Jason Leonard: The Autobiography - Jason Leonard

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back-up. The opinion that the older players had of me after that was great – they thought I’d coped well, especially because I was only 20, hadn’t stepped back from anything and had given as good as I got. I had proved my worth and hadn’t backed down, which made me feel pleased that I could cope at this level and under all that pressure; and it also showed the selectors that I was tough and not afraid of confrontation. In games like that you can’t hold back and as I was a youngster with much to prove, I wasn’t going to be pushed about, so I was in the thick of it as much as the experienced boys.

      Brian Moore later commented that seeing my contribution in that game was one of the highlights of the tour. He wrote: ‘The match at Tucumán, surely the most hostile place to play in the world, was a real test for the young players. It was patently obvious in that match that Jason Leonard, new to the squad at loose head, was going to be an outstanding player. He stood his ground. If the tour produced little of merit for English rugby, then at least it produced Jason.’

      It’s great when teammates say things like that about you, but the truth is that it was the support of people like Brian, throughout that tour, that enabled me to perform so well. The pieces of advice I was given will stay with me for ever – I just ran around like a sponge for the whole trip, soaking up everything I could.

      I remember, before that match, a lot of the players had told me to just concentrate on my own game. If you make a mistake, don’t harp on about it, forget it and carry on, that’s all you can do. I find myself saying that now to young players, because if you make a mistake in front of 70,000 people, you feel stupid. All of a sudden it can make you go into your shell and put you right off your game. I managed to follow that advice, and still do.

      Because that first game had gone well for me personally and we had won it, I started to relax and enjoy the tour a little bit more. I’d got in one good game, whereas my two oppos had had a bad one. It meant that there was no reason to drop me, and I kept my place for the Test matches. In some ways it wasn’t very fair on Vic and Mark because they didn’t get back into the side then, and that was just because of one game on the tour. Anyone can have a bad game but they were quite harshly punished for theirs. I played in one more game after Tucumán, before the first Test – against a Buenos Aires team called Cuyo Select. We lost 21–22 but I felt I played pretty well, so I thought I might just make it into my first Test team.

      The morning that Geoff Cooke was going to announce the Test team, I felt a little nervous. When I’d left for the tour, I never thought I would be in contention for a Test place, but now that things were looking so good, I was very keen to make it. I remember sitting there in the team room at the hotel while they read through the list, through the backs, and then the forwards – number one, Jason Leonard. Yes – I was in. The players congratulated me, as did Victor and Mark, and I sneaked out of the room to call Mum before we started training.

      I was one of four new caps chosen for the first Test – Dean Ryan, David Pears and Nigel Heslop being the other newcomers. Together we participated in the dirtiest game imaginable. Punches and boots were flying and we took the brunt of it all in the front row. Jeff Probyn, playing at tight head, got a kick in the face. It was quite unbelievable. We won the match 25–12, and I crawled off the pitch, having had a real baptism of fire as a Test player.

      The penultimate game of the tour, before the second Test, was against Cordoba and was captained by John Olver – a big schoolkid who is second only to Mickey Skinner in the practical jokes department. They spent the whole tour trying to hit each other in the face with cream cakes, or tipping buckets of water over the balcony at each other, like seven-year-old boys on a school outing. In the Cordoba game, like in most of the matches on tour, there were local referees who were very biased. At one point in the game, Olver felt the referee was offering our players no protection at all, and they were getting lumps kicked out of them, so he turned to the referee and said, ‘I’ve had enough of this, if you don’t sharpen up, I’m taking my players off the pitch,’ and walked away.

      I was on the bench for the match and was standing on the sidelines at the time. I remember thinking to myself that Olver’s words might calm the situation down a bit, when all of a sudden Olver ran in and deliberately kicked one of the Argie players – the whole crowd went mad. We couldn’t believe he’d done it, but I think he’d got so sick of the whole thing that he decided to take the law into his own hands. Even us players on the bench were shouting ‘Get him off, get him off’ along with the crowd, because we didn’t want to look like tourists – we were scared for our lives. But somehow he managed to stay on the field and England won our third victory of the tour.

      We lost the second Test 13–15, meaning we’d tied the series which was a massive disappointment. That second Test was the first time that Argentina had beaten England anywhere – so it was not great to be part of that particular record breaker.

      Once the rugby was over, we all started to relax a little bit, and although we still couldn’t go out and about on our own, we were able to see some of the countryside in the organized trips that the RFU had set up. Argentina has some wonderful countryside and a traditional, rural lifestyle. Someone in the England team management decided that it would be good to see this lifestyle from the backs of horses.

      We arrived at the foot of this enormous mountain at some ridiculously early hour and were given our horses. I took one look at mine and knew I’d have problems. It was clearly an unmanageable horse that objected to having 16½ stone on its back. The theory was that the horses would take us up to the top of the mountain where the views were beautiful, but my horse didn’t want to go anywhere. So everyone jumped on their horses and click, click off they all went up the mountain. Except me. My horse refused to move no matter what I did – talk to it, coax it, kick it. I tried all the things you see in those old cowboy movies but nothing worked – not a thing.

      By this stage, the rest of the guys were really motoring, and had got halfway up the hill. Because the horses do this all the time, they just follow the backside of the one in front, so they were all off in one long line. But not my horse. I ended up dragging it up the mountain, swearing to myself as I went. I eventually got to the top about an hour after everyone else, and they were all killing themselves laughing. I’ve got a video of the whole thing somewhere because Terry Crystal, the team doctor, and Kevin Murphy, the physio, videoed me walking up the mountain pulling this horse behind me. They were laughing so much that the video shakes when you watch it.

      By the time I got to the top, I was soaking wet with sweat and exhausted, but the trouble was that the rest of the team had been standing there for an hour, so by the time I made it to the peak, they were ready to go back down. I like to think that they assumed my horse would be OK going down, or they wouldn’t have left me. Unfortunately, my horse was far from OK going down and refused to budge, so I had to drag him back down the hill again. I’ve never seen a group of grown men laugh so much as when I got back down to the bottom, having pulled this horse all the way up, and all the way back down again. Everyone else had had such a pleasant afternoon, and had taken lovely pictures of the beautiful landscape – I was just completely exhausted.

      The tour to Argentina was also where I was first introduced to the delights of the international players’ courts – one after the first Test, and another after the second Test. At the first court, Mark Linnett was judge in Rendall’s absence, and Carling was court artist for the trip. He was ordered to whiten the faces of Paul Hull, Chris Oti and Victor Ubogu and that’s how they were made to spend the evening following the first Test. After the second Test it was decided that revenge should be taken on the court artist, Will Carling, and it was with a painted black face that he walked into the dinner that evening. Geoff Cooke was not impressed. Five minutes later Carling was in the toilets, scrubbing the ink from his face. Cooke felt that the captain should behave more responsibly. It was the first time that I came across the expectations that people had of Carling how he was always expected to stand apart and be a leadership figure, yet in order to gain the respect of the guys had to get involved with us to a certain extent and not be seen as Cooke’s man. I think he was in a very difficult position.

      The tour to Argentina was a real breakthrough for me, but it was a dire trip in every other respect. We’d drawn the series, been mauled wherever we’d gone in the country, on the pitch, and

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