Jonny: My Autobiography (53 page)

After the autumn internationals, it’s great to be back in France again, where friendships and a sense of familiarity are forming. At the bottom of the hill from where we live, Shelley and I are warmly received in the boulangerie and the boucherie, where the chat invariably heads in certain directions – how the season is going, how much better the weather is on the Med compared
to England, how the England team is doing and how long I’m going to be playing in Toulon.

Down in the village of Bandol, we have our regular spots. The Bistrot always looks after us. In La Seyne Sur Mer nearby, my favourite spot is a beautiful restaurant on the beach, Bard’ô, where the owner, Andrew, sets us up regularly the day after games, sometimes with tables for family and friends. We have already set a recrod with a table for twenty-two. It’s a great escape.

I have done some sponsorship work for SFR, the French telecom company, who have made some radio ads playing off my accent. They ask for my English pronunciation of words such as ‘Euro’. Of course, this leads to relentless piss-taking at training. Whenever a chance presents itself, one of my teammates will throw in one of these words with my English pronunciation. Very funny indeed. But I love the atmosphere here.

Away games are an interesting challenge. As always, I like to get in some practice before a game, and so someone at Toulon arranges with a local rugby club for me to use their ground. It’s amazing how quickly word can get round. Usually, the minimum that is required is to pose for a photo with the local team, who will almost certainly have pitched up. Sometimes, I find I have an audience of around a hundred people. You don’t want to tell them to back off, but with pre-match anxieties in full flow, you don’t want to be signing hundreds of autographs before a game, either. It’s a tough one.

I do not remotely mind signing afterwards, because I love the opportunity to connect with the supporters. After away games, I hardly ever make it to the post-match meal because I get caught in-between the changing rooms and the reception, and when I’m asked to sign then, I’ll sign every one if I can. The other players often bring me food while I’m signing. They really look after me. But later, they’ll be waiting on the bus and we have to leave.
Most likely, we have a plane to catch, and anyway, it’s not fair for me to hold up the rest of the team. So I make my apologies and get on the bus, often to find that someone has brought more food for me. There is a great, respectful spirit among these players.

Since I’m a rugby league nut, I was a bit of a fan of Sonny Bill Williams before I got to Toulon. His talent is enormous. He is phenomenal. He has gifts that could make him unique in the world of rugby. But he is struggling to come back from injury and to show all his abilities in the game, so he is not as effective as he could be. He is also quite complex, sometimes solitary. He reminds me a little of myself.

We have been chatting on and off for a while and the similarities are becoming clearer. Back at Newcastle, I’d always seen it as my role to try to assist the younger guys, such as Toby Flood, to develop their game. I kicked with Toby a lot, trained with him. When he was still at school, I actually coached his team. I feel a similar responsibility with Sonny, but I’m also just inspired by what this player is capable of.

I ask him if he wants to do some one-to-one training with me, and if there’s anything he particularly wants to work on. Little does he know that I’m keen to learn from him in return.

So now we sometimes train together, perfecting each other’s passing skills and movement, and he asks me loads of questions, on positioning – where should I be if this happens? – and on decision-making – what’s the best thing to do if this happens?

I tell him rather than working out where you fit in, you’ve got to find a way of actually making the team and the game fit in with you. Basically, you
need to spend the entire game doing what you’re great at. If you manage that, the team will win – end of story. And so will you. You’re going to be the guy who’s taking it to the next level.

And he is. The guy has got talent that I could only dream about.

We play away against Clermont, just into the new year, and afterwards I’m due to stay overnight at a Lyon airport hotel and then fly to London to join England for an analysis day.

But at 11.30pm, I start vomiting and at five o’clock I still haven’t stopped. It’s like the South Africa 2000 tour all over again. So I leave a message with Gavin Dovey, the England team manager, that I can’t make it.

At the meeting I miss, they discuss the New Zealand game and the new game plan, and it gets well supported. The decision is let’s carry on. So by the time we meet up again for the Six Nations, it’s firmly set.

We go into the Wales game with the same game plan, same tactics, and it’s a solid start, a good win. I fall ill in the following week and play Italy in hot weather feeling pretty rancid, stuffy, no energy, nothing.

Everyone always ignores the fact that playing Italy away is damned hard. I miss a couple of easy kicks that I shouldn’t have missed, and the game is pretty close, but we win and we get in place some of the rugby we wanted. In the shape I’m in, I feel pleased just to have come through it. The media, however, don’t agree. Their questions afterwards make that clear. I feel hounded. I’m being killed for not being on top form.

