Michael Aylwin: David Campese

I haven’t always been a writer of impeccable impartiality and angelic wisdom. Oh, no. I fell in love with rugby, just as any boy falls in love, long before any pesky need to earn a living required me to disavow such concepts as love and joy.

It is fair to say I have always sided with the brilliant and mercurial over the disciplined and stable – or at least I did before I became boring. In the universal rite of finding self, which for me took place at university in the early 90s, I was practically evangelical in my advocacy of Barnes over Andrew, Gower over Gooch. We even formed a cult in Gower’s name. I wrote a novel inspired by it.

But there always has to be ‘a moment’, a spark to light the fire. Mine ignited on the afternoon of 26 November 1988. I was 16, drunk and at a vulnerable moment confronted with what I perceived to be a thing of transcendent beauty – all the usual preconditions for love.

I’ve just googled the moment in question, watched it on YouTube. It’s true, several decades later, in blurry film, I’m not quite sure it was worthy of the spawning of cult, novel, way of life – but that’s not the point. At the time, anything seemed possible.

We were drunk, for a start, a couple of mates and me in a living room in Kent. As 16-year-olds we weren’t really supposed to be, especially as it was on our housemaster’s beer. Might even have been his living room. The match that was going on while we were drinking was the Barbarians against Australia in Cardiff. Jonathan Davies, Gavin Hastings, Michael Lynagh, Nick Farr-Jones, all the usual.

But it didn’t matter who they were when He stepped up to supply the divine climax of the match, the Wallaby tour, the human race.

David Campese received the ball on halfway and immediately transferred it into one hand, the wrong hand, but who cares when you can ghost round Hastings like that, bamboozle Matt Duncan with a look, go one way, then the other and leave Davies floundering, the ball still in one hand, more of a wand really.

That was me, rugby and alcohol set up for life. And Campo. Although he might not realise it.

My first term at university was dominated by the 1991 Rugby World Cup. That semi-final. And then the final when he took his prowess beyond the mere field. Surely no other sportsman in history has managed to talk the opposition out of their own modus operandi the way Campese convinced England to abandon their conservative approach of the time in favour of something more flamboyant. Bamboozled by the man again!

My young student self thoroughly approved of the way England tried to play that day, but the annoying pragmatist in me wondered if it was entirely wise. It wasn’t. And there he was again at the climax, knocking the ball on to ruin what would have been a dazzling England try. Ah, well. No one said love was easy.

In 1997, I met him for the first time. I was a young reporter for the Times, and he had just played for Padova against Gloucester. They got thrashed. We gathered afterwards in a portacabin by the Kingsholm pitch. In he walked in his rugby socks and sat down to shoot the breeze with a handful of us in the press. He was warm and relaxed. Turns out meeting your heroes can be an uplifting experience after all.

Then again, in 2003 I came across him once more – on a field in Sydney shortly before England returned the favour by winning rugby’s great prize on Aussie soil. It was the North v South media match. Farr-Jones, Lynagh, they were all there. We had Eddie Butler.

At the climax, there he was again. This time, I supplied Campo with a try-scoring pass of my own, a reverse flip, soft, accurate, exquisitely timed.

I just wish he’d been playing on the same team. Off he ran towards our try line to win the game for the South, that familiar swagger, ball in one hand.

I found myself standing next to him at a urinal later, as drunk, almost, as I had been in 1988. I pointed out how I’d laid on that pass he’d intercepted earlier.

He did up his flies and said: ‘You’ve got to learn to read the game, mate.’ And off he strode, beer in one hand, like a wand.

My journey’s end.

Michael Aylwin. Rugby Correspondent for 'The Guardian' and the 'The Observer'

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