Jonny: My Autobiography (6 page)

How’s my defence?

Yeah, fine.

How’s my attack?

Yeah, fine.

Over and over, I play my airshots and study my style. It has to be spot on.

A few other lads are allowed to play with the dads’ side, but no one else gets such pleasure from fielding as Sparks and I do. They always field Sparks at deep, because he has such a long throw, and I’m usually in the covers because I love diving around. But our secret joy comes from throwing the ball in to the wicketkeeper, Mike Smailes. The game is to bounce the ball in front of him, just where wicketkeepers like it least, so he can’t quite get to it and the ball bounces up and hits his fingers. That’s just Bilks, Sparks and me – always aiming for Mike Smailes’s dislocated and increasingly more deformed fingers.

I enjoy the Wednesday nets the most. I love it when they pull out the catching cradle and three or four of us are catching at each end. What a great piece of kit the cradle is. As the light slowly fades, the crowd gradually thins out, and every Wednesday, the three Wilkinsons are the last to leave, still throwing and kicking balls to each other in almost complete darkness.

Sparks and I are back on the basketball court. This is the last time in our lives that we will ever allow ourselves to get into proper one-on-one competition.

It isn’t even supposed to be that way, but we have watched an NBA clip of Patrick Ewing and Dennis Rodman in a game between the New York Knicks and the Detroit Pistons. In one epic moment, Ewing is driving towards the net and as he leaps to dunk the ball, Rodman throws himself in the way and manages to make the block just in front of the rim of the basket.

We want to recreate the moment. It’s simple. Sparks is Ewing and I am Rodman. He wants to dunk, I want to block. Those are the roles that we decide upon, everyone is happy. So Sparks dribbles the ball once and then jumps off one foot and tries to dunk the ball into my face while I run in and try to block him.

We try it once and then we try it again. And the more we try it, the more competitive it gets. He tries to go harder and harder, and I’m trying more and more desperately to stop him, knowing that every time I do, that’s a win for me. We become more and more aggressive. I get so determined, I almost break my wrist over the rim of the ring. We start pushing each other hard.

It all comes to an end when he dunks one with full power, pulls the ring off the side of the house and it collapses over my head. We both know that we should not be competing like that, not against each other, and although we don’t say as much, we will never do so again.

But there is a happy ending to this episode. Bilks doesn’t put the net up on the side of the house any more. This time we upgrade to a spring-loaded, professional-style ring and a gangster-style chain net, which we put up at the bottom of the garage. We take Sparks’s ghetto-blaster down there and play for hours on end, but not competitively, never again.

AT the age of fourteen, I am not prepared yet for failure. I am sitting in Bilks’s car, having completed the second round of trials for the Surrey Under-15s, and I’ve got this excited buzz about what it could mean to be a county rugby player and what those games might be like to play in.

I have been told that, potentially, I am a good player. I have been playing in age groups above myself. So now I am sitting in the Mitsubishi Jeep, waiting for Bilks to come back from the clubhouse, where the selectors are announcing who’s made it into the squad.

I don’t like trials. You’ve got no lineout calls, no backs moves, you don’t even know the name of the guy you’re playing with. It’s a lottery whether you are behind a good pack or not, and your teammates are a bunch of guys who just want to show themselves up in a good light. In reality, for the purpose of identifying quality players, they are a pretty terrible idea.

But I am still not prepared for it when Bilks gets in the car, grabs the steering wheel and says sorry, you didn’t make it, they didn’t read your name out. That hurts. It hurts like hell.

But I get a second chance. Farnham is on the Surrey–Hampshire border, so I can trial for Hampshire, too. Bilks takes Andy Holloway and me. This time we both get in, me at number ten and Andy at scrum half, and we forget our complaints about trials. You don’t have the whiney stories when you’re on the right end of the roll call.

Andy and I seem to progress well together. The following year, we go from Hampshire Under-16s into the London South East Divisional team. Then we both get picked for the Under-16 England side and travel to games against Wales and Portugal, but they pick a guy called James Lofthouse at number ten. Andy and I sit on the bench throughout both games and leave with two perfectly clean sets of kit.

The selectors tell me I’m not demonstrative enough, too shy, too quiet. James Lofthouse seems like a nice enough guy, and it is pretty obvious that he’s stronger in the areas where they think I could improve. I can’t say the selectors are wrong with their advice to me, but in my head, I am still convinced that I am capable of playing rugby at that level.

