What a Flanker

Whenever it’s a player’s first training session, he’ll go at it like it’s a Test match. You’ll sometimes hear some of the older players having a grumble as they traipse off the field at the end of the session. ‘Jesus, he’s a bit keen …’ In my first England training session, I tackled someone, got back to my feet and stole the ball, and as I was re-setting I heard someone call me ‘a fucking nause’ and got punched in the face. When I looked up to see who it was, Martin Corry and Louis Deacon were staring back at me. I think it was Louis, but to be honest it would have been a hell of a risk to hit him back, let alone punch an innocent party. If you think the Tigers boys grouping together for a coffee was bad, imagine what would happen if you decided to fight one of them. They would have been like a pack of hyenas. However, I refused to let them bully me. The next time I tackled someone, I stole the ball again. That was my way of saying, ‘Fuck you’, and hopefully earning their respect.

When Leicester legend John Wells was England forwards coach, he’d turn everything into full contact, even warm-ups. This is a man whose highlights reel as a player, discovered on YouTube, consisted of him diving into a ruck and getting shoed half to death. As far as Wellsy was concerned, if you got cut to ribbons but disrupted the other team while doing it, it was job well done. I am obviously doing him a disservice, but Wellsy was most happy when he was at the bottom of a ruck, getting kicked, while clinging onto the ball with his considerable farmer’s strength.

John would put you into groups of three at the start of a rugby session and get you to play a very simple game, which was for two of you to attempt to steal the ball off the other person. But he wouldn’t be happy unless you were hurting each other. He’d walk around shouting in his shrill, slightly camp Yorkshire accent, ‘James! What are you doing? Twist his wrists! Bend his fingers back! Pull them as hard as you can! Break them if you have to!’ Before one game against France, Wellsy wanted to know how we were going to get the ball off their prop Jean-Baptiste Poux at the back of the line-out, but he kept pronouncing his name as ‘poo’.

‘Right, how are we going to get poo off the ball?’

Cue lots of sniggering.

‘What’s so funny? Poo’s on the ball! How are we gonna get poo off it?’

Wellsy looked at Tom Wood, who was in his first England camp, and said, ‘Woody, how are we gonna get poo off the ball?’

‘Erm … twist his nuts off and snap his fingers?’

You could see Wellsy vibrating with sheer excitement.

‘That, Woody, is the best answer I’ve ever had! Now, all of you, go out and show me that in training.’

I turned to Woody and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Don’t fuel the madman. Never fuel the madman. And also, you’ve never tried to rip anyone’s balls off or snap anyone’s fingers in your life. If you did, you would get banned.’

‘Sorry, mate, I just got carried away.’

If you weren’t bleeding at the end of a warm-up, Wellsy wasn’t happy. I recall one warm-up before a game against Wales when I had to get stitches, and I’d never seen Wellsy so thrilled. As far as Wellsy was concerned, the blood was a sign that I was going to play a blinder. The Leicester boys even had a game called ‘maul touch’, which was the worst game ever invented and only popular at Welford Road. Everyone would be running around playing a fun game of touch and Wellsy (who always used to say to me, ‘Hask, less flash, more bash!’) would march over and start barking at you to set up a maul, which would often descend into a fight. And if Julian White hit you, you were lucky if your head didn’t fall off the back of your shoulders. Luckily, Julian found me quite amusing, however much he hated the fact. A recurring theme of my career was people desperately wanting to hate me but finding they couldn’t.

Liabilities

Lewis Moody was a good bloke but a liability to himself and his team-mates. Every time he made contact, he’d knock himself out or get kicked in the balls, and one or more tacklers would be writhing about on the floor in agony. Even if he had a tackle shield in his hands, he’d use it as a deadly weapon. We should have called Lewis the spine compressor instead of ‘Moodos’. Lewis was an incredible player and competitor, but he only had two settings: off or absolutely mental. The same went for anyone who played for Leicester. Moodos would get very upset if everyone else was only working at the prescribed 50 per cent and start telling everyone to buck up their ideas. And if you tried to explain that we’d been told to hold back, it wouldn’t make any difference. A few minutes later, he’d be trying to smoke everyone and then the lads would ramp things up to 100 per cent trying to smoke him back, which of course he absolutely loved.

Some players are dangerous simply because they’re ridiculously clumsy. At Wasps, whenever James Dunne jumped in a line-out, he’d elbow someone in the face, punch someone in the neck and land on someone’s foot. Pretty much every one of his team-mates suffered multiple DRIs – Dunney Related Injuries – so that there should have been a separate Dunney Related Insurance policy. Every training session, you’d get someone rolling around on the floor and shouting to the physio, ‘DRI! DRI!’, like a wounded soldier calling for a medic. But every player will tell you, whatever club they played for, that they had their very own Dunney, an injury trap running around like a maniac, waiting to ruin your day with his size 16 feet or massive cow head.

