he was going to die on the field. He was unconscious, fitting. He’d swallowed his tongue and was biting on his gumshield. He could not get any reaction from his pupils at all for a minute. He thought he’d gone’), yet had still managed to score six tries. As we dragged one another into position to repel yet another Springbok assault on our line, we tapped into that defiant spirit. Our bodies cried out for mercy, but we held firm. Against all odds, the series was ours.

Ellis Park, the spiritual home of South African rugby, was supposed to host the party to end all parties. And so it did, but the hosts had anticipated Johannesburg celebrating a Springbok series triumph rather than a Lions drink-up which left the management with a £3,000 bar bill and me nursing the mother of all hangovers. South Africa won the third Test, having finally realized that it pays to play a goalkicker. A combination of injuries and a couple of days on the piss after the second Test proved our undoing. We were still desperate to win, though; there was no feeling that it was just a jolly. Even though we had won the series there had been the usual southern-hemisphere bleat of ‘at least we scored tries’ and a feeling around the place that they were better than us.

But try telling that to the record books. History will not remember it that way.