Matt Dawson: Nine Lives - Matt Dawson

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by coach Paul Larkin. ‘A very frustrating and eventful year you have had,’ he began.

      Inevitably you must have suffered the full range of emotions, but there is always some consolation. After the previous season when you had supposedly suffered loss of form, you were able to concentrate your efforts in order that you regained your confidence as first-choice scrum-half. Frustrated with injury at least you were still able to achieve this. And despite injury, you were able to grab consolation with England A selections.

      Next season you will have to contend with different problems, but if you are able to shrug off the injury doubts then you will be ready psychologically. I also feel that with Dewi Morris retiring from the England scene there is much to prove. Kyran Bracken may have the edge, but I feel that nothing is definite. You need to concentrate your efforts and work on your range of skills. That means non-stop passing practices prior to sessions and kicking drills. Because we are in the Second Division you will have to be at the top of your game to get the recognition.

      Our gameplan will continue to expand next season. We must take on board the wider game through the hands; the mobility of our back row will legislate for any breakdown. You should be looking to snipe and penetrate from third, fourth and fifth phases etc. Inevitably you will be involved in the occasional back-row move to keep the opposition occupied.

      The most important factor is that we are confident. Not complacent, but prepared to win through hard graft. Prepared to accept that the team will win the championship, not the individual. Prepared from the onset for every possibility.

      Larkin ended his report with the words, ‘You have it all in your grasp.’

      Little did I know, but in the early summer of 1995 I still had a place in England’s World Cup squad within my grasp. In March, on the same weekend that Kyran Bracken helped England to a 24–12 Five Nations victory over Scotland at Twickenham, I had been sent on a mission with England A to South Africa to check out the World Cup facilities in Durban. We played one match, against Natal, and I played the full 80 minutes in a 33–25 defeat at King’s Park. Although England opted for Dewi and Kyran as their World Cup scrum-halves, Kyran picked up an injury during the tournament which meant Jack Rowell needed to send for a replacement. I was next in line, but I was touring Australia and Fiji with England A. Jack’s Mayday call coincided with a game against Queensland during which I was boomed by a big Fijian centre and suffered major-league concussion, and as I was away at the races, so to speak, England were forced into a decision. With me out of the reckoning, they plumped for Andy Gomarsall, my understudy on the A tour.

      Even though Andy would actually play no part in the tournament, I was beside myself when I heard. Fortunately that was not for a while, thanks to a combination of a friend’s sensitivity and a case of mistaken identity. Paul Grayson, my Northampton and England A half-back partner, had heard the news while I was under observation, suffering from impaired vision and various other side effects and thus unable to travel on to Melbourne with the rest of the squad. For the best part of a week he sat on it while I recuperated in Manly with Tim Stimpson, who had also left the tour having gone down with glandular fever. When we were given the all-clear by the doctors to fly home we headed for Sydney airport, only to discover that I was attempting to travel on Grays’s passport. I phoned him to say that he must have mine as I had his, and that I couldn’t leave the country. We then chewed the fat about rugby and about life, which gave him ample opportunity to say, ‘Oh, and by the way …’ But being the mate he didn’t, suspecting that I would have gone walkabout had I heard about Gomars.

      He was absolutely right. It was a nightmare end to what had been an utterly forgettable season.

      The whistle blew and my head started to spin. The game was over and I was running on empty. As I reached the dressing room I slumped on a bench and closed my eyes. Then it all went blank. Moments after playing my first international for England, I passed out.

      When I came round, I would reflect on an upturn in fortune which had brought me my first cap only months after I’d been relegated to the Second Division with Northampton, and transformed me from rugby-playing schoolteacher with casual attitude into fully professional England international.

      But now wasn’t the time. It wasn’t the time either to admit to myself that I had a virus which was invading my body and would confine me to bed for a fortnight after England defeated Western Samoa 27–9 at Twickenham just nine days before Christmas, with Matthew James Sutherland Dawson at scrum-half and his best mate, Paul Grayson, wearing the number 10 shirt.

      Weeks earlier rugby union had become a professional sport, but there were still amateur traditions to observe, one of which was that new caps go out and get as drunk as skunks. It is a proper initiation, with no cactus leaves involved. Each of your team-mates selects a drink and you share it with him. The outcome was inevitable, especially when Ben Clarke and Phil de Glanville came over. Clarkey had a bottle of red wine which he insisted Grays and I polish off with him, then DG ordered us each a vodka martini, which went down like paint stripper. I turned to Grays and said I had to go. He laughed at me and called me a pussy. I went to the 100 and chucked the lot up. It was 10 minutes of pain, but I got rid of most of the alcohol before it had even got into my system. Then I was back at the bar sipping a beer, feeling on top of the world.

      England have had some good chunderers, none better than Bath’s Steve Ojomoh, who puked into the wine bucket in the middle of the table at the Hilton Hotel in London just as he was asked to go up and be presented with his cap. He didn’t hear his summons because he had his head buried in the bucket.

      At least I discharged my cargo in private. But Grays was unimpressed. He had kept it down and was still going strong when I returned. Moments later his colour changed, and his missus suggested she take him up to their twin room. What happened next wasn’t pretty. Grays puked in his bed, got out of it, got in with Emma, then puked in hers as well. From there he stumbled to the toilet, saying how sorry he was, and puked again. He didn’t know where he was, other than that he was in a world of pain. The pussy.

      The morning after the match I woke in the Petersham Hotel feeling deathly. I saw a doctor who confirmed that I was not well and had not been for a while. I had got through my England debut on pure adrenalin, much as James Simpson-Daniel would when playing against the All Blacks with glandular fever in 2002. But it didn’t matter. I had my cap.

      That summer I had seen no reason to circle Saturday, 16 December 1995 on my calendar. When pre-season training began at Northampton, ahead of us lay a year playing Second Division rugby away from the public spotlight. Ian McGeechan wanted to remind us of the hard work that had earned us membership of the Saints’ playing squad in the first place, before the good times took over and softened our edges. So, a year after spending pre-season in Lanzarote, Geech took us training in parks around Northampton, the town we had taken out of the top flight of English rugby. He ran us into the ground, he watched us spill our guts, and after every session he would walk around saying, ‘It’s gold in the bank, boys, it’s all gold in the bank.’ And so it was, for having spent pre-season backing up the pledges we made the day after we were relegated, we proceeded to go unbeaten through the league campaign.

      It was a vital period for me and my rugby because I was not the most popular player at Northampton at the time. I was seen as very arrogant and cheeky, which I probably was. I didn’t know where the line should be drawn. I thought I could get away with saying things because of who I was and who I played for. If I was sitting having a drink with my friends and someone came and plonked themselves down and started joining in, I would look dismissively at them and say, ‘I don’t need this.’ I was blind to my obligations as a player representing the town’s major sporting team. Winger Harvey Thorneycroft used to be the one to pull me aside.

      ‘Daws,’ he’d say, ‘that person thinks you’re a little bit out of order.’

      ‘What you talking about?’ I’d reply. ‘He’s a nob.’

      Geech drummed most of that out of me. He was interested in actions, not in smart-arse talk.

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