Open Side: The Official Autobiography
Sam Warburton
‘A terrific book. No one put their body on the line quite like Sam Warburton. ’ Brian O’Driscoll ‘It was an absolute privilege to play against Sam. An inspiring leader with an equally inspiring story to tell. ’ Jonny Wilkinson Sam Warburton OBE was not only a titan of Welsh rugby, but an icon of the game. Having represented his country as a player and team captain at all junior levels, he propelled himself to international attention in 2011 when named as the youngest ever captain of Wales for the Rugby World Cup. Despite his tender age, Sam’s immense displays for club and country were recognised still further in April 2013, when, at just 24, he was named the Lions' captain for the extraordinary 2013 tour to Australia. Four years later, after a year ‘in the wilderness’, Sam was named Lions’ captain yet again for the historic tour to New Zealand, thereby becoming the first ever Lions Captain never to lose a series in the professional era. Intelligent, calm, thoughtful – in many ways seemingly the exact opposite of the smash and crash of modern rugby – Warburton’s edge never came with his size, but with his depth of thought, his reading of movement, and his understanding that, to be a uniquely successful leader, one needs to set goals that far exceed the ambitions of even the most ferocious of opponents. In leading other men, and in pitting himself against the world’s best, Warburton was forced repeatedly to push himself to the very edge of his physiological and mental limits, the 21 significant injuries over that period a painful testament to his sacrifice. Open Side is therefore not simply a chronology of events or a celebration of statistics. Written in a compelling but soul searching style, this is an astoundingly personal book exploring the nature of leadership, the value of self-control, the precision of mindset and of course the future of the game. It is also a deeply personal meditation on the sacrifice of body, the torment of injury and the pain of retirement, a decision Sam was forced to make in July 2018, at just 29 years old. Never before has a rugby autobiography given such intimate access not only to the realities of the dressing room and the heroes and villains of the modern game, but to the unique mindset required to make someone a genuinely great leader of men.
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COPYRIGHT (#u2f3d1a88-7aaa-5a69-ba44-6ca60d60ddaf)
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© Sam Warburton 2019
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Andrew Brown
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Sam Warburton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Extract from Western Mail, 17 October, 2011 courtesy of Western Mail/Media Wales
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Source ISBN: 9780008336578
Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008336608
Version: 2019-07-23
DEDICATION (#u2f3d1a88-7aaa-5a69-ba44-6ca60d60ddaf)
To my wife Rachel, daughter Anna, my family and close friends – thanks for being on the journey with me, supporting me and helping me through all the tough times. I could never have done it without you.
CONTENTS
1 Cover (#uadeaa61e-4a07-562a-a7d8-16e3f7010d19)
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Dedication
5 Contents (#u2f3d1a88-7aaa-5a69-ba44-6ca60d60ddaf)
6 PROLOGUE
7 1 WHITCHURCH
8 LEADERSHIP 1: PERSONALITY
9 2 TOYOTA STADIUM, CHICAGO
10 LEADERSHIP 2: PROFESSIONALISM
11 3 EDEN PARK
12 LEADERSHIP 3: PERFORMANCE
13 4 MILLENNIUM STADIUM
14 LEADERSHIP 4: PERSPECTIVE
15 5 ETIHAD STADIUM, MELBOURNE
16 LEADERSHIP 5: POSITIVITY
17 6 TWICKENHAM
18 LEADERSHIP 6: PERSISTENCE
19 7 WESTPAC STADIUM, WELLINGTON
20 LEADERSHIP 7: PEOPLE
21 EPILOGUE
22 APPENDIX A: THE FUTURE OF THE GAME
23 APPENDIX B: MY BEST WELSH XV
24 APPENDIX C: MY BEST INTERNATIONAL XV
25 About the Publisher
LandmarksCover (#uadeaa61e-4a07-562a-a7d8-16e3f7010d19)FrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
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PROLOGUE (#u2f3d1a88-7aaa-5a69-ba44-6ca60d60ddaf)
Friday, 30 June 2017
The Rydges Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand
Two in the morning.
Can’t sleep. The witching hour, when the darkness comes flooding in: thoughts tumbling and cascading over each other like a Snowdonia river in full spate. The darkness comes flooding in, and it’s all I can do to stop it drowning me.
Everything hurts. My body, my mind, my heart. Everything. I’m a wreck.
It’s easier to list the parts of me that aren’t in pain. My eyelashes. That’s pretty much it. I’ve had more than 20 injuries over my career: the concussions, the broken jaw, the plate in my eye socket, the trapped shoulder nerve, the hamstring torn clean off the bone, the knee ligaments.
Before I go out to play these days, I have to neck painkillers while the physios strap me up like an Egyptian mummy. I have to stand there butt naked in front of them, cupping my twig and berries, while they bind my knees, my ankles, my shoulders and my elbows.
It’s not just tonight. It’s the relentless grind: week on week, month on month, year on year. Smash and be smashed. Try to recover. Smash and be smashed again. The equivalent of strapping myself into a car like a crash test dummy and driving it at a wall every weekend.
I get out of bed. Shards of pain as my feet touch the floor. I push myself slowly upright, gritting my teeth as the aches flare and settle.
If my body’s only at around 70 per cent fitness, my mind feels around half that. I’m exhausted, but also wired: antsy, yet craving rest. Yes, these are the small hours when everything seems worse, but even in broad daylight the doubts and questions are never far away.
Sam Warburton shouldn’t be captain.
Sam Warburton shouldn’t be playing.
Sam Warburton’s past it.
What I know is that there are plenty of people out there who think that.
What I fear is that they might be right.
I take one step, gingerly, then another, and another. Walking – hobbling, more like – across the carpet over to the window. I pull back the curtains and look out.
Below me is the Wellington waterfront. It’s quiet and empty now, but earlier this evening it was packed, as it will be later tonight and tomorrow night. Many of these people will be wearing red rugby shirts and will have saved up for years to come all the way across the world just to watch us play.
Because tomorrow evening I’m going to lead out the British and Irish Lions for the second of three Tests against the All Blacks. We lost the first in Auckland last week, which means we have to win this one to stay in the series. I’ve played in some big games in my life – World Cup semi-finals, Grand Slam deciders, Lions Tests against Australia – but nothing that comes close to this.
Nothing that comes remotely close.
The best of the Home Nations, a once-every-four-years touring team, against the double world champions. I came off the bench in Auckland, but now I’m starting and I simply have to deliver.
It should be the highlight of my career. It feels like anything but.
This is a game that’s been the biggest part of my life for almost two decades, a game that has largely defined me. It’s a game I love. Rather, it’s a game I thought I loved. Right now, I hate it.
I want to be one of those fans, on the piss and singing their hearts out, with no problem more pressing than who gets the next round in. Instead, I’m here, torturing myself with questions to which I have no answer. Why? Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I putting myself through all this pain, all this pressure, when I could be doing something – anything – else? Why am I in a job which right now I detest?
Round and round and round. Body, mind and heart. Physical stress, mental stress and emotional stress, all working on and off each other. I feel as though I’m in a submarine going deeper and deeper, springing leaks as the hull creaks and flexes, and soon I’ll come to the point of no return, the moment when the pressure gets too much and crushes me like a tin can.
Two in the morning, and no one to talk to.
For once in my career I’ve chosen to have a room on my own rather than share with a team-mate. It’s the captain’s prerogative, to have a room to himself, but one I’ve rarely used as I don’t like to be set apart from the other boys.
This time, I have. I’ve told everyone it’s because I need the sleep, which is true – my daughter Anna’s not far off a year old, and like all babies she’s up more times in the night than a vampire – but it’s not the whole truth either.
It’s because I need the space too. The six weeks of this tour are what my entire career has been building towards, and I want to win so much, so much, that the desire is almost in itself a physical pain. Another physical pain, more like.
A submarine. A volcano. All this pain bubbling up inside me, and if I don’t deal with it, it’s going to explode and consume me in all its molten fury.
I need to talk to someone. There are several people I could call, but there’s only one person I know will really understand. I dial her number.
‘Sam?’ Her voice is full of concern. It’s lunchtime back home in Cardiff. She knows what time it is where I am, and that I wouldn’t be phoning for no reason.
‘I’ve had enough, Mum.’ My throat is tight with the effort of not bursting into tears. ‘I really have. I’m just going to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘To the airport. Do a bunk. Leave all my kit here, get on the first plane home. I’ll be in the air before they realise I’ve gone.’
I didn’t, of course. Can you imagine the headlines?
LIONS CAPTAIN DOES MIDNIGHT FLIT.
WARBURTON QUITS.
THE RUNAWAY SKIPPER.
I’d never have lived it down, and rightly so.
But at the time I was deadly serious. And no one knew, apart from my mum. She talked me down: told me that I didn’t owe anything to anyone, so all I had to do was get through this week and the next and then the series would be over and I could do what I wanted.
She was right, of course. She knew the way love for and hatred of rugby oscillated within me, because they did for her too. She loved what the game had given me and the pleasure I’d got from it, but she hated seeing me beaten up, or under the knife, or criticised. Even though I was 6 ft 2 and 16 stone, I was still her little boy.
No one knew, apart from my mum. The spectators in the Westpac Stadium the following evening certainly didn’t know when they watched one of the most titanic and dramatic Test matches imaginable. And there’s no reason they should have known. The rugby public see what the players want them to see, and no more.
I played most of my career with 7 on my back. For me 7 has, in rugby terms, always been a sacred number. This book is arranged according to that number. There are seven main chapters, each centred on a different rugby ground in which something important in my life happened: a red card or two, a debut, a barnstorming run, a horrific injury, a goal-line stand, a split-second decision with a referee.
In between those chapters are seven sections centred around different aspects of leadership (Personality, Professionalism, Performance, Perspective, Positivity, Persistence and People), because over the years as captain for Wales and the Lions I’ve learned a bit about all of those too.
Number 7 is the openside flanker, the one who packs down in a scrum furthest from the near touchline and therefore has more of the field to patrol than number 6, the blindside. I’ve played a bit at six too, and in writing this I realised that openside and blindside aren’t just positions on the pitch. They’re also reflections of how much people really know about the life of a professional rugby player.
Most of the time, that knowledge is the blindside, the narrow side. You see us on match day, and maybe in social media videos or promotional appearances too. That’s some of our life, but it’s only a very, very small part. The rest of it, those wide expanses which the number 7 needs to patrol, is kept hidden.
This is the story of those expanses, the parts of the iceberg beneath the surface. It’s a story of highs and lows, of triumph and disaster. It’s a story of what it’s really like to be in the thick of it, on and off the pitch. It’s not every rugby player’s story, but it’s my story, told as clearly and honestly as I can.
This is my open side.
1
WHITCHURCH (#u2f3d1a88-7aaa-5a69-ba44-6ca60d60ddaf)
51.5132°N, 3.2234°W
2002
We’re playing Llanhari. Their number 8’s a big lad, running to fat, and he’s nasty too. We’re not yet a quarter of the way through the match when I see him choking our scrum-half: proper choking, lifting him off his feet while holding him by the neck, all that.
I see red. I smash into this lad as hard as I can, picking him up and throwing him down, head first. I don’t know how dangerous this is, of course; none of us do. I’m just enraged that he’s picking on one of my team-mates, and the smallest lad on the pitch to boot. Besides, dump tackling’s my trademark, my way of stamping my authority on the game and getting my team behind me. In each game I play, I don’t look to dump the smallest guy on their team, but the biggest one.
Having seen red once, I see it again when the ref sends me off. I can’t complain, but equally I won’t apologise. I’m not a dirty player, and I never do anything illegal unless provoked; but if someone starts something, I’m determined to be the one to finish it. And I’ll never back down from defending a team-mate. Even a chopsing scrum-half, talking back to people.
1995. ‘I want to be a footballer.’
I’m seven years old. Mum’s putting me and my twin brother Ben to bed. We’ve been playing football all afternoon, like we always do. There’s a grass verge on the corner of our street, and we play there for hours at a time. The neighbours must hate us, but we don’t know, and even if we did we wouldn’t care. We’re just kids playing football.
When he’s not on shift at Whitchurch fire station, Dad plays with us. He was pretty good when he was younger – he had a sweet left foot and a trial for Bristol Rovers – but he couldn’t be bothered with the whole professional lifestyle, certainly not in the days before the big money came flooding in. He just wanted to play locally. Now he teaches us how to pass, and control, and shoot, and head the ball: all the things that will make us better players.
We’ve both got little Spurs kits. Mine has ‘Sam, 9’ on the back; Ben’s has ‘Ben, 10.’ Dad’s been a Spurs fan all his life; he was born in the northwest London suburb of Kingsbury, even though his family are originally from Bury, and he came to Cardiff via Birmingham. ‘Once Tottenham, always Tottenham,’ he says. Playing for Spurs and Wales, that’s my dream.
‘Really?’ Mum says. ‘You want to be a footballer?’
She had Ben and me five weeks premature. One of the maternity nurses at Heath Hospital took one look at how small we were and said the words no self-respecting Welsh person ever wants to hear. Mum and Dad have, laughing, told us often enough what those words were.
‘Well,’ I reply, mimicking what the maternity nurse said, ‘I’m never going to be a rugby player, am I?’
Ben and I are playing with our toys on the floor. Our favourites are Action Man (obviously) and Biker Mice from Mars. We take their clothes off and play with them. When Dad finds them naked, he puts their clothes back on. We take their clothes off again when we next play with them.
‘Carolyn,’ Dad says to Mum. ‘I think the boys might be gay.’
Actually, we’re just transfixed by the muscle definition on Action Man and the Biker Mice.
1997. Ben and I play centre-back for Llanishen Fach Primary School. We’re as good as most kids our age, but now and then we come up against someone special. And there’s no one more special than this kid who plays for Eglwys Newydd. We know he must be good even before the match begins, because he’s wearing adidas Predators.
He’s got everything: ridiculous levels of skill, pace to burn and stamina that means he can keep going all match. When he dribbles, it’s like the ball is stuck to his laces. He’s so good that we need half a team to stop him, and even if we do manage that it just means we’ve had to leave two or three of his team-mates unmarked.
He might be only nine years old, but news of his talent has spread far and wide. We hear parents whispering to each other on the touchline. Did you see him play at that tournament in Newport? There were some pro scouts there, you know. Southampton have signed him to their academy.
