Am I planning to hang up my boots? Hell, no!
MY LIFE IN RUGBY
THE CHINNOR HOOKER, FORMERLY OF EALING, NEWCASTLE, NOTTINGHAM, EDINBURGH & SCOTLAND U20s
IHAD a bad injury at the start of my Edinburgh career, tearing my hamstring off the bone, and I had to have surgery and there were complications. At one point, I thought my days as a pro were done. But luckily I had a really supportive family around me, to give me advice and encouragement.
My old man is a miner, a typical old-school Scot, and he had a massive influence in terms of what I did in sport. He was always the person I went to ask questions and stuff and he was the one who told me there is no point in retiring now, you are still young, give it a crack and see how you go.
Once I recovered, I went on loan to Nottingham. I loved it there, and I loved the Championship. I thought I knew about scrummaging before I went there but I didn’t really have a clue. The league was so set-piece orientated back then, and that helped me massively in terms of developing my game. It gave me a taste of what life was like down south and also regular game time, something I had been missing at Edinburgh, where I had won Scotland U20 honours, playing at two Junior World Cups. Both squads were littered with internationals, including Stuart McInally, who was a No.8 at the time.
When I signed a deal with Ealing, I was 22/23 at the time. They had just been relegated out of the Champ and were in National One. It was a big decision to make as I was in and around the Edinburgh first-team squad and still had aspirations to play at as high a level as I could. But I stayed with Ealing for the majority of my career because I am a loyal type of guy – too loyal sometimes for my own good some people would say – and I enjoyed it until those last couple of years and the club looked after me well. It’s a source of pride that I was the first Ealing player to make it to 100 appearances in the pro era.
Moving down from a very small mining village just outside of Musselburgh to London was a shock to the system; I hated it to be honest, it was just too busy for me, I couldn’t hack it, so I ended up moving to Swindon after that first year because it was so much quieter, easy to get into London still, and so much more affordable. We had a flat for just under £700 a month. I had a couple of years in Swindon before moving to Oxford, which is much more like Edinburgh but maybe more diverse in terms of culture, and I have been based there ever since, which is how the Chinnor opportunity came around.
As well as struggling to adjust to life in London, things didn’t get off to the best of starts on the field. I got red carded in a pre-season game and got a nine-week ban, which was reduced to five because I had never had a card before. I only managed four games after that, though, before I blew my knee completely out, I ruptured my ACL, PCL, MCL, which sidelined me until the following season. I haven’t had the greatest career in terms of injuries, I think 11 operations in all, seven of them quite major. It’s been tough going but when you do have people to lean on like my dad, it does make it a little bit easier.
“Moving down from a small mining town to London was a shock to the system”
When I turned up at Ealing, I think people thought I was a lot older than I was – late 20s rather than 23 years old – because I have always looked and acted older than I was, literally an old head on young shoulders. I think I have been like a 50-year-old ever since I was 15 in my ability to take things on board and talk to people. Jimmy Lowes, who coached Ealing for a brief time, was always someone I enjoyed talking to, and still do now. For me, he struck the perfect balance in the way he spoke to the players. One, he is a great guy and two, he is a great coach as well. I don’t think he was quite the right fit for the coaching group that we had at Ealing but for what he brought I would genuinely be happy to run through a brick wall for him.
Codders (Alex Codling) had a big impact on both my game and that of Ealing’s. The year after we got promoted I think we finished second bottom and only just survived. Codders came in and I think we finished fourth that season. It showed how big a difference a good set-piece could make. We won scrum penalties and our maul was very dominant, and I was happy to take the credit by scoring a shedload of tries. It used to be flanker that scored the tries from the back of mauls but they changed the laws and after that flankers had to pass the ball back and I became a prevalent try scorer by accident really. I would always get stick from the lads for getting the glory by doing minimal work.
I had a really nice year when I was at Ealing and Bristol were in the league and it was between me and Luke Morahan as to who would be top try scorer that season. I think the furthest I scored from was about 15 metres, I think it was Leeds away. You could see everyone wincing when we watched the try back for fear my hamstring would go. Most were from about a metre out.
How I looked was never far away from the conversation at Ealing. I completely got the fact that I didn’t look how modern-day athletes are supposed to look but because of nerve damage, I needed a bit of extra weight on to help me be a dominant scrummager. I don’t think you can tar everyone with the same brush. Ben Tameifuna, Thomas Waldrom … there are a lot of people who don’t exactly fit the norm but society is such that you are expected to fit the norm, and that was certainly the case with one coach we had at Ealing, he just didn’t like the look of me, and I also got a couple of injuries which I didn’t see coming; I did my hamstring and then broke my neck.
I went on loan to Newcastle when I got back fit. It was supposed to be the rest of the season but, unfortunately, I was called back early, after about a month. I enjoyed the attention to detail at Newcastle, it was the next step up and it was refreshing to be somewhere new after such a long time at Ealing. I only played one game, against Cardiff in the Challenge Cup, and I scored. Guess what – it was from a metre out! It was my last chance to have a crack at the Prem. But they said I had to go back even though I didn’t want to, because Ealing had lost a couple of crucial games that year and they needed me. It was then that I realised that if I can’t be where I want to be, it was time to give up full-time rugby and start to think about life after rugby. It was a shame things ended the way they did. It was a bit frustrating that we were never able to go up, that would have been the cherry on the cake for me, but you can’t take anything away from what Sir Mike Gooley has done for the club.
Now I am just about to start my second season with Chinnor, having won Nat 1 for the second time. My situation has very much changed in the sense I work for the construction company Rectory Homes, which the chairman Simon Vickers own. So first and foremost, I have to make sure I do well with my daytime job but rugby is still important to me. Minty (DoR, Nick Easter) understands that I don’t need to be doing every contact session and every rep at my age (33), the most important thing is being fit for the weekend. So I am being well looked after on and off the field at what is a brilliant community club. Am I planning to hang up my boots? Hell no, not yet.