Peter Buxton was responsible for roughly 80 per cent of injuries at Gloucester and maybe 50 per cent of injuries in the Premiership. BRIs were a big problem. Pete would fly into a ruck at 100 mph, take out three people from his own side, three people from the other side, bounce straight up and carry on running. Players from both sides would be scattered all over the floor, groaning. Then there were players like Trevor Leota, who was so dangerous he was banned from tackling in training. He was so hard that I once saw him get off the floor after a tackle and his cauliflower ear was hanging on by a single thread (he simply had it strapped up and carried on, but it took 23 stitches to reattach after the game). Some poor kid would cut a line and Trevor would appear from nowhere and bury him. The kid would be folded up on the floor like a deckchair, struggling to breathe, and you’d hear a coach say, ‘Jesus, Trev, you’ve done it again’, and Trevor reply, ‘Sorry, bro.’

The Wigan Way

Rugby union may have gone professional in 1995, but some of those early pros never really stopped being amateurs in their attitudes to training. But no-one exemplified the new paid era more than Jonny Wilkinson. Jonny trained like a madman, to the extent that it was a miracle he ever turned up fit for a game. Jonny would do extra this and extra that and took things to a whole new level. By his own admission, his perfectionism wasn’t always a positive thing, because it stemmed from an almost morbid fear of failure and made him extremely unhappy. But if it was good enough for Jonny, it was good enough for me.

After my first day at Wasps, my dad took me aside and said, ‘Listen, son, you’ve never tackled properly, and you and I both know you don’t like doing it. You need to work on it, or you will never make it as a professional.’ It didn’t go down well, but he was right. So I asked Joe Worsley for help. ‘Joe, you’re an unbelievable tackler, the best I’ve ever seen, can you teach me?’ And he did. After every training session, I did 15 minutes extra tackling with Joe and Tom Rees. And I never stopped doing extras on every part of my game for the next 18 years. When me and James Wellwood went on holiday to Majorca during some time off from Wasps, we found a football pitch with a running track and trained every day until we were spewing, while everyone else was nursing a hangover. Even when I went on holiday to Las Vegas, I’d try to train every day. The lads would be walking along with some girls, the day after an all-day session, and see me through the window of the gym, sprinting on the treadmill. There’s no real secret to getting better, at whatever it is. It’s mainly about working your bollocks off and doing more than most other people are prepared to do.

Some of my older team-mates weren’t keen on lifting weights, drinking protein shakes or taking supplements. But Warren Gatland’s rugby philosophy was quite simple: be fitter, bigger and stronger than everyone else. Apparently, it stemmed from the 2002 Middlesex Sevens, when rugby league’s Bradford Bulls destroyed Wasps in the final (although we did better than most Premiership teams that weekend). After that game, Gats decided to completely overhaul the Wasps set-up and lured conditioning guru Craig White back to rugby from Bolton Wanderers. Craig and his assistants, Paul Stridgeon and Mark Bitcon, all went to the same school in Wigan, as did Shaun Edwards. Between them, they instilled rugby league levels of professionalism – ‘the Wigan Way’ – into Wasps.

Suddenly, there were conditioning coaches everywhere, which meant players couldn’t hide and had no choice but to work hard. Before Craig’s arrival, the backs and the forwards would do the same weights routines, which was madness because we were all different body shapes (nowadays, ironically, everyone looks the same, and in some cases backs are bigger than forwards). But Craig introduced intricate periodised weights and fitness programmes tailored to individuals, and taught us that good training was about intensity and rest, rather than volume. On pre-season trips to Poland, we’d have some mad scientist putting us in cryotherapy freezers, years before any other clubs were doing it. You’d be sitting in this thing, set at –170°C, shivering what was left of your bollocks off and thinking, ‘This is complete madness, but I’ll go along with it.’ Craig was a pioneer, years ahead of his time. And because Gats and Lawrence demanded that everyone buy into his culture, Wasps stole a march on their rivals.

Lifting cows

When you’re a young pro and keen to prove yourself, the weights room can be a very macho place. Wasps hooker Phil Greening used to say to me, ‘There’s no point in being able to lift a cow if you can’t catch one, outrun one or outthink one.’ Today, I tell kids something similar. ‘Concentrate on core skills rather than spending all your time in the gym shifting weights. The reason people miss tackles isn’t because they’re not big enough, it’s because they don’t know how to tackle properly or don’t have the right attitude.’ But I didn’t take much notice of Phil, just as kids today probably don’t take much notice of me.

