What a Flanker

Fraser then turned on Wellwood. It was like a scene from a 1970s slasher flick – the assailant, fresh from a kill, a crazed expression on his face, brandishing a pair of scissors. Five minutes later, Fraser had fashioned Wellwood’s brogues – handmade, Church’s, probably cost him (or more likely his mum and dad) about 500 quid a shoe – into a pair of flip-flops. But because Fraser wasn’t a shoemaker, especially after 10 pints of Stella, the flip-flops soon disintegrated. So to save him from walking about barefoot for the rest of the day, the lads gaffer-taped the strips of leather to his feet and calves, so that Wellwood now looked vaguely like a posh Hawaiian in calipers.

Unprovoked mob attacks aside, I soon realised that drinking could be a good laugh. Chatting shit in the sun, swapping funny stories, taking the piss. Back then, there was no pretence of organised fun. It was a simple case of herding everyone into the same space, drinking as much as possible, seeing what panned out and hoping no-one died. Before that day in the Mitre, Tom Rees hadn’t been much of a drinker either. But Phil Greening spotted him hiding in a corner nursing a Coke, marched over, shoved a pint into his chest and roared, ‘Drink this, Robot Nause!’ (Reesy was nicknamed Robot Nause or Robot Wars or Rees Bot, all because I told everyone that his dad and him built robots in their garage and once appeared on Robot Wars with a machine called Thunder Claw. All lies, of course, and I probably wouldn’t have made it up if I’d known how big my team-mates’ appetites were for morsels of nonsense that painted anyone in an unflattering light.)

‘Sorry, Phil, I can’t,’ replied Reesy. ‘England Under-21 training tomorrow.’

It was like that scene from the screwball comedy Old School. Remember Will Ferrell as Frank the Tank? Phil was looking at Reesy in utter disbelief, as if Reesy had just told him he was going shopping at Home Depot in the morning for wallpaper and flooring. Maybe Bed Bath & Beyond, but only if he had time.

‘Haskell, why is your mate Rees bot not drinking?’ said Phil eventually.

A brave man, and a good friend, might have told Phil to piss off and leave Reesy alone. Instead, I smirked and shrugged, and suddenly Reesy was surrounded by baying team-mates.

‘Robot Wars! We’re gonna hit you ’til you drink!’

All these lads started piling into him, hitting his legs, around the back of the head, in the gut. Have you ever seen the film Scum? Well, it was a bit like that. Except with a load of big posh blokes. I half expected Fraser to come flying in, swinging a sock full of billiard balls. But still Reesy resisted. He was curled into a ball, shouting and screaming about England training, until he realised that the only way to stop them hitting him was to agree to drink. And the second Reesy took his first sip he was Frank the Tank, a straight-shooter transformed into a beer monster: ‘Fill it up again! Fill it up again! Once it hits your lips, it’s so good!’ The last I saw of Reesy that day, he wasn’t running down the middle of the road naked, he was spewing in a urinal. And in case you were wondering, Reesy did make it to England camp the following day – and trained the bloody house down. They’d never seen him play so well. Maybe it was the guilt. Maybe lager just agreed with him. But he never stopped drinking.

The rest of that day is pretty hazy. I do recall Purdy playing the guitar, making up a song about team-mates to the tune of Damien Rice’s ‘Cannonball’ (a song that is still sung at Wasps today, with lyrics tailored for current players), and someone creeping up behind him and setting his linen shirt on fire. Typical Purdy, he just carried on playing while people were putting him out. I also recall Purdy (who got a double first from Cambridge and now makes furniture in France), who had one of those early fitness watches that told him his heart-rate, running on the spot in the middle of the dancefloor – a massive second row, with a bottle of lager in one hand, properly sprinting, knees up to his chest. He actually did that quite often, way more than anyone else would think was normal. If someone asked him what he was doing, he’d say, ‘What the fuck does it look like? I’m doing a fat burner,’ and he’d carry on running for another 20 minutes.