Look on the bright side, Ben and I tell each other. When we go to Whitchurch in a couple of years, he’ll be on our side rather than against us.
We ask what his name is.
He’s called Gareth Bale.
There’s a special needs section at school, for kids with learning difficulties and the like. One of these kids latches onto me a bit and follows me into my lessons even though it makes him late for his own. Some of my mates laugh at him and tell him to get lost, but I always try and make time for him.
We’re playing cricket in the yard, and this same kid is there. He’s batting and he’s not very good. He swipes at the ball, missing it by a mile. The lad playing wicketkeeper catches it and throws the ball in the air. ‘You’re out,’ he says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s not.’
‘He is.’
‘He was nowhere near it, and you know it.’
‘He hit it.’
‘You only want him out so someone else can have a go.’
‘Well, he’s rubbish, isn’t he?’
‘If you want him out, then you get him out.’
‘He is out.’
The argument turns into a scrap, and it only ends when the headmistress comes to break us up. In her office, she asks me what happened, and I tell her the truth. This kid was being bullied, and I hate bullies. I don’t even know where that comes from, just that I do. I can’t stand bullying, and I won’t stand by when it happens and can do something about it.
1998. Ten years old, Llanishen Fach. We’re playing touch rugby: Bluebirds v Blackbirds. The Bluebirds are the rugby boys, even though they’ve named their team after Cardiff City football club; the Blackbirds are the footballers (or, as the rugby boys like to call them, the losers). I’m playing for the Blackbirds. I’ve never played rugby, no one in our family’s ever played, I don’t like the look of it, and a game of touch doesn’t make me change my mind. It’s a rubbish game. You can’t pass it forwards, you can’t tackle people, you can’t kick it.
I must have changed at least one of the teacher’s minds, though, as I’m picked to play in the next rugby match. Full contact, not touch. They want me to play on the wing, as I’m quick: when it comes to sports-day sprints, I’m either winning them or pretty close.
I don’t want to play. I really don’t want to.
Match day comes. I’m terrified. I go from lesson to lesson, wondering how I can pretend to be injured, or hoping that the match will be called off. The clock ticks round. We’re due to play after the school day’s ended, so when the bell goes and all the kids who aren’t playing go home as usual, that’s just what I do. Sneak out, follow them through the gates and leg it home.
‘I thought you had a match,’ Dad says over tea.
‘Got cancelled,’ I reply, quite a lot more coolly than I feel.
Next day at school, no one says anything. All morning I’m waiting for one of the teachers to ask where I was, but they don’t. By lunchtime I’m beginning to think I’ve got away with it. I’m in the yard with my mates, playing around, when I sense more than see the other kids stop what they’re doing.
I turn around. The headmaster, Frank Rees, is coming towards me. The whole place is still; there’s not a kid born who’d want to miss one of their fellow pupils being reamed out in front of the whole school. It’s the kind of thing they’ll be talking about for weeks afterwards. They all back away a little, as if the trouble I’m clearly in is going to be somehow contagious, but they make sure to stay well within earshot.
‘Where were you yesterday afternoon?’ Mr Rees asks.
It doesn’t really matter what excuse I give, as he knows it’s going to be a lie. He gives me a bollocking: not a shouting or screaming one, as he’s not that kind of man, but stern and strict, nonetheless. If you’re picked, he says, you play. It’s not up to you to decide whether or not you want to.
He’s right, of course, and I deserve it. By the time I get home that afternoon, he’s already spoken to my parents. They tell me the same thing: don’t ever bunk off again.
By the end of the year I’m playing for East Wales.
‘That’s why I picked you,’ Mr Rees says. ‘I knew how good you could be.’
1999. Being good at rugby isn’t yet enough for me. I don’t love it, not in the way I love football.
Cardiff Schools trial. I’m so nervous that I’m crying in the car. Just relax, Dad says, you’ll be fine. But I’m not. I don’t want this pressure. School matches are one thing, but this is a step up. I play badly, and not by accident. I do it on purpose, so I won’t get picked for Cardiff Schools.
It works. I don’t get picked. I’m glad.
Two weeks later, I’m playing for the school against Willowsbrook. No one’s watching, so I don’t have to throttle back or sabotage myself. I score four tries.
One of the Willowsbrook fathers comes over to Dad afterwards.
‘I’m a selector for Cardiff Schools,’ he says. ‘Why couldn’t your boy have played like that at the trial?’
2000. I’m at secondary school in Whitchurch, a school so massive (more than 2,000 kids) that they basically have to split it in two. With the move comes a jump in rugby too, from ten-a-side to the full 15.
Cardiff Schools, away to Bridgend. My first time on a bus with a bunch of strangers. I don’t say much. I’m quiet, shy, watchful; not one of the inner circle who colonise the back row of the bus as though by right.
The coach tells me to stand on the sidelines. I’m not sure if I’m playing or if I’m a sub. Bridgend ship it out to their winger. He comes haring down the touchline towards me. What am I supposed to do?
Best take no chances, I reckon. I fly onto the pitch and smash him into next week. I’m still on the ground when I hear their players’ disbelieving protests, and a fair bit of verbals too.
‘Bloody hell,’ says our coach. ‘You’re on the bench, you muppet.’
I come on in the second half. The Bridgend winger gives me a wide berth when I do.
We reach the semi-finals of the Welsh Cup. Playing against Pontypool, I put one of their boys into touch, and as I’m getting up I hear one of the coaches whistle softly and say, ‘I’ve never seen an Under-12 hit so hard.’
They put me at openside, number 7, and instantly I fall in love with the position. A lot of the good kids play 7, so that’s a compliment in itself, but it’s more what the position demands. Sevens aren’t as quick as the wingers, as strong as the props or as skilful as the fly-half, but they do have to be reasonably quick and strong and skilful: good all-rounders, the decathletes of a rugby team.
And they’re always involved, which I absolutely love. I don’t play rugby either to stand shivering near the touchline or to have my head up a prop’s arse for 80 minutes. I want to be where the action is. When you’re a 7 and doing your job properly, the ball’s never far away, whether you’re running support lines for your team-mates or tackling the oppo.
And tackling, as the coach on the sidelines saw, is very much my thing.
The one constant through changing teams and changing years: Ben. On that grass verge near our house or on a pitch a few minutes away, we’re always playing; not just football now, but rugby and cricket too. God knows how much we cost Mum and Dad in broken windows, though of course we don’t really realise that things cost money.
The other thing we don’t realise is how much time we’re putting in to making ourselves better, because it never seems like a chore. In years to come Malcolm Gladwell will write in his book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to really master something, and Ben and I are putting in a lot of these hours without even realising it.
We do lots of one on ones, trying to beat each other. Ben’s where I get my competitive edge from. But no matter how much we want to beat each other, we always help each other along too. We make suggestions and point out where we think the other one’s going wrong. We work together and look out for each other. We don’t lay into each other or put each other down. We’re best mates.
2001. I’m still playing football, not just for Whitchurch – such a relief to watch Gareth tormenting other defenders week in, week out, shielding the ball from three players at once and then weaving through them like a magician – but also for Lisvane. It’s quite an affluent area of Cardiff, and a lot of the teams we play against take the mickey out of us for being posh lads and that. But we’re good – we go a couple of years undefeated – and we can look after ourselves.
When we play Grangetown, which is a rough and tough area, I’m determined to show we’re not going to let ourselves be intimidated. I come in hard on this kid, and he jumps on my back and tries to punch me. I hold his arms out like a crucifix and walk him all the way over to the ref so he can deal with him.
‘You ever come past JD Sports,’ this kid says afterwards, ‘we’ll be waiting.’
I know that he and his mates hang around there, and that a handful of them against one of me is going to be a different story. I give JD Sports a miss for the next couple of months.
Besides, I’ve slightly tarnished Lisvane’s reputation. Before I started playing for them, they prided themselves on a spotless disciplinary record. The first season I’m there, I get two red cards and three yellows. I’m being physical rather than dirty, but it doesn’t matter.
I realise that football doesn’t have enough aggro for me. Football’s a contact sport, but rugby’s a collision sport. I need to smash people when I play.
2002. We’re playing Llanhari. Their number 8’s a big lad, running to fat, and he’s nasty too. We’re not yet a quarter of the way through the match when I see him choking our scrum-half: proper choking, lifting him off his feet while holding him by the neck, all that.
I see red. I smash into this lad as hard as I can, picking him up and throwing him down head first. I don’t know how dangerous this is, of course; none of us do. I’m just enraged that he’s picking on one of my team-mates, and the smallest lad on the pitch to boot. Besides, dump tackling’s my trademark, my way of stamping my authority on the game and getting my team behind me. In each game I play, I don’t look to dump the smallest guy on their team, but the biggest one.
Having seen red once, I see it again when the ref sends me off. I can’t complain, but equally I won’t apologise. I’m not a dirty player, and I never do anything illegal unless provoked; but if someone starts something, I’m determined to be the one to finish it. And I’ll never back down from defending a team-mate. Even a chopsing scrum-half, talking back to people.
I’m waiting for the bell to start school when I first see him. He’s walking across the yard with a file in his hand, and it’s the way he’s walking which really catches my eye: upright, purposeful, military. Even before we’ve exchanged a word, I know this is not a man who’s going to settle for second best.
He’s called Gwyn Morris, and he’s our new PE teacher.
The hardest-working player will win, that’s what he tells us. If you work harder than your opposition, you will win. Twice a week he has us training for an hour before school and an hour afterwards. It’s not all physical stuff – we’re 14 years old, and you can’t push growing bodies too hard – but tactical and mental too. Mr Morris doesn’t just want us to work hard, but also work smart.
Be professional, he says. Professional isn’t about getting paid. It’s about the way you approach things and the standards you set. It’s about never being satisfied with your performance and always wanting to analyse your game, to see what you could do better next time round.
April 2003. We win the Welsh Schools championship. The final is at the Millennium Stadium, where only a few weeks earlier Wales were playing Six Nations matches against England and Ireland. (They lost both of those, and their three away matches too, for a whitewash and a wooden spoon.)
The stadium’s almost empty, but it doesn’t matter. Ben and I become the first twins to play at the Millennium (he plays in the centre), and I score two tries. It’s a great team full of great lads. Afterwards, on the bus back to school, I have a profound sense of satisfaction: a glow, really. We did it. We worked hard for it, and we worked smart for it, and we did it.
We’re singing and laughing and joking, and we feel like kings of the world.
I go for a trial at Cardiff City FC. Very quickly, I realise two things. First, there’s no one here who’s remotely as good as Gareth. It’s hard to know quite how good someone is when you only have the schools you play by way of comparison, but Cardiff are a decent club – they’ll get promotion to Division One, a step down from the Premier League, next season – so if Gareth’s better than all these kids then he really must be something special.
And second, I’m not good enough. This is a step too far for me. I’m a little sad, because football’s been my first love for as long as I can remember, but sooner or later I’d have to choose between football and rugby. This has made my decision for me, and deep down it’s probably the decision I wanted to make anyway.
October. For our 15th birthday, Mum and Dad give Ben and me a multigym, which we put in the garage. We train there after school.
I keep thinking of what Mr Morris said. Whoever works hardest will win.
I go to the school gym at lunchtime to do weights. Sad Lad, a couple of girls call me when they see me coming out dripping with sweat. I don’t care. I’m not too cool to make it look like it’s all beneath me. Gym, weights, speed stuff, I’m mad for it all. I drop honey sandwiches for tins of tuna, crisps for pieces of fruit.
Whoever works hardest will win.
December. We get 21 days’ holiday over Christmas, and I train at the school on 20 of those days. The 21st is Christmas Day, and the only reason I don’t train then is that the place is locked and I can’t get in.
Whoever works hardest will win.
2004. I start to train my mind as well as my body.
Whenever we play a match, I have to be better than my opposite number. You hear whispers on the circuit: oh, Pembrokeshire have got a good number 7, or Llanelli, or Pontypridd. And I’m thinking, Well, he can’t be as good as me. He can’t be as good an athlete as me, or train as hard as me, or want it as much as I do. So no matter how good he thinks he is, I’m better.
Whoever I play for, there’s only one number 7 shirt. I’m the best 7 at Whitchurch, which is a huge school. I’m better than everyone I play against, every 7 in all 26 of Cardiff’s secondary schools, and all across Wales. I’m the best 7 in Wales.
And if that’s the case, and it is, then why shouldn’t I be better than every schoolboy 7 in England, Scotland and Ireland, because I train harder than they do too?
I take it further. I keep hearing about this team, this almost mythical band of brothers who comprise the four Home Nations and only come together once every four years. The Lions. The British and Irish Lions.
If I’m the best schoolboy 7 among the four Home Nations, and if I keep that going into senior level, and if I’m better than everyone in a 10-year age range too – if I continue to be better than every 7 I play against, no matter how old they are – then why shouldn’t I play for the Lions one day?
There’s a questionnaire for the rugby team. One of the questions is ‘What’s your ultimate ambition?’
‘British and Irish rugby legend,’ I write.
‘That’s a bit big-headed,’ says Dad when he sees it.
I shrug. ‘It’s true, though.’
Mr Morris nods when I tell him what I wrote. ‘Aim for the stars, lad,’ he says. ‘If you fail, you’ll still reach the sky.’
I win player of the year for Cardiff Schools Under-15s. I smile sweetly when I go up to accept the award and shake the hand of the guy presenting me with the award, but inside I’m seething.
Sure, I’ve won it this year, but the previous year I was on the bench all season and only played 17 minutes. I’d been a regular starter for the three years before that, and I was playing as well as anyone for Whitchurch, so why the difference?
Because the coach was getting free golf lessons off the number 7’s dad, that’s why.
To start with, I know her only as the badminton girl.
I hardly ever see her around. The school’s so huge – 12 classes in each year – that it’s split across two sites, and she’s usually on the other site from me. All I know is that she plays badminton at age group for Wales, and she looks really nice.
In year 10 we get to be in a maths class together. Friday afternoon, really bored, I’m sitting with my mates at the back, and we do what boys have done in mixed classes since pretty much the dawn of time: we start rating the girls out of ten. When it comes to Rachel Thomas, I go, ‘Oh, four,’ just so no one thinks I’m too keen. But inside I’m thinking, She looks really nice. Not just attractive, though of course she is – brown hair, big eyes, wide smile – but a really nice person too.