Because they knew players were naturally competitive, Wasps’ coaches would stick players’ personal bests on the wall and you’d see boys eyeing them up, maybe checking what their rival for a starting spot was lifting. They had a bell in the weights room, and you’d ring it if you set a new PB. When I first joined Wasps, I was already 100 kg. But Gats locked me and Tom Rees in the weights room for six months with Mark Bitcon (aka Big Guns), and everything changed. Written on the gym wall in big letters was Big Gun’s motto, ‘Get big or die trying.’ I emerged weighing 110 kg, an absolute monster.

In the England set-up, Andrew Sheridan loved lifting weights, the heavier the better, stuff like 300 kg squats and 220 kg bench presses. Towards the end of my England career, Joe Marler took fellow prop Kyle Sinckler under his wing and their sessions were intense, like an episode of World’s Strongest Man. If you ever wanted to give Kyle a bit of a lift, all you had to say was, ‘Sinks, your back is looking massive’, and he’d be absolutely chuffed. ‘Do you really think so? Thanks, Hask, I’ve been working on it …’

Manu Tuilagi would do chin-ups with an 80 kg dumbbell hanging off him. Before the 2015 World Cup, they got this American guy in who created weights programmes based on something called force plate testing. You stood on this plate, jumped upwards, and it told you areas you were strong in and others you needed to work on. Maybe you needed to work on squats or build up your hamstrings. Manu did it and almost blew the machine up. The American guy had worked with countless NBA and NFL players but reckoned Manu was the most powerful vertical jumper he’d ever seen.

A lot of the Pacific Islanders had to be careful with weights because they got too big. I had a team-mate at Northampton, Taqele Naiyaravoro, who was told to stop doing weights altogether, after he blew up to 140 kg. He was a winger, by the way. I never got as big as that, but I prided myself on being really strong and spending a lot of time in the gym. During the 2011 World Cup, me and Tom Wood both box squatted 295 kg and I was bench pressing about 195 kg. I got a reputation as a meathead, which I was never able to shake off. But eventually I realised that Phil Greening had been right all along. Did being able to lift loads, or look great in the mirror, make you a better player? The honest answer was no, but what did was focusing on the technique of the individual areas of rugby, the core skills. Once I realised this, there was a huge sea change in my training and what I did. I moved away from gym work and focused on my mobility, carrying, tacking, passing, running lines, etc, all the elements that were actually going to make me a better player.

Melted wheelie bins

Rugby isn’t as professional as it’s made out to be, in many respects. For a long time, clubs were very backwards in terms of nutrition. At Wasps, I’d get advice on what to eat and what not to, but I was never given a specific nutritional plan or encouraged to track my food intake. Eventually, I went and paid for advice out of my own pocket and started weighing my food out, so I could change my body when I needed to and maximise my performance. Trying to look like a cover model is not going to make you a good player, or help you perform well in games. Some might say my commitment to eating properly was obsessive. When I was 26 or 27, I moved back in with my mum and dad for a bit. I was on a mad diet at the time – six meals a day, consisting of 200 g of a protein source, 380 g of a carbohydrate source and 30 g of fats – but all pretty bland and regimented. When I came down for breakfast every morning, there would already be chicken and potatoes boiling and salmon cooking on the grill. As I was eating, my mum and dad would be systematically filling Tupperware, like robots on a car assembly. Once filled, they would be put in my super 1980s Jane Fonda-style coolbox that I would carry around for the whole day. This was extreme, and you would often find me staring at a huge portion of cold white fish and brown rice, wishing it would disappear. Reflecting back, I can see it actually affected how I looked at food. I did get into mental shape and performed well on the field, but I realise now that food is meant to be fun and flavourful. Cold fish, boiled chicken, cold butternut squash and broccoli is no fun at all, especially not for the eighth day in a row.

The rise of professionalism and sports nutrition certainly didn’t eradicate fat props and hookers. The changing room would be packed with brick shithouses but there would always be a couple of melted wheelie bins. Apparently, before the 2003 World Cup, Clive Woodward got Josh Lewsey to take his top off, pointed at him and said, ‘Everyone in this squad needs to have a body like that.’ Jason Leonard put his hand up and said, ‘Boss, that ain’t gonna happen.’ Jason had an excuse – he’d been playing since the 1950s – but there’s no reason for props and hookers to have guts nowadays. They need to be a certain weight, they need a low centre of gravity and they might have an excuse to have higher body fat than the rest of us, but they don’t need to be blubbery. In fact, there’s no reason for any professional sportsperson to be fat. The excuse that you just love your food is not valid. It’s just poor nutrition.

