Open Side: The Official Autobiography

As with other aspects of leadership, professionalism begins with the right mindset. You have to set yourself standards, but not limits; you have to hold yourself to minimum requirements rather than maximum ones. For example, Ben hasn’t framed and mounted his Wales Under-16 shirt, as for him it’s not a measure of success but of failure: it’s not how far he got, but how much further he still had to go. If I hadn’t got a Lions shirt, I wouldn’t have put up a Wales one.

Gats used to say that ‘we should be the best at everything that doesn’t require talent. Effort doesn’t require talent. Hard work doesn’t require talent. We should be the best at hard work.’ It’s never too early to start this. When I’d train at lunchtimes in Whitchurch, that was professional behaviour, what I needed to do to get better. Round about that time, Mr Morris gave me a referee’s rulebook. How many 16-year-old kids had even read one of those, let alone owned one? I turned straight to the sections that were most relevant to me, the ones that covered contact rules. I read these until I knew them off by heart, because they helped me work out how to compete, how to know where the offside line was, and so on. Why bother playing a sport unless you knew the rules inside out? But most people didn’t. I did, because it gave me an advantage; and if something gives you an advantage, then you’d be nuts not to take it.

Training was an obvious arena in which I could be professional. I was Mr Preseason: you’d have had to tie me down to stop me training. As Muhammad Ali said: ‘The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road – long before I dance under those lights.’

Michael Johnson described it well in his book Gold Rush. ‘The desire to succeed is extremely important, but it’s easy to want to be the best in the world. Drive is more important. It’s easy to commit to being the Olympic gold medallist, but not as easy to commit to training 50 per cent harder than you did the year before and to making sacrifices to achieve that goal. It is that drive that causes an individual to work for what he desires. Once I started training, my position was simply that every day was an opportunity for me to get better. So with that in mind, any day I missed training or any day I didn’t give 100 per cent of the effort I was capable of giving would have been a missed opportunity.’

And 100 per cent means just that. Professionalism means paying attention to the small things as well as the big ones. Sometimes the analysts would play us the voice of the referee for our next match as we did scrum-machine work, not just to add some match atmosphere to the session but so we could get used to his intonation and rhythm, how long he paused for when issuing instructions to set the scrum, and so on.

I hear academy kids asking how to get a Range Rover, how to get an adidas endorsement, that kind of thing. That’s topsy-turvy thinking, and a sign of a mindset and values that are all wrong: putting output above input. The true professional would never ask such questions, as the true professional knows that input comes first both in time and importance. Prepare properly, train properly, play properly, and the remainder will look after itself. I picked my endorsements carefully. I didn’t just sign with any company that turned up with a cheque and a photoshoot. I only signed with companies whose products I believed in and which I used anyway, or would have used, without being paid.

Rest is a big part of being a professional. You have to learn to say no. I get so many requests to do stuff, and people have no idea how much it all mounts up. I’ve got people I haven’t seen in years who’ll drop me a message out of the blue saying: ‘I was just wondering …’ Luckily Ben and I have largely the same group of friends, so I can say to him: ‘I got a message from X – are you in touch with them anyway?’ If he says yes, then maybe I’ll do it, but if he’s not, and they’re just chancing their arm, then I definitely won’t.

It’s hard, sometimes, because people think they own you. I was doing a Q&A up in Cwmbran once, and a bloke stood up and said: ‘What are you doing next Monday?’ I said I didn’t know off the top of my head. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘we’ve got a presentation at our club that day, and I bet you don’t turn up, because you professional rugby players are all too big for your boots and have forgotten the grassroots game where you come from.’

His tone really took me aback. I explained that I had a certain amount of community work built into my contract, and on top of that I’d go to local clubs, kids’ camps and so on. But I also needed nights at home to rest and do nothing, because that was the professional, disciplined thing to do.

At the end, I was signing autographs and stuff – I never left any of those events until I’d signed for anyone who asked – when this same bloke came up. ‘Which rugby club are you from?’ I asked him. When he told me, I said: ‘Just so you know, I’m never going to come up there, purely because of the way you spoke to me.’

