Playing out in France was brutal -it really was
MY LIFEIN RUGBY
THE FORMER LONDON IRISH & CLERMONT FLY-HALF
NOWADAYS it is a trend: players moving across the English Channel to play in France. But back when I moved to Montferrand (Clermont) in the mid-1980s, I was quite often the only foreigner playing, and probably the only one in the entire ground on a lot of occasions. You were on your own and you just had to get on with it. I remember one match when the Sydney Morning Herald sports writer, Peter FitzSimons, was playing second row for Brive, and we had a chat over the half-time oranges because it was a rare moment when there was another English speaker on the pitch.
I’d made my first-team debut for London Irish in the 1982/83 season but never really got a good run in the side. Selection was very political then and unless you were a doctor, a solicitor or an officer in the Army you were often on the outside. So being a roofer my face didn’t exactly fit. Having limited opportunities to play I went back and played for Old Wimbledonians, as well as playing a couple of midweek games for a combined Old Boys’ team, which is how I came to take the unconventional route to playing in France.
The Combined Old Boys went on an end-of-season tour to Clermont Ferrand, and we won this mini tournament against university sides. I played well and got a couple of offers to stay in France, and one of them was from Clermont University, who asked me over to study in France for a year and to also play for them. So I thought why not? That season went well and I got a bit of positive press. Montferrand saw what was happening and invited me to play for them. I was seen as a kicking fly-half. They loved anyone who could eliminate all the rubbish between the 22s, and just get you from one end of the pitch to the other. So much for French flair! Jean-Pierre Romeu was the coach. He was the fly-half when France won the Grand Slam in 1977. I was playing against internationals week in, week out – your Frank Mesnels, your Charvets, your Lescarbouras – sometimes in front of crowds of around 15,000 people.
In one of my first games, at home to Toulouse, I got 11 points and man of the match, and we won, 18-4.
France isn’t exactly known for cricket but when I played for Montferrand all the backs used to put boxes on. It was brutal, it really was. There was fighting everywhere, you have never seen anything like it. Luckily I had some minders. Our back five was over two metres tall, even then. I remember one game, when we played Auch away, which is Jacque Fouroux’s old club, where a fight spilled over onto the running track and the spectators got involved as well. Carnage!
While I was in France, Clermont hosted the French National Kicking Championship. Something like 1,000 people entered it and after a month of qualifying rounds they’d whittled them down to eight. Those eight qualifiers joined the best eight kickers in the French Championship for the finals, myself included, and I won it in
“Once, a fight spilled onto the running track and fans got involved. Carnage!” a sudden-death shootout. What the organisers didn’t know was I was using this electric pump on the touchline to take air out of the old Adidas Wallaby ball because it travelled further when it was a bit softer.
It was a great experience, and one I was keen to repeat, but I returned to England because my dad had had a stroke and needed looking after. It was payback time because he had always been so supportive of me and, although I didn’t know it at the time, it was clearly his love of rugby that rubbed off on me when I was growing up. Dad played wing/centre for Belvedere, Clontarf and Leinster and went to three Ireland trials but never got capped. He must be one of the first players to play for Leinster and Munster, who he joined after moving to Cork to work on assignment at the hospital there. He played for Munster against the All Blacks in 1954.
The following year I returned to France, this time to RC Hyères, who’d been hassling me to play for them for a while. It was the days of shamateurism so money was changing hands and I asked for X amount and they agreed to it, and it was a lot of money. So I thought let’s go to the south of France, which is when I met my wife, who is Italian but was living in Nice. I was on a bonus of 100 Francs for every point that I kicked, which was a nice little earner. There was a game against Grenoble when the floodlights failed. We were getting hammered so most people on our side were keen for it to be called off. But luckily for me they got them working again and I scored all 27 of our 27 points, albeit in a heavy defeat, to pocket a handy windfall!
As it happened, we weren’t a very good side, the forwards were going backwards, and it all fizzled out after about three to four months. They got rid of the president and got rid of the coaches and then they started to look at people’s payments. When they stopped paying the bonuses I thought it was time to go, so I headed off back to London Irish about December time.
I’d been having problems with my neck and the relentlessness of the training and the physicality of the matches in France was taking its toll on me. Whereas in England, when Leagues first started, a league match would often be followed by a friendly because you didn’t play each other home and away, so I could rest up every other weekend if I needed to.
That said, there were plenty of top-quality flankers that I had to avoid. I am 6’2 but I was only 80 kilos, so there wasn’t a lot of me. Self-preservation was one of my first thoughts when it came to defending. Gary Rees (Nottingham), in particular, was a nightmare. I used to like opensides who used to run straight at you because they were easier to step. But Gary used to hover, menacingly, waiting to get his man. You used to think ‘what the hell am I going to do?’.
I prided myself on game-management, kicking when I needed to but also opening up play when opportunities arose. We had a great backline during my time at London Irish. Rob Saunders was my 9 and captain of Ireland for a time. And when you had backs like Simon Geoghegan and Jim Staples out wide it made sense to use them, especially when the opposition wingers had dropped back expecting me to leather it; that was the time to run it.
Winning promotion to the First Division in 1991 has to be the highlight of my time at London Irish. We were just beaten to the title by Rugby Lions and I finished the season as the league’s top points scorer. With results going our way more weeks than not, the atmosphere around the club was terrific. We had a three-day bender to celebrate. After going out in Richmond, to Bellini’s, we returned to Sunbury late in the evening. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be there but when they turned the floodlights on, there were 5,000 people waiting to celebrate with us. The only trouble was that I had to catch a flight at 7am, to play in the Belvedere 7s, which my uncle Karl founded. I got dropped off at 2am, had two hours kip, and then a taxi took me to London Scottish, where my car was parked. But the iron gates were locked. We ended up removing one of the gates to get the car out, and I made it to Heathrow in the nick of time.
It was well publicised that I would retire at the end of that season. I’d been training every day for six years, it was like a drug to me, and I was miles ahead in the fitness stakes when I came back to England but by now I was 31/32 and I’d done my time. I played on for a bit longer at the request of the club, which I did for a bit, but then I made way for Paul Burke.
I’m still in touch with a lot of the London Irish guys from that era to this day, and I am still very much part of the Clermont ‘family’. Back in June, I went along to the Assemblée Générale of former players. Around 150 attended, including people like Aurelien Rougerie and Philippe Saint-Andre. The oldest player in the room was 80-plus and he was presented with a commemorative leather ball and my 20-year-old son, who was with me and plays for RC Roim, a club to the north of Clermont, was also presented with one as the youngest person in the room, which I thought was a lovely touch. That, for me, is what rugby is about. While the ‘boot money’ was welcome, it’s the friendships and the shared memories that are priceless.