During a Hampshire Under-16s game against Sussex, I make a tackle I’ll never forget. I line up the ball-carrier, but he steps slightly and my head gets caught on the wrong side, between my shoulder and the man. It hurts. Down my arm shoots a strange pins-and-needles sensation, heavy, burning, white hot. I don’t think I can possibly play on, but then the feeling passes and I’m OK. I carry on.

This is a stinger. My first. It comes, I am informed, from a compression of the nerves between the vertebrae as they branch out from the spinal column. The problem is that once you have had one, you have opened the door to more. And the more the door swings open, the easier they come. So I start seeing a physio at Aldershot Town football club and he does good things with my neck. The point is I want to keep playing and this guy is helping me get out on the pitch.

What I need is a run of three or four games without a stinger, because that helps me reset, shut the door – but get another unfortunate hit and the door is open again. Bang, bang, bang, I get another load in a row. One morning after a game, I wake up and I can’t move my head in any direction. This is scary. There’s no way I’m going to school today. Instead, I’m straight to the doctors for a neck brace. The nerve in my neck is trapped that badly.

Still, I hardly miss any games. But I have established a pattern; I might get one stinger followed by about three or four others, and then a break for three or four months without any.

It has developed into a bit of a chronic problem. This becomes pretty clear when the cricket season comes round. I am coming in to bowl and there it is again, that hot, burning sensation down my arm.

One of the unspoken rules in rugby is not to blame the kicker. When I miss six out of seven, though, our coach ignores the rule – as if I don’t feel the hurt enough already. But I am also being propelled towards one of the most significant moments in my entire career.

The game is London South East Under-18s against Midlands, I am a year younger than the rest of my team and I have one of my worst kicking days
ever. I don’t miss the uprights by much, but I don’t really quite know where any kick is going to go. And, as it turns out, any one of the six missed kicks would have been the difference between victory and defeat.

Naturally, I feel horrible. I know it is my responsibility and, later, when I go into the team meeting, I am pretty sure that everyone else is thinking the same – that I’ve let them all down, and it’s my fault.

As it happens, this is how the coach sees it, too. He says we played well in parts, we’d have won with better kicking, and assures the team that we won’t ever have a day like that with a kicker again. I don’t know where to look and settle for staring at the floor.

But I also have a solution – be obsessive about making sure this doesn’t happen again. In other words, go out and kick some more balls. So the next morning, I’m out there kicking, trying to drive the memories of yesterday from my mind. It’s not that I enjoy the business of kicking well; it’s that I detest the imperfection of kicking badly. I can’t get out there quickly enough to erase yesterday’s memories and ensure they are not repeated.

And I can stay out there for two or three hours if required. This is my response. Flick the Tunnel Vision switch and carry on with barely another thought in my mind.

A few weeks later, Bilks and I are driving to Bristol to meet a guy called Dave Alred. This has been arranged by Steve Bates, a chemistry teacher at school who is also the rugby master. Steve plays for Wasps with Rob Andrew and Rob works with Dave. He has arrived at Lord Wandsworth College, the school I now attend, at a good time. I’m at the stage when career advisers try to work out what you might do one day for a living. All I can say is I want to play rugby. They say that’s not really a career. Steve has given me hope that it might be.

Sending me up to see Dave Alred might help, he suggests, but I feel slightly ambivalent about it. Alred is a kicking coach, but I reckon I’m about a seven or eight out of ten kicker who has the occasional bad day, and I’m not quite sure what he can tell me about kicking a ball that I don’t already know.

I’ve been to a kicking clinic before, last year with the England Under-16s. All that happened that day was that we were asked who wanted to be kickers, a bunch of us, including props and number tens alike, put up our hands, and then we all did lots of kicking together. The height of the technical advice handed down was after one of my teammates asked should he be looking at the posts or the ball when kicking for goal.

As our car pulls into the Bristol University sports ground, what I don’t realise is that the guy I am about to meet is not only a kicking coach, he is by far the best in the world.

He is immaculately turned out in adidas gear – just three stripes from the top of his shoulders down to the underside of his feet. He seems to be about forty years old, but I later discover he is a wee bit more than that. We say hello and chat for a bit but he is quite keen to get down to business and I like that.

I assume we are going to kick some balls around, but he takes me straight to a flip pad and starts drawing. The diagrams are a demonstration of kicking through the ball, not across it, about the line of the kick, your body position and the feedback you feel through your feet.