Jonny: My Autobiography (23 page)

I have some specific hotel-room rules:

1 No rugby magazines. No rugby reading material of any kind if I can help it. This is definitely the biggest rule of all.

2 At least one item of contraband confectionery in the room. Chocolate preferably. I often travel with a bottle of Heinz Salad Cream, although that’s not quite so illegal.

3 Live out of your bag. Only if you are staying somewhere for weeks do you unpack, putting away clothes in cupboards.

On this tour, as well as Lawrence and Will Greenwod, I have roomed with Dafydd James. He’s a great bloke, a worrier like me and always concerned about being late. He was slightly perplexed about the number of times I lost our room key.

I have also shared with Neil Back, who is the tidiest man I know and cannot understand why anyone would live messily out of a bag. Whenever I threw some paper at the bin and missed, he’d be straight up to put it in for me the second it hit the floor.

Now I’m with Rob Howley, who is also a great bloke, but a rugby junkie and an arch contravener of Rule 1. Like me, he keeps notes of moves and strategies, but while I jot mine down in a notepad for an occasional peek, he draws all his up and sticks them on our bedroom wall. There is no escape.

Another of my rules is to make the night before a game as restful as
possible. But the eve of the first Test does not go to plan. I am lying in bed in the early hours when I suddenly realise I’ve left my dad’s match tickets up in the team room.

In a panic, I shoot out of the room and head for the lift. We are on the fourteenth floor. The team room is on the thirtieth. The lift won’t budge, so I take the stairs at a run. The team room is locked. I run down all the way to reception, literally counting the number of steps, trying to work out how much energy it’s taking out my legs, how much damage I’m doing and whether I’m losing the game for us there and then.

For a pre-game panicker, this is not good. But at reception, they help me. We even get a lift to work. I get my tickets and eventually I get some sleep. Not clever.

We wake to find a note from Blackie slipped under the door. It reads: ‘When you’ve worked so hard that you feel you may pass out and your body and mind seem to have been stretched to breaking point, and momentarily you think you’ve no more left to give, hear a voice remind you that there’s something far more important than anyone’s susceptibility to pain. It is the great tradition, belief and respect of what it takes to be a true Lion. It is then you will become a legendary Lion.’

When you get the chemistry right, everyone on the same wavelength, the right connection between players who have been pulled from international teams because they’re good at what they do, the result is exponential and you get a kind of boom effect.

That is what we get in the first Test. There are three minutes on the clock when we pick off a four-on-three down the left touchline, Rob Howley, me
and Matt Perry with Jason on the end. What Jason does, one-on-one with Chris Latham and just a tiny amount of space – I love it. It brings me back to that training session at Pennyhill. I sympathise with Latham, who is left clutching the air exactly like I did.

And I love Jason’s try celebration. Just pure emotion, no egotism. He celebrates for everyone. It fires me up, inspires me. Such an awesome try. His energy is infectious. And the crowd is very red and very noisy.

We don’t drop for a minute. From a midfield scrum, we pull a move – ‘Pace’ – crafted on the training field to bring in our strike runners, Brian and Jason, and it works to perfection. Dafydd James finishes it and we are still in the first half.

The second half has hardly started when Brian surges through the defence. He isn’t even looking in the right direction when he steps Matt Burke. A touch of exceptional individual talent and another try.

I feel the buzz. It feels special, a privilege to be a part of it. There is no formula for it, you cannot just repeat it or reinvent it. It is what it is and then it’s gone. But for now it reads thus: Australia 13 Lions 29.

We move to Melbourne for the second Test and the confidence remains with us. Again, we start well, even if this is not reflected in the score. We go in 11–6 ahead and it should be more.

We charge straight back into the second half and the game turns. I throw a pass over the top, but Joe Roff manages to stick a hand out and bat it up in the air. He intercepts it and he is away.

The scores may be tied 11–11 but that is nearly it for us. Australia score two more tries, we get a single penalty. I leave the field fearing a
broken leg. Rob Howley is out of the tour with a broken rib, and so is Hilly with a nasty concussion. The momentum has swung and the initiative has switched hands.