A significant aspect of professionalism is honesty: not making excuses, and owning your mistakes. If everyone in a team does that, the environment is healthy and the team has the best chance of improving. Everyone makes mistakes. The only way not to make a mistake is not to try something in the first place. Making a mistake isn’t wrong or unprofessional. What is wrong and unprofessional is trying to sweep that mistake under the carpet, because by pretending it never happened you deny yourself the opportunity to learn from it next time round.

When other people see you being honest, it inspires them to follow suit. In one training camp, we had a whole load of protein bars brought in, boxes and boxes of them, which were kept in the gym for the boys to take them when they needed.

At one team meeting, the nutritionist said that we had a problem. He’d catered for each person having two bars per day for the duration of the camp, but now there weren’t enough anymore, so someone must have been taking more than their fair share. And he knew who the guilty parties were, as there was a CCTV in the gym and it had all been caught on camera. So if whoever had done it didn’t own up right now, they’d be exposed as liars and not team players. A few of the younger guys in the squad immediately fessed up, to gales of laughter from the senior boys.

Yes, the young guys had been taking more than their share, but of course there was no CCTV and we could have got more bars delivered at the drop of a hat. The point was to encourage blokes to be honest with each other and with the team as a whole, and it worked. Own up to something before you get called out on it.

Being professional extends to life outside rugby too; indeed, when you’re in the public eye it extends pretty much to everything you say or do, 24/7. You represent the club you play for, you represent your country, and you represent the hopes of all the supporters who’d give anything to do what you’re doing. These aren’t things to take lightly, and if they involve a certain amount of sacrifice here and there, well, that’s just the way it is, and it’s a small price to pay.

I haven’t been on a night out in Cardiff since 2012. The last time I did, it was with Lyds; we’d been to a wedding, and inevitably we came across someone who’d had too much to drink and who wanted to pick a fight, probably just to prove to his mates what a hard man he was.

On another occasion, I was on a stag night and we were in a pub. There was a group of guys there who wanted to chat, and I was being friendly to them, but then it was time for us to leave and to go on to the next venue. One of the men I’d been talking to became aggressive and started manhandling me in an attempt to get me to stay, and I had to grab his hands and yank them off me so I could leave.

It doesn’t take much for these kinds of situation to spiral out of control, and then suddenly you’re dealing with negative headlines and distractions, which neither the team nor you need.

Take the case of the England cricketer Ben Stokes, who was charged with affray following a fight outside a Bristol nightclub. He was acquitted, but not before he’d missed an Ashes series and lost a sponsorship deal, and following his acquittal he was fined for bringing the game into disrepute.

Now I don’t know him from a bar of soap, I’ve got no axe to grind with him personally and I mention his case for one reason only: that it could all have been avoided if he hadn’t put himself there in the first place. Don’t give people the opportunity to make you look bad.

People remember you and judge you as they see you. It doesn’t matter what kind of day you’re having; the professional thing to do is to smile and make time for people. What’s a few seconds for you might mean a whole lot to them. As Ben always reminds me, an autograph or a selfie might be my 100th of the day, but for them it’s their first. That’s why I always made time for autographs; they don’t take up much time and they mean a lot to the person receiving them.

Having been on the other side of the fence, trust me, you remember these things. In the summer of 1999, Mum and Dad took us to Copenhagen. Spurs had won the League Cup a few months before with a 1–0 victory over Leicester City, and Allan Nielsen had scored the winning goal.

In my 10-year-old mind, the logic was clear. Nielsen was Danish, we were in Denmark, therefore we were definitely going to see him. Dad tried to explain that Denmark was a big place with millions of people, so we weren’t going to see Allan Nielsen.

