Jonny: My Autobiography (48 page)

Blackie would never allow that ethos to be placed upon his players. He knows how we pull together. He knows it always begins with the team and the players. Basically, he just told it how it is, and Thomo chose to tell him that he is no longer needed.

Typical Blackie, his parting shot was humble and thoughtful, and showed where his priorities always lie. He asked Thomo to look after the players and give us an environment in which we can go out and thrive.

There is only one person I would possibly choose to work with in place of Blackie and that’s Sparks. So it’s a huge relief when Thomo puts him in place, but also an interesting decision because Sparks’s and Blackie’s philosophies are almost exactly the same. So now I work with Blackie
away from the club and I love working with Sparks within it. But with what seems to be unfolding behind the scenes, I do start to fear for the future of the team.

For most of my life as a professional rugby player, I have been advised to lay off the kicking practice a bit. I’ve been told to spend a little less time out on the pitch and a little more at home with my feet up. And I cannot argue with the advice. My injury record over the years – particularly the groin injury – is proof that there was some mileage in what everyone had been telling me. I just found it hard to accept.

The Newcastle medical team have now got me keeping a diary of how long I kick for and how many kicks I hit each day. They’ve been threatening me with this for two years, ever since my groin problems, and I’ve done an expert job of dodging it. Even now, I rarely fill it in honestly, which probably renders it pointless.

Back in those earlier England days, Clive was never afraid to let me know his concerns that I was doing too much. I still get it from Pasky and Simon Kemp. Even Ronan O’Gara, on Lions tours and after England–Ireland games, has told me I might be taking it a few steps too far.

It’s not that I don’t want to take the advice on board. In fact, deep down I know it holds the key to taking me to the next level. The problem is that my best intentions of finishing up my practice in good time are too easily overpowered by the need for perfection, and by the fear and anxiety that builds in me when things don’t go exactly to plan. The way I still see it, the only solution is to stay out practising until I have literally kicked the feeling away.

But now, the current England management have fresh, undeniable evidence with which to confront me.

As the 2008 Six Nations season rolls around, the players are being told to wear a new device, a GPS monitor. This allows the coaches to collect data on each of us, and to see the exact distance we have covered in training, which in turn gives them an idea of how hard we are working.

Where I go wrong is that I forget to take my monitor off when squad training is finished. I keep it on for my kicking training afterwards. This means that for those hours when I’m kicking, every time I jog there and back to collect the balls is notched up as part of my day’s work.

In the build-up to the Six Nations, the GPS stats show that I am doing well over seven or eight kilometres a day. Before games, that is too much. The evidence is there before me. Not that I find it any easier to respond to; after all, by my standards, these are already shortened sessions.

The GPS does not just show distance covered, it shows your average and maximum speed. Before the Wales game, the coaches are fascinated to see that my top speed is significantly, astonishingly faster than anyone else’s. They call me in. How come? What are you doing that we don’t know about?

The answer is that not only did I forget to take my monitor off for kicking training, I forgot to take it off when I was in the car on the way back to the hotel.

At Newcastle, we have a new, world-class prop, who doubles as a useful guitarist. Carl Hayman is the latest member of the band, although I’m not exactly sure that’s what you’d call us.

I’ve been playing the guitar for a few years now, and we have a great recording studio at home. It all came about courtesy of a music company called Roland. I happened to mention in an interview that I was trying to learn the piano. Roland got in touch and offered me a grand piano in exchange for an interview and some photographs for their personal use. Great deal, except the house didn’t have room for a grand piano, so I asked for a few other things instead.

So now when we rock out, we do so in style with amps, effects pedals, microphones, a digital piano, a 24-track recording studio and a fully equipped digital drum kit for Sparks. I think the expression is: all the gear, no idea.

Pete Murphy was our lead singer, but when he left Newcastle, we had to find a stand-in. John Stokoe, the club kit man, more than competently took the mic. Toby Flood is our resident bass slapper, and when he is able, Graeme Wilkes, the club doctor, pops along to show us how it’s really done. He is a genuinely good pianist.

The type of music favoured by this group with no name is very broad. We like a bit of Motown and have played a whole range from Stones to Oasis, from Arctic Monkeys to Pearl Jam. In fact, we are open to any suggestions, as long as they involve a decent guitar solo for me and something difficult for Sparks to get his head round on the drums. The song ‘What You Could Have Won’ by Milburn nicely ticks both boxes.

