Jonny: My Autobiography (58 page)

Arriving in Auckland is like linking up with my past. I catch up with Tana Umaga who is now coaching over here; he looks physically very fit and is in great form. I love seeing Pat Lam, who is training for a marathon – rather him than me. And it is brilliant to see Inga again and his family. I love that.

Harley Crane comes round to the team hotel one day to take me out for a Thai meal. He is driving a low-riding Holden Ute and I jump and land straight on a half-drunk coffee on the passenger seat. Typical Harley. But it’s great to catch up on old times and interesting too; he’s got a family and a young son, and working and still playing and coaching rugby. He has the trappings of a grown-up life, but he is still hilarious, still hasn’t changed.

Then when England move down to Dunedin, I catch up with some other old Newcastle teammates – John Leslie, Brent Wilson, Cory Harris – all fabulous people. I also get a chance to see my Argentinian friends. On England’s one day off, we go down to the beach, and down there too are Argentina, our first opponents. It’s a little bit awkward but it’s really good to see Juan Lobbe, so we exchange a brief hello, and then agree to leave it until after the game.

But even people I don’t know here know me. Awareness levels are through the roof in New Zealand and people here know their rugby so well. If I am out and about in Toulon, people might just say, in passing, hey, how are you? How’s the team? But here, you put your head out of the hotel and they don’t just want to say hello, they want to analyse the entire World Cup with you.

I feel a bit cramped by this. And it is quite clear that nothing we do here will go unnoticed.

The day before the game, as always, Floody and I have the window to do kicking practice with the match balls at the stadium and I find that some of my kicks are drawing left to right. The Otago Stadium is indoors, so it can’t be the wind.

When you’re kicking with wind, a ball will start straight before it catches the wind. That is fine, you can play wind like that, you get used to it. But these balls are drawing straight from impact, so you line up your kick and before you even have a chance to look up, it’s somewhere else. That is a bit disturbing but I just tell myself that tomorrow I will be even sharper, even more precise.

The next morning, I do more kicking practice, but with practice balls, not the match balls, and I am absolutely nailing them. However, later at the stadium again, warming up before the game, I am kicking from a tight angle, I have Dave Alred behind me and I say to him: Mate just watch this, I’ve hit this match ball from here three times and it’s missed near post three times.

I then say: Now watch this. I put down one of the other balls, a training ball, not a match ball, and it goes straight through the middle. Again and again, I’m hitting the same kick every time but it’s non-match ball straight through the middle, match ball to the right, non-match ball straight through the middle, match ball to the right.

Going into the game, I still feel it’ll be fine and for the first kick I’ve got, from the right hand touchline, I just pick the centre of the posts, smash it and it goes through the middle. I’m really happy with that.

The next one is fairly simple, from about 20 metres in from touch on the left, and I’m thinking I want to hit middle but look up and just watch as this ball keeps shifting further and further to the right, almost as if it’s being pulled by a piece of string. It goes right across the posts. I want to shake my head and throw my arms up in the air but that won’t help anyone. The real problem is now I don’t know which balls are doing what or why. From then on, it’s a joke.

The reason it’s a joke is because there is no constant involved any more. When there is a constant, you can get feedback from what’s going right and
wrong, you can re-adjust, refine and correct yourself. The more you kick, you’re ever more aware, ever more sensitive to feedback, so you know how to bring about the changes you require. The problem is that when you feel like you’re smashing it and the feedback is telling you that everything is great, yet the ball is swinging both ways and missing one way and then the other, you’re left with a very difficult situation.

With every kick that doesn’t go over, you hear the crowd hushing even more, you are even more aware of them talking to each other, the collective murmuring round the ground, the impressively loud jeering from the large number of Argentinian supporters. Ah, another one, he missed that one as well. And to think that throughout the Six Nations, plus those games against Wales and Ireland before we came out here, I missed only a single kick.

In all, I hit eight kicks. One of them I’m definitely not happy with, one of them I didn’t hit the exact line I was after, the other six I am really happy with. Only three went over.

Thank God, then, for Ben Youngs’ try. We scrape through 13-9. I know I’ve got to get better, I’ve got to work harder. But also I know that I am kicking brilliantly and the balls are going everywhere.