One of my mates adds her to my list on MSN Messenger, and we start chatting. Two years of messaging before we meet in person! Even though – and this is the really insane bit – all the time she lives four doors down from me, and neither of us ever know. We don’t even bump into each other on the street when going to and from school. She tells me all about her family, which is tight and close like mine: she has two sisters, her parents are always loving and loyal, they’ve got the same values I’ve been brought up with.
And just as I’ve never had a girlfriend, she’s never had a boyfriend. I ask her if we can meet up – anywhere you like, I say, even if it’s just for five minutes outside your house with a bag of sweets. She’s wary. She knows I play rugby, and she knows what kind of reputation the rugby boys have – girls and drinking and bad behaviour. I’m not like that, I say, but of course that’s just the kind of thing someone who was like that would say. No point in saying it. I have to show her. Once she gets to know me, she’ll see I’m really not like all the other rugby guys.
Christmas. The Lions are due to tour New Zealand next year. My folks give me a Lions jersey with 7 on the back: a real 7, with the Lions logo at the bottom. I wear this shirt everywhere, absolutely everywhere. I wear it to the gym, and out running, and in the school library when it’s a non-uniform day, and when sitting at home. Sometimes I even let Mum wash it.
2005. Rugby players have a bit of an image as thick louts, and I’m determined to be neither. I’m in the top third of my classes; not super-intelligent by any means, but better than average. Only two teachers reckon I won’t do well in my GCSEs. My biology teacher predicts a D, my RE teacher says E. No way, I tell them both. I’ll get an A. I might not be able to work everything out for myself from scratch, but I’m good at parrot learning, and if that’s what it takes then that’s what it takes. You can argue that the exam system is wrong and that it doesn’t take into account things that it should do, but it’s like wanting to play rugby at 7 – don’t bitch about it, just get on with it.
Prove the doubters wrong. It’s the easiest way of making me do something, to tell me that I won’t.
I get A’s in both RE and biology, just like I said I would. The RE teacher runs up to me and hugs me, thrilled that I’ve proved her wrong.
The biology teacher doesn’t say a word.
The prom, end of year 11. Rach is there. I’m more nervous than I’ve ever been before a rugby match. Do it, I say to myself. Talk to her. She’s right here. It’s now or never.
So I do. We sit on a bench and chat. It’s the happiest day of my life, honestly it is.
And that’s it. From that moment onwards, I’ve got no interest in any other girl. I know she’s the one for me. She’s the one I’m going to marry.
When you know, you know. And I know.
July. I immerse myself in the Lions tour to New Zealand, getting up at stupid o’clock to watch some of the games. Martyn Williams is my hero, and I’m so thrilled when he makes it onto the pitch as a replacement in the third Test, even though both the match and the series are long gone by then. I’m also transfixed by the way Marty Holah at 7 plays for the Maori All Blacks when they beat the Lions before the Test series begins.
The next time my beloved Lions shirt comes back from the wash, I fold it neatly and put it in the bottom of a drawer.
‘What’s up?’ Mum says. ‘Don’t you like wearing it anymore?’
‘Next time I wear that top,’ I reply, ‘it’s going to be the real thing.’
Rach and I start going out. I’m lovesick, quite literally; every time I see her, I’m so nervous that I throw up beforehand. I’ve only ever been sick before a match once, and even that was just reflex from a cough I had, but with Rachel it happens every time. ‘I’m not sure this is normal,’ Mum says. Maybe not, I think, but Kyle in South Park used to get sick like this too whenever he met a girl, so at least I’ve got company (even if that company is a cartoon character).
Sometimes it even happens when I’m with Rachel, in the car for example. ‘Rach, can you pull over? I just – there’s something I need to get behind that post-box.’ And then I’m out of the car and chucking my guts up behind the post-box, as if it’s two in the morning and I’ve had a skinful.
If I haven’t learned the lesson from last year’s case of free golf tuition, I do this time round. I’m playing two years up by now, and we go to face Glantaf. Last time we played them my opposite number started strangling me, and when I fought back he bit my finger. At the next kick-off, I told the fly-half to put it on him, and when he caught it I forearmed him in the face as hard as I could. He never came back at me for the rest of the game.
So there’s a bit of history here. I’m thinking about this and looking to see whether this bloke’s going to be playing again today, so when I see a Cardiff Blues car parked near the pitch I don’t take much notice. I assume they’re there to watch one of the Glantaf boys, a big, hard-running back called Jamie Roberts.
Turns out they know all about Jamie, and it’s me they’ve come to watch.
I do well at a Cardiff Blues academy training session and get taken on there. They pay me £50 a month, which for a teenage boy is the dog’s bollocks. No paper round, protein shakes whenever I want, travel expenses too. Happy days.
Not quite. The coach is really down on me, giving me three or four out of 10 when I know I’ve played much better than that. Not just one game or two, but every single time. Maybe he’s trying to motivate me, but if so there are better ways of going about it. I’m not a professional player, not yet. I’m a schoolboy who like all teenagers keeps a lot of insecurities tucked away behind the façade. Am I good enough? Am I tough enough? Am I wasting my time here?
Just as bad, he keeps putting me in the second row. I’m not a second row. I’m a 7. That’s where I play, that’s where I’m best.
One night, after another three out of 10 in the second row, I come home in tears. I go straight to the multigym and smash out as hard a session as I can manage, way harder than normal. I’m at it for an hour and a half, fuelled by rage and frustration, pumping weights until I can’t move my arms, screaming at the walls.
‘Sam!’ It’s Mum. She’s standing by the door. I don’t know how long she’s been there. ‘Sam, what’s going on?’
I tell her. She takes me inside the house and calms me down.
The next day, I realise something: the lesson that both this incident and the golf coach have taught me.
Not everyone has my best interests at heart, and not everyone’s going to play fair. The only way to deal with it is to make myself so good that they can’t do anything other than pick me, and pick me where I play best.
The only person who sets my boundaries is me.
I play for Wales Under-16s that year. Not at 7, ironically, but at 8, which is the next best thing. I don’t mind 8 – most of the skills are transferable. It’s still the back row, and I’m a back-row player.
On Friday nights, our mates start to go out into Cardiff, and they invite Ben and me along. We usually say no. Because we’ve always had each other, because we’ve never needed to bike over to someone’s house to find someone to play with, we’ve never really needed anyone else.
Besides, Fridays are when my granddad Keith comes round, and we sit there watching Friday night sport on TV. Wrestling, boxing, football, rugby league, whatever. Me and Ben and Dad and Keith, while Mum and our elder sister Holly roll their eyes at these cavemen on the sofa.
Dad introduces me to heavy metal. Specifically, he introduces me to Anthrax; and even more specifically, to their track Refuse to Be Denied.
Refuse to be denied.
Refuse to compromise.
I listen to it while running the streets at night. Seven – that number again – seven words in the chorus that sum up my entire philosophy.
Refuse to be denied.
Refuse to compromise.
I never stop trying to get better.
On Saturday mornings I watch Super Rugby on TV. I sit there with pen and paper, and whoever’s playing 7 – Richie McCaw, George Smith, Schalk Burger – I note down everything they do in the game. Tackles, rucks, carries, turnovers. In the afternoon I play for the Blues Under-16s, and when we’re given our own statistics for the match I compare them to those of the pros. So I might get something like eight tackles, 16 rucks, eight carries and no turnovers, while McCaw would be on 21 tackles, 40 rucks, 18 carries and five turnovers.
You’ve got a bit of a way to go here, old son, I think to myself.
But having a way to go doesn’t matter if I’m on the right path. I start jackalling – trying to steal the ball at the point of contact – in school matches, just like I’ve seen McCaw do. No one else my age is doing that. They don’t even know what jackalling is; they just tackle and ruck.
One of my teachers, Steve Williams, was a flanker for Neath, so he does one-on-one breakdown training with me too. It all helps me improve.
Ben and I play for Welsh Schools together. He’s a fabulous player, in many ways better than me, and that’s not false modesty on my part. He plays at outside centre, and his footwork and handling are absolutely brilliant. His hero is Brian O’Driscoll, and it shows.
One match, he suffers a shoulder injury, and a freakishly bad one too: serious nerve damage. The doctors tell him that continuing to play is really risky, and that the injury’s only going to get worse under contact. Besides, he wants to be a physio, and for that he needs strength in his upper body.
He’s 16 years old, and his rugby career is over. I couldn’t be more gutted if it had happened to me. Rugby is something we both live for, something we share. I feel his pain, his anguish and his frustration as though they were all mine.
From now on, I resolve, I’m going to play every game not just for me but for Ben too. I will carry his career, the one he didn’t have, in my heart and on the crest of my jersey. I will achieve the things he couldn’t, not because he wasn’t capable but because he wasn’t given the opportunity.
2006. After about a year, I manage to stop throwing up whenever I see Rach. It’s such a relief when this happens.
‘Sam,’ Rach says.
‘What?’
‘I think it’s time you met my parents.’
And the throwing up starts all over again.
Rach challenges me to a game of badminton. She’s playing for the Wales senior team by now, so I know she’s pretty good, but I reckon I can have her. I’m taller, quicker, more powerful, and I’ve got good hand–eye co-ordination. This might even be quite easy, I think.
It is easy. It’s 21–0.
To her.
She does me up like a kipper, hook, line and sinker. There’s not a single rally that lasts more than three shots. She’s always one step ahead of me, teeing me up one side and then putting the shuttlecock the other, or driving me deep to the back of the court before dropping it just over the net. I’m sweating and swearing and throwing my racket. There are a bunch of kids watching, and they’re all laughing: look at Sam Warburton, being beaten by a girl.
It’s the way you’re moving, Rach says. You’re turning like a boat, slow and cumbersome. Watch my feet. Look at the shuffle, quick steps side to side. You don’t need to keep twisting your body this way and that.
Right, I say. Race over 10 metres. I’ll definitely beat you.
Ten metres there, ten metres back, she replies.
No way, I say. She’s so much smaller than me that she’ll turn much quicker, and any advantage I have in straight-line speed will be cancelled out.
Finally she agrees just to the ten metres there, and I do beat her.
We play tennis on holiday. I beat her. We play again. She beats me.
That’s 2–2 in the Warburton–Thomas Cup. We agree to leave it there for the sake of our relationship. Otherwise in a few years’ time we’ll be going to the lawyers, and when they ask why we’re getting divorced we’ll both simultaneously say ‘sport’.
2007. Ben and I opt for the same A levels: chemistry, biology and PE. We revise together, and make it count; not the usual ‘Oh, I spent ten hours in the library’ stuff, conveniently forgetting that half that time was coffee and chat, but constructive and regimented, applying the principles of rugby training to revision. Half an hour on, ten minutes off, and repeat. Work out targets for sessions and stick to them.
A couple of months before the exams, I get a phone call. The bloke says he’s from the Welsh Rugby Union, and can he ask me a few questions. Sure, I say.
‘Where’s your dad from?’ he asks.
‘Originally? London. But his folks are from Lancashire.’
‘Like Warburton’s bread?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And your mum?’
‘Born in Somerset. Her folks are Welsh, but her great-grandfather had Scottish roots.’ My full name is Sam Kennedy-Warburton – the Kennedy is Mum’s side, and since she has a sister and their parents were both only children, she wants to keep the name alive – but I don’t use it too often when playing as it’s a bit of a mouthful and makes me sound way too posh.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’
Now he knows that I’m eligible to play for England and Scotland as well as Wales. Sure, I’ve played all my representative rugby for Wales at age-group level, but that doesn’t matter. You can play senior rugby for any country you’re eligible for, and the moment you have your first cap that’s it, you can’t play for anyone else (at least not without taking three years out to qualify for another country). Shit, better cap this kid quick: that’s what the bloke from the WRU’s thinking.
Sure enough, a week or so later I get asked to play for Wales in the World Sevens Series at Twickenham.
It’s a great honour, but I turn it down. First, I don’t want it to interfere with my exams, and second, I’m carrying a knock on my knee. But I assure the WRU that they don’t need to worry about me turning out with a red rose or a thistle on my chest. I’m Welsh through and through, and I’ll never play for anyone else.
LEADERSHIP 1: PERSONALITY (#u2f3d1a88-7aaa-5a69-ba44-6ca60d60ddaf)
It might sound obvious, but one of the first rules of leadership is this: know who you are. There are as many different styles of leadership as there are personality types, and trying to adopt one that doesn’t suit you is not just pointless but counterproductive.
The WRU once asked us all to take personality tests based on the Myers–Briggs model. These tests assess personality in four main areas:
How you focus attention or get your energy (Extraversion/Introversion)
How you perceive or take in information (Sensing/Intuition)
How you prefer to make decisions (Thinking/Feeling)
How you orient yourself to the external world (Judgement/Perception)
You’re assigned to one category in each area, which means there are 16 possible personality types. I came out as ISFJ: introverted, sensing, feeling and judging.
Introverted people tend to be quiet, reserved, and generally prefer either being alone or with a few close friends rather than a wide circle of acquaintances. They find that large social situations sap energy from them rather than give energy to them. This is why I was the quiet kid on the bus to Bridgend, why I preferred Friday nights in with Ben, my dad and my granddad, and why I bunked off the end-of-year prom!
Sensing people tend to be more concrete than abstract in their thinking, focusing on facts and details rather than ideas and concepts. Hence my choice of A levels, all science-based one way or another rather than arts or humanities, and why I liked to collect data on players while watching Super 15 matches. I was always the kind of player who would do the groundwork first and never try to wing it.
Feeling people tend to value personal considerations above objective criteria. My parents brought me up with strong values, especially as regards treating other people. For example, I would defend kids against bullies even if it made me look bad in the eyes of my mates.
Judging people like to plan things, make decisions a long way ahead of time, and try to ensure that things are as predictable as possible by leaving little to chance. I always liked to prepare the best I could for any test, be it a rugby match or an exam.
ISFJs are often known as Protectors or Defenders, and I fit the broader characteristics of the personality type too. Here are a dozen ISFJ traits that apply to me.
I have a strong work ethic, which sometimes means that I take too much on.
I feel responsible towards others and like to help by sharing my knowledge, experience, time and energy with anyone who needs it.
I like to be conscientious and methodical, to do jobs to the best of my ability, and to see them through to the end.
I like working within established structures and organisations.
I’m deeply devoted to my family and value long-term friendships.
I can be reserved with people I don’t know well, which can sometimes be misread as standoffish.
