In the Lancashire camp they tell the story of how Richard and Fran Cotton attempted a monster meal the evening before once again taking on Durham. As coach John Burgess wasn’t due to arrive until the day of the game because of business commitments in Russia, there wasn’t the same control over what the players ate. Normally it was a set meal but the players this time were allowed to tackle the à la carte menu instead and both Richard and Fran had ordered so much food that their meals could only be accommodated on two large platters – each – and the unbelieving waiters actually carried the platters around the room so that other diners could see what was about to be attempted. I wasn’t there but I’m told Fran retired hurt while Richard sent clean platters back to the kitchen. If Burgess had known about it then their overworked guts would have been had for garters.
John Burgess was not a man to fool with. When I first made the Lancashire squad I was petrified of him. He was a bit of a control freak but I had the greatest admiration and respect for him. In many ways he was ahead of his time because his organisational skills were second to none and he really thought about his rugby at a time when sides tended to go through well-tried motions. Before every Lancashire game he would provide each player with a dossier on the opposition and he had newspaper cuttings of all their previous matches. Goodness knows how he found the time to do it all and run a major engineering company at the same time.
He knew exactly what everyone had to do in every corner of the field and nobody in the Lancashire camp argued with him, not even the top players. A great motivator, he also had tremendous pride in his county and country, although his experience of coaching England wasn’t a happy one. I suppose that when he reached that level he probably needed more than motivation, organisation and set-piece plays. Sadly, there were those in the England camp who regarded him as someone from a different planet.
I’m certain that he was far more comfortable with players such as Cotton and Neary, who thought the world of him, as indeed I did. He more or less transformed northern rugby after it had slipped into something of a backwater. We weren’t a force in the land by any means but Burgess changed that, in no small part due to his honesty, which invariably shone through. As a player the last thing you want to hear is that you haven’t played well but he would certainly let you know if he thought you had had a bad game, and it didn’t matter if you were a many-times-capped international either. He was a massive influence on all our playing careers and I don’t think many of us would have achieved what we did without him. I for one owe him a great debt of gratitude.
I played for the county throughout the 1973–74 championship campaign but injured my Achilles’ tendon and had to withdraw for the final against Gloucestershire – a game we lost and that sparked a sequence of three successive title wins for the West Country side. Battles with Gloucestershire were always pretty memorable because both counties took the championship very seriously and, in some respects, it is sad that this particular element has gone out of rugby. When I played it was imperative that you figured in a successful county side because that was the best route to an international cap, considering the strength, or rather weakness, of club rugby in the north.
Injury kept me sidelined for three months but there was something to look forward to. Lancashire were due to tour Zimbabwe (Rhodesia as it was then) and South Africa in the summer and I was fairly confident of being included in the squad. I had succeeded in forcing out Mike Leadbetter and there was no serious challenger so far as I could see, so I assumed that I would be renewing my second row partnership with Richard Trickey. I had yet to meet a player who later proved capable of challenging the very best – Maurice Colclough. He was a complete stranger then but was destined to become my partner in an England Grand-Slam-winning team and on a British Lions tour. Maurice, a big, redheaded student from Liverpool University, was poised to have a memorable tour but for all the wrong reasons. That he enjoyed a drink was never in dispute and he would have made his Lancashire debut earlier but for the fact that he had to withdraw because of a judicial appearance he had to make in Dublin. In his youthful exuberance he had apparently stripped off in order to swim across the River Liffey and I can only assume that this didn’t go down too well with the local gardaí. Maurice was picked to play in Lancashire’s second tour game in Bulawayo but after a heavy night of carousing he was not really in the best state to sally forth into battle. He tried to fortify himself with a glucose drink, but whilst that provided the propulsion for a wonderful break out of defence it obviously wasn’t too easy to digest because he threw up spectacularly the minute he hit the deck after being tackled. That didn’t endear him to a management that took its rugby very seriously. He had a lot to learn about our Lancashire rugby culture.
Touring clearly suited me because I always seem to return from my travels a better player. That probably had something to do with playing in good company, and very often against more demanding opposition. The trip to Zimbabwe and South Africa, from a purely personal point of view, had gone very well and I was ready, on my return, to make a determined effort to break through into the England side, knowing full well that this would probably mean renewing my rivalry with Roger Uttley.
Tonga paid a visit to the UK during the autumn of 1974 and played against the North at Birkenhead Park just four days before they were due to take on England Under-23s at Twickenham. I was involved in both games, teaming up with Gosforth’s Terry Roberts in a North side that also included my Fylde pals Brian Ashton (who had joined Orrell), Tony Richards and fly-half Ian McDonnell, and I was subsequently included on the replacements’ bench by England.
As I had already taken Monday and Tuesday off work to play for the North, I telephoned Twickenham to ask if it would be in order if I turned up on the Friday rather than Thursday, on the grounds that I didn’t want to push my luck – family business or not. They said that this was all right but assumed I would be in London in time for the Friday-afternoon training session, so I suspect I wasn’t the most popular guy in town when I actually arrived during the evening, having done a full day’s graft at the factory. My punishment was to be dragged from my warm and comfortable bed very early the following morning to practice line-out work with skipper John Raphael, who was also the hooker. I was such an innocent abroad that I didn’t even possess a tracksuit, so I went through the line-out ploys in the car park clad in a pair of jeans and a sweater, relying on one of the other lads to lend me a tracksuit to wear that afternoon so that I wouldn’t look completely out of place sitting on the bench.
Twickenham was an entirely new experience for me and I couldn’t get over the size of the dressing room. I was used to the cramped boxes that seemed to be the norm at a lot of clubs so it took some time to adjust to the luxury of space and the sight of rows of individual baths rather than the traditional communal bath. The top players, I decided, as I settled down on the bench to watch the match, were very cosseted. I wasn’t too concerned when Trevor Cheeseman, who was playing at number eight, had to leave the field suffering from