I held my place as we won 39–21 and the selectors picked us en bloc to take on Australia. Sadly for Roger Uttley he had been forced to pull out of the trial through injury, his place taken by Andy Ripley. The team included three new caps: Barrie Corless, the Coventry centre; Mark Keyworth, my old team-mate at Ellesmere College who was playing for Swansea; and a scrum-half who appeared to come from nowhere and who almost as quickly went back there. Mike Lampkowski, who was of Polish extraction, played for Headingley and had been a member of the North and Midlands side that beat England in the trial game. He was a very powerful player and extremely committed. He could batter his way through all but the best defences but he lacked that one ingredient that is so necessary to a scrum-half: he couldn’t pass a ball quickly and accurately and, at international level, you aren’t afforded the luxury of time.
As debut games go, Lampkowski’s wasn’t too bad. It can sometimes happen that a new boy gets an adrenalin rush and plays better than he will ever play again. Certainly, the lad played out of his skin, despite his limited repertoire, scoring a try, and many were left thinking we had unearthed a real find. For obvious reasons, we were very keen to beat Australia but it turned out to be a very different Aussie side, especially in terms of attitude. The only Test they in fact managed to win was against Ireland in Dublin. We recorded what, at the time, was the biggest ever victory over our Commonwealth cousins from Down Under. Even with Steve Finnane, Peter Horton and Stuart MacDougall in their front row the game passed without incident, although the 23–6 scoreline may have given us a false impression of just where we stood in the pecking order. In those days the Aussies were nowhere near the force they have been in the last decade.
Having earned the first three of my four caps against Australia, it was great, from a personal point of view, to be given the chance to play against the other countries in the Five Nations Championship. Yet it was a campaign to forget as we suffered a whitewash that had more to do with the selectors than the guys out on the park. We were well beaten by Wales, but then Lampkowski and Martin Cooper were up against Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett so the first chinks were seen in the scrum-half’s armour. The difference in class was patently obvious and Lampowski’s form had reached crisis level by the time we had succumbed to Scotland 22–12 at Murrayfield. Alan Old had been drafted in to partner him but passes were flying all over the place and he made a number of suicidal breaks, which resulted in him spending much of the game under a pile of Scottish bodies. Panic set in but the selectors kept faith with Mike and, instead, dropped our key line-out jumper at the back of the line, Andy Ripley, and replaced him with Leicester’s Garry Adey, who was much smaller and never reappeared in England colours once the campaign finished. Dave Duckham was injured so my Lancashire colleague Mike Slemen won his first cap in the 13–12 defeat by Ireland at Twickenham and, that time, Lampkowski paid the ultimate price after another poor game in which his inadequacies were once again exposed. I must confess to feeling sorry for him. It wasn’t his fault and he was being asked to do a job that, quite clearly, he was incapable of doing. Nobody helped him to either improve his service or iron out some of the wrinkles in his game.
While Mike stayed in the side we simply couldn’t set up our backs, and I couldn’t believe that the selectors could ignore the claims of Steve Smith. I know he was a mate but when you play alongside a player you discover what sort of contribution he is capable of making and there was no doubt in my mind at that time that Smithy and Alan Old made up the best half-back pairing in the country. They were ignored for too long and it is interesting that both played key roles in the tremendous success of the North side that so comprehensively beat the All Blacks at Otley in 1979. There is an irony about Smithy being forced out by Lampkowski. He had been told by the selectors at the trial stage to concentrate his efforts on getting the ball out to the backs quickly, which is exactly what he did. Then, when he was left out of the side, he was told that he hadn’t been taking defences on in quite the manner that Lampkowski had. If that wasn’t double-Dutch then I don’t know what is. Smithy was penalised for obeying instructions and not playing his natural game. In any case, he had the ability to play it whichever way they wanted and was experienced enough, once on the field, to determine the tactics rather than adhere slavishly to whatever battle plan had been concocted in the dressing room.
Even when the selectors finally turned to Smithy that season, having dropped Lampkowski, they still contrived to get it horribly wrong. Initially they paired Steve with Moseley’s Martin Cooper for the game against France in Paris but Martin was getting over an injury and, before we flew out on the Thursday, he was subjected to the most rigorous fitness test I have ever seen. If he had started out fit there is no way he would have been at the end, and, surprise, surprise, he was ruled out of the game.
At that stage it was patently obvious to everyone involved that Alan Old, who had already been named on the replacements’ bench, was the player who should be called in at the eleventh hour. All except for the selectors who plucked another name out of the hat and Chris Williams, the Gloucester fly-half, was rushed out to the French capital to earn his one and only cap, while poor Alan sat and watched us go from bad to worse.
When I think of how organised things are today in the England camp it is difficult even trying to comprehend just how chaotic it used to be. You really did have to be involved to understand how bad it was and I had sympathy for Chris because an international debut is tough enough anyway without it being made even more difficult by going in unprepared, and having to join a losing side that was very low on morale.
France hammered us 30–9 and seven members of that side – Garry Adey, Bob Wilkinson, John Pullin, Peter Butler, Ken Plummer, David Cooke and Chris Williams – were never seen again. I had only been on one winning side in eight international starts but survived to fight again. It was little wonder we were so poor because the standard of selection was awful and too many of the players, myself included, simply weren’t playing at a competitive enough level on a regular basis. By that stage I had found club rugby pretty well pressure-free and it was only in the county season that the standard was high enough to be meaningful. Even then there was a big disparity in terms of the ability of the county sides and, with a side as strong as Lancashire had become, there were a limited number capable of asking serious questions of us. Gloucestershire would always do that and, in the northern region, Northumberland enjoyed a dominant spell with a side based largely on the successful Gosforth club. It has been very different since the game went professional and the best players have been confined to a smaller club elite, much though some in the game hate the thought of any form of elitism at club level. With top players scattered around a great many clubs, it was a mammoth, costly and time-consuming task for selectors to traverse the length and breadth of the country checking on form.
The present England management not only has its senior squad available for training on a regular basis but is also able to monitor progress by taking in just six games every weekend. Very often those games are spread over three days and, even if Clive Woodward and his coaches can’t always get to games they have the facility of watching match videos. Nothing is left to chance and most countries now envy our domestic competition.
The 1976–7 season dawned with me in good condition and spirits. I was due to get married, Lancashire were sweeping all before them, Fylde even had a good run in the John Player Cup, rugby’s equivalent to the FA Cup, and the British Lions were due to go on tour to New Zealand the following summer. My hope was that I might possibly be in with a chance of a Lions tour providing that I stayed in the England side and performed well. I thought my chances had been enhanced when a combined North and Midlands side crushed Argentina 24–9 at Leicester, just seven days before the Argies lost by a mere point to Wales in Cardiff. A lot of good it did me. England had a new selection committee, headed by the genial Sandy Sanders and including Mike Weston, Derek Morgan and Budge Rogers, and I was dropped