I don’t like to draw attention to myself, and prefer to work behind the scenes rather than out front.
I don’t seek out positions of authority.
I work well on my own.
I’m receptive to new ideas.
I can take things personally even if they’re not meant that way, and find it hard to wall off my professional life from my personal one.
I don’t like confrontation (at least off the pitch!) and will try to avoid it wherever possible, always seeking to build consensus rather than laying down the law.
All of these traits fed into my leadership style, as you’ll see throughout this book. For example, I was never one for big, rousing speeches or putting myself in front of the camera; I went out of my way to try and get to know the newer boys in the squad; and I felt more comfortable as time went by and I knew the nucleus of the team better.
But what worked for me wouldn’t have worked for other people, because their personalities were different from mine. Leadership only works if your personality informs the way you carry out those leadership duties rather than vice versa. Know yourself, and you’ll know how best you can lead.
2
TOYOTA STADIUM, CHICAGO (#u2f3d1a88-7aaa-5a69-ba44-6ca60d60ddaf)
41.8623°N, 87.6167°W
Saturday, 6 June 2009. Wales v USA
The USA kick off, Ryan Jones catches it, is hit in the tackle – and is knocked out. Literally in the first minute. I’m on the bench as back-row cover. If Ryan comes off, I’m on. Robin turns to me. ‘Get ready.’
Ryan doesn’t come off immediately. He stays on, hoping that if he’s out there long enough he’ll recover. Am I coming on or not? Ryan doesn’t look too great, but it’s not my call.
Thoughts whirl through my head. What do you want? To come on at 50, like you presumed you would? Or now, before you have time to think about it? Are you ready? Doesn’t matter. You have to be ready when they need you.
With 19 minutes gone, Robin and the medics have seen enough. Ryan’s groggy and not playing anywhere like he usually does.
Off he comes. On I go. There’s more than an hour left to play.
This is it. I’m a Wales player now, and no one can take that away from me.
2007. I’m playing for Glamorgan Wanderers when I tear my hamstring. It keeps me out of the whole of Wales’s 2008 Under-20s Six Nations campaign. It’s pretty much the first time I’ve ever been injured, certainly badly enough to keep me out for a match or two. It feels like the end of the world, watching my body waste away while I have to rest and let nature take its course. As if all the good work I’ve put in so far has been for nothing.
Injury #1. It won’t be my last, not by any means.
2008. ‘You should get an agent.’ That’s what I hear time and again. A couple of the other academy boys have already got people interested in them, and of course a lot of the senior Blues players have them already. I get a few names recommended to me, and a few calls from agents sounding me out. They’re all slick and have the sales patter down to a tee, but I bide my time. I want an agent who’s out for me more than for himself, who’s going to look to manage my career in the long term rather than just getting as much money as possible up front.
Then I meet Derwyn. He used to be a player himself – 19 Welsh caps and more than 150 games for Cardiff – so he knows the system and what the game demands.
‘What do you want to achieve?’ he asks. I’ve heard him ask this of some of the other boys at the academy too, and they all answer the same way. I want to turn professional. I want to play regional. I want to play for Wales.
‘I want to be the best 7 in the world,’ I say.
He doesn’t laugh or make a face. Just says he can help me do exactly that.
I sign with him. It’s one of the best moves I’ll ever make.
First day training with the senior Blues squad. I grew up with a Blues season ticket: watch them at the Arms Park on Friday night, play for Whitchurch on Saturday morning. All that time, I’d dreamed about making the jump from one to the other. And now I’ve done it.
You’re good enough to be here, I tell myself. They wouldn’t have signed you if they didn’t think you were up to it.
‘Hello, Sam.’
It’s Martyn Williams: club captain, Wales legend, and my rugby hero. Also current holder of the Blues and Wales number 7 shirt. He was one of the main reasons why I wanted to play rugby. I remember watching the 2005 Six Nations and not a game would go by where he wouldn’t get man of the match or score a try. He was absolutely amazing.
He shakes my hand – the very first person to do so at the club – and takes me under his wing.
This is one of the bittersweet things about rugby, that you can end up competing for the same position as someone you idolised as a schoolboy, and maybe even usurping them. Right now, that’s a way off, but it won’t be for long.
And maybe Martyn sees it before I do. Later, he’ll tell me: ‘I knew you were going to take my spot as soon as you walked in. I saw you training and I knew, Christ, I haven’t got long left here.’
September. I’m feeling good. I might have missed the Under-20s Six Nations, but I was back in the side – captaining the side, in fact – for the summer Junior World Cup, where we reached the semi-final. I’ve just signed for the Blues, my first pro contract. It’s the last pre-season game, and I’m playing well.
Then I go over on my shoulder. It’s weird, because there’s no pain, but when I press the bone it bounces.
You’ve detached your collarbone, the physios say. The ligaments have gone round the ACJ, the acromioclavicular joint. It doesn’t hurt because there’s no nerve damage there. But you have to let it heal.
You’ve also got a hairline fracture of the knee, which will need an operation, so this is as good a time to do it as any.
How long?
Five months.
Five months?!
Injury #2.
The Blues boys are very sympathetic. They put Natasha Bedingfield’s I Bruise Easily – or Warby’s Song, as it’s now known – on the gym stereo at full volume.
According to the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Clearly no injury, no matter how bad, is on the same scale as a genuine bereavement, but the same five stages apply in both cases.
Denial kicks in more or less the moment I get injured. It isn’t that bad. The pain will wear off soon. I didn’t even fall that badly. How can I be injured when I’m in such good condition?
Once the medical staff have made their diagnosis, that’s when anger kicks in. This is so unfair. Someone else will come into the team, take my place and play so well that I’ll never get it back. I’ve got all this energy and I have to sit here like a little old man. It’s all I want to do, play rugby. Is that too much to ask? Oh – and it hurts. It really hurts.
I can’t stay angry forever, though. The anger subsides and gives way to rationalisation, which brings with it bargaining. If I do all my rehab, then I’ll get back to where I was. If only I can get back in time for this match, then I don’t mind missing a few less important ones further down the line. I’ll swap this cruciate ligament injury for a couple of ankle strains.
And when the bargaining doesn’t work, which of course it doesn’t, that’s when the depression comes. I’m stuck on my own in the gym while the rest of the boys are training and playing. I’m on the outside of the squad looking in, part of it but not part of it. Sportsmen don’t like injury, because injury means weakness, and when they see it they move away in case it infects them too. Every day is such a slog. I’m not making progress quickly enough.
But I won’t be a pro player for very long if I let the depression and moping linger. This is where the acceptance comes in. Everyone gets injured. There are always silver linings to things. I can work on different aspects of my fitness. I can take a mental break from the relentless grind.
These stages don’t always happen in strict sequence, they don’t all last the same amount of time, and they won’t remain constant throughout my career. Right now, when I’m still young and inexperienced, the anger and frustration last longer and feel more acute. Later on, when I’m more used to being injured and more secure in my place in the team, I’ll be able to get to acceptance much more quickly.
Friday, 3 April 2009. My first game for the Blues is a Magners League fixture up in Edinburgh. Early April, a bit of a nothing match on most fronts. We’re mid-table only six weeks from the end of the season, and we’ve rested two-thirds of our first team ahead of the Heineken Cup quarter-final next week. The match is nothing to write home about: one of those stop-start affairs with no real fluency. Edinburgh win 16–3.
A bit of a nothing match for everybody but me, that is. I’m excited to play, of course, but I’m still only 20 and it shows. It’s not that I play badly; more that I’m not strong enough. I’ve never played against people of this calibre before, and I feel a bit out of my depth. I’m used to being among the most physically imposing players on any team, and it’s a shock to find myself being muscled off the ball time and again. My opponents are gnarly and grizzled; they know all the tricks, all the body positions, all the little niggles out of the ref’s sight. I’m a greenhorn.
There’s only one solution, the same one there’s always been. Work. Work harder. Work smarter.
I’ve only played a handful of games for the Blues when I get the call-up. The call-up, that is: the Wales summer tour to Canada and the USA.
It feels both weird and entirely normal. Weird, in that I’m still only 20 and pretty inexperienced at senior level; but normal, in that if I’m going to be the best 7 in the world then I have to start playing for my country sooner or later.
It’s the first time I’ve ever flown business class. I’m like a kid in a sweet shop: the seats, the films, the food. All the way over, I keep sneaking a peek at the official tour guide, and my head shot in it. I try to act cool. Not sure how well I succeed.
Four years ago, men like Dwayne Peel and Ryan Jones were playing for the Lions against the All Blacks, and I was watching them on TV on Saturday mornings. Now they’re sitting alongside me. For them, this tour’s a step down from what they’re used to. For me, it’s just the opposite. I remind myself that they were in my position once: the newbie, the hopeful.
I keep my head down, as far as possible. I don’t know many people, I’m conscious that I’ve got a lot to learn, and I’m also feeling homesick. It’s only a two-week tour, but when you’ve spent all your life living either at home or within half a mile of it, that’s a long time to be several thousand miles away.
I sit in the team room and watch what the others are doing, looking to pick up pointers as to how senior pros handle themselves and prepare for matches. Be like a sponge. Soak it all up.
Saturday, 30 May. Our first match is against Canada. I’m a sub, which is always much harder than starting. When you’re starting, you know your timings and you can work backwards off them. When you’re a sub, all that’s out of the window. You might be on in the first minute, or the fiftieth, or not at all. If you use an energy gel, when do you take it? Too early or too late, and it won’t be effective. The starting XV have first dibs on strapping and so on in the dressing-room, which is of course entirely right, but it does mean that the subs can feel rushed in their own preparations. Everything’s a little bit out of sync when you’re a sub, basically.
We make reasonably heavy weather of the game. At one stage, not long after half-time, it’s 16–16, and we have to work hard to get more than one score ahead and close it out 32–23. All through the second half I’m waiting for coach Robin McBryde to give me the nod. There are seven of us on the bench, and one by one they go on until it’s just me and Nicky Robinson left. Canada have emptied their bench, but we’re still sitting there like lemons.
Two minutes left, and the game looks safe. Come on, I think. Give me a runout. Even if I don’t touch the ball or make a tackle, at least I’ll have got it over with. Good or bad, long or short, it doesn’t matter.
For almost 80 minutes I’ve been on edge, warming up now and then, trying not to get ahead of myself but still being ready for anything.
It never happens. The final whistle goes, and I’m still on the bench. What a comedown. After all that, what a massive anti-climax. I feel like crying. I’ve got so much energy that I could run round the pitch non-stop for all of those 80 minutes I didn’t get to play.
That night, on the phone to Mum, I do cry. I let all my frustration flow out while she listens and does her best to comfort me.
‘Mum,’ I say, ‘can you put Ted on?’
Ted’s my dog. He’s a rough collie, and he’s named after Teddy Sheringham, one of my Spurs heroes. He’s very vocal, and he likes to talk to me: howling and woofing and barking when I make noises. His favourite sounds are the theme tune to Coronation Street and the sound of an ice-cream van, so I sit in my room in Toronto and sing these down the phone to him. Ted howls them back to me, which makes me start crying all over again.
Saturday, 6 June. One week later. We’re playing the USA at Toyota Stadium in Chicago. Again I’m on the bench, and I’m thinking that if I don’t get on this time I’m going to explode. Surely they’ll bring me on? What would be the point of taking me all the way to North America and not giving me any game time?
Eight and a half thousand miles away, though I’m only very dimly aware of it, the British and Irish Lions are playing Free State on their tour of South Africa.
Here in Chicago, the USA kick off, Ryan catches it, is hit in the tackle – and is knocked out. Literally in the first minute. I’m back-row cover. If Ryan comes off, I’m on. Robin turns to me. ‘Get ready.’
Ryan doesn’t come off immediately. He stays on, hoping that if he’s out there long enough he’ll recover. Am I coming on or not? Ryan doesn’t look too great, but it’s not my call.
Thoughts whirl through my head. What do you want? To come on at 50, like you presumed you would? Or now, before you have time to think about it? Are you ready? Doesn’t matter. You have to be ready when they need you.
With 19 minutes gone, Robin and the medics have seen enough. Ryan’s groggy and not playing anywhere like he usually does. Off he comes. On I go. There’s more than an hour left to play. This is it. I’m a Wales player now, and no one can take that away from me.
Blimey, it’s quick. Doesn’t matter that this is ‘only’ the USA, who are a rung or two down from the highest echelons of world rugby, and doesn’t matter that we run out easy winners, 48–15. It’s noticeably quicker than the Heineken Cup, which is itself noticeably quicker than the Magners League. It’s as though someone’s running it at normal speed plus a half. The passes, the runners, the tackles, all coming fast and relentless, and I have to concentrate more fiercely than ever before just to keep up.
That concentration and the physical effort take their toll – even though I didn’t play the first 20 minutes, I find myself cramping up with 10 minutes to go, which I find out later happens to lots of new caps as they get used to the pace of the game – but I play pretty well.
Back at the hotel, I find myself in the lift with team manager Alan Phillips.
‘You had a good game out there,’ he says.
‘Thank you.’
‘You know what I think? I think we’ve found the next Martyn Williams.’
Friday, 16 October. There’s a bug going round the Blues camp before we play a Heineken Cup match away to Sale Sharks. I’ve got it too, a bad chest infection, but even though I’m an international player now I still feel too young to assert myself properly. So I play. I feel terrible, and I play even worse than that. I give away two tries all on my own.
It’s the worst professional game I’ll ever play, but it teaches me another lesson: illness is as bad as an injury, so treat it like one. If you’ve got the flu or the shits, pull yourself out. The fans won’t know that you’re crook, and they won’t care either. You’re not doing yourself, your team or your reputation any favours. This isn’t playing for the local second XV, making up the numbers or filling in for a mate. This is your livelihood now. If you’re not there, you can’t play badly.
Friday, 13 November. My second cap against Samoa, but in many ways it feels like my first proper match: my first start, my first playing at 7, my first at home. Samoa have history in Cardiff – they won World Cup matches here in both 1991 (when they were called ‘Western Samoa’, leading to lots of resigned jokes about how it was lucky we hadn’t played the whole of Samoa) and 1999.
Just over one minute gone. We break through the middle and Dwayne feeds me on the inside. There’s no defender in front of me and for a split second I sense glory, but in the next stride David Lemi tackles me and then knocks the ball from my grasp just as I’m about to pop it up to Huw Bennett. Another reminder of how narrow the margins are at this level. In a club match, I could well have been in under the posts.