We are to play Ireland next, but by now it seems commonly accepted that England aren’t playing well and that’s down to me. We’ve just beaten a good team away from home. There were a couple of kicks I could have
executed better, but the reaction is grossly sensational, egged on by, of all people, Matt Dawson.

Have you read what Matt Dawson wrote in the
Daily Mail
? That’s the question put to me by the press a few days later.

No, I haven’t. I don’t read the papers.

So they tell me. Dawson says that I am not, and never have been, a comfortable play-maker or decision-maker. Apparently, I can only play to a team plan and I have always relied on others – and he puts his own name forward here – to make the decisions for me.

That’s nice. That seems to set the agenda for the entire week.

Before the Ireland game, after a meeting with the team leaders, Johnno asks me to stay behind with a few of the coaches. Look, he says, you’ve been taking loads of stick, but we just want you to know we think you’re doing a perfect job for us, and we’re actually really happy. Don’t let it get to you.

That’s great to hear, because I really need a boost right now. I have been strict over my relationship with Johnno. Ever since he shifted from ex-teammate and fellow World Cup-winner to team manager, I have made a point of ensuring a safe distance between us. He is the guy picking the team and so I have felt I should treat him like management, not like an old friend. We do have our moments when the guard drops and we find ourselves reminiscing about what we once went through together as fellow players, but Johnno is more relaxed about that than I am. I only want what I genuinely deserve; I don’t want history and past friendships to complicate anything.

So, from manager to player, it’s great to have that reassurance from him. Nevertheless, I’m certainly feeling the pressure, but I want to be positive. I’m desperate to go out against Ireland and be myself.

I need things to go well. But our game plan, still relatively new to us, requires a few phases before we really exploit them and the moment of exploitation never seems to arrive. As a number ten, I feel predictable and a bit restricted in what I can do and where I can go on the field.

I start going after the game a bit and taking on the defence at every opportunity, but it doesn’t help having the other guys standing off. I look to offload the ball, but I don’t have people to pass it to. I sense moments of hesitation around me, as if some guys don’t want to interfere, as if they don’t know how to react to me as a person or as a player. But I’m crying out for support. I’m not seeing too many other options, so I try to create situations myself.

How I could do with a Mike Catt to help out and share the responsibility; or someone to play with the ball while I step back to take a look. I feel I’m constantly in the game but unable to affect it.

Yet the scores are tied and, with ten minutes to go, I hit a right-foot drop goal on the turn to give us the lead. If only this can be enough. But then I make a criminal defensive error. I don’t make many and this serves as an indication that too much is going on in my mind. I over-read the play and am caught taking the man outside the one I should be taking. So Tommy Bowe runs through inside me and that is more or less that.

It shouldn’t be, because we have a chance to win at it the close. We have numbers and could attack them out wide, but we aren’t ready to exploit those areas of the field. No one says anything, no one talks to me, no one lets me know where the space is and, with my head still spinning from their try, I take us somewhere else. The chance of a reprieve is gone.

I’ve now had two fairly good games and was up and down against Ireland – and I’m being hammered by the media. I’m being hit harder now than ever before. You’d think I’d attacked their families. It’s madness.

It doesn’t help that every Wednesday without fail at Pennyhill, I’m sent out to talk to them. The same guys who are killing me in the newspapers after the games sit three or four yards away asking me how do you feel? What is your reaction to the media criticism? You must feel pretty down. It must really hurt.

It’s like a guy punching you in the stomach and then saying oh look, you’ve got a bad stomach, that’s terrible. Tell us about your bad stomach.

Now I am really struggling, desperately re-evaluating the rugby. I don’t know how to make this work. My response always is to tackle the challenge and overcome it with hard work. That’s how I always understood rugby. Now something’s just not working and it upsets me.

I feel increasingly isolated from the squad. It’s as if there is some obligatory respect for me because of where I might have been and what I might have achieved. It’s like they don’t want to interfere or get in my way. And now the whole media are pinning me down as the reason why it isn’t going well, so I feel like an old expert hand who’s letting all these young inexperienced guys down. The whole complexity of the situation created by the media and the past has made it really tough for me to connect with some of the guys. I’m sure that I’m largely to blame for this. I’m starting to feel ashamed and embarrassed around everyone, which is probably making them feel a little embarrassed for me. It’s getting awkward.