It’s difficult to say whether Lawrence Dallaglio was there that day or not. It’s quite likely that he swanned in at some point, although Lawrence always had something else on and didn’t like to mix with the rabble – or what I like to call ‘bin juice’. Bin juice are those players who, when they turn up to pre-season training, get issued with a bib and a tackle bag, act as cannon fodder for the first team, have a lot of awkward conversations with coaches about selection that never happens, get roped into all the community commitments but come into their own at team socials, get steaming and cause lots of drama. Don’t get me wrong, bin juice players are integral to any successful team, essential for the group’s energy and morale. Because if the bin juice goes off the boil, they’ll bring the house down from the inside. Not that I blamed Lawrence for his reluctance to wade into the bin juice nonsense. He was the skipper, after all, a Wasps legend, an England World Cup winner, a British and Irish Lion. He couldn’t be seen slumming it with bin juice, not when they were cutting off clothes, making people drink and setting people on fire.

After hours of drinking in the sun, we all decided to move the party to Purple, this horrific nightclub attached to Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground. As we were strolling down the Fulham Palace Road in the lazy early evening, surrounded by roaring football fans and families heading to dinner, Kenny Logan grabbed me from behind and Paul Volley gripped the bottom of my exposed boxer shorts and gave me a horrific wedgie, which led to my boxers being torn in half. Paul chucked the two tattered pieces of cloth into a bin and with that, him and Kenny took off down the Fulham Palace Road, crying tears of maniacal laughter. I was left standing there, like Alan Partridge and his tiny shorts with the perished inner lining, my boys firmly out of the barracks. What to do? Going home wasn’t an option. I’d never hear the last of it, and I lived in the butt fuck of nowhere. So I made the best of a bad situation, balanced one testicle precariously on the gusset of my denim hot pants and left the other one hanging. One out of two ain’t bad. Although I do sometimes think, ‘If camera phones had been around back then, I might never have played for England, or been allowed near playgrounds.’

I walked into Purple, took one look at the bar and shuddered. Purple was a terrible mess of humanity, as always – and that was just my team-mates. I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the night without a girl accusing me of exposing myself and getting filled in by the bouncers, so I got a few pints of water down my neck, and me and a couple of other lads got a cab back to some girl’s house in Fulham. So there I was, wedged into this old-fashioned armchair, the kind of thing Scrooge would have sat in, trying to flirt with these girls. The boys were still out of the barracks (I’d given up trying to stop them making an appearance many hours earlier, and luckily I was still a young man – a senior player might have had to tuck them into his socks), and I was chatting away as nonchalantly as a man can with his testicles on display, when James Dunne, a fellow academy player, stormed into the living room and started doing a flamethrower with a can of hair mousse and a cigarette lighter. Clearly James had been spurned by a woman, so he did what any spurned and very drunk rugby player did back then – regressed to a childlike state and became hellbent on ruining everyone else’s chances of pulling. He became the true personification of a cock blocker: if he wasn’t getting any, then none of us were.

Dunney’s catchphrase was, ‘I’m not scared of it.’ And whatever it was, he wasn’t. That’s all the man used to say. Someone would say to him, ‘Dunney, there is no way you can fit your head in those railings.’ And he’d reply, ‘Yeah, why not, I’m not scared of it.’ Or they’d say, ‘Dunney, are you going to have a fight with that bloke over there?’ And he’d reply, ‘Yeah, why not, I’m not scared of it.’ Some nights, Dunney would go to bed, set his alarm for 1 am and drive down to the Oceana nightclub in Kingston, which was only 10 minutes from his academy digs. He’d enjoy the last two hours of partying, chat up a girl and take her home. He was like an early Uber service. We used to say, ‘Dunney, isn’t that a bit weird?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m not scared of it.’ Had I lived next door to a nightclub in London, I might not have been scared of it either.

Anyway, I was wedged into Scrooge’s armchair in some strange girl’s living room, my testicles were hanging out and there were flames whizzing past my face. Hair mousse, when flamed, turns into something resembling napalm, and this stuff was landing on the furniture and all over my exposed legs, so that the room smelled of burning hair. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in this strange living room with the worst hangover known to man. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and some imaginary being was smacking me over the head with an invisible lump hammer. I was half-standing, half-sitting in this armchair and my joints had seized up. I had terrible tendinitis in my knees at the time, so my bottom half had gone rigor mortis. As I tried to unfold myself, whimpering as I did so, ‘Help me! Someone please help me!’ this girl strolled in and asked, almost airily – as if it was the most normal thing in the world to see some 6 ft 3 in boy-man, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, hot pants and with his bollocks hanging out, trying to extricate himself from her armchair on a Sunday morning – if I was okay.