But one day, in the Tivoli Gardens, there he was! I plucked up the courage to go over and ask him for an autograph, and to this day I remember how nice he was: asking my name, where I was from, that kind of stuff. I was so thrilled that Mum laminated the piece of paper with his autograph, and for years it was my pride and joy. So when a kid asks for my autograph, I always remember that I could be their Allan Nielsen.

As Alan Phillips said to me: ‘People are looking at you and they’re dreaming, aren’t they? When they look at you, these people, when they see you, they’re seeing their dreams.’ That was my responsibility as a professional: to be worthy of their dreams.

3

EDEN PARK

36.8750°S, 174.7448°E

Saturday, 15 October 2011. Wales v France, World Cup semi-final

Come on, son. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.

Vincent Clerc comes flying onto the pop pass. I line him up perfectly, driving up and forward with all the force I can muster as I hit him. I absolutely unload on him. But he’s two stone lighter than me, so suddenly he’s up in the air and his body’s twisting beyond the horizontal.

So I let go. Clerc hits the deck and I’m on him again, competing for the ball and ripping it from him. That’s an awesome tackle, I’m thinking. I’ve melted him there. That one’s going on my all-time highlight reel for sure.

The next thing I know, there’s a French fist in my face, and another one, and the Welsh lads are hauling me up and away while the French forwards are still trying to use me as a punchbag.

Alain Rolland blows his whistle and beckons me over. I reckon it’s a safety thing. I don’t even think it’s a penalty, let alone a yellow card.

Rolland reaches into his pocket and pulls out the red card.

Monday, 9 May. ‘I’m calling to see if you’d like to be captain against the Barbarians.’

I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I do know what to say, but I don’t think Gats would like to hear it. I hate captaincy. That’s what I’m thinking. I hate captaincy. I don’t want to do it. I’m just 22 years of age. I’ve only started 10 games for Wales. I’m one of the quieter members of the squad. I’m not given to rousing speeches. Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen guys who’d be better at it than me, who have the experience and the personality to do it: Alun Wyn Jones, Stephen Jones, Bomb (Adam Jones), Gethin, Shane, Phillsy (Mike Phillips).

I’m standing in the front room of my house. I glance at the mirror above the fireplace. I look as stunned as I feel. I never expected this, not in a month of Sundays.

On the other end of the phone, Gats is silent, waiting for me to answer.

Why me? He must see something in me. Buggered if I know what it is, though. But he’s a smart coach and a smart guy, and I trust him, so whatever it is, he must genuinely believe in it.

And it’s an honour, of course it is. You don’t turn down selection for your country, do you? So why would you turn down the captaincy? The only bigger honour than the first is the second. You take each one and do it to the best of your ability.

‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘I’d love to do it.’

‘Great. There’s a press conference at the Millennium in half an hour.’

Flippin’ heck. I go upstairs three steps at a time, grab a Welsh Rugby Union polo shirt, slip on some tracksuit bottoms and trainers, and rush out of the door, phone crooked in my neck as I ring first Rach and then Dad.

They both ask me the same question: ‘Do you want to do it?’

And I give them both the same answer. ‘I have to.’

All the way to the stadium, driving with a calmness I don’t feel, two words chase each other through my head. Wales captain. Wales captain. Wales captain.

In Portugal with Rach. So much for a week of relaxation and switching off. I’m in the gym twice a day, and in the small hours I’m wide awake, making notes about what to say and do.

‘Please just switch off,’ Rach says.

I can’t. I’m worrying about anything and everything.

It’s only for this match, I tell myself. It’s only because Gats wants to rest Smiler – Matthew Rees, the regular captain. Maybe Gats is doing it to get me out of my shell a bit, the same way he asked me to stand up in front of the boys and talk about defence and the contact area before the Italy match a couple of months ago. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t given it to one of the more experienced boys like Stephen or Alun Wyn. Yeah, that makes sense. He wants me to speak up a bit more, take more of an active role once Smiler’s back. I’ll do it this once and then never again.

When it’s announced that Gavin Henson will be playing for us – his first match in a Wales shirt for two years, even though he’s currently not attached to a club – I almost weep with joy. All the media coverage will be about his return rather than my captaincy. Gavin’s a hundred times more box office than I’ll ever be, and that suits me fine.