It’s a scrappy game – we’re playing in our change yellow kit, which doesn’t feel at all Welsh – and though we win 17–13, we should close it out much earlier than we do. I play pretty well, though a knock-on reminds me that Ben was right when he said my handling needs to improve, and like most of our forwards I seem to spend half the match clinging onto Henry Tuilagi, who’s basically a wrecking ball in a blue shirt and the hardest guy to tackle I’ve ever come across.
The next day, I’m going up an escalator in the St David’s 2 shopping centre when I hear someone saying, ‘That’s Sam Warburton.’ Rach and I try not to laugh, not because it’s not flattering but because it feels a bit weird. No one’s ever said ‘That’s Sam Warburton’ before. It’s the first tiny taste of something I’ll have to get used to over the years: not of being famous, because I genuinely don’t think that’s a word that can ever be applied to me, but of being locally well recognised.
Saturday, 28 November. I come off the bench against Australia. The match is memorable for two reasons.
First, Australia hammer us, scoring three tries in the first 25 minutes, and – though obviously I don’t yet know it – it’s the start of a miserable personal run in a Welsh shirt against Australia. By the time my career comes to an end I’ll have played for Wales against Australia ten times, and lost the lot.
Second, when I come on it’s in place of my mate Dan Lydiate – Lyds – which means I end up playing blindside with Martyn Williams at openside. Or rather, we play as twin opensides. Rather than having a six who’s a carrier and a seven who’s a scavenger, we both do a bit of each, and spell each other if need be. After a particularly draining period of play, Martyn asks me if I’ll jump on the openside for the next scrum just so he can catch his breath, and I’m happy to do so.
‘This is the way forward,’ Gethin Jenkins says afterwards. ‘Playing two opensides. Makes you as a team so quick to the breakdown.’
He’s right, of course. When it comes to rugby, Gethin usually is. He reads the game so well, and he isn’t afraid to speak his mind either; he’s the only player I’ve ever seen grab the waterboy’s mike and yell up to the coaches, ‘Get X off now, he’s playing shit!’ (X was playing shit, and the coaches did indeed pull him off.)
In years to come this is how I’ll play with Justin Tipuric for Wales and Sean O’Brien for the Lions; I might have 6 on my back, but I’ll still be playing as a 7. And those combinations will respectively yield two of the most memorable victories of my international career.
Sunday, 17 January 2010. The Six Nations is almost upon us, and I know this is it. Summer tours and autumn internationals can be experimental – a chance to try out new players and combinations, perhaps give the more senior and experienced players a rest – but the Six Nations is the real thing. Every country picks their best team. If I’m selected here, I’ll really start to feel that I belong in a Welsh shirt.
Even as a fan, I always loved the Six Nations, and on the morning of every match I’d read all the papers I could find: the predictions, the stories, the latest bulletins from inside the Wales camp. The tournament has such a long and varied history, and every year the players get a chance to add to that history by making some of their own. Five weekends to look forward to in the cold and damp winter days, and the simple primary colours of the competing teams: Welsh red, English white, Irish green, French blue, Scottish navy and Italian azure.
I’m driving back from Loughborough, where I’ve been seeing Rach. She’s studying there, and it’s 150 miles each way, but we try to see each other as much as possible. I know the squad’s due to be announced today, and each player selected will receive a text message by midday to let them know.
I’ve got my ringer turned up to max as midday approaches.
Silence.
The midday news on the radio comes and goes. Still nothing.
Maybe I didn’t play well enough in the autumn internationals. Maybe I haven’t been playing sufficiently well for the Blues lately. I think I’ve done enough on both those fronts, but then again I’m not the one making the selection calls. Am I another nearly man? Rugby’s full of them. The kind who play a few games at international level but can’t really cut it.
At 12.15 I pull into a petrol station. I’m filling the car up when I hear the text tone.
Congratulations, you’re in the Six Nations squad. An email will follow.
The relief. The sheer relief. ‘Yeah!’ I shout as loud as I can. The other customers are looking at me a bit strangely.
The attendant’s voice comes over the tannoy. ‘Pump 6. No mobile phones on the forecourt.’
Saturday, 13 February. Wales 14 Scotland 24, with 12 minutes left. I come on for Martyn. All the second half we’ve been attacking, and even though we’re still ten points down, we – and the crowd – believe we can come back. The game’s frantic, and I have to hit the ground running, adjust myself to its pace instantly.
I make some yards down the left-hand side. A minute or so later, I’m caught in possession by a couple of Scottish forwards. I’m fresh against some tired boys, and I’m hitting the rucks well, but I’m not carrying the ball as well as I could do.
There are only three minutes left when Pence – Leigh Halfpenny – scoots in for a try, which Stephen Jones converts. As we go back to halfway, Jonathan Thomas says something, but although he’s right next to me I can’t hear a word over the crowd.
We still trail by three. Now Lee Byrne goes through, kicks ahead – and is taken out by Phil Godman, who’s sin-binned. Penalty. Three points to draw. Stephen knocks it over as though it’s the training ground.
This is fantastic. If this is the Six Nations, I can’t get enough of it.
The clock’s already gone red when Scotland kick off for the last time. With Godman and Scott Lawson in the bin, we’ve got a two-man advantage. Stephen kicks to the corner for Pence to chase. Pence scrabbles, darts, sets up the ruck. We work it left and left again – and there’s Shane Williams, arm aloft as he goes under the posts to win it in the second minute of added time.
The Millennium goes mental.
There’s this guy called Andy McCann, who’s working with the squad. He’s a psychologist, which of course immediately brings to mind patients on couches and drawings of a house that reveals you have unresolved mother-attachment issues or something like that.
Andy gets that kind of stereotyping a lot, and always explains patiently that psychoanalysts, not psychologists, are the couch and Freud guys. He likes to think of himself more as a mental-skills coach, in the same way that we have coaches for attack, defence, scrums, fitness and so on. And it’s about something physical that I first really get chatting to him.
‘I’ve got some confidence issues when it comes to ball-carrying,’ I say.
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ he replies.
I go to see him in his room. He doesn’t tell me which other members of the team he works with, as all his stuff is confidential: more like a doctor–patient relationship than a coach–player one. I know that about half the squad use him, but I don’t know which half unless boys come out and say so. There’s still a stigma attached to seeing him in some quarters, as though it’s embarrassing, an admission of weakness.
I don’t care. Everyone can improve somewhere, and I’m no different. I want to be a better player tomorrow than I was yesterday, and if Andy can help me in that, then happy days. To me, it’s no different from doing extra gym training or sitting in my pyjamas counting McCaw’s tackle rate in Super Rugby. If it’s going to give me an advantage, then I’d be a fool not to give it a go.
In any case, Andy instantly makes me feel so comfortable that there’s no chance of being embarrassed.
‘Breathe in and out,’ he says. ‘In and out properly, using your diaphragm, until you feel relaxed. When you’re breathing in, that’s positive green energy; when you’re breathing out, that’s negative red energy. Positive energy in, negative energy out. Good. Close your eyes. Now, your next game’s against Ireland at Croke Park, yes? Imagine the noise. So much noise. Always is with Irish crowds, the way they get behind their team. You’re on the bench, and all this noise is swirling around you. Embrace it. Don’t let it intimidate you. It’s there for you just as much as it is the Irish players. Use it, the way they use it. Feed off it, the way they feed off it.
‘You’re warming up. Along the sidelines, behind the posts. Getting your head as well as your body right. Any minute now you’re going to get the nod. There it is. Warby, you’re on. The announcer’s voice. ‘Wales, Number 19, Sam Warburton. The crowd cheering your name. On you come. You’re relaying instructions from the coaches. Your voice and body language scream energy and freshness, and those by themselves give the other lads a lift.
‘First play after you’ve come on. You’ve got the ball. Short pass off 9. Now, don’t think of it from your point of view. Think of it from the point of view of the Irish player waiting to tackle you. What’s he seeing? He’s seeing how big you are, how strong, how dynamic. He’s seeing all your explosive power, and how much you love the confrontation, and he knows that when you smash into him it’s going to hurt and it’s going to take him backwards, and bang! There it is, and you’re through him and there are a couple of your boys piling in behind and you’ve got front-foot ball and the Irish are scrambling and your backs love you for setting them up like this.
‘OK. Rewind back to the moment you get the ball. Now imagine it from the ref’s point of view. Imagine where he’s standing, looking at you from side-on. He’s seeing the determination on your face, and all that power in you as you run, and he’s thinking “I’d better have my eyes peeled here, because this boy’s going to be hard to put down” – and bang! You’re through the first tackle – which means he’ll be giving Wales good ball, which means Ireland will try to slow it down at the ruck, which means they’re going to risk getting pinged for infringing at the breakdown.
‘OK. Rewind again to the pass off 9. Now imagine yourself in the crowd, high in the stands. What have you come to watch? The hits. Think of the ancient Romans and the gladiators. It’s alpha males, it’s one-on-one dominance. It’s in our DNA. The crowd see your power and intent, and they’re bracing themselves for something they can feel 25 rows back – and bang! They shudder at the impact, and then they’re looking at each other and grinning, like “How about that!”’
We do this for four separate incidents – a carry, a lineout, a tackle and a jackal. For each incident Andy makes me think of it from the same three viewpoints: the opposition player, the ref and the crowd. By the time we’ve done all 12, I’m feeling so confident that I could run out at Croke Park here and now. I see it all unfolding almost in slow motion, as though my brain and body are so much quicker than everybody else’s.
I open my eyes.
‘How long do you reckon we’ve been in here?’ he asks.
‘Ten minutes?’
‘Thirty-five.’
Andy helps me in other ways too. He teaches me relaxation techniques, tensing and relaxing various parts of my body until they feel heavy. He’ll massage my head and neck until I’m practically asleep. And he works with me to produce a document that we call Warby’s Winning Ways.
It’s ten pages or so, and I keep it as a PDF on my phone. It’s there so that I can continue to reinforce my positive mindset and remind myself that I’m good enough to be playing international rugby, that I deserve to be playing international rugby and that I add value to every team I play for.
On the front is a picture of me walking out of the tunnel at the Millennium before a Wales match. Behind me the tunnel is lit up all red, and on my face is an expression of total focus: confident in my ability, completely ready for the battle ahead.
Inside are some of my statistics on the pitch and in the gym: I’m strong, I’m fit, no one’s going to better me physically. There are positive newspaper clippings from people in the game I respect praising me. There are photographs of me playing well, and of people who matter to me: my parents, my brother and sister, Rach, Mr Morris and Lennox Lewis, whom I idolised as a kid. My dogs Ted and Gus too, of course; wouldn’t be properly Warby without my dogs.
We’ve even included pictures and logos of the companies that sponsor me, such as Land Rover, adidas and PAS supplements, because these companies wouldn’t be endorsing me if they didn’t believe in me both on and off the pitch.
Later in my career, when I’m more confident as a player, a person and a captain, I won’t need all this. But right now the third of those isn’t yet an issue, and the first two still need a lot of work. So I keep Warby’s Winning Ways close by at all times, and it’s invaluable.
Saturday, 20 March. My first Six Nations start, against Italy at the Millennium. My opposite number is Mauro Bergamasco. He’s smaller than me, but he’s a very good player with that bit of devil in him that all top opensides need. Un cane sciolto, as he once described himself: a marauding dog, an outlaw. He’s played on the wing and at scrum-half for them too. Definitely not your average 7.
‘If you don’t get the first shot in on him,’ Martyn tells me before the match, ‘he’ll niggle you all game.’
I don’t need telling twice.
Five minutes in, I see Mauro contesting a ruck. I come flying in like an Exocet and clear him right out. He, the ref, the crowd – they all see and feel that, just like Andy told me they would.
Mauro doesn’t come back at me all game.
Of all the things I work on and am known for, the breakdown is the single most important aspect. It’s a much bigger part of the game than it used to be; there are something like 170 breakdowns every game, which is almost double the number at the 1995 World Cup, which marked the end of the amateur era, and almost six times the number back in the early 1970s. There are also four and a half times as many breakdowns per game nowadays than scrums and lineouts combined.
That’s helped a new species of defender evolve: the jackal, who pounces on the ball when it’s taken into contact by the opposition and tries to scavenge it. The ultimate aim is of course the turnover, when you rip the ball from the opposition player and secure it for your own side. An interception try apart, the turnover is the single biggest momentum shifter in rugby. Suddenly, the team that were attacking not only have the wind knocked out of them by the frustration of losing the ball, but they also have to instantly reorganise into a defensive structure before the counterattack comes – and, statistically, that moment of transition leads to a disproportionate number of scoring opportunities. A player who can reliably secure four or five turnovers a game is worth his weight in gold.
In every team I play for, I am that player.
The jackal is the one who comes in after the tackler to try and grab the ball from the man on the floor. If you’re exceptionally quick you can be both tackler and jackal, bouncing up off the floor to go from one to the other, as long as you release the opponent after the tackle and before the attempted jackal. But at international level things happen so fast that this isn’t usually an option. Better to hunt in pairs, as I do with Lyds; he goes low to bring the man down and I’m on that man in a flash. Lyds and me: tackle and jackal.
The jackal’s not allowed to support his own bodyweight, which means no knee resting on the opposition player or hands on the ground beyond the ball. This means I have to be both very flexible and very strong; very flexible to get into the low, wide stance I need to secure the ball, and very strong to withstand the hits coming in from the other opposition players arriving at the ruck. Sometimes you get smacked by two or three men at a single ruck. It hurts. Trust me.
So for 15 minutes before and after every training session, I work exclusively on hip mobility: working my glutes, my groin and my hamstrings. I take the heaviest kettlebell I can find, set myself in a sumo squat and go from left to right and back again, shifting my weight all the way over onto one foot and then back through the centre to the other. Deep and strong, I tell myself. Deep and strong.
It’s basic physics. The lower you can go, the harder you are to shift. As Vince Lombardi, the legendary American football coach, used to tell his blockers, ‘The low man wins.’ If you’re low enough over the ball, the opposition players won’t be able to get beneath you to drive you up and out of the way. That’s where the leverage comes in, and without that they’re trying to shift you backwards without first weakening your strong position.