The morning after the game I am out very early training with Dave; all that’s on my mind is that I’ve possibly let the team down. But we’re back to the training balls. We work on new stuff and different stuff with ever more attention to detail to help me smother the ball and hit an ever more assured line. It’s going even better. I’m just kicking so well in practice; this is just the start of another great week’s training.

We move up to Queenstown to train for the week and I am out again kicking early the next morning when I find out that there’s been some incident regarding the boys going out for some beers.

Here in Queenstown, I do actually get away from the training pitch myself to enjoy some of the fabulous attractions; we go in a helicopter over some glacier lakes to a gold mine, and some of us go clay pigeon shooting (I’m not as bad as I thought I’d be, but Manu is a natural at this too). But I don’t go out for the beers. It’s been years since I’ve gone out after an England game; the last time was in 2007 and that was because it was the end of the World Cup. I’m not saying this is right; there’s a balance to be struck and I’m probably the wrong side of one half of it.

When I was 20 or 21 years old, with England, I would go out after some games. I needed the mental clear-out before I could move on to the next one, I needed to liberate myself from all the pressure. I enjoyed it too. So I don’t have a view on other people. It works for some, not for others.

What I cannot understand is the naivety of people going out to the extent that they did and it not crossing their minds it would find its way back to the media. We’ve already been warned several times about what it’s like here, especially in the World Cup. You need to be a little reserved, careful, aware. With a camera on pretty much every phone these days, how could it not come back?

What is required is individual responsibility and not Johnno at his wit’s end because the inevitable has happened and the night out has found its way into the newspapers. We’ve worked a huge amount on accountability on the field; the off-field thing just seems to be coming last and this is a conversation that needs to happen.

So we gather in the team room and people have their say and there are two sides to it. Some of the guys say you can’t just stop doing everything
because of the media, which is perfectly fair. On the other side of the argument is the big question that we need to ask ourselves: What are we here for and what have we worked so hard to be here for?

If there is any consensus, it’s that we just need to be very careful from now on. But it is a conversation that I feel almost completely unable to contribute to. My own position is so far on the obsessive side of preparation and professionalism that I fear my point of view is not going to be shared by anyone.

Where I will not let my point of view go unheard is after the Georgia game. I watch the whole game from the bench and we win 41-10, but we don’t adhere to the values that we had set at the start of this campaign about being ruthless, professional and together as a team. It looks like we lack urgency in what we’re doing. There are also individuals playing for themselves, not showing respect for the opposition, throwing unnecessary fancy passes, not playing for one another.

The next day at the hotel, we have a team meeting with a harsh analysis of the game. At the end of it, Lewis speaks to the squad and when he is done, I ask if I can piggy-back on the back of his comments.

With his permission, I tell the squad that I cannot believe that it has come to this, where our defence coach, Mike Ford, who is as passionate as they come, has had to ask a group of players to buckle down and give it a bit more. I say that there are things we’re doing in training that we’re not doing in games and mistakes that we’re making that we’re not correcting, that there’s sometimes a lack of hunger on the field, a lack of desire to get things right.

For me, the pure basics of rugby are not passing, catching, kicking; the basics are simply working yourself into the ground and doing whatever it takes for 80 minutes. The only reason that you don’t change things, or that you don’t work hard enough, is that it doesn’t matter enough to you. And unfortunately, what that ultimately means is that the other 29 guys in this squad don’t matter enough to you.

I don’t often speak to the squad and hardly ever in this way, but I carry on. I say no one ever regretted giving it their best shot, but from now on we have to show how much it really matters to us. When we get things right, we’re a great team and we can do whatever we want. But when we don’t, we’re just average. We’ve got one chance at this. If we don’t take it, the regrets will last forever.

When I am done, my words are followed by silence. I hope it’s the right kind of silence. Mark Cueto then comes up to me and says: Well done. He’s a guy with great values and one of England’s constant shining lights. He says to me: It just sounds right when you say these things.

I hugely appreciate his support. I tell him: Mate, it’s all I think about, it’s all I’ve got.

I might have just summed up my entire life in a two-minute speech.

After that first game, against Argentina, I’d learned my lesson with the balls and so for the Georgia game, which I didn’t play, l went back to where I was in 2007, writing down on a piece of paper which of the match balls does what, and then memorising it for the game.