Jason Leonard: The Autobiography - Jason Leonard

Скачать книгу

to a female to not talking to a female, to wearing inappropriate clothes. Players who were called out late to tours would often be tried for arriving late. It was just a bit of fun, a nonsense occasion when we would all take the mickey out of one another.

      Because Judge was left behind for the Argentina tour, I knew that I was in with a good shout for the England loose-head spot if I played the best I could. Jeff Probyn was chosen as the guaranteed tight head and Mark Linnett and Victor Ubogu were the other two. Vic, Mark and I were specialist loose heads, so we knew we were up against each other for the honour of filling Judge’s boots, and there is no doubt that Mark was in pole position as we left Heathrow, bound for Buenos Aires.

      Argentina was a difficult place to tour – it was hard work, and there was enormous tension and a feeling of imminent danger all the time. We couldn’t go out very much, and when we did leave the hotel, it had to be in numbers – always twos and threes rather than alone in case we came across some group in a bar or someone who took exception to us being English. We couldn’t relax because we were forever looking over our shoulders.

      Because there was nothing to do in the hotel and the players had started to feel a bit cooped up, Chris Oti and Victor Ubogu decided to go out one evening, coming back to the hotel afterwards, raving about this great bar they’d been to. ‘There were loads of women in there,’ said Victor. ‘No men in sight, just full of women. It was a great place.’

      As you can imagine, the England players thought this sounded like heaven on earth, so, the next night, half the England rugby squad went along with Victor and Chris, to find this magnificent bar. We arrived there and all seemed well until we had to pass a 6′5″ doorman to get in. I thought that seemed a bit heavy-handed for a bar full of women, but we carried on inside and wandered up to the barman, who was also about 6′5″ but with the added attraction of having a huge scar down the side of his face.

      By this stage, I knew that this was no normal bar. We went to buy drinks, and they were 50p each. Every other place we’d drunk in, in Buenos Aires, it was about 15p a pint – even in the hotels. It was still a really cheap beer for us, but it was three times the price of the other bars, so I knew something wasn’t right. Why would there be such a huge mark-up? When I looked around there were indeed just girls in there – all sitting round the edge of the bar. The man with the scar on his face told us that the girls weren’t allowed to talk to us unless we spoke to them, so we had to make the first move. I couldn’t believe it – it was obviously a knocking shop.

      I told Victor and said we’d better go, but he didn’t believe me. ‘No, no, Jase, the girls aren’t like that, they’re nice girls,’ he said. ‘Are you nuts?’ I replied. ‘Just look at them.’

      Victor looked around the room, and I could see that he was slowly realizing exactly what sort of place he’d brought us to. We all made a quick exit, with Victor running behind, still insisting that the girls had all seemed very nice and very friendly, and not at all like prostitutes. Yes Victor, of course. We believe you.

      The tour began with a game against Banco Nación. It was expected to be an easy, warm-up match because Banco were just a club side, but it turned out that they were not just any old club side – they were Hugo Porta’s side, and Porta was the greatest player in Argentine rugby. He was a real hero and the club were the current champions. Still, you’d expect an international side to beat them. On that day, Mark and Victor were selected, with Jeff Probyn on the bench and me in the stand. Mark was in at tight head because he had been on the bench covering loose head and tight head the previous season. England were beaten 21–29 in that game and everyone really laid into the team afterwards. Loads of questions were asked and selection plans changed. Mark had got himself into trouble by saying that he could play on both sides, because it was obvious to the selectors that he was a much more natural loose head.

      The next game was against Tucumán, a team with a reputation for turning over tour sides. I didn’t know too much about the team or the place before the tour, but in the build-up to the game, and certainly during it, I learnt a great deal about the area. Tucumán is, apparently, the place that took the greatest number of casualties in the Falklands War, so to say that feelings were running high would be an understatement. You didn’t dare walk around the streets. It was extremely daunting. We decided that we should stay in as much as possible, which I found difficult because even staying in the hotel was dull – there were no televisions in the rooms, nothing to distract you from the situation. It’s odd how much it mattered, not having any televisions, considering we wouldn’t have understood a word of what was going on anyway, but it’s still nice and somehow reassuring to have a TV on, and to flick through the channels and recognize the programmes – like the news, sports updates and game shows.

      In the end, I decided to ask why there were no televisions. The hotel receptionist said that it was because the New Zealand team had been there a few weeks before us, and after losing a midweek game, they’d all gone nuts, got drunk and thrown the televisions out of the windows. They clearly thought that all rugby players would be of a similar temperament, so had decided that we couldn’t have them at all. It’s one of the very few times that I’ve been treated like a rock star on tour.

      When I heard that I had been selected for the game against Tucumán, I knew it was my big chance. Geoff Cooke decided to completely change the front row, and I would be playing with John Olver and Jeff Probyn, whom I’d played with in London divisional games. We’d worked well together, so I was optimistic. By this stage, I knew of the problems that we would encounter at Tucumán. I knew that at the best of times they were viewed as being the bad boys of Argentine rugby, and that the match against the All Blacks (the one that had led to all televisions being thrown out of the hotel) had been a fight from start to finish, with the game almost being stopped halfway through. So, I could only imagine what sort of treatment we would be in for, with the memories of the Falklands crisis to aggravate them even further.

      Tucumán play in an orange kit and are known as the Clockwork Oranges. Indeed, oranges are a bit of a theme at the club – there are orange trees on the way to the ground, and the fanatical supporters pluck them off on the way to the game. To eat? What do you think? No. To throw at us! During the national anthem, we were standing there, singing our hearts out in order to be heard over the booing Argentinians, and oranges were flying past our noses. Just when we were starting to think we were onto a bit of a lost cause, we saw something of a commotion on the far side of the ground. When we looked more closely, we could see smoke and hear people chanting and shouting, then we could see what was really going on – they were burning the Union flag. They stopped the anthem halfway through before things got really out of hand.

      Once the game started, the oranges kept flying. I remember being hit by them in the line-out, in the scrums and all over the field. The crowd was very close to the pitch – about 10 yards away – so we were covered with oranges all the time. And it was not just fruit missiles that we had to contend with. At one point during the game, Dewi Morris complained to the referee that he’d found a pair of scissors, an empty whisky bottle and a bath tap on the pitch. Who brings a bath tap to a rugby game?

      The stadium itself was like a football ground, with barbed wire around the top of the fence to stop fans climbing over and onto the pitch – it was an intimidating place. When I first saw the barbed wire, I thought it looked awful, but by the end of the game, I was quite glad it was there to keep the supporters from us.

      We played well in that game and we beat Tucumán 19–14, but to be honest, it had been little more than a brawl in places, and was like nothing I had ever experienced before. There was sheer bloody-minded violence going on – just nasty, vindictive incidents which were designed to seriously hurt our players. In the first ten minutes Wade Dooley was muscled up the wrong way (he really is the wrong person to punch and barge into) so he turned round and smacked someone, and that was it – the whole pack was in there. Suddenly, minutes into my first international game, I was about to get involved in my first international fight.

      I don’t mind playing a hard game, and I believe there’s a place for that in rugby, but what we experienced in Argentina on that tour was completely out of order. What it did show me was how good it is having people who’ll stick up for you – I had Wade Dooley on one side of

Скачать книгу