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Matt Dawson: Nine Lives. Matt Dawson
Читать онлайн.Название Matt Dawson: Nine Lives
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isbn 9780007438259
Автор произведения Matt Dawson
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
John Mitchell, Graham Rowntree and I go into town for a beer. We enter this bar, it must be two or three in the morning by now, and find Hewitt in there, badly pissed up. He starts slagging English rugby, saying how shitty we are. I ask him how his arse feels with all those splinters in it from sitting on the bench. Then I really get to work on him. I start doing the Haka in front of him, slapping my thighs and sticking my tongue out. He seems to take it all right, considering he’s got a reputation for being as much a handful as I am. It’s agreed we’ll all move on somewhere else and we call a cab. Hewitt gets in first, ahead of me, and as soon as I stick my head through the door to follow, he leathers me. Suddenly it all kicks off in the van, him and me going at it for all we’re worth. My eye swells up straight away and is a right mess. He’s had a good cheap shot at me but it’s far from over. When we reach our destination I’m the first out of the taxi, and I’m waiting for him this time. When he gets out I smack him one and we end up brawling again, right down the street.
Doubtless Cockers would regard this as normal Leicester activity, a bit of harmless rough and tumble. Whatever it was, it was definitely not a sign of the tour going off the rails. As I would discover with the 2001 Lions, when a tour goes off the rails you don’t go out for a beer with your mates, let alone the opposition. All right, what went on shouldn’t have, and everyone wishes it hadn’t because it was unnecessary, but Cockers, like me, had been an amateur rugby player in the days when you could indulge in rough and tumble without coming under scrutiny.
As skipper, I tried to refocus minds on the solid performance the Test team had produced in so many areas, little knowing that the tour was headed for rock bottom in Rotorua against the New Zealand Maori. They were well up for the opportunity to give England a good thrashing, but that could be no excuse for what unfolded. England lost 62–14 and missed 24 first-up tackles along the way. Mitch ripped into the midweek players afterwards, saying that they had had their chance, had blown it, and England would never see them again.
His words echoed a warning I had issued prior to the game. I had felt the need to warn the squad that certain individuals were in danger of kissing goodbye to their England careers by the way they were behaving – going out all the time and regarding the trip as a bit of a jolly. ‘Look,’ I told them, ‘if you don’t get serious we will get home and Clive will never pick you again. It’s quite simple. You’ve made a rod for your own back really.’ It is no secret to whom I was referring; you only have to look up which players last wore an England shirt on that tour. Whether they were already resigned to never being picked again anyway is for them to say. Clive’s maxim, except in extreme cases, has always been that if you are good enough you will play, and in my experience he has stood by that.
The good news for our hopes against the All Blacks in the second Test was that the mood among the first-choice players was upbeat as we swept into Auckland. We had taken a lot of confidence from the Dunedin game and we thought that if we could keep the ball for a bit we would actually be in with a chance. Our hunch was right. At half-time at Eden Park we trailed 14–7, and it should have been all square. I scored a try inside the first half-hour which gave me immense satisfaction, breaking from a ruck and beating Taine Randell and Christian Cullen to the line, and Ben Clarke had a perfectly good score disallowed. Given that we bossed the Test for an hour, the final scoreline of 40–10 in favour of New Zealand certainly felt cruel; we’d conceded four tries in the last quarter as our resistance finally waned. Nonetheless, the game, without question, was the highlight of the tour. For once, all the heroes were dressed in white, and I would pick out Dave Sims, Rob Fidler, Graham Rowntree and Ben Clarke. Stephen Jones, writing in the Sunday Times, noted, ‘England’s rag-bag collection of second, third and even fifth choices, derided all around the country, had the temerity to stay in contention for an hour and even raise serious question marks over the current All Blacks. The plain and heroic fact is that England’s forwards outplayed the New Zealand pack.’ He also described me as a ‘massive force’ at scrum-half, which was very flattering, especially when Clive, who had returned from attending his father’s funeral shortly before kick-off, added his own praise. ‘I am seeing Dawson in a new light,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to know him very well over the last five weeks. He’s really impressed me as a player and captain.’
I don’t actually remember an awful lot about the day because I was as tired as I’ve ever been on a rugby pitch. And that was at half-time. The second half was too knackering to describe. I remember sitting in the changing room at the break and Mitch coming over to talk and me not being able to say anything. It was as though I’d already played a full 80 minutes. I was absolutely screwed. I was not alone either, and that state of physical exhaustion contributed to us leaving the gameplan behind in the last 20 minutes.
Jonny Wilkinson’s tour had finished the previous weekend at Dunedin when he was stretchered off the field, and Josh Lewsey, who’d played centre that day, was moved up to partner me. It was in fact an eventful tour for Josh from the moment we met up in England. The backs were doing some fitness work when, much to Josh’s horror, Clive came over and asked him to take off his shirt and show the rest of the lads his physique. ‘That’s what you’ve got to aspire to,’ said Clive, pointing at Josh. ‘You’ve all got to get into that sort of shape.’ At the same time, on the other side of the field, the forwards were being drilled by Mitch, who instructed prop forward Duncan Bell to remove his shirt. He then absolutely abused him. In the minds of the management, Josh and Duncan offered two extremes as to what an England player should and should not look like. They say you’ve got to be cruel to be kind …
I have since had even more feedback about that second Test. Wayne Smith, my coach at Northampton, has referred to it a number of times, saying that I gained a huge amount of respect from that game as an individual. I never thought of that at the time. The New Zealand public are very critical of their rugby, but they do applaud individual talent. Mitch was also generous with his words. After becoming All Blacks coach in 2002, he said I would be in his team were I a Kiwi. Blimey. It means an awful lot to me that I am respected in New Zealand. There are no people in the world more knowledgeable about rugby, with the possible exception of South Africa. To be respected there will always give me cause for pride. And for that game to have coincided with the birth of my godson, Paul Grayson’s son James, made it a very special day.
The tour should really have ended then and there. There was no desire whatsoever to embark on a 28-hour journey to South Africa after those two Test matches against the All Blacks. All that extra travelling across goodness knows how many time zones, and for what? The only good news was that Austin and I managed to blag a couple of first-class seats, which was nice. We get so much crap for talking too much, but sometimes chat can get you into good places.
The most memorable happening in Cape Town in early July, apart from another towering display from the pack in an 18–0 defeat, was Clive checking us out of the three-star team hotel and into the best gaff in Africa, known locally as the Pink Palace, which was about six times the price. Not only that, but he picked up the tab on his own credit card. That one act spoke volumes for the ambition Clive had for England. It said he would no longer put up with second best. It also said to me that he wanted sole charge from now on (manager Roger Uttley knew nothing about the change of plan). Here, I thought, was a man unafraid to speak his mind. He said what we were all thinking when lambasting those responsible for organizing the tour. ‘This was something I inherited,’ he was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. ‘Unfortunately, the people who put it in place are still on the RFU. They keep their heads down and hide while we travel round the world to play Tests on successive Saturdays. I wish they would say why they did it. What I cannot seem to get through their thick heads is that we don’t control the players. This means they cannot go around arranging fixtures, telling people what strength of teams we will be sending.’ He stepped up his attack on his Twickenham bosses in the pages of the Daily Telegraph. ‘Anybody who could organize a Test match in New Zealand one Saturday and then another Test halfway round the world in a completely different time zone the next Saturday is somebody who doesn’t know about playing the game.’
It was not until later that Clive’s position