My Life in Rugby: Jon Clarke – former Leeds, Worcester and Northampton centre

On reflection, being told there was no money left in the kitty at Bristol and that I was free to move on was a blessing in disguise.
I’d not long been awarded an academy contract when owner Malcolm Pearce broke the news to us in a letter a month before the end of the 2002/03 season.
From there I enjoyed nine seasons at Northampton where my game was developed massively under Wayne Smith, Jim Mallinder, Dorian West and Nick Johnston.
Luckily for me the Bristol coach Peter Thorburn was best friends with Wayne and I had been invited for an interview at Saints. I turned up suited and booted for the first and only time in my career, but apparently it went down well and I got a contract. I’d like to think my playing ability had something to do with it as well!
Not long later, I was thrown in at the deep end on the wing against champions Wasps, with John Rudd, an absolute unit, up against me. Wayne was full-on and I learnt lots very quickly in that first season. Senior pros like Nick Beal were an unbelievable help, too.
I established myself in the team when Paul Grayson moved me from full-back to outside centre in 2005/06. Geoff Appleford was earmarked for the No.13 shirt but he broke his arm badly while playing sevens and that opened the door for me.
Initially, I played alongside lots of different 12s but eventually formed a good partnership with James Downey. He got pigeon-holed as an up-and-down runner but there was much more to him than that: he consistently ran good lines and the hits he put in were unbelievable.
After breaking my ankle and tearing all the ligaments, I hardly played the year that we were relegated. Unfortunately, I was never able to recapture the same pace as I had before the injury but some of my best days were still ahead of me.
In our first couple of seasons back, we won the Amlin Challenge Cup, after a horrible game against Bourgoin, who just wanted to fight us, and then the LV= Cup. It was a great time in my career and I got picked by England Saxons for the Churchill Cup in North America.
With momentum behind us we went on a great run in the Heineken Cup in 2010/11, reaching the final. I’ll never forget scoring in the semi-final against Perpignan on a baking hot day in Milton Keynes. But we just ran out of steam in the final against Leinster.
Saints decided they needed to freshen things up to kick on to the next level and George Pisi was seen as the future at centre.
I moved to Worcester on a three-year deal, the first of which went okay but after that things fizzled out. I picked up a knee injury at the worst possible time – in the final game of pre-season – and Dean Ryan told me very early on that I didn’t figure in his plans and that he was investing in youth.
Leeds came in for me and I can honestly say the rugby we played in my first year at Carnegie was the best I’d been involved with. Jimmy Lowes kept things simple but very effective, and I’m convinced we would have been promoted had the board invested a bit more money and brought in a defence coach to help him out. That was an opportunity missed in my book.
After Jimmy left late on, we went through a succession of coaches until they brought in Bryan Redpath, who, like Ryan, left me out in the cold.
I was basically unemployed until an opportunity came up to become part of the coaching set-up at Rotherham.
It’s enjoyable but the long hours take some getting used to!
*As told to Jon Newcombe