Dear Martin,
Would you consider a move down the road to Northampton Rugby Football Club? We know you are a world-class player already playing for an excellent team in Leicester, so why should you consider a move?
Let me put one thought in your mind. Northampton are going to be a great club. In Rodber, Bayfield, Grayson, Dawson, Townsend, Dods and Bell we have seven established internationals. Ian Hunter will also shortly be available. We intend to strengthen the side by recruiting two world-class players to supplement our front five. We would like you to be one of them. With Ian McGeechan as our coach and with currently £1 million in the bank we intend to ‘go for it’ during the next two to three seasons.
It wouldn’t do you any harm to have lunch with me. During the next few weeks players will have to make big decisions that will mean them signing contracts and agreeing wages for the next one to five years. We could offer you a financial package that is unbeatable.
Warm regards, Keith Barwell.
It is testament to his ambition for Northampton that Keith went fishing for Martin Johnson. He offered him a £15,000 salary and listed him as A.N. Other on his budget for the season. It is Keith’s biggest regret that he did not raise his offer by £5,000 as he is convinced that he would have lured the future England and Lions captain away from Welford Road.
But no one really knew then what amount of money was too much or too little. All sorts of figures had been bandied about in the months after South Africa had upset the form book by beating New Zealand to win the World Cup. Rupert Murdoch had signed a 10-year deal worth £366 million for exclusive rights of an annual ‘Tri Nations’ series between the Boks, the All Blacks and the Wallabies. Then another Aussie magnate, Kerry Packer, wanted to start a global circus to challenge Murdoch’s deal. The England and England A lads attended a meeting down in Maidenhead at which Ross Turnbull, Packer’s representative in Britain, promised us the world if we signed with him. I hadn’t yet made my debut against the Samoans and was a little bit starry-eyed in the company of Will Carling, Dean Richards, Jeremy Guscott and the like, but as thousands of pounds were being offered we all agreed that it was too good an opportunity to turn down. It was so far above my head that I didn’t even see it. If it all happened now I’d probably have the likes of Steve Thompson and Ben Cohen hounding me to explain what’s going on, because I did the same in 1995 to Kyran, Martin Johnson, Tim Rodber and Phil de Glanville. I didn’t have a clue. Everything was so far removed from anything I’d ever experienced. I signed a letter of intent which Kyran, who was a solicitor, kept in the safe in his office. We were told that contracts would be put in the post to our club representative, and that the quicker we got them signed and returned the sooner the ‘circus’ would be up and running. It was literally as quick as that, and then, as quickly again, nothing happened and it was never heard of again.
But there could be no holding back the tide of professionalism. Since my days playing with the Marlow under-16s I had thought that the game needed to become more professional. And when Will Carling was stripped of the England captaincy in the spring of 1995 for saying that the English game was run by ‘57 old farts’ my view was only confirmed. I was not alone in thinking that the players were professional in attitude and physical ability, but that everything else was totally amateur – the set-up, the financing, player welfare and so on. The administrators couldn’t seriously expect the players to continue to become better and stronger, and therefore to make more and more money for the game, yet not go professional. Sooner or later something had to give.
I don’t believe that the way the game went pro was right. The Blazers just announced that rugby union was ‘open’ and effectively washed their hands of the situation. It was like, ‘You wanted it, you have it, you deal with it.’ The transition needed to be managed skilfully. Had it been, then maybe the gulf between the haves and have-nots might not have been as big and the likes of Richmond and London Scottish would still be around.
I had no problem supporting Northampton in the ensuing club versus country wrangles. By then I had a mortgage and day-to-day security, all of which had come from Keith and Saints. The RFU had assumed they would get control of the players, but they faffed about with different contracts and how best to move forward. I preferred to be paid by someone I trusted and felt loyal to, so there was only one option for me. The Union was not at that time a body I felt I could trust. Relations between the two parties became increasingly strained and reached a head when the England squad boycotted a training session at Bisham Abbey. The situation had become so confused, and the players were the most confused of all. We were all geared up for the start of the season and then it all blew up. One of the lads referred to us as bargaining chips, and it did feel that way. It was a deeply worrying time. At the click of a finger we could all have had our England dream taken away. We were looking for middle ground but there was none; we were loyal to our clubs but we didn’t want to snub England, which is every player’s ultimate goal. The Union made it very awkward for us to choose between club and country when we shouldn’t have been put in the position of having to choose anyway.
The day of the boycott, when we skipped training to attend a meeting at the Heathrow Hilton, there was a sense of nervous anticipation among the squad. There were going to be offers, decent offers too, on the table to side with the clubs, but there was also unease at the ramifications of us signing an agreement and breaking away from the RFU. I thought the chances that I would not play for England again were about 70–30. That bothered me because that was what I wanted to do, and I know the club also wanted me to do it. I just couldn’t understand where the problem lay. It seemed so simple to me: you play for your club, with whom you are contracted, and if you get selected by England they pay you a fee to represent them. Rob Hardwick, a prop forward from Coventry, was the one player to turn up at the England session that day at Bisham. He would get his one cap, but the general view among the squad was that he wasn’t thinking of the other people involved. We were all desperate to play for England, but had we allowed ourselves to be rolled over by these guys then that would become the norm for the next generation.
The Union had their chance to avert such a conflict. We as a group gave them every opportunity to sign us all up on RFU contracts very early on, and they decided not to do it. They were so amateur in their approach. I’m sure there was plenty of business acumen among the members of the committee, but as a committee they were still very much old school operating under old-school rules. Yet while they wanted us to play for the honour of representing the jersey, they were quite happy to sell all the catering rights, up the prices at Twickenham, and generally make a load of money on the back of the professional era. They became perturbed that we had some bright guys in the squad who decided it was very wrong that the players, who make the occasion what it is, were not receiving a decent percentage of the income.
The game is about the players. It’s about youngsters from all walks of life aspiring to play for England and dreaming that one day they will make it and be recognized as the best in the land. No matter what people might say, you can’t mess with that dream. When we went on strike four years later, coach Clive Woodward threatened to pick a team of junior league players to wear the Red Rose. It wouldn’t have worked. They wouldn’t have been England. That wouldn’t sell out Twickenham, and that is where the RFU make their money. Eventually, the Union realized that.
Keith Barwell is a good man, one I am proud to count among my very best friends. Whether it’s going for a beer, to a barbecue or to his shoot in Bradden, we are mates. And as with all my good mates I feel a loyalty to him which I know he reciprocates. Over the years I have turned down lucrative offers from Gloucester, Leicester and a number of French clubs to leave Saints. In return, he has always looked after me. For instance, when I became a Lion in 1997 he didn’t dance around Franklin’s Gardens screaming, ‘Happy days! I’ve got Daws on a five-year contract and now he’s a Lion!’ He simply upgraded my deal, without me even broaching the matter.
I once asked him why he got involved. ‘I sometimes ask myself the same question,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes I look in the shaving mirror and have a little honesty session with myself. Part of it, at the time, I think, was to show off, to try and