My leg is not broken, just severely bruised. The medics put it in a cast, tell me to keep it at 45 degrees and not to move for two days. So I do and I rack up a £250 room bill on films and room service.

By the Thursday, I am able, at last, to join training and stand side by side with the other survivors of this seven-week journey. We aim to play more of a kicking game, to keep the ball in their half. We know it’s come down to this, the third Test, one last push.

We wake up to another note from Blackie. He quotes from Rudyard Kipling, Albert Einstein and the world of sport – not a bad range. The message ends: ‘A great gridiron coach summed up the effect of determination like this: “Most players are about as effective as they make their minds up to be.” How right he was. Make your mind up and be the change you want to see.’

When we arrive at Sydney’s new Olympic stadium, there is little doubt that our minds are made up. We go behind early this time, but punch back with a try from Jason. We go behind again, but we pull together with a penalty from my boot. At half-time, we are three points down.

The second half starts well when I deliver my own try – a testament to the punchbag-dodging with Blackie, my own tribute to Jason Robinson. It has nothing of the same quality, but there is an element of the instinctive foot movement. I manage to step around Toutai Kefu and I am over.

But then it slides. We are 29–23 down. Ten minutes to score seven points. We can still win this.

Two minutes to go, the chance appears. We get a penalty, kick to the corner. This is it.

We lose the lineout. But that’s still not it. The buzzer goes, we have possession, field position and good numbers, still a chance. Until an Australian hand disrupts a pass and that is it. So close to glory. And so damn painful.

It takes me a while to change and put on my suit. I’m never quick to move on, but especially not tonight. I’d rather sit in rebellious protest. The result should have been different this time. I don’t feel like going anywhere.

This is my question: why couldn’t I affect it? Why couldn’t I make it happen? Why, when my life’s work is preparing for this? What have I done wrong? What have I not done? And ultimately, what the hell is it all about? I am miles away from solving that one.

Sometimes there are no real answers to any of this. You’ve just got to put it down as a lesson learned. As a response, though, that’s never been good enough for me.

I do go out eventually. I go out with the boys – properly – and at eight in the morning I am delighted to discover that Brian O’Driscoll’s table-tennis game has finally imploded.

You could call all this a drowning of sorrows, but overall I feel it was a great tour. I enjoyed it, which is a strange conclusion, given that we lost. On the day of the first Test, Matt Dawson had a diary column in the
Daily Telegraph
in which he was very critical of the management and the amount of training we’d been doing. He even said that some of the midweek players had been thinking of leaving the tour.

I don’t know about that, and I guess I was fortunate to be in the Test
team, but I think of guys who didn’t play in the Tests but really held their own, such as Ronan and Neil Jenkins. The chanting of ‘Neil-o, Neil-o’ as they came back, sometimes from a night out, tended to suggest that they were still enjoying themselves.

As for the heavy training, I didn’t really get it. I was asking Blackie for extra training, not less.

When you’re part of a team, everything you do has an effect on that team, no matter how big or small. That’s just the way it works.

At Sydney airport, we are weary, waiting for the flight home. Colin Charvis has his head in a laptop and starts talking about a rugby website with a chatroom, which is getting loads of feedback. Foolishly, I allow my intrigue to get the better of me and take a look at it.

I flick down through the comments. Some of them say I lost the series. A lot of them. My intercepted pass was the turning-point. That, apparently, is the view.

Is this really the view out there? I tend not to listen but I never figured
that
was the tone of the conversation.

It confirms a deepest fear, that when you’ve given your best, when you’ve given everything that you can and it doesn’t quite work out, there will be people who say don’t worry about it, and there will be others who think it’s just your fault.

But I can’t regret what I did on this tour. I have beaten myself up enough times for my errors on the pitch, but not this time. If I had my 24 hour video camera and could review this tour, I think I could sign off my Lions life with pride.