Murrayfield 2000 - Losing out on the Grand Slam
Yes I was playing in that game in 2000. It was one of those days that… even as the game was going on we were saying, ‘we don’t want the ball, kick the ball away, kick it back to Scotland’, but at the time we had a very young Jonny Wilkinson and some very talented backline players in the England team who still wanted to run the ball. A lot of the forwards were saying we don’t need the ball, pump it down the other end of the field but Jonny Wilkinson was still a very young impressionable player and a lot of the backs were on him. If you have a look at the game, actually in hindsight we could have won that game three or four times but because of the elements it was never going to be one of those days for running rugby so it was one of those days that I think along the lines of the England 2003 World Cup winning side, it was a realisation that games like that and like Wales in 1999 and Ireland in 2001, where we lost grand slam games, but the thing about the pain of losing those grand slam games is you make sure you don’t lose games like that in the future and you’d be a better side because of it.
What were your great sporting memories and sporting heroes when you were growing up?
Well coming from where I do, which is a big football area and West Ham is the local team so obviously it’s always West Ham, and then there’s the players, the legacy of Bobby Moore, Trevor Brooking and Billy Bonds. I went to a couple of the games but you didn’t do that many at the time. You had family members who had tickets and season tickets but I think those season tickets were like hen’s teeth! As a West Ham supporter at that age the most memorable moment was the FA cup final where Trevor Brooking scored the only goal he ever scored with a header and they won the FA cup.
Boxing was always a big thing. Look at Mohammed Ali; I think he will always be there because he was around for so long and he was, to a certain degree, bigger than the sport itself. And the middleweights at the time who were having some great battles, the likes of Durán, Leonard, Hearns and Hagler, all those sort of fights were absolutely amazing.
Rugby at the time was the old Five Nations so we’d watch it on a Saturday afternoon as a kid down at the rugby club.
How did you get you into rugby?
I come from a soccer-playing school, a state comprehensive, and we never did any rugby but we had a great football pedigree. We had lots of players who went on to youth honours and one player, Tony Cottee, who got capped and went on to play for West Ham and Everton and he was the first ever £2m transfer - he come from my school. Then, one year, we had a Welsh rugby teacher, a PE teacher who came to the school and said to the lads ‘You don’t have rugby on your curriculum?’ and we said ‘Yeah’ and he said ‘Well next year you will do!’ and that was it.
For me, I tended to play my soccer like my rugby anyway so it wasn’t particularly a huge change for me. It was a chance to play a sport where physically as a child I was most probably bigger than all the rest of the kids and in school time I was always being told ‘Be gentle Jason, don’t do that Jason, put him down Jason’, so to be then told by a school teacher, ‘No, don’t be gentle, smash him in tackles, throw people about, be a general pain in the backside’, it was an absolute revelation.
I think it wasn’t just only the enjoyment that I had, it was also playing in a team sport where it was genuinely a team effort. Where in soccer you know you had some very good players, you had strikers or whatever but in rugby you might have some very good backs but if you don’t have the forwards… Or you might have some very good forwards but if the backs don’t get you into position for the forwards to actually do their job then again you’re very dependent on each other; so it’s just one of those games that really clicked for me.
Because of the size of me I was always playing kids a couple of years older than my age. I got to 15 and I was playing in the under 19s at club rugby, I got to 18 and I started on the representative trail for England honours and then I played England under 19s, got into England under 21s, and then it seemed to go from there. It’s like anything else, you tell people, and mums and dads ask you what sort of age should little Jonny be doing this or doing that and you just wanna go somewhere and play rugby with your mates, and that was one of the most important things for me. Then once you start getting to a level where you think ‘actually, I’m pretty good at this’ or some people think I’m pretty good at this and do I want to train harder? Do I want to go to the next level? or actually you get to an age and realise maybe I won’t be the best rugby player in the world but I want to play rugby with all my mates with every Tom, Dick or Harry in the second or third team level at the rugby club and again there’s nothing wrong with that either. So I think I got to about 15 or 16 years of age and realised I’m not a bad little player and I do want to push on and try and go for the best standard So I played at Barking rugby club until I was 18 and then I trialled with Saracen’s under 21s for a while. I played a full season at Barking as an 18–19 year old and then went to Saracens after that and had two years at Saracens where we got promotion from division two to what would have been the original premiership then, sort of like the first division, and at the time I got picked up for the under 21s for the first ever England under 21s international in Romania and then I came back and played one season again at Saracens in the first team in the first division and then got chosen to go on tour to Argentina with the England team. So it happened pretty quick for me.