There is one way of getting me out of the jackal position, though only one team have worked it out and even then I’m not sure they know they’ve done it. Whenever you play against France, you can guarantee they’ll be grabbing your balls like it’s going out of fashion. That gets me off the ball better than any clean-out. Just pull my bollocks and I’m off.
Sunday, 23 May. The Blues reach the final of the Amlin Challenge Cup, basically the plate competition for those teams that don’t make it through to the latter stages of the Heineken Cup. The final’s in Marseilles, and we’re up against Toulon, a side for whom this is almost a home game – less than an hour’s drive away – and who are chock full of international superstars: Jonny Wilkinson, Juan Martín Fernández Lobbe, Tana Umaga and Sonny Bill Williams. The stadium’s a sea of black and red, Toulon’s colours, with only a few hundred Blues fans in there. We’re massive, massive underdogs.
And we win. Against all the odds, we hold out for a 28–21 final score. It’s the first time any Welsh club has won a European title. I should be bursting with pride, and for the boys I am, but I don’t really feel part of the victory.
It’s not just that I only came on as a sub in the final, and didn’t play in either the quarters against Newcastle or the semis against Wasps. It’s that, much as I love the Blues – and I really do, I’m a one-club man, both as player and fan – I don’t play quite as intensely for them as I do for Wales.
I still play to a high standard, don’t get me wrong. But when I play for Wales, I’m ruined for days afterwards. The way I play is so physical that if I played for the Blues week in, week out the way I play for Wales a handful of times a year, I’d never be off the physio’s table, and I’d be retired by the age of 25. My body just wouldn’t take it.
It’s an emotional thing as much as a physical one. Getting yourself up for the confrontation on the weekend isn’t just a matter of putting on the strapping and going out there. It’s a lot of mental strain, a lot of the old Shakespearian stiffening up the sinews. That takes its toll too.
And I’m the kind of player who needs pressure to really perform. With the best will in the world, even a European club final isn’t remotely on the same level as a Six Nations match, a World Cup knockout tie or a Lions Test. I need those environments in which to perform my best.
And if this leaves the Blues feeling a little short-changed, then I understand that and to an extent agree with it. But like all players, I’m not a robot.
Saturday, 5 June. South Africa at the Millennium. Martyn’s been given the summer off. He’s 34, and even his storied career is going to end sooner rather than later. This is your chance, coach Warren Gatland – Gats – tells me. This is your chance to prove to me that you’re our best 7. He leaves the second half unspoken: not just for this year but next year too, when the World Cup’s taking place in New Zealand. Put down a marker for that tournament.
It’s my first time playing South Africa, and I love it. Perhaps more than any other team, they pride themselves on physical confrontation, which suits me just fine. In the first 15 seconds I tackle Joe van Niekerk, their number 8, but I get my head position slightly wrong and cop the most almighty crack in the gob.
I can taste the blood welling up inside my mouth. I take my gumshield out and feel for my teeth, checking that they’re all there, but the blow’s been so hard that I can’t feel them properly.
‘Mate,’ I say to fellow forward Jonathan Thomas, ‘can you check my teeth?’
He has a look. ‘Yeah, they’re all there. You’ve got a big old gash, though.’
Gashes are ten a penny. Crack on. I throw myself into contact after contact. It’s fast and furious, and when I’m subbed off with a couple of minutes to go we’re trailing by only three points, 34–31 down.
‘Let’s have a look at you,’ the doctor says afterwards.
He presses his finger on the underside of my jaw, and I almost go through the ceiling.
‘Yup,’ he says. ‘You’ve broken your jaw.’
Injury #3.
I need an operation, and they put a metal plate in my jaw. I’m ruled out of the summer tour to New Zealand, which is gutting; I so, so wanted to go down there and prove myself against McCaw, pretty much universally regarded as king of the opensides. And if anyone would appreciate playing 78 minutes with a broken jaw, it’s him.
Saturday, 27 November. I get to play against McCaw six months later, though not without another injury scare. Three weeks earlier, I tear my calf while playing against Australia. Injury #4. It’s somewhere between a grade 1 and a grade 2, which means I should be out for four or five weeks, which in turn means I’ll miss the New Zealand match. If you’re an international player, they’re the team you want to play: the most famous and successful in the history of the game.
‘You can get back in time,’ Andy says.
‘How?’
‘By believing.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. The right mindset can help you so much.’
I ask Prav Mathema, the Wales team physio, if he’s on board with this. I half-expect him to roll his eyes and say it’s a load of bunk, but no, he agrees with Andy, 100 per cent.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘Let’s do this.’
I pepper Prav with questions about the anatomy of the calf. When I have a picture in my mind of what’s beneath my skin, I start to visualise the torn fibres knitting themselves back together again. In my head, I send the positive green breathing energy from my lungs to my arteries, directing blood flow to the affected area and dragging all the damaged red energy back out again where it can’t do any more harm.
Four weeks, they said. I’m recovered in two. The fourth injury of my career, but the first time I really see how much difference a positive mindset can make.
We lose the game 37–25, but I feel I match McCaw in our personal duel, just as I’d matched David Pocock in the match against Australia. These two are as good as it gets, so to hold my own against them when I’ve only just turned 22 is a great confidence boost. Prove to me you’re our best 7, Gats had said. I’ve done that, surely, and a bit more too.
Saturday, 19 March 2011. Our final Six Nations game, against France in the Stade de France. Fifteen minutes in, I have to go off with a knock to the knee.
Injury #5.
I watch from the bench as we lose 28–9.
For the team, it’s been a mixed tournament. We lost our first match to England – our eighth defeat on the trot including the summer and autumn internationals – before winning the next three games: Scotland 24–6, Italy 24–16 (including my first try for Wales, running the inside line off James Hook: a 15-metre break that gets longer and involves beating more players with every retelling, as all forwards’ tries should do), and Ireland 19–13. We end up fourth with six points, the same as Ireland, but behind them on points difference and tries scored.
More than the results, though, there’s a sense that things are changing. Some of the old guard have been phased out, leaving a young team that might not have so much experience, but that has got both talent and the willingness to work together. We’ve done tons of fitness, strength and conditioning work – perhaps to the detriment of the rugby itself at times – because Gats has his eyes not just on this tournament but on the World Cup too. He thinks we can go far, but to do so we’ll need to match our opponents physically as much as anything else.
For me personally, the 2011 Six Nations feels like a triumph. Until the injury against France, I’ve played every minute of every game, and been consistently good. Almost every newspaper’s team of the tournament has me in at 7. To be brutally honest, I feel I should win the official player of the tournament award. This year, however, they’ve changed the way it’s decided, with a shortlist purely from the man of the match winners from the opening four rounds, before the public can vote for the winner. As a result, a couple of Italian players come first and second, even though their team received the wooden spoon.
Don’t worry about it, Andy says. These things are subjective, which means they’re out of your control. Rugby’s not figure skating or gymnastics, where the judges’ role is paramount. It doesn’t matter whether you win player awards or not. What matters is that you play well enough to be in with a shout, and I’ve certainly done that.
Monday, 9 May. The season is over, and I’m at home thinking about an upcoming week’s holiday in Portugal with Rach.
My mobile rings. I look at the screen.
Gats.
I wonder what he wants. It’s not like we speak every day, and there’s no Wales match until we play the Barbarians next month. He’s not the kind of guy who rings just for a chat. I honestly can’t think why he could be ringing.
When I answer, he comes straight to the point.
‘I’m calling to see if you’d like to be captain against the Barbarians.’
LEADERSHIP 2: PROFESSIONALISM (#litres_trial_promo)
When people say that rugby went professional in 1995, what they mean is that from then on players could be paid openly rather than clandestinely, which had been the case under amateurism (or ‘shamateurism’, as it had long been known). This allowed players to devote themselves full-time to rugby rather than needing to hold down day jobs in other sectors.
But for me, and as Gwyn Morris pointed out back at Whitchurch, ‘professionalism’ doesn’t mean simply being paid to play rugby. In fact, professionalism has little or nothing to do with salary. Professionalism is about giving your very best, using your talent to the maximum and being highly competitive. Professionalism is about how you conduct yourself on and off the pitch: how you behave, how you train, how you prepare yourself. Professionalism is about making yourself not just the kind of player others respect, but the kind of person too. There were plenty of rugby players in the amateur era who behaved professionally, just as there are still some players nowadays who don’t, not properly at any rate.
As with other aspects of leadership, professionalism begins with the right mindset. You have to set yourself standards, but not limits; you have to hold yourself to minimum requirements rather than maximum ones. For example, Ben hasn’t framed and mounted his Wales Under-16 shirt, as for him it’s not a measure of success but of failure: it’s not how far he got, but how much further he still had to go. If I hadn’t got a Lions shirt, I wouldn’t have put up a Wales one.
Gats used to say that ‘we should be the best at everything that doesn’t require talent. Effort doesn’t require talent. Hard work doesn’t require talent. We should be the best at hard work.’ It’s never too early to start this. When I’d train at lunchtimes in Whitchurch, that was professional behaviour, what I needed to do to get better. Round about that time, Mr Morris gave me a referee’s rulebook. How many 16-year-old kids had even read one of those, let alone owned one? I turned straight to the sections that were most relevant to me, the ones that covered contact rules. I read these until I knew them off by heart, because they helped me work out how to compete, how to know where the offside line was, and so on. Why bother playing a sport unless you knew the rules inside out? But most people didn’t. I did, because it gave me an advantage; and if something gives you an advantage, then you’d be nuts not to take it.
Training was an obvious arena in which I could be professional. I was Mr Preseason: you’d have had to tie me down to stop me training. As Muhammad Ali said: ‘The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road – long before I dance under those lights.’
Michael Johnson described it well in his book Gold Rush. ‘The desire to succeed is extremely important, but it’s easy to want to be the best in the world. Drive is more important. It’s easy to commit to being the Olympic gold medallist, but not as easy to commit to training 50 per cent harder than you did the year before and to making sacrifices to achieve that goal. It is that drive that causes an individual to work for what he desires. Once I started training, my position was simply that every day was an opportunity for me to get better. So with that in mind, any day I missed training or any day I didn’t give 100 per cent of the effort I was capable of giving would have been a missed opportunity.’
And 100 per cent means just that. Professionalism means paying attention to the small things as well as the big ones. Sometimes the analysts would play us the voice of the referee for our next match as we did scrum-machine work, not just to add some match atmosphere to the session but so we could get used to his intonation and rhythm, how long he paused for when issuing instructions to set the scrum, and so on.
I hear academy kids asking how to get a Range Rover, how to get an adidas endorsement, that kind of thing. That’s topsy-turvy thinking, and a sign of a mindset and values that are all wrong: putting output above input. The true professional would never ask such questions, as the true professional knows that input comes first both in time and importance. Prepare properly, train properly, play properly, and the remainder will look after itself. I picked my endorsements carefully. I didn’t just sign with any company that turned up with a cheque and a photoshoot. I only signed with companies whose products I believed in and which I used anyway, or would have used, without being paid.
Rest is a big part of being a professional. You have to learn to say no. I get so many requests to do stuff, and people have no idea how much it all mounts up. I’ve got people I haven’t seen in years who’ll drop me a message out of the blue saying: ‘I was just wondering …’ Luckily Ben and I have largely the same group of friends, so I can say to him: ‘I got a message from X – are you in touch with them anyway?’ If he says yes, then maybe I’ll do it, but if he’s not, and they’re just chancing their arm, then I definitely won’t.
It’s hard, sometimes, because people think they own you. I was doing a Q&A up in Cwmbran once, and a bloke stood up and said: ‘What are you doing next Monday?’ I said I didn’t know off the top of my head. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘we’ve got a presentation at our club that day, and I bet you don’t turn up, because you professional rugby players are all too big for your boots and have forgotten the grassroots game where you come from.’
His tone really took me aback. I explained that I had a certain amount of community work built into my contract, and on top of that I’d go to local clubs, kids’ camps and so on. But I also needed nights at home to rest and do nothing, because that was the professional, disciplined thing to do.
At the end, I was signing autographs and stuff – I never left any of those events until I’d signed for anyone who asked – when this same bloke came up. ‘Which rugby club are you from?’ I asked him. When he told me, I said: ‘Just so you know, I’m never going to come up there, purely because of the way you spoke to me.’
A significant aspect of professionalism is honesty: not making excuses, and owning your mistakes. If everyone in a team does that, the environment is healthy and the team has the best chance of improving. Everyone makes mistakes. The only way not to make a mistake is not to try something in the first place. Making a mistake isn’t wrong or unprofessional. What is wrong and unprofessional is trying to sweep that mistake under the carpet, because by pretending it never happened you deny yourself the opportunity to learn from it next time round.
When other people see you being honest, it inspires them to follow suit. In one training camp, we had a whole load of protein bars brought in, boxes and boxes of them, which were kept in the gym for the boys to take them when they needed.
At one team meeting, the nutritionist said that we had a problem. He’d catered for each person having two bars per day for the duration of the camp, but now there weren’t enough anymore, so someone must have been taking more than their fair share. And he knew who the guilty parties were, as there was a CCTV in the gym and it had all been caught on camera. So if whoever had done it didn’t own up right now, they’d be exposed as liars and not team players. A few of the younger guys in the squad immediately fessed up, to gales of laughter from the senior boys.
Yes, the young guys had been taking more than their share, but of course there was no CCTV and we could have got more bars delivered at the drop of a hat. The point was to encourage blokes to be honest with each other and with the team as a whole, and it worked. Own up to something before you get called out on it.
Being professional extends to life outside rugby too; indeed, when you’re in the public eye it extends pretty much to everything you say or do, 24/7. You represent the club you play for, you represent your country, and you represent the hopes of all the supporters who’d give anything to do what you’re doing. These aren’t things to take lightly, and if they involve a certain amount of sacrifice here and there, well, that’s just the way it is, and it’s a small price to pay.
I haven’t been on a night out in Cardiff since 2012. The last time I did, it was with Lyds; we’d been to a wedding, and inevitably we came across someone who’d had too much to drink and who wanted to pick a fight, probably just to prove to his mates what a hard man he was.
On another occasion, I was on a stag night and we were in a pub. There was a group of guys there who wanted to chat, and I was being friendly to them, but then it was time for us to leave and to go on to the next venue. One of the men I’d been talking to became aggressive and started manhandling me in an attempt to get me to stay, and I had to grab his hands and yank them off me so I could leave.
