Jonny: My Autobiography (28 page)

By the time I have to go off with a blood wound, we have a healthy lead. In the changing room under the stand, Simon Kemp, the doctor, puts some stitches in my mouth and I try not to cool down, or lose focus. When I come out, we are another seven points ahead.

But we keep resisting them. The shout goes round the pitch – no fucking tries! No fucking tries! We are going to win the Grand Slam, but we’re not relaxing. We want to keep making the statement.

And we don’t stop making it. Not until the final whistle and the 42–6 scoreline make it for us.

I am due to appear in an adidas ad with David Beckham and word is that they are going to want me to hit a few football free-kicks. And being a perfectionist and not wanting to let myself down, I make sure I get my preparation in early.

So the day before, I turn up to training at Kingston Park with the usual kit plus a bag of footballs. To my great fortune, Newcastle United’s reserves have been playing a match, so the goals are set up on the main pitch, and after training I go out to practise. Jamie Noon and Dave Walder join me for a kick-around, but they don’t last long. I don’t want to look anything but natural in the ad, so I practise free-kicks for an hour and a half.

The next day, very early, I arrive for the shoot near Manchester. Two Hollywood-style trailers, one for each of us, have our names on the door. I’ve not had anything like that before. I suspect that David’s trailer is superior to mine, although that might be because my name is spelled wrongly. Nearly everyone everywhere still seems to spell Jonny with an ‘h’.

They mike us up and, with a bag of balls over our shoulders, David and I head over to the pitches. He seems a relaxed, decent, interesting bloke, and I am fascinated to ask him how do you perform so consistently? How do you manage your career? We exchange views and stories. I really like him.

When we get to the pitches, the guys directing the shoot say right, let’s do some kicking.

What about the dialogue? I say. What are our lines?

We’ve already got all that, is the reply. Nice one; very painless.

I am glad of yesterday’s practice because I acquit myself OK. My first shot goes just over the bar. The second hits the underside of the bar and bounces back out. As long as they caught that one on camera, I know there’s something of me that looks all right.

But whereas I’m just smashing balls at the goal, David places them left, right and centre. They ask him for one particular shot from a different camera angle and he finishes off by lacing it over the wall and into the top left corner. That’s a wow moment. It’s like watching Dave Alred.

He doesn’t have much trouble with rugby goalkicks, either. I talk him through the routine and then put a ball down for him in front of the posts about 15 metres out, thinking it’ll be OK for the cameras from here. But he smashes it straight through the middle and about 25 metres beyond. We move back bit by bit and he continues to do the same thing. The guy has incredibly well-educated feet.

I like doing this. If I wasn’t here, I’d be kicking anyway, but here I’m getting a glimmer of the Hollywood experience and, as much as I am supposed to be one of the stars of the day, there’s a part of me that still feels like a little kid hanging around with someone I’ve always wanted to get to know.

Quite soon, though, David has to go. There’s a Manchester United function he has to attend and a David Beckham lookalike takes over for the rest of the day.

Funnily enough, there is no Jonny Wilkinson lookalike here, although I am aware one exists because once, when I gave my consent for a character in a kids’ novel to be called Jonny Wilkinson, it turned out that the book publishers got the lookalike to attend the launch party. Apparently, he turned up wearing full England kit and merrily signed autographs.

I know this because I started getting letters from angry parents who felt their kids had been duped. I’m not sure why this was my fault, but I sent these kids genuine autographs in return.

But I hate to leave a negative impression. I got a fairly strong letter from two girls in Leicester recently. We asked for your autograph when we saw you before the game and you ignored us, they said. How could you do that?

I wrote back: You have to understand that before the game is very different from after the game. It is a very tense time, I have to prepare, I have to get mentally into the right zone, so I can’t stand around and sign autographs.

I sent them some autographs and they wrote back to say thank you. We appreciate the situation, they said, and we understand.

I want to do the right thing. Once a game is finished, I’ll stay and I won’t stop signing until the last person has gone.

