My Life in Rugby: Ian Hunter – former England full-back

When I started playing for England, in 1991/92, I was seen as a big full-back – 6ft 2in and just shy of 16st. But now you look at the players and I’d be an average build. There are scrum-halves that size now and the game has moved on massively, as has my club Northampton, since I first started playing for them in 1989.
Growing up in New Zealand you couldn’t fail to notice rugby. My dad played for NZ Police so I was always around rugby. However it wasn’t until we returned to the UK, to Cumbria, that I started playing the game; before that it had been soccer. The Rugby master at Lakes School, Windermere, was Graham Smith, the England U17 coach, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
After attending Art College in Carlisle in my 6th form years, I went to University in Leicester to study for a design engineering degree. I went to a few training sessions at Tigers but wasn’t made to feel that welcome by the coaches, so I went to Nottingham instead for six months. They were a top club at the time and I was understudy to the then England full-back, Simon Hodgkinson.
So I dropped a level to join Northampton, and it proved to be the best decision I ever made. It was an exciting time, the club was going through a big shake-up on and off the field with a new board and a raft of new players, such as Paul Grayson, Matt Dawson, Tim Rodber, Nick Beal, Martin Bayfield – and later Gregor Townsend – all helping to re-energise the club.
It was in my early days at Franklin’s Gardens that I got approached by Wigan RL with a view to switching codes. The papers claimed I’d been offered a million pounds – in reality, the figure was significantly lower than that but still a sizeable sum, nonetheless. Unlike one of my England B peers, Jim Fallon, who went to Leeds, I opted to stay in Union and not long after I was awarded my first England cap – against Canada, at Wembley. I scored twice in a 26-13 win.
As well as being the first player to score a try in a rugby international at the famous old ground, rugby people seem to remember the try I scored against France the following year, when the ball cannoned back off the post from a Jon Webb penalty. I picked up a handful more caps, including a couple at the 1995 World Cup, but I was not the same player I was pre-Lions tour ’93.
Being selected for the Lions was obviously a career highlight, however my tour ended as soon as it started after I dislocated my shoulder in the opening game against North Auckland.
My shoulder was never the same after that and I suffered several more dislocations. It changed the way I played the game; I couldn’t tackle in certain positions and that made positioning more critical.
England drew a line under my time with them when I missed another block of training after the World Cup and looked at the new generation such as Matt Perry and Tim Stimpson.
I was back on the edge on the England set up in ’98/99, but my shoulder went again and after three shoulder reconstructions and not being able to get insurance, I’d had enough.
On retiring I stepped back from rugby and it’s only in the last couple of years, thanks to BBC Radio Northampton, who asked me to summariser on matches, I’ve got my love for the game back.