Andrew Sheridan was one of the first props who was built like a tank, with hardly any fat on him, while my best pal and Wasps and England team-mate Paul Doran Jones had a six pack (his nickname was BLT, as in big, lean and tanned, although I suspect he made that up himself). But not everyone got the memo. One Wasps prop who shall remain nameless had probably the worst body of any professional rugby player I ever saw. It looked like a cross between a burst beanbag and a fire-damaged Portakabin. The nutritionist tried to fix it, but there’s only so much a nutritionist can do when the player’s excuse is that everything tastes good.

When a season finished, Trevor Leota would be in unbelievable shape. But he’d return for pre-season about 40 kg overweight and get out of breath walking from the car park to the changing room. They’d get Paul Stridgeon to live with him and try to stop him eating KFC and drinking bourbon and Coke every night, and a couple of months later he’d be one of the best hookers in the world again. But then the cycle would start from the beginning again. Even when he was in decent nick, Trevor was always a hair’s breadth away from an all-dayer in the Redback in Acton. During one exhibition game between Wasps and South Africa’s Sharks, the referee called Lawrence Dallaglio over and said, ‘I’m worried about your hooker, I can smell Jack Daniels coming off him.’ Lawrence quick as a flash replied, ‘Oh, he always smells like that, that’s just his aftershave,’ and gave the ref a wink.

The Rope

Aside from one emphatic victory over the All Blacks, Stuart Lancaster’s reign as England head coach will sadly and unfairly be remembered for the disastrous 2015 World Cup. But one thing I did enjoy about his stint in charge were the heated trousers we wore on the bench. You’d press a button and a minute later you’d feel like you’d pissed yourself. Other fads I came across I wasn’t entirely sold on. For example, I never worked out whether ice baths worked, even though there was a time when just about every professional sportsperson in the country was using them. I recall someone shitting in the communal ice bath at Wasps, so there was at least one person in the rugby community who was even less convinced by their benefits than me.

When I joined Stade Français in Paris in 2009, the medical staff were very machine orientated. That’s if they could fit you in. You’d pop along to see them and they’d be on their one-hour lunch break. And because the unions are so strong in France, you’d just have to wait. The hour would pass and they’d go straight into a 20-minute fag break, before strolling back into the treatment room stinking of Gauloises. One time, I had a dead leg and one of the lads pulled out a pair of women’s tights. I was thinking, ‘Jesus, I know things can get a bit fruity in Paris, but I’m not into this. Well, not on a school night.’ I thought he wanted to paint me like one of his French ladies. He persuaded me to put them on, before pulling out what looked like a Henry hoover (an Henri hoover, perchance?) and vacuuming my legs. And you wonder why I spent my one day off a week travelling back to London to visit my personal physio Kevin Lidlow, out of my own pocket, before returning to Paris for training the following morning.

Talking of eccentric, Paul ‘Bobby’ Stridgeon, Wasps’ former strength and conditioning coach, was completely off the charts for all the best reasons. Bobby is one of those unknown heroes of professional rugby, a legend of a man in every way. Anyone who has worked with him, either with Wasps, Wales or the Lions, will tell you he is an indispensable part of any team. Brian O’Driscoll once said that Bobby would be his first pick for any coaching staff, and I’d completely agree. A former GB wrestler who once took on eight Lions forwards in New Zealand, and beat them all, Bobby is one of the biggest characters in rugby, brilliant at his job, always wired off his tits on caffeine and has the biggest cock I’ve ever seen, which he nicknames ‘The Rope’.

Bobby’s party trick would be to put a full can of Red Bull on the edge of a table, pull out The Rope and use it to slap the can across the room, like he was playing a game of human pinball. He was also a master of the penis windmill and penis puppetry. If you’re ever lucky enough to meet Bobby and ask him nicely, I’m sure he’d be happy to teach you everything he knows. The Rope also has magic powers, in that it can inspire people to do great things. I would be lying on my back, about to do a bench press, and Bobby would stroll past and say in his broad Wigan accent, ‘Mate, you ready to lift big? Do you need Rope?’

If nervous about the lift, I’d say, ‘Yes, Bob, I need Rope.’

As quick as a flash he would slap The Rope on me, to psyche me up. And you know what? Being anointed by The Rope would mean that I would go right ahead and bench press a personal best. Don’t ask me how or why, some things in this world just aren’t meant to be explained, but if I could pack The Rope in my kit bag for the dark times when I was searching for motivation, then I would. Sadly for me, Bobby needs it, and it wouldn’t fit into any known kit bag anyway.

The Rope also healed injuries. Bobby would say to me, ‘Hask, mate, how’s the elbow?’

‘Not great, Bobby.’

‘Rope will sort it out …’

And he’d lop The Rope out and hit my elbow with it. Strangely it worked, and I would be back training straight after.

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