Sergio Parisse is captaining the Barbarians. He’s a class player, and we know we have to get to him early and often. ‘Put the heat on him,’ Shaun Edwards tells us.

‘Shall we have a call for that?’ says Josh Turnbull.

Shaun looks at him like he’s mad. ‘Get up and f***ing twat him. That’s the call.’

Saturday, 4 June. One thing’s totally clear in my mind: we cannot, must not, dare not lose to the Barbarians. It’s not that they don’t have good players, because they have some great ones: Doug Howlett on the wing, Carl Hayman at prop, and a back row I know well: van Niekerk, Martyn and Parisse.

It’s that they won’t be taking it seriously, because that’s the whole ethos of the Barbarians. Five-star hotel, all expenses paid, out on the piss day and night, and five grand at the end of it.

That’s why I’ll never play for them, because for someone like me it’s a lose-lose proposition. If I go with tradition and drink a lot when I so rarely drink, I’ll play terribly and it will be bad for my reputation. If I prepare well, as I do for every match I play, everyone will think I’m a shit bloke and boring. The Barbarians are a great tradition and a longstanding part of rugby, but they’re not for me and I’m not for them.

So I just can’t even begin to conceive that my first match – my only match, hopefully – as captain is going to be a defeat. I want not just to beat the Barbarians but to humiliate them, to show that in this day and age you need to take international rugby seriously.

I’ve had enough of the team playing well but coming up a bit short, which has happened all too often in the past couple of seasons, and I’ve also had enough of people accepting that a little too easily. With the changing of the guard has to come a change in attitude too. After this match there are only three more warm-up matches before the World Cup. If we fancy ourselves to do well in the World Cup, and we do, we have to win this one.

We don’t.

Oh, we should do. We’re nine points up with nine minutes to go, and from a position like that we ought to be home and hosed. Just keep the ball tight and work it through the phases, running down the clock as we do so. But we’re not ruthless enough. Mathieu Bastareaud scores a try to bring them to within a score, and then with a minute to go they run it from deep, Willie Mason offloads out of the tackle to Isa Nacewa, and Nacewa beats four players in a 65-metre run to touch down. The conversion makes it 31–28 to them, and that’s that.

I try to rationalise it. They were a good team, they had nothing to lose. We were missing a few players. That’s how it goes. But whichever way I look at it, we shouldn’t have lost.

July. Spala, Poland. You can’t win a match you’ve just lost, but you can win the next one. The only way to atone for the Barbarians defeat is to do well at the World Cup. The only way to do well at the World Cup is to be the fittest team there. The only way to be the fittest team at the World Cup is to push ourselves further than ever before.

Hence Spala.

It was built in the 1950s and still looks like the kind of place where they’d have trained Soviet cosmonauts. It’s spartan, in every way. No frills, no fripperies, no distractions. No TV, no PlayStation or Xbox, and no alcohol, not for anybody; drier than a backwoods county in the Bible Belt of the Deep South. Oak forests all around, swaddling us away from the outside world.

You’re hard men who’ve lived soft lives, they tell us. Not any more, not while you’re here at any rate. You’re going to push yourselves and each other harder and harder, to be quicker and stronger and more durable than you ever thought possible; a hundred and fifty per cent harder than ever before, our strength and conditioning coach Adam Beard says. Take the maximum you’ve known and add on another half of that again.

This is not a joke. This is not a figure of speech. A hundred and fifty per cent. Add on another half again.

And the pain. Always the pain. We hurt. We hurt together.

We’re split into three groups: front five, back row and half-backs, centres and back three. We have three hour-long sessions a day. The sessions are staggered, so we wait our turn while the group before us is being beasted. We wait in silence, readying ourselves for the pain. As we go out to start a session, we pass the guys before us coming back in. They have the glassy-eyed look of a convicts’ road gang. They’re all dripping with sweat. Quite a few are splattered with vomit.