It doesn’t take much for these kinds of situation to spiral out of control, and then suddenly you’re dealing with negative headlines and distractions, which neither the team nor you need.
Take the case of the England cricketer Ben Stokes, who was charged with affray following a fight outside a Bristol nightclub. He was acquitted, but not before he’d missed an Ashes series and lost a sponsorship deal, and following his acquittal he was fined for bringing the game into disrepute.
Now I don’t know him from a bar of soap, I’ve got no axe to grind with him personally and I mention his case for one reason only: that it could all have been avoided if he hadn’t put himself there in the first place. Don’t give people the opportunity to make you look bad.
People remember you and judge you as they see you. It doesn’t matter what kind of day you’re having; the professional thing to do is to smile and make time for people. What’s a few seconds for you might mean a whole lot to them. As Ben always reminds me, an autograph or a selfie might be my 100th of the day, but for them it’s their first. That’s why I always made time for autographs; they don’t take up much time and they mean a lot to the person receiving them.
Having been on the other side of the fence, trust me, you remember these things. In the summer of 1999, Mum and Dad took us to Copenhagen. Spurs had won the League Cup a few months before with a 1–0 victory over Leicester City, and Allan Nielsen had scored the winning goal.
In my 10-year-old mind, the logic was clear. Nielsen was Danish, we were in Denmark, therefore we were definitely going to see him. Dad tried to explain that Denmark was a big place with millions of people, so we weren’t going to see Allan Nielsen.
But one day, in the Tivoli Gardens, there he was! I plucked up the courage to go over and ask him for an autograph, and to this day I remember how nice he was: asking my name, where I was from, that kind of stuff. I was so thrilled that Mum laminated the piece of paper with his autograph, and for years it was my pride and joy. So when a kid asks for my autograph, I always remember that I could be their Allan Nielsen.
As Alan Phillips said to me: ‘People are looking at you and they’re dreaming, aren’t they? When they look at you, these people, when they see you, they’re seeing their dreams.’ That was my responsibility as a professional: to be worthy of their dreams.
3
EDEN PARK (#litres_trial_promo)
36.8750°S, 174.7448°E
Saturday, 15 October 2011. Wales v France, World Cup semi-final
Come on, son. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
Vincent Clerc comes flying onto the pop pass. I line him up perfectly, driving up and forward with all the force I can muster as I hit him. I absolutely unload on him. But he’s two stone lighter than me, so suddenly he’s up in the air and his body’s twisting beyond the horizontal.
So I let go. Clerc hits the deck and I’m on him again, competing for the ball and ripping it from him. That’s an awesome tackle, I’m thinking. I’ve melted him there. That one’s going on my all-time highlight reel for sure.
The next thing I know, there’s a French fist in my face, and another one, and the Welsh lads are hauling me up and away while the French forwards are still trying to use me as a punchbag.
Alain Rolland blows his whistle and beckons me over. I reckon it’s a safety thing. I don’t even think it’s a penalty, let alone a yellow card.
Rolland reaches into his pocket and pulls out the red card.
Monday, 9 May. ‘I’m calling to see if you’d like to be captain against the Barbarians.’
I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I do know what to say, but I don’t think Gats would like to hear it. I hate captaincy. That’s what I’m thinking. I hate captaincy. I don’t want to do it. I’m just 22 years of age. I’ve only started 10 games for Wales. I’m one of the quieter members of the squad. I’m not given to rousing speeches. Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen guys who’d be better at it than me, who have the experience and the personality to do it: Alun Wyn Jones, Stephen Jones, Bomb (Adam Jones), Gethin, Shane, Phillsy (Mike Phillips).
I’m standing in the front room of my house. I glance at the mirror above the fireplace. I look as stunned as I feel. I never expected this, not in a month of Sundays.
On the other end of the phone, Gats is silent, waiting for me to answer.
Why me? He must see something in me. Buggered if I know what it is, though. But he’s a smart coach and a smart guy, and I trust him, so whatever it is, he must genuinely believe in it.
And it’s an honour, of course it is. You don’t turn down selection for your country, do you? So why would you turn down the captaincy? The only bigger honour than the first is the second. You take each one and do it to the best of your ability.
‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘I’d love to do it.’
‘Great. There’s a press conference at the Millennium in half an hour.’
Flippin’ heck. I go upstairs three steps at a time, grab a Welsh Rugby Union polo shirt, slip on some tracksuit bottoms and trainers, and rush out of the door, phone crooked in my neck as I ring first Rach and then Dad.
They both ask me the same question: ‘Do you want to do it?’
And I give them both the same answer. ‘I have to.’
All the way to the stadium, driving with a calmness I don’t feel, two words chase each other through my head. Wales captain. Wales captain. Wales captain.
In Portugal with Rach. So much for a week of relaxation and switching off. I’m in the gym twice a day, and in the small hours I’m wide awake, making notes about what to say and do.
‘Please just switch off,’ Rach says.
I can’t. I’m worrying about anything and everything.
It’s only for this match, I tell myself. It’s only because Gats wants to rest Smiler – Matthew Rees, the regular captain. Maybe Gats is doing it to get me out of my shell a bit, the same way he asked me to stand up in front of the boys and talk about defence and the contact area before the Italy match a couple of months ago. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t given it to one of the more experienced boys like Stephen or Alun Wyn. Yeah, that makes sense. He wants me to speak up a bit more, take more of an active role once Smiler’s back. I’ll do it this once and then never again.
When it’s announced that Gavin Henson will be playing for us – his first match in a Wales shirt for two years, even though he’s currently not attached to a club – I almost weep with joy. All the media coverage will be about his return rather than my captaincy. Gavin’s a hundred times more box office than I’ll ever be, and that suits me fine.
Sergio Parisse is captaining the Barbarians. He’s a class player, and we know we have to get to him early and often. ‘Put the heat on him,’ Shaun Edwards tells us.
‘Shall we have a call for that?’ says Josh Turnbull.
Shaun looks at him like he’s mad. ‘Get up and f***ing twat him. That’s the call.’
Saturday, 4 June. One thing’s totally clear in my mind: we cannot, must not, dare not lose to the Barbarians. It’s not that they don’t have good players, because they have some great ones: Doug Howlett on the wing, Carl Hayman at prop, and a back row I know well: van Niekerk, Martyn and Parisse.
It’s that they won’t be taking it seriously, because that’s the whole ethos of the Barbarians. Five-star hotel, all expenses paid, out on the piss day and night, and five grand at the end of it.
That’s why I’ll never play for them, because for someone like me it’s a lose-lose proposition. If I go with tradition and drink a lot when I so rarely drink, I’ll play terribly and it will be bad for my reputation. If I prepare well, as I do for every match I play, everyone will think I’m a shit bloke and boring. The Barbarians are a great tradition and a longstanding part of rugby, but they’re not for me and I’m not for them.
So I just can’t even begin to conceive that my first match – my only match, hopefully – as captain is going to be a defeat. I want not just to beat the Barbarians but to humiliate them, to show that in this day and age you need to take international rugby seriously.
I’ve had enough of the team playing well but coming up a bit short, which has happened all too often in the past couple of seasons, and I’ve also had enough of people accepting that a little too easily. With the changing of the guard has to come a change in attitude too. After this match there are only three more warm-up matches before the World Cup. If we fancy ourselves to do well in the World Cup, and we do, we have to win this one.
We don’t.
Oh, we should do. We’re nine points up with nine minutes to go, and from a position like that we ought to be home and hosed. Just keep the ball tight and work it through the phases, running down the clock as we do so. But we’re not ruthless enough. Mathieu Bastareaud scores a try to bring them to within a score, and then with a minute to go they run it from deep, Willie Mason offloads out of the tackle to Isa Nacewa, and Nacewa beats four players in a 65-metre run to touch down. The conversion makes it 31–28 to them, and that’s that.
I try to rationalise it. They were a good team, they had nothing to lose. We were missing a few players. That’s how it goes. But whichever way I look at it, we shouldn’t have lost.
July. Spala, Poland. You can’t win a match you’ve just lost, but you can win the next one. The only way to atone for the Barbarians defeat is to do well at the World Cup. The only way to do well at the World Cup is to be the fittest team there. The only way to be the fittest team at the World Cup is to push ourselves further than ever before.
Hence Spala.
It was built in the 1950s and still looks like the kind of place where they’d have trained Soviet cosmonauts. It’s spartan, in every way. No frills, no fripperies, no distractions. No TV, no PlayStation or Xbox, and no alcohol, not for anybody; drier than a backwoods county in the Bible Belt of the Deep South. Oak forests all around, swaddling us away from the outside world.
You’re hard men who’ve lived soft lives, they tell us. Not any more, not while you’re here at any rate. You’re going to push yourselves and each other harder and harder, to be quicker and stronger and more durable than you ever thought possible; a hundred and fifty per cent harder than ever before, our strength and conditioning coach Adam Beard says. Take the maximum you’ve known and add on another half of that again.
This is not a joke. This is not a figure of speech. A hundred and fifty per cent. Add on another half again.
And the pain. Always the pain. We hurt. We hurt together.
We’re split into three groups: front five, back row and half-backs, centres and back three. We have three hour-long sessions a day. The sessions are staggered, so we wait our turn while the group before us is being beasted. We wait in silence, readying ourselves for the pain. As we go out to start a session, we pass the guys before us coming back in. They have the glassy-eyed look of a convicts’ road gang. They’re all dripping with sweat. Quite a few are splattered with vomit.
Weight vests on, stiff with the sweat of whoever used them last. Standing in a sandpit lifting heavy bags from ground to head and back. Pushing weighted sleds. Tyre flips. Bear crawls. Down and up, sprint, down and up, sprint.
Throw up? Good. Better out than in. Keep going. Trying to suck in the air. Shattered. Don’t show it. Don’t put your hands on your knees. That’s Rule One. Never put your hands on your knees.
Thank God that’s over.
‘One more circuit.’
Wrestling, one-on-one with Jonathan Thomas. He’s three inches taller and a stone and a half heavier than me. Money passing between Gats and Rob Howley as they watch. ‘A tenner says JT.’ I look up long enough to snarl at them, which is exactly the response they want.
Tug-of-war, one-on-one with Bradley Davies: six inches taller, three stone heavier, and a real athlete. Gats doesn’t care. ‘Fancy yourself up there with McCaw, Warby? Bradley’s making you his bitch.’
I set myself and pull harder. Every muscle screaming in agony. I can take it.
The management watching us like hawks the whole time. Who’s going to crack? Who’s going to break? Who’s going to whinge? Do any of those and you aren’t going to the World Cup. You keep going because the next guy does, and the next guy keeps going because you do. If you break that chain then you have no place here.
Into the cryotherapy chambers. Shorts, socks, gloves, face mask, headband and wooden clogs. The first chamber is at -50°C, but that’s just a warm-up, if you like, for the second chamber. The second chamber is -150°C: a whiteout where you can’t see the guy standing right next to you, where you keep talking and moving for fear that if you don’t you’ll just stop and die. Even the tiniest drop of sweat left over stings as it freezes hard on your skin.
This kind of cold is a living thing: something that scours, something that sears. It’s not just that it helps repair damaged tissues quicker, allowing us to train harder. It’s a mental thing too, a purging. The cold strips away everything but the essentials. Cleanse yourself. Punish yourself. You want to win? This is what it takes.
This is the kind of thing that bonds teams together, so that in the last few minutes of a tight match you can look at each other and know what everyone’s thinking without needing to say it.
Remember Spala.
Remember Spala, and know that you have what it takes to close out the win. We’ve lost too many of those kind of matches. Not anymore.
Remember Spala.
Smiler’s suffering from a neck injury, so I keep the captaincy for the two warm-up matches against England in August, first at Twickenham, then a week later in Cardiff.
Andy helps me develop a leadership compass: four attributes that will make me a better captain.
Professional attitude
Positive attitude
My own performance, and leading by example
Develop personal relationships with the players
The first three come easily to me, the fourth less so, simply because I’m quite introverted and shy. Work on that one more than the others, Andy says. Sometimes you have to work on your weaknesses rather than your strengths, at least to get them to the point where they’re no longer a weakness.
Saturday, 6 August. Twickenham. I write reams and reams on the hotel notepad before the first England match, pacing up and down the room, practising what I’m going to say. But when it comes to giving the team talk, it all comes out as just a bunch of mumbled irrelevant crap. It would be bad enough as it is, but much worse that I’ve spent so much time and energy on it for so little reward.
We lose the match 23–19, though the result pales into insignificance compared with the horrific injury that Morgan Stoddart suffers early in the second half. He wasn’t even supposed to be on the pitch so soon, but Stephen had pulled up with a calf injury in the warm-up, forcing us to switch Rhys Priestland to 10 and bring Morgan in at 15.
Morgan’s tackled from behind by Delon Armitage, and his left leg goes two different ways at once. Danny Care, fair play to him, instantly sees the trouble Morgan’s in and frantically calls the ref to blow up so Morgan can get treatment. He’s snapped both his tibia and fibula, and he’s screaming in pain. It’s a break so horrific that they don’t even show it on the TV replay, and it’s a reminder to everyone that there but for the grace of God go us all. It wasn’t a foul or a dirty tackle, just a tragic accident.
Morgan’s out of the World Cup, that much is immediately obvious. What we don’t know at the time is that he’ll never play for Wales again.
Saturday, 13 August. Millennium. I don’t use any notes or prepare a speech this time. I just speak off the cuff and from the heart. I keep it simple. What are the three things we need to win this game? Discipline, work rate, belief. Nothing special, nothing Churchillian. It’s England at the Millennium. That’s enough in itself.
We’re level pegging at half-time, 6–6, and in the second half we stretch away to win 19–9. It’s the seventh time I’ve played an England representative side – Under-16s, Under-18s, Under-19s, Under-20s, in the Six Nations earlier this year and at Twickenham last week – and the first time I’ve ever beaten them.
God, it feels sweet. It’s not that I hate England – how can I, when my dad’s English? – and I certainly don’t have that mentality typical of some Welsh people that beating England is the be-all and end-all of Welsh rugby. But when you’ve only ever known defeat against a side and you finally get one over on them, it means more and tastes better than just your average common or garden victory.
‘Smiler’s out.’
‘What do you mean, Smiler’s out?’
