Yet at the time I scored that try it felt no different to scoring for Marlow under-8s. I had no perception of how big the game was, I think because I had been third choice, then second choice, then thrown in. It had all happened so quickly. I hadn’t had time to think ‘Oh my God, this is the biggest game of my life’. I was even quite relaxed and chilled before kick-off because I had very simple jobs to do and there was no weight of expectation on me.
My critics, particularly Austin Healey, will tell you I only made the tour party because Geech was my club coach at Northampton. I had been dropped by England the previous autumn, then ruled out of the 1997 Five Nations campaign by injury. By my reckoning I was at best third-choice scrum-half behind Wales’s Rob Howley and Austin. But as South Africa were to find out, Lions tours throw up tales of the unexpected.
I had known little of the British and Irish Lions until 1989 when a friend of mine, Phil Chamberlain, somehow got himself on a four-week trip to follow them in Australia. It sounded a good crack, but I didn’t really know what he was on about. I was a spotty teenager, mad for rugby, playing it all the time, but because you never saw Lions rugby on television in those days I didn’t really understand the concept. I thought it must be something like the Barbarians. I can’t even recall watching the matches in 1989. But I did rip a page out of Rugby World magazine which had the Lions motif on it, and stuck it on my pinboard.
By the time the next Lions tour came round in 1993 I was living with Tim Rodber, Paul Grayson, Brett Taylor and Nobby (Ian Hunter). Amazingly, given that I had never seen a Lions Test, even on TV, my name was bandied about as a possible tourist. There was quite a bit of press saying I should be New Zealand-bound, and I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even been capped at that stage. Anyway, it didn’t happen, and while Nobby was selected, Rodders and I went to Canada with England on a non-cap tour, both of us returning early with hamstring injuries.
Fed up, the two of us went ever so slightly crazy. We spent pretty much every night of the summer in a bar in Northampton called Aunty Ruth’s. The night before Nobby’s first game, against North Auckland in Whangarei (a game in which he would last only 38 minutes before dislocating his right shoulder and being packed off home), we both went to bed battered only for Rodders to wake me up with the tune of the house, ‘Remedy’ by the Black Crows, blaring in my ear. He had rigged up the sound system in order to ambush me and had a speaker under each arm. ‘Come on, we’ve got to watch Nobby!’ he yelled. That was my introduction to Lions rugby.
Looking back now, I wonder whether 1993 would have caused the same furore as the 2001 tour to Australia had rugby been a professional sport. There were a few murmurs of dissent coming back. Will Carling, for one, didn’t really seem interested. Wade Dooley returned home following the death of his father and was then barred from rejoining the tour. If you do happen to have players who are unhappy, it does filter through. But 1997 was very much like 1989: everyone got on famously and it was just the most fantastic of tours on and off the pitch.
From the moment my name was linked with the Lions in 1993, I decided I wanted to be on the 1997 tour. The love affair had begun, and it has never gone away. For all the unhappiness in 2001 (more of which later), I would go on another one tomorrow. The Lions is the ultimate rugby dream. Playing for England is probably the greatest honour I’ll ever achieve – certainly captaining my country was – yet the Lions is the best of the best. It’s the history and the tradition, as Geech said on the eve of the 1997 tour: ‘What we have got is four countries playing as one. The mantle that you carry and the challenge that you have is to put a marker down in South Africa about the way we can play rugby. A Lion in South Africa is special. The Lions are special. The legends go with it.’ The Lions mean everything to me. That’s why I would stand by what I said in 2001. I’m that kind of person. If things upset me or I feel they could affect my squad, my family or my friends, I’ll speak out.
The 1997 tour passed by in a huge blur. I do remember having my head shaved bald by Keith Wood. He was only supposed to give me a number two, but sneakily he removed the grating and ploughed a stripe down the middle to leave me no choice but to have the lot off. I remember also Paul Grayson returning home with a groin injury after playing only one game. Grays’s injury was a big disappointment, and I did miss him. I’d lost my partner, and it was a cue to go and find myself a little bit. I was 24 and a little bit too reliant on the friends I had. It was time to stand up for myself if I wanted to make any impact at all.
I started only one game before the Test series began and assumed I was battling it out with Austin for a place on the bench, as Rob Howley was quite rightly in the number one spot. My aspirations were no more lofty than that, because at the beginning of the tour I had a feeling, from the way the practice sessions went and from his selection for the first midweek game, that Austin was ahead of me in the pecking order. Sometimes you just have to accept that. On tours like this you can’t get above your station and assume you’re going to be in, even that you’re going to be fit. That was the mistake Graham Henry made with the 2001 Lions, pencilling in his Test team before he left Britain. Look at the Test team in 1997. Paul Wallace – no one in their right mind would have put Paul in that team. Absolutely nobody. Jenks at full-back, Alan Tait on the wing, Jerry Davidson and Richard Hill in the pack ahead of Eric Miller and Simon Shaw. You have to stay open-minded. Yes, Geech played certain combinations, but he mixed things up so that at no time did the squad feel divided between the Test team and the midweek dirt trackers. From start to finish we were all in it together. We trained well, and there was great respect among not only the players but between the players and management. You’re never going to be best mates with everybody, of course, but the whole party was prepared to do absolutely whatever it took to make things work. If that meant Rob Howley wearing the number 9 shirt, so be it. A place on the bench would still be a massive achievement for me.
Then Rob dislocated his shoulder against Natal on 14 June, just seven days before the first Test. All bets were off.
It came down to being in the right place at the right time. Austin had made two starts to my one, in a 64–14 win over Mpumalanga on 4 June. I felt I’d played well in that game, done all the things I was supposed to do, been very busy and organized. I’d even scored a try for good measure. And I was on the bench in Durban when Rob’s shoulder went. One man’s misfortune is always another’s opportunity. And it was a huge opportunity. I had most of the game left to play. If I came through all right I would probably be playing in the Test team a week later. I was on trial as never before.
Rob’s wife, parents and in-laws had flown out to see him play in a Lions series, and he was inconsolable in the dressing room afterwards. ‘Rob dissolved into a fit of despair’ was how Dr James Robson described his immediate reaction to the news that his tour was over. But at the time he left the field I had no way of knowing how bad his injury was. I just had to get on with it; there wasn’t any time for me to get emotional or to flick two fingers in the direction of Jack Rowell and Les Cusworth for dropping me from the England side without explanation. I was playing against Natal with a Test jersey at stake.
This was another match the Lions were expected to lose, yet we ran out 42–12 winners, which made the reference to us as ‘pansies’ on newspaper flyers in the Cape Town area on the day of the opening Test all the harder to fathom. Funny that they weren’t reprinted for the Monday edition. All of a sudden the debate was about whether a 2–1 series win for the Boks could really be termed a success.
Geech had said at the start of the tour that the 13-match itinerary was akin to playing ten Five Nations games and three World Cup finals. His lieutenant, Jim Telfer, used another analogy. ‘This is your Everest, boys,’ he whispered. ‘Very few ever get the chance in rugby terms to go for the top of Everest. You are privileged. You are the chosen few. Many are considered but few are chosen. It’s an awesome task you have, an awesome responsibility. They do not rate us. They do not respect us. The only way to be rated is to stick one on them. There’s no way we go back. We take every step forwards. Nothing, nothing stops us hitting the fucking maximum.’
We did that at Newlands. We stuck it to them. The downside was that the second Test in Durban a week later would be nothing short of ferocious.