Weight vests on, stiff with the sweat of whoever used them last. Standing in a sandpit lifting heavy bags from ground to head and back. Pushing weighted sleds. Tyre flips. Bear crawls. Down and up, sprint, down and up, sprint.

Throw up? Good. Better out than in. Keep going. Trying to suck in the air. Shattered. Don’t show it. Don’t put your hands on your knees. That’s Rule One. Never put your hands on your knees.

Thank God that’s over.

‘One more circuit.’

Wrestling, one-on-one with Jonathan Thomas. He’s three inches taller and a stone and a half heavier than me. Money passing between Gats and Rob Howley as they watch. ‘A tenner says JT.’ I look up long enough to snarl at them, which is exactly the response they want.

Tug-of-war, one-on-one with Bradley Davies: six inches taller, three stone heavier, and a real athlete. Gats doesn’t care. ‘Fancy yourself up there with McCaw, Warby? Bradley’s making you his bitch.’

I set myself and pull harder. Every muscle screaming in agony. I can take it.

The management watching us like hawks the whole time. Who’s going to crack? Who’s going to break? Who’s going to whinge? Do any of those and you aren’t going to the World Cup. You keep going because the next guy does, and the next guy keeps going because you do. If you break that chain then you have no place here.

Into the cryotherapy chambers. Shorts, socks, gloves, face mask, headband and wooden clogs. The first chamber is at -50°C, but that’s just a warm-up, if you like, for the second chamber. The second chamber is -150°C: a whiteout where you can’t see the guy standing right next to you, where you keep talking and moving for fear that if you don’t you’ll just stop and die. Even the tiniest drop of sweat left over stings as it freezes hard on your skin.

This kind of cold is a living thing: something that scours, something that sears. It’s not just that it helps repair damaged tissues quicker, allowing us to train harder. It’s a mental thing too, a purging. The cold strips away everything but the essentials. Cleanse yourself. Punish yourself. You want to win? This is what it takes.

This is the kind of thing that bonds teams together, so that in the last few minutes of a tight match you can look at each other and know what everyone’s thinking without needing to say it.

Remember Spala.

Remember Spala, and know that you have what it takes to close out the win. We’ve lost too many of those kind of matches. Not anymore.

Remember Spala.

Smiler’s suffering from a neck injury, so I keep the captaincy for the two warm-up matches against England in August, first at Twickenham, then a week later in Cardiff.

Andy helps me develop a leadership compass: four attributes that will make me a better captain.

 Professional attitude

 Positive attitude

 My own performance, and leading by example

 Develop personal relationships with the players

The first three come easily to me, the fourth less so, simply because I’m quite introverted and shy. Work on that one more than the others, Andy says. Sometimes you have to work on your weaknesses rather than your strengths, at least to get them to the point where they’re no longer a weakness.

Saturday, 6 August. Twickenham. I write reams and reams on the hotel notepad before the first England match, pacing up and down the room, practising what I’m going to say. But when it comes to giving the team talk, it all comes out as just a bunch of mumbled irrelevant crap. It would be bad enough as it is, but much worse that I’ve spent so much time and energy on it for so little reward.

We lose the match 23–19, though the result pales into insignificance compared with the horrific injury that Morgan Stoddart suffers early in the second half. He wasn’t even supposed to be on the pitch so soon, but Stephen had pulled up with a calf injury in the warm-up, forcing us to switch Rhys Priestland to 10 and bring Morgan in at 15.

Morgan’s tackled from behind by Delon Armitage, and his left leg goes two different ways at once. Danny Care, fair play to him, instantly sees the trouble Morgan’s in and frantically calls the ref to blow up so Morgan can get treatment. He’s snapped both his tibia and fibula, and he’s screaming in pain. It’s a break so horrific that they don’t even show it on the TV replay, and it’s a reminder to everyone that there but for the grace of God go us all. It wasn’t a foul or a dirty tackle, just a tragic accident.