My Life in Rugby: Don Caskie – former London Scottish & Gloucester centre and Moseley & Georgia head coach

After my playing career I coached Georgia for the World Cup in New Zealand – an outstanding experience all-round.
It is the pinnacle of most players’ career and to have that as a goal to set yourself was brilliant. It was a bit surreal facing Scotland, but it was one of those days that could have gone either way.
Richie Dixon was my coach going through the Scotland system. He was director of rugby at the SRU and in charge of all the coaching.
He had become head coach of Georgia for the World Cup and I just got the call from him saying: “Would you like to take the step up?” It didn’t take long for me to say: “Yes.”
I’d started playing rugby at 11 and fell in love with it immediately.
I played football as well and I had trials for various teams – Bristol City, Plymouth and Swindon. They went well but I was also going through the school system with the rugby, at Rednock School.
I found that easier. It was a comprehensive, but we had a good fixture list and I think we had four guys in the county side.
I went from school straight to Borough Road College and got into the senior side. We were one of the first student sides to play in the third round of the John Player Cup.
While there I played for London Scottish, with Gavin Hastings and other internationals and I learned a huge amount.
I left there when I finished college and went to Gloucester. The coach, Keith Richardson, was a teacher at Wycliffe College, who we used to play against. Scottish also played Gloucester and he said: “Why don’t you come and play for Gloucester?”
We got to the Pilkington Cup final in 1990, which was a high and a low. We were on for a league and cup double but we lost the lot – beaten by Bath in the cup and finishing second to Wasps in the league.
But it was a great experience, the crowd especially. It was a very humbling experience to play in front of them.
The game moved into the professional era and I had to make a decision. I was coming to the end of my career and had to decide whether to go full-time.
It was a natural ending – I couldn’t have done any more. You never want to retire but you have got to be realistic. It was just unrealistic to expect to go into the full-time game at that stage of my career.
I had a very good experience in coaching at Moseley, where we won the EDF Cup final against Leeds. We had some outstanding players, like Charlie Sharples, Henry Trinder and Dan Norton.
Then I had quite a scare in 2010. We were doing the November tests in Georgia and I just had a bad throat. Luckily the doctor that was with us was a throat and head cancer specialist. As soon as I got home I was diagnosed with throat cancer.
It was not the best news for Christmas. It was a bit of a shock – I don’t smoke or anything. I had two stints in hospital with chemotherapy and a six-week course with daily radiotherapy which, touch wood, did the trick.
Georgia did fairly well in the World Cup so they asked me to set up their national academy.
The raw material is fantastic – it’s just getting the finesse, which is being worked on all the time.