‘Not really,’ I replied meekly. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in Fulham. Would you like some breakfast?’

The smell of bacon started wafting in from the kitchen – such a beautiful aroma when you’re in the right mood, but a hellish aroma after a ferocious all-day booze-up and the realisation that your mother might see your pixelated testicles in tomorrow’s Sun – and I almost spewed. I had to get out of that place. So without bidding farewell, I fled the scene, leaving Dunney to mop up the mess that, to be fair, he’d made. Alas, I didn’t know London from Adam. I was a homebody from a small town in Berkshire. And I’d lost my phone, probably because that bastard Waters had cut my pockets off. So I begged for some change and called my mum from a payphone. The conversation that followed was a bit like that scene in Pulp Fiction, when Vince blows the kid’s head off in the car and gang boss Marsellus Wallace summons Winston Wolfe to clean things up. My mum didn’t tell me that she was on the motherfucker and to wait for The Wolf, but she did tell me that she was sending Mladen. Shit. That’s all you had to say! Mladen was this guy who worked for my parents, a kind of gardener/handyman/chauffeur/all-round hero and a person, like The Wolf, who could get you out of sticky situations.

I managed to find my way back to the Mitre, having asked directions from various perturbed early risers, and Mladen was there waiting for me, like the legend he was. Mladen had always been one of my biggest fans (still is) and thought I was destined for great things in rugby. But he was also a strict Seventh-day Adventist and had never touched a drop of drink. So when I fell sideways into the passenger seat, bleary eyed, stinking of sambuca, my Hawaiian shirt open to the waist, balls hanging out, he looked at me like I was the second coming of Beelzebub. But Mladen did what Mladen does best – drove fast and asked no questions – and I stuck my head out of the window all the way back to Berkshire. I didn’t say a word, even when Mladen wound the window up and slowly crushed my arm and head in the door.

Back in Berkshire, I tumbled out of Mladen’s car, staggered into the garden, fell flat on my face on the lawn and passed out. We were having some building work done at the time and a concerned builder rushed inside and said to my mum, ‘Mrs Haskell, we don’t mean to alarm you, but there appears to be a vagrant asleep on your lawn. Wearing hot pants.’ My mum, a very proud woman who liked to tell everyone everything about me (at least the good stuff) popped her head out of the kitchen window and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, that’s just my son.’ How proud she must have been that morning.

Dangerous people

There is a misunderstanding among the public that professional rugby players are the same as university rugby players, which is why a lot of people immediately take against us, because they assume that all we do is drink and play games involving biscuits. But university rugby players are mad bastards who do stuff we’d never do – drinking piss and sick, bullying the fringe members of the team into shaving various parts of their bodies, being louts and smashing things up. I’d go as far as to say that if I’d been made to do some of the initiations my schoolmates were made to do at university, I wouldn’t have been a professional rugby player. Luckily, I never went to university. When I hear those stories, I just think it’s odd. There’s nothing fun about it.

I’ve been made to drink seven raw eggs, vodka-soaked tampons and plenty of ‘dirty’ pints, consisting of a bar’s top shelf and various other bits and bobs. But nothing seriously weird. That’s not to say some serious drinking didn’t go on, and the thing you feared most was being caught trying to avoid it. Wasps and England prop Tim Payne was a hero of a man but a grimly determined drinker when he needed to be. While I was never a heavy drinker, even in my early days, Payner was a stickler for commitment, on and off the pitch, and never failed to notice a player’s absence from post-match festivities. He’d phone me after games and growl down the phone.

‘Haskell, it’s Payner. You coming on the piss tonight?’

‘Erm, no. I mean, yes. Maybe. Probably not. I’ve got something else to …’

‘Fuck off, you cunt!’

And the phone would go dead. I’d be sat there thinking, ‘Shit, maybe I should have gone out. Maybe this will be held against me.’ But on Monday, I’d rock up to training and all would be forgotten, as long as I worked my bollocks off. James Brooks, another lovely guy and a top player, was another strange one when it came to drink. One minute you’d be talking to him and he’d be his perfectly normal, calm and collected self. But after three pints he’d transform into his alter ego, who was this this unbearable nightmare of a human being called Hank. And once Hank was out of the box, he would just refuse to go away. When people saw Hank marching in their general direction in a bar or nightclub, they’d start running. And if you didn’t run fast enough, he’d pin you in a corner and start nausing your ear off.