What was the game where you thought, ‘I’ve really made it?’
Oh I don’t know, I don’t think you really ever think like that. I think you most probably think that the first game you ever play for England in a senior shirt is always quite special, as is every single time you ever pull an England shirt on. You’re representing your country. You’re representing your family, your friends the fans so it was most probably my first game for England in Argentina in 1990, which was my first cap.
Was it a baptism of fire was it?
Just from the point that obviously we weren’t particularly that well liked because we were the first English side in there after the Falklands war but that said, they were very hospitable everywhere we went except on the rugby field! It was a very tough place to tour and it was a baptism of fire playing rugby but actually going around and visiting the regions and some of the places we went to, we were looked after royally. But obviously there were quite a few people who had very strong feelings at that time so the feelings were running quite high when it came to the games.
During your career are there any particular games or perhaps players that you’ve played against that really stand out in your mind?
I would say from the early 1990s… the French teams that we played in the then Five Nations – firstly, the brutality of the way they played the game, especially against England, because there was very much a hate-hate relationship with France at that time. So the games were very tough, but whilst the forwards was as hard as a brick wall and it was always a battle of attrition, their backs are amazing; they had players like Sella and Blanco, all those types of guys and you’re like ‘oh my god’, I mean they’re amazing players! I would say I think New Zealand in any era you could pick… are a great side… but I would say the New Zealand side of the mid 1990s with the front row of Fitzpatrick, Dowd and Brown were pretty special and obviously the introduction of Jonah Lomu in the world cup 1995 - you’ve never seen anything like him or actually since, and I would say from a South African point of view, I think the side that won the world cup in 1995 was a very special side and the side just after I finished in 2007 I thought that was a great side as well mainly because of the person who was leading it. I thought John Smith was a great captain and a great leader and I had the honour of playing against him quite a few times and it was always a pleasure. From an English point of view, I would say that some of the players I had the privilege of playing with, people like Dean Richards, Peter Winterbottom, Dooley, Probyn, Brian Moore, Jerry Guscott – all those types of guys, and then going through to the 2003 squads you’ve got so many to pick from, you’ve got Dallaglio, you’ve got Johnson you’ve got Back, you’ve got Dawson, Wilkinson, Greenwood, Robinson, Lewsey the list goes on so I think I’ve been very fortunate in the players that I’ve managed to play the game with and against.
And what was the 2003 World Cup Final like for you?
We thought we’d get to the final, we thought we’d win the final it’s just that we made bloody hard work of it and we shouldn’t have. We should have won the game in eighty minutes but lack of discipline let them back in the game and one thing you can always say about Australia is that they can play the game – they’re very intelligent about how they play the game and when they play. So all the credit to them, they got back in the game and I was lucky enough to come on the field at extra time. We were having a problem with the scrums at the time and the referee was a very good referee André Watson (South Africa). I’d never had a problem with him, we’d been refereed by him a number of times and we’d never had any issues with him really but for some reason, on that day, he obviously took a dislike to the English scrum so when I got on the field I just had a quiet word with him just to say ‘look sir, you know me, I go forwards, I go backwards, I don’t go up and I don’t go down so you won’t be getting any penalties out of me.’ He was actually quite grateful and said ‘thank you very much Jason’; most probably because they were probably the kindest words an English man had said to him for the best part of sixty minutes!
And what about those final moments, when did you think you could win?
I’d say from that final line out to the play down in mid field, Matt Dawson’s break, another ruck… the ball came back from Matt Dawson to Jonny Wilkinson – that move wasn’t luck, we’d practised that move most probably every training session for two and a half years!
Going back to the disappointment of losing five games - what I said before Grand Slam games - we knew at some point we would have to just win a game and it just so happened it was the World Cup Final; that we would have to win a game under those circumstances. So that sort of drop-goal routine was practised nearly every training session.
Jason Leonard
Memory added on November 10, 2014
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