I’M still convinced that the food poisoning myself and half-adozen others got on the flight to South Africa on the Lions tour in ’74 was intentional. Anyone who’d chosen the meal with an anchovy garnish fell ill. I’ve not eaten them to this day, I felt so rough. I never truly got back up to speed after that. Instead of running onto the training field, I was running to the toilet.
Spending three months away from work was problematic for some of the players but I was very fortunate. I was working for a subsidiary of Midland Bank, on a graduate trainee scheme, and they very kindly agreed to pay me in full and the only concession was that I used one week of my annual holiday allowance. I thought that was a pretty good deal!
By the time I felt well enough to start training, there had already been a couple of games, so I was always on a race against time to make it for the Test series. I played in eight games and the highlight would be the hat-trick I scored against South West Districts. JJ Williams got six that day, so nine tries came down the same flank. As I got fitter and fitter, I pushed myself too hard and tweaked my hamstring. I thought it would be okay after a week or two but it never really got better, not to the point that I’d be considered for the Test series anyway.
The Lions is the pinnacle, it’s what you dream about growing up. It was obviously disappointing not being involved in the Tests but, by the same token, getting there and being in that environment was still a heck of a thing. For me, the Lions at that time was the closest you’d get to professional rugby with the way that it was managed by Willie John McBride and Syd Millar. We’d be training every day, and it would be taken very seriously, and we’d have the best food available; nothing was too much trouble for us and the players were always put first. I think Fran Cotton had steak every meal – breakfast, lunch and dinner!
While the red carpet was laid out for us with endless cocktail party invites and the like, the South Africans did everything possible to intimidate us on the pitch, from first whistle to last and Willie John hammered home to us that we needed to have each other’s backs. He was very keen to avoid the cliques that people said there had been on the ’71 tour to New Zealand so one rule was that you couldn’t share a room with someone from the same country. I was fortunate in that regard. Being English, I didn’t have to room with Andy Ripley, the rebel of the tour, who was not the tidiest. Andy always managed to wear the wrong attire. On one occasion, he was reminded to wear his blazer and tie and he turned up with a blazer and tie on but no shirt underneath. Willie John laughed it off but Alun Thomas, the tour manager, didn’t see the funny side.
Fran and I were the only Coventry players on the tour. I say only, because at that time the club would regularly field a side with 14 internationals. I think I am right in saying that we are the last Coventry players to play for the Lions while still at the club. Having attended Bablake School in the city, Coventry was the only club I ever wanted to play for. That said, I did play for Sale for a bit when I was at Manchester University.
I was English Schools‘ long jump champion when I was 16 and at one point the people at Lilleshall who’d devised a training programme for me, said I couldn’t do both because I had to train through the winter. There was only going to be one winner – rugby, I enjoyed that much more because of the team aspect and the camaraderie. I will say, however, that the game became a bit less fun to play when coaching started to become a thing and like with most new things, it was a bit over-the-top at first. Peter Preece and I used to talk about how the game had got a bit too choreographed. We had set moves for every scrum and lineout imaginable and it would have been easy for individual flair to have been stifled as a result. But when you had players of the calibre of David Duckham outside of you and Peter Rossborough at full-back, it would have been criminal not to use them. In a one-on-one, I’d have put my mortgage on David beating the defender and scoring. One of the main things was we all had real pace and we could do things at speed to get behind the gain line.
We all got on well at Coventry and had a good mix and we enjoyed some notable success. We didn’t get to the final in the first year of the John Player Cup, and that was the result of 6-6 draw at home with Gloucester, a really dour game. We thought we’d have to replay it but as we came off the pitch, we learnt that they would go through to the next round on the away team ruling. When we won the Cup for the first time the following year, against Bristol, we hadn’t been beaten in the competition for two years. I played in that game but not the following year, when we beat London Scottish, because it was a bit too close to the time I was leaving for South Africa with the Lions.
My England call-up came in 1972, after playing on the Far East tour the previous season. I was 21 and still at university, so there was a lot of excitement. My first two England caps ended in defeat but I remember for the third one, a win against France, I had quite a bit to do and played a part in David Duckham’s two tries. I scored my one and only Test try the game after that, against Scotland. It was a bit of a messy affair if I’m honest from a Preecey cross-kick that went higher and further than he intended. It ended up going over the line, their defence missed it and my quick reactions and ability to dive a long way meant I got to it first.
Without a doubt, the standout moment of my England career was beating New Zealand in New Zealand in ’73. Originally, we weren’t going there, we were supposed to be going to Argentina but they’d had one of their coups and the authorities judged it not safe to travel there, so a tour to Fiji and NZ was quickly organised and we were pleased to go. One thing I remember very vividly from the Fiji leg is turning up for training one day and finding the pitch covered with hundreds if not thousands of huge frogs.
We played the Fijian national team in a one-off match and we managed to thrash them, 13-12! They were just raw-boned guys who looked unhurtable and were all fantastic ball handlers.
After we’d lost all three of the provincial games in New Zealand, the All Blacks were perhaps a bit over-confident when it came to the Test in Auckland. But had we have had neutral referees rather than local ones, I’m sure we’d have won at least two of those warm-up games. In one of them, I put the full-back Peter Knight in for a try which was called back for a forward pass. I couldn’t believe it. We went into the Test with nothing to lose and we did a lot of attacking. The forwards were great and Jan Webster, from Moseley, was superb. For the half an hour I was on the pitch before I limped off with a pulled muscle, it was go, go, go – very hectic – and we won 16- 10. We got the wooden spoon in the Five Nations the year after that! That summed up England’s inconsistency at the time.
After the Lions tour, I was still a relatively young man but I continued to be beleaguered by injury, and in 1976, I had a bad car accident. I was never my old self after that but kept on playing into the 1980s before calling it a day. I was fortunate to be around when tours were becoming a thing and I travelled the world with rugby, to places like Russia, Singapore, Ceylon – as it was then known – and I also went on three Easter tours with the Barbarians. To visit lots and lots of different places, all under the guise of playing rugby, was a fantastic experience but Coventry is where my heart will always be.