‘You don’t understand, Haskell, you’re not tough enough [that’s hard to take from a 5 ft 4 in fly-half]. You need to be doing this, you need to be doing that …’

‘Sure Hank … what’s that over there?’

‘No! You’re not listening to me!’

Hank had this heavy lead (as in the metal) finger and he’d prod you in the chest with it for an hour, telling you how good you could be if only you stuck with him and wanted it enough. (I should note that Hank’s lead finger wasn’t as heavy as Craig Dowd’s lead finger after he’d put away a couple of bottles of red wine – after a few minutes of Dowd’s lead fingering, you were struggling to breathe.) Hank just loved having these horrific, steaming deep and meaningfuls. His intentions were pure and noble, but it was difficult to take. And if his victim was also steaming, these chats could go on for two or three hours. Hank also had two fights (two?!) with Shaun Edwards, which only a fully fledged madman would do. Seriously, who goes back for seconds with Shaun Edwards? Certainly not me, and I’m twice his size.

The players who presented most danger to life and limb on team socials tended to be boys from the South Pacific. Pacific Islanders are the loveliest people and unbelievable players, but they often have a huge amount of pressure on their shoulders because of the shoddy contracts they are cajoled into signing and the number of dependants they have. They’re often supporting big families and sometimes whole villages back home. One player told me he had 100 people relying on him, which must be tremendously stressful. People might go hungry based on the bad decisions they make, and imagine having to phone home and tell your folks your contract isn’t being renewed and no other clubs are interested. I also found the South Pacific boys, like most men, weren’t very good at communicating their problems. Whether any of that’s got anything to do with their wildness on the booze, I don’t know. But it was definitely a trend and something former Samoa international and my old Wasps team-mate Dan Leo spoke about eloquently and at length on the House of Rugby podcast.

Some know themselves well enough not to drink at all, but I’d often hear those that did drink say, ‘We’ll just have one beer,’ and I’d watch them chin it in one and know it was all going to go wrong. I’ll have to leave out some of the names because they got up to some seriously mad shit after a few beers, as we all have done, but there was the time two Fijians, a Samoan and an England international walked into a pub – yes, this is a joke, kind of – and the older Fijian ended up punching the younger Fijian in the face. And because of their strictly observed rules of social hierarchy, the younger Fijian couldn’t hit him back. This was a nice pub in Coventry, full of families trying to eat their Sunday lunches in peace, so the England international tried to calm things down. But the Samoan, who was normally quite an unassuming guy and was as confused by the Fijians’ disagreement as anyone else, started shouting, ‘Why are you fucking fighting? If you want to fight, fight me!’ before punching himself repeatedly in the face. I can only assume he felt left out. Unsurprisingly, the Fijians weren’t interested in fighting the Samoan, and the barman had to ask the Samoan to stop punching himself in the face, because he was scaring the customers. In the end, with the barman having failed to calm the Samoan down, the bouncer pepper-sprayed him. Bizarrely, it was the Samoan who ended up in the back of a police car, for fighting himself. How did he know if he’d won or not? As you can imagine, when we heard about it in the Monday morning changing-room debrief, we all found it hilarious, albeit a little bit shocking.

There is a lot of social hierarchy in the Pacific Island nations, stuff that is difficult for British people to get their heads around. But the basics are understanding your heritage, knowing your place and respecting your elders. For example, when it comes to England’s Mako and Billy Vunipola, whose heritage is Tongan, Mako rules the roost. And it’s the same with the Tuilagi brothers. Manu, the youngest, used to carry Alesana’s kit bag for him at Leicester, and up the chain it went. If I asked my younger brother to carry anything, he’d tell me to get fucked and walk off. After England won the Grand Slam in 2016, all the friends and family who had travelled over to Paris joined us in a nightclub to celebrate, including Henry Tuilagi, who is just about the biggest man I have ever met. A long table of drinks had been laid on and when I wandered over to wet my beak, big Henry was blocking my path. I’m not ashamed to say that I was too scared to serve myself, even though Henry wasn’t even in the team, because I knew that Samoans were quite strict about stuff like that. So I asked Henry’s permission to take a beverage and he said, ‘Of course, bro, they’re not my drinks.’ And I started stuttering like an idiot: ‘Thank you Henry, thank you sir, you are so, so generous …’

