My Life in Rugby: Tony Yapp – Taunton head coach
Luckily I managed to get some game time for Taunton towards the end of the season and, in the last game, at home to Bournemouth, I kicked a conversion that took me past 3,000, an achievement I am proud of.
I’ll be the first to admit, though, that the vast majority of those points came about because of the hard work of my team-mates.
Hard work was a quality instilled in me growing up on a farm in Shropshire. My main sport then was Tetrathlon – shooting, swimming, horse riding and running. I was fortunate to represent Great Britain at age-group level and I didn’t start playing rugby until I was 14, basically just to keep fit through the winter.
However, things progressed, and by my late teens I was playing age-group rugby for the Midlands. Worcester picked me up and it was while I was there that I had a training session with Wallaby legend Glen Ella.
After finding out I was planning a trip to Australia he arranged for me to play for David Campese’s former club Randwick. I spent six months with them and won the Colts/U21s Grand Final.
On return I finished the season with Worcester before Paul Turner, one of most exciting fly-halves around, came calling. He wanted me to play for Bedford and before you knew it I was running around with the likes of Rory Underwood and Martin Offiah.
I played Premiership rugby with Bedford and while there got capped by England U21s. Five of the 2003 World Cup-winning side – Joe Worsley, Lewis Moody, Iain Balshaw, Ben Cohen and Josh Lewsey – were among my team-mates. In my first game against Scotland I scored two tries and completed a ‘full-house’.
In the next game, versus France at Twickenham, I scored a try and kicked four from four to earn an England A squad call-up for a trip to Ireland. Unfortunately I was an unused replacement and didn’t get another chance.
Another highlight was playing three games for the Baa-baas.
Bedford’s financial problems meant I went back to Worcester for a second spell and I spent three more enjoyable seasons there before heading down to Exeter. Earl Va’a, the Samoan international, and Craig Chalmers had provided fierce competition for the No.10 jersey at Worcester and the prospect of getting more game time at Exeter appealed to me.
Sometimes players go to a club and it just feels right, and that was certainly true of Exeter and me. It was a club based on a real work ethic and the squad was full of loads of different characters who played hard on and off the field.
You had the likes of Keith Brooking and Tony Walker, who were always up to no good, Garry Willis, a man of few words but when he spoke you listened, the Baxter brothers, and people like Chris Bentley who said a lot but not much ever made any sense.
All told, I played seven seasons at Exeter and scored 1,800 points, which, I believe, is still a club record, although Steeno (Gareth Steenson) is not far behind.
I had one of the best seasons of my career when I left Exeter to join Launceston, another great bunch of boys who punched above their weight.
But I was also coaching at Blundell’s School in Tiverton at the time and the travelling back and forth just got too much.
Taunton showed interest in me and moving there made sense on a number of fronts. Taunton had been in the doldrums for a few years and had struggled financially. Cut-backs meant a lot of players left and, in my second season, they asked me to take over as head coach and bring the youngsters through.
The first person I got in touch with was my old back-of-the-bus buddy from Exeter, Keith Brooking. Keith’s organisational skills are perfectly suited to the team manager role and he’s someone I trust implicitly.
With Chris Brown doing the forwards, I believe we have the right people for the right jobs, and things are getting better all the time both on and off the field.