At our height, some of us have made cameo appearances in Graeme’s band, The Klack. So yes, I have played live, up at Slaley Hall. Great fun, but boy do I hate performing in public. There’s only one public stage I ever want to go out on and it’s not this one.

But I love messing around with the guys in our studio. I can get pretty immersed. It is probably the only other environment where I feel the same buzz as when I’m playing rugby or training hard with Blackie.

Carl has introduced a new element. He has started turning up in fancy dress and he insists that we join him. The latest is Carl on rhythm guitar, dressed as a nun, Sparks on drums in an off-grey leather jacket and incredibly low-slung beige slip-ons, looking like a sleazy seventies second-hand car salesman, and me on lead, wearing black cowboy boots, viciously tapered stone-washed jeans, a black playboy vest and a long black wig, all from the charity shop. We make quite a sight now as well as quite a noise.

At last, I can sign England shirts again.

The Sporting Icons case has finally been to court and two of the company’s directors have been found guilty, one of cheating customers and the other of supplying forgeries.

I never actually had to appear in court myself, although footballers Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Ian Rush all gave evidence.

The memorabilia dealers all now know our stance on this business. Since 2003, over 2000 items bearing my fake signature have been removed from eBay, and without one single legal challenge from the seller.

For all the time and work, and all the reading and thinking, that I have put into following my spiritual pathway, I cannot change the core of who I am.

On the morning of the Wales game, before we leave for Twickenham, I find myself caught up in the biggest bout of pre-match nerves I have ever experienced. I am 28 years old, I have 70 odd caps, yet this is as bad as it has ever been.

In my room with an hour to go before the coach leaves for the game, an old thought process rifles through my mind. If you could offer me a way out now, would I take it? Right now, I probably would. I’d probably leg it.

I phone Blackie in a panic. Blackie knows the right messages to give me. He helps calm me down. So I go to the game. I’m ready to play. I don’t leg it. I don’t even know where those intense nerves suddenly came from.

The game starts well. In the first half, we are really effective. We run the ball well, we feel confident, we make good decisions and build a lead. But in the second half the game changes. Danny Cipriani is off the bench, making his England debut at centre, and I throw him a long pass. There is nowhere for me to kick, so this pass is delivered knowing that it will bring up the Welsh defence and give him better kicking options and plenty of time to execute one of them.

But I overthrow the pass and it goes over Danny’s head, bouncing between him and Paul Sackey. Any sort of half-reasonable bounce would have been absolutely fine, but this one goes everywhere. We struggle to control the ball, concede a scrum and, a bit further down the line, they score a try.

We are still ahead, but then Balsh has a kick charged down and another Welsh try goes in. Now the game has genuinely turned and we need people to help manufacture scoring opportunities. But there is a whiff of panic in the air and we have too many players committing themselves to rucks that we have already won when we need them to take responsibility elsewhere. We lose 19–26, and afterwards, the questions from the press to me are all about that pass. I think I can see where this is going.

A week later, against Italy in Rome, Danny unluckily has a kick charged down and a good victory becomes a close one. And then, when we beat France in Paris, Jamie Noon has a great game at thirteen, but I win Man
of the Match, and the press ask me was your performance today a kind of response to the criticism you got after the Wales game?

The question is about as pointless as any you could ever get. The stories are already written in the journos heads and they are now just waiting for my permission so that they can go ahead and fill in the blanks. But I won’t play the media game; it’s like banging your head against a brick wall. I just tell them that I appreciate being given the opportunity to play for England. That might not be what they want but, on my spiritual pathway, it is genuinely how I feel.

But if, in the public eye, I was up again against France, I am apparently down again after Scotland. We go to Murrayfield, where the conditions are terrible, the wind is shocking for the kickers and we struggle to assert any dominance. I don’t feel that our structure and game plan are troubling them at all. I try to manufacture something out of nothing but I’m forcing it. It’s what I do when I sense we are idling towards defeat. Someone has to step out of a structure that isn’t working, put his head above the parapet, and that’s what I try to do. What I’m trying to show on the field is that I’d rather take a few risks and win this than do nothing wrong and lose.