While I pride myself on being culturally aware, there was another reason for my reluctance to cut in front of Henry at the bar. I had been told about one Leicester team social where Henry made it clear, or thought he did, that he was the king of a particular table and therefore it was his job to serve the drinks. If you wanted one, you just had to ask and he’d pour it. So when a slightly addled physio forgot his place and served himself, he was given a stern warning by Henry not to do it again. Fast forward 20 minutes and the physio, even more drunk and forgetful, did it again, before Henry, without any hesitation, chinned him. There was some concern that the physio might be dead, but it having been decided that he was in fact still alive, the party continued around his lifeless body. And when the physio eventually came round and made the mistake of getting to his feet, Henry chinned him again, or so the story goes.

When I told that story on the House of Rugby podcast, I got a direct message on Instagram from Henry the following day. When I saw his name, I shat myself. Henry is lovely, but he is also one of the scariest men I have ever met. And he is very clearly a stickler for the rules. But when I opened up the message it read, ‘Bro! Love that story, it’s not all true!’ If you listen intently on a quiet day, you may still be able to hear my sigh of relief.

Total commitment

While on the 2017 Lions tour, me and Rory Best got into a very deep discussion about team socials and he told me a strange story about his Ulster and Ireland team-mate Jared Payne. When Payne told his captain Rory he didn’t enjoy the socials that were being laid on, Rory asked him what he’d like to do instead. Payne, who was born and raised in New Zealand, replied, ‘We could do a hermit half-dozen.’

‘What the fuck is a hermit half-dozen?’

‘Well, each player gets six beers, they all find a tree, climb the tree and drink the beers on their own as quickly as possible. Before meeting up again.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much fun. It just sounds a bit weird.’

‘Well, we could do a house hermit half-dozen instead?’

‘What does that involve?’

‘Well, each player gets six beers, you all find a separate room in the house, sit in the room and drink the beers. As quickly as possible.’

‘I don’t think you understand, Jared. It’s a team social …’

Who in their right mind wants to sit in a room, or up a tree, drinking six beers on their own in silence when they could be out drinking with their team-mates? The answer to that question is Kiwis. Apparently, this hermit half-dozen is an actual thing, loved not only by Kiwis, but also by Trappist monks and serial killers. I recently spoke to one of the Northampton lads and they told me that, under pressure from their Kiwi cohort, they tried the hermit half-dozen. Having necked six beers in about half an hour, they reconvened for the main part of the evening and everyone was spewing in the bin by 11.

Clearly, different people have different interpretations of what a team social should be. I think a team social should be fun. I never liked the idea of being locked in a room with a load of lunatics and made to neck pints. I loved the socials which were planned to the letter, with almost military precision. Nowadays, they almost have to be like that, because if you think modern kids have short attention spans due to prolonged exposure to mobile devices, try keeping a rugby team amused, organised and focused for longer than 10 minutes. During my second stint at Wasps, Sam Jones was a meticulous social secretary and ran some of the best socials I was ever involved in (although, let’s be honest, the boat trip was a bit of a black mark against his name – I’d give him two stars on Tripadvisor for that one). One time, Sam organised for the whole team to go on a pub crawl round Leamington Spa before jumping on the train and heading down to London. We had to do daft things to win points, like presenting a random woman with flowers while she was walking along with her bloke. That didn’t always go down too well. There were quizzes, mandatory selfies in front of landmarks, and more points awarded for various challenges, ranging from 10 points for getting a fit girl’s number to 100 points for getting a tattoo. The assumption being that no-one was stupid enough to get a tattoo on a team social. They assumed wrong, as four lads came home with them. There were more points to be won if your team managed to make it home without breaking a precious golden egg that everyone was given at the start of the day. We’d do pretty much anything to break up the drinking. One of the challenges was to snog a celebrity for 200 points, so I snogged Danny Cipriani. Alas, the jury wouldn’t accept it, on the grounds that he wasn’t famous enough. However, I can reveal that Cips is a wonderful kisser, with lovely soft lips like velvet.