Jason Leonard: The Autobiography - Jason Leonard

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over it. We would often find other little gifts on the ground from the neighbours too (most of whom hated the players because they said we made too much noise at nights and at the weekends). There were things like broken glass, nails and ring pulls. It meant that when you went down on a loose ball in training, you could come back up with a cut on your leg, arm, face or whatever part of your anatomy touched the ground. There were people at Saracens whose limbs went septic overnight after playing on the pitch and they had to be rushed to hospital to be pumped full of antibiotics.

      Then, when there hadn’t been much rain, the pitches would have the opposite problem and they would be rock hard. It was like training on concrete, and if you went down on a loose ball you’d worry about breaking your shoulder.

      It was the hard pitch scenario for the first session of the season and our coach for the evening, was a guy called Ivor Jones who, as far as I knew, had never coached anything higher than Hertfordshire first division. He had certainly never coached a national standard first team before, and it seemed to me that he had something of a chip on his shoulder about the standard of players he was working with. Being an old-style prop, he obviously felt most at home when talking about set-piece play, so he decided that we were going out to practice scrummaging.

      I said that I thought this was a bad idea because of the state of the pitch, which was like concrete, and the guys would be better off doing some fitness work and ball handling on the hard grounds. It was the first session of the season – we really didn’t need to practise our scrums with any urgency, especially since there was no way we could even get a stud into the ground, it was so hard.

      ‘Look, we can’t scrummage on this pitch, mate. We can’t get our studs in,’ I explained, carefully and politely.

      ‘That’s OK. Wear trainers,’ he barked back. I was feeling slightly less polite by this stage.

      ‘What? How can we get any purchase on the ground in trainers?’

      Ivor didn’t answer. He just led the way to where he wanted us to work and we followed him in our trainers, muttering about how ridiculous it all was.

      The results were painfully predictable – every scrum hit the ground, every time. We just couldn’t get any grip on the turf at all. Bang – both packs hit the deck, face down in the dirt. Up we got and bang – back on our faces again. I can remember my nose smacking against the hard ground and wondering whether I’d break it by the end of the session. We were also putting real strain on our unprotected ankles and knees. It was all crazy.

      In the end I said, ‘I’ve had enough of this. You’re a fucking idiot. We can’t scrummage like this’

      ‘No, no. It’s because you’re not doing it properly, that’s why it’s not working,’ he insisted.

      ‘Not doing what properly?’ I asked.

      So he then started to go through my technique and tried to tell me exactly where I was going wrong. He said that, for starters, I was binding wrongly. I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, no one in the England team seems to think my binding is wrong.’ I just gave him a look which implied that I didn’t agree with him and for the next four or five minutes it was like something out of the old Harry Enfield sketch with the old git in the father-in-law sketch: ‘You don’t want to do it like that, you want to do it like this. Not like that, like this.’

      In the end, I just looked at him and said, ‘You are so fuckin’ wrong.’

      ‘Don’t talk to me like that. I know what I’m doing – I’m the coach. Listen to me,’ he replied. As if the fact that he was calling himself ‘coach’ automatically meant he deserved respect. By then, I’d had enough. ‘I’ve just spent the summer with the best hooker and tight head in the world and that’s how they like me to fucking scrummage. If it’s good enough for them, then it’s fucking good enough for you.’ I flounced off the training pitch like a prima donna – it was all high drama stuff! As I left, I could hear him asking, ‘Who the fuck’s that?’

      When he realized who I was, I think he must have been mortified, but it had taught me a lesson – I needed better than this. I wanted to be somewhere where quality training was taken for granted. It might sound a bit over the top to say it, but the training session at Saracens was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I could suddenly see, with crystal clarity, that I wanted to be with the best players and the best coaches in the country. The barrel-shaped boy from Barking was going to sign for the poshest club in the world.

      My first move was to ring Will and Pete to check they were still interested. They were. ‘Any chance of coming round, just to see what the club’s like? Can I come to a training session or something?’ I asked. They said that wouldn’t be a problem, so along I went. Dick Best was the coach at the time – one of the best coaches in the world, and several notches up from what I’d experienced in my last session at Saracens. I enjoyed every second of it and from that point I knew that I would leave Saracens and join Quins.

      So I had to go back and explain to the guys at Saracens that, despite their offer of vice-captaincy, I was going to join Harlequins. They were so disappointed because they had hoped that the lure of captaincy would keep me at the club. At one point I had most of the Saracens hierarchy in my flat, desperately trying to convince me to stay. They had all returned from holiday by this stage and couldn’t believe that I was off. I had everyone including the club president in my flat, trying to persuade me to stay. I can still picture them all piled into my tiny front room in their Saracens blazers, urging me to stay. But I had made up my mind by then. I knew what I wanted to do. By this stage, what had happened in the training session was behind me. The officials had heard about the pre-season training and they kept assuring me that nothing like that would happen again, but it wasn’t about the session – it was the fact that I had enjoyed watching Dick Best training the boys at Quins and felt confident that I could build a better future for myself there. Slowly, I got the Saracens guys to realize that this was the right move for me – it wasn’t an impetuous decision based on one dodgy training session, but a considered approach to my future. I ran through the players at Harlequins, and – to their credit – they all accepted that it was a good move for me and wished me luck. Saracens still retain a special place in my heart to this day. They are good people and no one was more pleased than I when Nigel Wray stepped in and sorted out all their finances for them.

      The only problem I encountered after leaving the club was with a committee man who was particularly upset that I was leaving – I think he saw it as a personal betrayal. It practically broke his heart. He used to drive round to my flat and sit outside in his car, trying to get me to change my mind. Eventually he realized that nothing was going to change and his car disappeared.

      It was time to move on. I have to admit that I was worried about joining Harlequins. Despite the reassurances of the players on the England tour, I knew it had a reputation of being run by gin-swilling former public schoolboys and I had heard all the rumours about players being paid to play and being given good jobs in the City. I didn’t really know what to expect.

      Rugby was going through a difficult time back then. The sport was in a period of vast change. Many called it shamateurism because the steadfast ways of the amateur players were being eroded. We were allowed to capitalize on our rugby skills a little by being paid to give talks or attend evenings, but we couldn’t be paid specifically for playing on the pitch or for anything to do with the playing side of the game. This led us into all sorts of awkward corners because none of us was sure where playing started and stopped. We were only famous because we were players, so our fame was playing-related. If we capitalized on fame, were we capitalizing on rugby? At one stage, the RFU responded by saying that it meant we could not appear in any promotional literature in our England rugby kits but, for example, it would be OK to appear in England football kits. That’s how ludicrous and unsophisticated the distinction had become. Even lawyers, like Brian Moore, had no idea what the complicated and fast-changing rules of amateurism meant any more. What chance did I have?

      When I first walked into the Twickenham clubhouse, I was pleasantly surprised. It was nowhere near as stuffy as I thought it would be. Of course, there were a smattering of regimental types

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