Yeah. Great, in theory. It proved to be much harder than I’d imagined because it was so tough. After ten minutes I was blowing out of my arse! I was absolutely bloody knackered. I’d never known anything like it. I’d been warned about how fast the game would be, but it was way faster than I’d expected. It felt so incredibly furious. It was hard to see what was going on, and get a sense of what was happening on the pitch, when it was all flying past you at such a pace. The daft thing is that I bet if I looked back at the match now I’d laugh at how slow it was, but back then it was such a huge step up from what I was used to.
All my memories of the game are of the great speed and the big hits. Everyone seemed bigger, faster and more focused than I had ever seen in rugby before. I just had to concentrate on what I had to do and what my role was. I remember trying to stay in my zone and do what I was there to do, but things happen in international rugby that you don’t expect and you’re not experienced enough to cope with. They floor you temporarily, but you have to deal with them and get back on the game. If you make a mistake or someone does something you’re not expecting, you have to keep a clear head and focus back on what your role is. I think that’s one of the hardest things in international rugby - keeping your focus on what you need to do while chaos reigns all around.
The overwhelming feeling after that first cap was of just how proud I felt and how lucky I was to have the opportunity to have played the sport at that level with those guys. We all went to the Park Lane Hilton for a massive dinner and I remember being so excited to be at the Hilton. Scott Quinnell came over to see me. He’d given me quite a whack in the game, so he was the first person to come and have a drink with me. He gave me a glass of wine which I knocked back. He said, ‘Well done,’ then another Welsh player came up and did the same, then another, then another …
Then all my team-mates came up … one by one. I drank wine with them all. By the time the dinner started I was absolutely legless. Lawrence was captain so he stood up to speak, and I was so drunk I stood in the corner shouting, ‘Bruno, Bruno, Bruno!’ (his middle name). Lawrence had to keep looking over and asking me to be quiet. The evening’s all a bit vague after that, but I’m told that Jason Leonard and Roger Uttley carried me to my room and put me in the bathroom, with my head in the toilet. It wasn’t the most dignified way to end my first cap, but it was a lot of fun. I woke up at 5 a.m. with a raging thirst and dried sick all over my hair and clothes. Horrific. Things didn’t get any better when I found out that I’d been cited by Peter Boyle, the match commissioner, for punching Colin Charvis in the second half of the game. I must admit that the first thing I thought when I was told about the citing was, What about Scott Quinnell punching me?
When it came to the citing, I was lucky on this occasion, though, because it never amounted to anything. I was told that I would be penalised with a one-month suspension, which seemed harsh, because the offence would have meant me getting just a yellow card if it had been dealt with by the referee during the game. In the end, Roger Pickering, who was the Five Nations’ chief executive at the time, changed Boyle’s decision because he said, ‘The citing procedure was not followed to the letter. There were misunderstandings between people who I have no intention of naming and as a result of the legal advice obtained by the committee the suspension was deemed unsafe.’ All very odd, but I wasn’t complaining.
I staggered out of that hotel in the morning, still drunk, I imagine, aching from head to foot and with the worst headache known to mankind, but I felt lucky. Very lucky. I’d been given the opportunity to play for my country. Now I needed to do everything possible to make sure that I was given the opportunity again.
I had played in the game against Wales at Twickenham because Darren Garforth, the first-choice tighthead prop, had been out through injury, and when he came back for the remaining games in the Five Nations Championships and took his place in the side I took my seat on the bench. It always takes a while to work your way into the affections of the England coach, so it was what I expected. Clive Woodward tended to be loyal to players whom he rated and wanted in his team, so I wasn’t in the least surprised that Darren came back into the side.
We followed up the 60-26 victory over Wales with a 34-20 victory over Scotland at Murrayfield and a 35-17 victory over Ireland, to put us second in the table behind France who had beaten us in that first game (the one that I had watched, terrified, from the bench). It meant we won the Triple Crown, and I’d been part of it, which was fantastic.
I was on the England coach’s radar now. Clive Woodward had seen me playing for England, and knew I’d coped well under pressure, so I hoped I would be given another opportunity to play soon.
Happily, that opportunity came in the summer of 1998. Sadly, it was on a tour that would always be referred to as ‘The Tour from Hell’ because of the absolute drubbing we received in every game we played. In a strange way it was the best thing that could have happened to the England team at that time, and could be regarded as one of the key reasons for England’s victory in the World Cup in 2003 because it shoved us right down to the bottom and galvanised us to fight our way back up again.
The benefit of hindsight - isn’t it a wonderful thing? I assure you that it didn’t feel like the best thing to happen to England at the time. The tour was good but the matches were awful.
When I was told I had been selected to play, I was obviously delighted, but there was no doubt that it would be a tough series. The itinerary was incredible: we would have to play four Tests in five weeks over three continents in the southern hemisphere. It was a crazy tour to have been slotted between a Lions series and a World Cup, and Clive Woodward was keen to point out that it was something he had inherited when he became England coach the previous year, and not the sort of tour that he would have chosen to set up himself.
It was a tough enough assignment for the most experienced of players, and in 1998 we were significantly lacking experience. I’m sure I was chosen because I had two working legs. Many of the country’s leading players, guys like Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio, Jason Leonard and Richard Hill, had picked up niggles over the season that they needed to get sorted in the summer, so they couldn’t tour. With a World Cup the following year, none of the top players wanted to go into the 1998-9 season with injuries.
So the big names pulled out, leaving Clive to assemble a group of everyone else. He tried to convince the southern hemisphere coaches that England had strength in depth, and that losing almost every top player would not stop the team from being competitive, but the reality is that, in every country in the world, if you take away all the leading players it’s hard to have a competitive team. In the end the squad that went on tour contained twenty uncapped players. It certainly didn’t please Clive that he had to select players with little experience, and it didn’t please the Australians either. To say they reacted strongly would be an understatement.
Dick McGruther, the Chairman of the Australian Rugby Union, attacked first, describing the England tour party as ‘probably the most underequipped group of Englishmen to be sent to Australia since the first Fleet’. The Australians like to mouth off about things, but McGruther seemed to be genuinely upset that England were sending a team that could not be described as a ‘best team’. England was accused of treating the southern hemisphere with contempt, and McGruther finished his attack by inviting all Australians to come and enjoy a ‘Pommie thrashing’. All of this, and we hadn’t yet stepped onto the plane. My first touring experience with England was clearly going to be a baptism of fire.
We arrived down under in late May, and realised straight away that McGruther wasn’t alone in the criticisms he was expressing about us. The newspapers were full of condemnatory articles in which Australian journalists were laughing at us, and dragging up former players to join in with the mirth. We just wanted to play rugby, and to be given the chance to prove that we were good enough to wear the England shirt. The newspapers reported that only six players in our tour