We arrive in New Zealand with the World Cup looming ever closer and, as proof of our credentials, an eleven-match unbeaten record that stretches back for more than a year.

In Wellington, two things in particular come to my attention. One is the stern advice of our medics. After a long flight like that, I always want to go out and take some exercise, and because they know exactly what I’m like, they insist I go easy and don’t kick for too long, because jet-lagged muscles are prone to pulls and tears.

The other is the rugby media here, which is so different – not that I read it, I’m past that, but you can’t avoid it. It’s everywhere. And they want to talk about how good their team is, how great their players are, and how much they want them to win. I get the feeling that they are rugby supporters first and journalists second. It seems they’d rather write a story about winning than losing. Compared to the English attitude, it’s pretty refreshing!

And they hype up their own players and spend the entire time ripping into us. They’re calling us ‘Dad’s Army’, which is hilarious and focuses attention on Dorian West, who is our oldest squad member and a definite Captain Mainwaring candidate.

In an unusual break with tradition, I treat myself to a day off during Test week. My days off on tour usually involve kicking for most of the morning, getting back to the hotel and then shutting myself away because I’m just so stressed and hyped up I feel I need a break and a bit of time to myself.

Here though, I join the others on a trip to the
Lord of the Rings
set. For some reason, I’m introduced as the team captain, a misapprehension I’m unable to shift while we watch a battle scene being filmed or when I’m introduced to Viggo Mortensen and some of the other cast. We have a great day. I barely think about the Saturday Test match. Stress and hype leave me briefly alone. It’s certainly a pleasant break, although I’m still not sure this day-out thing is going to catch on.

The day before the game, the anxieties are back in force. I go to the Wellington stadium, known as the Cake Tin, for my kicking practice. I throw a bit of grass in the air, it disappears behind my back and then materialises again in front of my face. In other words, the wind in here is impossible to read.

Back at the Cake Tin a day later, our winning streak is under threat. We have our noses ahead. We also have Lawrence and Neil Back in the sin-bin at the same time, and we are defending a five-yard scrum, six against eight.

The call goes up – Hit the Beach. Johnno shouts it, everyone shouts it. Hit the Beach! Hit the Beach! Whatever we do, we’re going to get through these next few minutes without giving anything away.

What follows is awesome. Our scrum doesn’t take a step backwards, but it has to be reset. The same happens again. Still not a step back. This happens four times and four times we hold out. A monumental effort.

I kick four of my goals and a drop goal, but it is in those moments in that scrum that we win the game.

It is a huge achievement. The last time an England team beat New Zealand on their home turf was over thirty years ago. But the changing room afterwards does not reflect this. The celebrations are a little muted. There’s no conscious decision to play it cool. It’s just that, despite everything we have just been through, most of the team are actually quite disappointed with our performance. The result’s not enough now. We’ve just won in New Zealand but we feel we could’ve done better.

The New Zealand media see it differently. They just rip straight back into us. They don’t seem to want to go deep into the defeat. They’re more interested in pointing out how big and lumpy and old we are, and what on earth have we been doing in training to look like this.

As we leave their country, we are being labelled ‘white orcs on steroids’. I love that.

We sign off for the season against Australia and, as a statement before the World Cup, this game is possibly the best we have ever played.

There is something in our history together, and the momentum of our victories, that works as a kind of glue. We are held together and, on the pitch, the togetherness keeps us safe.

All the repetition in training and our collective experience on the pitch means that instinct takes care of us. We know our jobs and our roles and when it doesn’t quite go as expected, we just alter and shift a little. We hang in the game because we have a structure for our game-breakers to come in when the time is right.

It feels as though we are permanently moving forward and waiting. The team performance becomes a springboard from which any player can launch at any time. In defence, the support is like a white wall round each player; in attack, it is the decoy runners, the unselfish options. It means that week in, week out, we’re seeing the best of each other. Whose turn will it be today to bring out the brilliance?

Last week it was the forwards. Today it is Will Greenwood and Ben Cohen. But you feel right now, it could be anyone.