‘His neck injury’s worse than we thought. We’d reckoned he could get through the World Cup and have surgery when the tournament’s over, but there’s no chance of that now. In Poland there were times when he couldn’t sleep for the pain. Losing feeling in his hands, that kind of stuff. Really struggling. He needs half a disc removed, and he’s going under the knife in Bristol any day now.’
Poor Smiler. He must be gutted. Every player dreams of playing in the World Cup. But I know what’s coming.
‘So,’ Gats says, ‘we’d like you to carry on as skipper on a permanent basis. To the World Cup, and beyond.’
Smiler rings me. He’s still on the ward after his operation.
‘Gats says you’re not sure about taking the captaincy,’ he says.
‘Yeah. I just feel it’s too early for me. I don’t captain the Blues, and I’m still quite new in the national set-up.’
‘Well, that’s one of the reasons Gats wants you. He’s looking long-term, for the next few seasons rather than the next few matches, just like the All Blacks have done with McCaw. And for what it’s worth I think you’ll do a great job. You’re guaranteed a starting spot, you’ll get a lot of help from the senior boys like Gethin and Alun Wyn, and most of all everybody in the squad respects you and likes you.’
Maybe, I think, but I know quite a few of the senior players disagree with my selection as captain. No one says anything bad to my face, but I can still tell. I guess that if I had 60 or 70 caps and fancied my chances as captain, and then someone with a quarter of that number was suddenly catapulted over the top of me into the hot seat, I’d probably feel the same way too. Knowing that there’s disapproval out there makes me feel as though I’m walking round with a sign hanging from my neck and a huge weight on my shoulders, both of them dragging me down when I should be standing tall and proud.
‘Listen,’ Smiler continues. ‘When I was first offered the role I wasn’t sure either, even though I’d already played for the Lions. Anyone with any sense doubts themselves. But I got great support and felt more comfortable with every game that passed. You’ll find the same. Trust me. Opportunities like this don’t come round too often, and if you turn it down you’ll kick yourself.’
I really appreciate Smiler’s call and I tell Gats I’ll do it, but deep down I’m still not sure. And I’m so immature in some ways that I can’t bring myself to front up and tell Gats my worries, even though I see him every day at training. I use Andy as an intermediary, which is chicken of me but at least gives me the chance to talk through things with him first.
‘I hate captaincy,’ I say. ‘It’s a strong word, but it’s the right one. I hate it.’
‘OK,’ Andy replies. ‘What don’t you like about it?’
‘I hate having a room on my own. I like having someone to bounce off.’
‘I’m sure we can change that. What else?’
‘I hate doing press.’ Not because I dislike the journalists personally – quite the opposite, they’re mostly good guys who know their rugby – but because all that press stuff gets in the way of everything else. The other day I had to miss lunch to do the press conference, but I couldn’t afford not to eat, so I got a plate of turkey, potatoes and vegetables, put it in a blender, added water and drank it like a protein shake. And yes, it was every bit as rank as it sounds.
Or I might have to miss the analysis sessions, which means I have to catch up on the calls and the moves everyone else knows perfectly, and then I risk being the one who messes it up. I especially hate live interviews, because they always want you there 20 minutes early and so you’re kicking your heels all that time for what ends up being a 90-second piece.
‘OK,’ says Andy. ‘Let’s ask that you do press once a week, no more. What else?’
‘Sponsorship appearances.’
‘What about them?’
‘There are too many.’
‘Then let’s delegate them among the boys.’
It sounds so simple, because it is, but until Andy goes through all this with me I don’t realise that captaincy, like everything, is give and take. Very few things are set in stone, and there’s almost always room for discussion. When we take my concerns to Gats, he’s fine with all of them.
But even so, he senses that I’m still unsure.
‘Have a look at this,’ he says.
It’s a clip from our victory over England at the Millennium. I tackle Mark Cueto, then immediately jump back up and take my position in the defensive line. Josh Turnbull competes at the ruck and wins the penalty. Immediately I march to the ruck, punching the air, pulling Josh to his feet and slapping his back, geeing everybody up.
Gats pauses the clip. ‘That’s leadership,’ he says simply.
Now I’m beginning to get it. I smile and begin to walk away.
‘Sam,’ he calls out. I turn. He’s pointing to my new sponsored Range Rover. ‘If you still don’t want to be captain, your profile won’t be as high and Land Rover might take that nice car off you.’
He smirks. I laugh. He’s got a point.
In his book The Captain Class, Sam Walker, former global sports editor at the Wall Street Journal, identifies seven traits that elite captains demonstrate. What Gats has just shown me is an example of one of them: ‘motivates others with passionate nonverbal displays’.
The others are:
extreme doggedness and focus in competition
aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules
a willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows
a low-key, practical and democratic communication style
strong convictions and the courage to stand apart
ironclad emotional control
As descriptions of both my style of play and my personality, all seven seem pretty much spot on.
Friday, 2 September. We land in Wellington. Including the time difference, it’s two days since we left home.
We go for a walk to help ease the stiffness after so long in an aeroplane. Look, someone says, there’s a bar up ahead. Let’s go get a drink.
The bar is called Mermaids. There are a few half-dressed women in there, and a pole on a stage, but we’re all a bit jetlagged and zonked so we don’t really twig what’s going on. We think it’s just a mildly risqué place. Most of us order coffee. A couple of the boys have a beer.
Then we see it. A huge, illuminated neon arrow pointing up the stairs, and beneath it in equally huge illuminated letters the word ‘SEX’.
We’re in a brothel.
We finish up our drinks a lot quicker than we started them and get the hell out. It’s only a couple of weeks since England made headlines for all the wrong reasons with their dwarf-tossing in a Queenstown bar, and if there’d been someone around with a camera we could easily have been in the same position, spending days dealing with the fallout and the negative publicity rather than concentrating on preparing ourselves for the tournament.
It was an innocent mistake, but try telling that to the press pack and the social media hordes. We’ve dodged a bullet there, and we know it. That’s one of the advantages of not being a high-profile team like England: we can fly under the radar a little. I hope we can stay there for a while.
It’s my first time in New Zealand. When Gats first came over to be interviewed for the Wales job, the WRU chief executive Roger Lewis took him on a helicopter trip over South Wales. Villages and towns dotted with rugby pitches, fields and hillsides lush with rain, valleys and the mountainous beauty of the Brecon Beacons – Lewis knew just what he was doing.
‘It looks like New Zealand,’ Gats said.
It does. And now I’m here, I see that the reverse is obviously true too – that New Zealand looks like Wales. The similarity doesn’t stop there. Both countries have got small, rugby-mad populations: just over three million for us, just under five million for them. England, France, South Africa, Australia and the rest of the big names here – their populations are too big, their range of other sports too large, for rugby to capture the soul of the nation in the way that it does us and New Zealand.
I feel right at home.
In Wales, the most celebrated position on the field is number 10, the fly-half. Think of the men who’ve played there: Cliff Morgan, Barry John, Phil Bennett, Jonathan Davies, Neil Jenkins, Stephen Jones.
New Zealand have produced their share of excellent fly-halves too, but for them the sacred number isn’t 10. It’s 7. Before Richie McCaw was Josh Kronfeld, before Kronfeld was Michael Jones, and before Jones was Graham Mourie. To be playing 7 in New Zealand, even if you’re not playing for New Zealand, is to take on a precious mantle.
Gats and I are in a press conference before our first pool match against South Africa. ‘There are three definite world-class players at the breakdown in this tournament,’ Gats says. ‘David Pocock, Richie McCaw and Heinrich Brüssow. I’d rate the guy next to me in that category as well. A lot of people haven’t seen Sam Warburton play, but he’ll create an impact in this tournament. He wins man of the match more often than not, and you’ll find out why on Sunday.’
Bloody hell, I think. No pressure, Gats.
Sunday, 11 September. You never want the hardest game in the group first up, because if you lose, then every game after that becomes a must-win. Even if those must-win games are ones you should win, it still alters the equation a little bit. But we didn’t choose the schedule and we can’t alter it, so there’s no point complaining. Crack on. Game on.
I lead the boys out in Wellington. At 22 years and 341 days old, I’m the youngest World Cup captain ever. I’m up against a seriously talented back row – Brüssow, Schalk Burger and Pierre Spies – but I feel invincible, and I play like it too. This is the best international match I’ve played so far, and only perhaps one or two more in the future will match it.
I’m everywhere. I make 23 tackles, almost a quarter of the team’s entire total. I secure six turnovers. I’m faster to every breakdown than the AA could dream of. No matter how quick the Boks are, I’m quicker, and it really pisses them off. As the game wears on I can hear them shouting more and more at each breakdown: ‘Smash him. Get him off the ball!’
They try and clear me out by fair means or foul. I cop a massive blow to my head and can hardly stand up for a moment or two while the world spins, but I’m there at the next breakdown, and the next one, and the next one after that.
I win man of the match. And we lose the game. Only by a point, 17–16, but a loss is a loss. It doesn’t matter how well I played, because we lost. But it does matter how well I captain, because I make one mistake that may have a big effect on the result.
It’s the 14th minute. Hooky – James Hook – kicks a penalty so high that it passes over the top of the upright. From where I’m standing, it’s hard to tell whether it’s just in or just out. The assistant referees watch the ball in flight, look at each other and keep their flags down: no score. The referee, Wayne Barnes, agrees.
Even though both Hooky and Jenks think it’s gone over – Hooky’s so confident that he starts running back to the halfway line for the kick-off – I don’t think of questioning it. The moment comes and goes so quickly that I’m almost not aware of it. I should question it, but I don’t. It’s just not me, to confront something like that. Ironic that I’m happy to confront enormous Springbok forwards all day but not ask a simple question of the officials, but there you go. I’ve never been the kind of person to complain in restaurants or make a fuss in public, and that feeds through into this.
It might not make a difference, of course. The officials might decide after looking at a replay that there’s no reason to change their minds; and even if they do, it’s so early in the game that there’s plenty of time for South Africa to come back, and maybe they’d change their tactics if they were two points down rather than a point up. Rugby’s rarely as simple as saying that a single incident would leave the rest of the match unaltered.
In years to come, this respect for referees and their decisions will become one of my biggest strengths. But right now it feels like a huge weakness, and even though I can’t change what’s happened, I resolve that if it ever occurs in the future I won’t make the same mistake again.
Losing to South Africa means that, assuming we both win all our other pool matches, we’ll come second in the group and face the winner of Pool C in the quarters. That’s almost certain to be Australia, whose toughest match in that pool is against Ireland. We’ve only won one of our last six games against the Wallabies. You can say all you like about having to play the good teams sooner or later, but Australia in the quarters would be a big ask.
The Irish turn them over 15–6.
Suddenly, all the permutations are flipped 180 degrees. Now it’s almost certain that we’d play Ireland in the quarters, which is a far easier prospect. We know Ireland’s game so well, we beat them in the Six Nations, and we reckon we’ve more than got the measure of them.
We’re looking at a semi-final here, I think, as long as we don’t screw it up.
Sunday, 18 September. Hamilton. We almost do screw it up. We’re 10–6 down to Samoa at half-time, and if we lose this that’s zero points from two games and we’re almost certainly on an early flight home.
I don’t know what to say to the boys in the dressing room, but Shane Williams does. He gives us all the most almighty bollocking. ‘There’s no way we’re going to lose this,’ he yells, ‘not after everything we’ve been through.’
Remember Spala.
Samoa are without doubt the dirtiest team I’ve played against; at one point I get someone’s heel in my face as I’m lying on the floor, and it’s not an accident. Stung by the thought of going home, we take it to them physically. We pluck it fast off lineouts, Jamie runs over Seilala Mapusua in the 12 channel, we work it through the biggest forwards until there’s space out wide and we can spread it. They don’t score a point in the second half, and we run out winners 17–6. It’s not pretty, but the result’s all that matters. Very few teams ever go through tournaments playing brilliantly all the time and swatting aside every opponent.
Now we know we’ll be in the quarters, because with the best will in the world we’re not going to lose either of our remaining matches to Namibia or Fiji.
Monday, 26 September. New Plymouth. There’s a moment against Namibia which means a lot to me, even though no one in the stands and few people on the pitch even notice. We have a penalty, and I tell Stephen to go for the three points rather than kick to the corner and go for a lineout within range of their tryline.
I know some of the boys will think this is me being too conservative, and that I should be being ruthless against a team who are never really going to trouble us – we’ll end up beating them 81–7 – but Stephen quiets any dissent.
‘Warby, you’re our captain,’ he says. ‘Whatever you say, we’re doing.’
From someone with more than 100 caps, that’s an endorsement I appreciate.
Sunday, 2 October. Hamilton. On the bus back from the Fiji game, as pleased with the zero points we conceded as the 66 we scored, I’m looking out of the window when I get a sudden and rather weird rush of feeling: a wave of positivity and excitement. We’re going to do something here. We’re going to do something special.
Saturday, 8 October. It’s wet and windy in Wellington – when is it not? – so at least we’ve got conditions that wouldn’t be out of place in either Cardiff or Dublin. Everyone’s talking about the back rows, because whenever we play Ireland it seems to be a massive cock-off as to who’s got the best.
Theirs is pretty good – Stephen Ferris, Sean O’Brien and Jamie Heaslip – but I reckon that Lyds, Toby Faletau and I have got the measure of them. Go low, Shaun says before the start. Go low at them, get their big men to the ground, chop tackle them all day long. Lyds tackles, I jackal. That’s how we’ll win our battles.
We’re ahead within three minutes. We run what we call ‘pattern’ and everyone else calls ‘Warrenball’, Jamie doing his usual battering-ram impression up the middle and working the phases from that to put Shane over in the corner. Rhys Priestland nails a very difficult kick, given the conditions, and we’re seven points up almost before we’ve started.
We’re never headed, even though Ireland do bring it back to 10–10 just after half-time. It’s a proper old-school Test match, intense and brutal, full of blood and thunder. They spend long periods attacking, but we just stand firm and soak it up, a red line spread across the pitch. When one team attacks and attacks without the scores to show for it, their self-belief inevitably starts to ebb away.
That’s what happens here. By the time we get to the last quarter, we know we’ve got them. They’re only five points behind, but they look tired and under the cosh; and when Foxy (Jonathan Davies, whose parents own a pub called The Fox and Hounds) scores we know it’s all over. The Welsh fans spend the last 15 minutes singing ‘Delilah’ over and over.
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