“Almost every international
team has two or three journeymen”
THE
SECRET
PLAYER
WE ALL start out with dreams of
Lions tours, Grand Slams, a man cave
dedicated to our vast collection of
Heineken Cup winner’s medals. But after
a decade or so of grind, bulking up and
leaning down, goal setting, visualising
and honing your basics, all for the most
marginal of improvements, eventually
the penny drops: you are simply not the
player you hoped you would become.
You can do a job of work, your stats
are pretty respectable, but you
are not exactly box office.
Inventive chants based around
your name are conspicuous
by their non-existence. Solid,
reliable, good but not excellent- hardly descriptors to have
Nick Mullins purring (ooh,
that’s such a Mullins word),
but qualities you can make a
career out of. Certainly enough
to earn the respect of various
coaches and team-mates. You
are a Toyota Corolla, spag bol
on a Tuesday night. In short,
you are a journeyman.
There is nothing to say you
can’t rise relatively high in the small
world of rugby on your meagre
attributes. Almost every international
team has two or three players who are,
by any metric, journeymen. The rugby
sages (read: Eddie Jones) have even
come up with a term for them. That guy
who does all the crappy, painful stuff so
stars don’t have to? He’s a “glue player”.
Damning by faint praise? Or a coach
justifying a dodgy pick, whilst hinting at
unmatched depths of understanding?
Either way, if you are that Mr Loctite,
just be thankful that a sport exists where
merely grafting like a navvy is rewarded
with representative honours, take your
£10k match fee and get to work.
During my own career, I have seen
both sides of the coin. I’m not one to
blow my own trombone but in my early
twenties I was... kind of a big deal. I was
fast, fit, could handle the ball a bit, and
had a knack of putting in a performance
when the TV camera was on. Somehow
I ended up being almost ‘the face’ of
my national team for a year or two.Seems like another lifetime, certainly a
different rugby epoch, but it was all very
exciting at the time. And Mummy ended
up with a fine collection of scrapbooks.
Unfortunately, during my mid-twenties,
injuries, various distractions and a huge
crisis of confidence took their toll on my
abilities, and without realising it I edged
irreversibly into the journeyman zone.
In hindsight, fundamentally it came
down to losing what had been my main
weapon: my top-line speed. Pace is like
the elastic in your socks: once it’s gone,
it’s gone. But when you’re in the midst
of that slide, either it’s impossible tohave enough distance to appreciate it,
or else you don’t want to admit it.
Sure enough, I raged against the dying
of the light, working harder than ever in
the gym, bulking up in search of more
oomph (which only made things worse),
did yoga (shout-out to Giggsy), sorted
out my diet. However, my returns were
diminishing, and it felt like the harder
I tried, the more average I became.
In my pomp, matches just came to
me – as an aside, back in
those more innocent days
it only took two or three
eye-catching moments to
have a WOW game. In fact,
I had verged on the lazy.
Now, in my unwitting
journeyman phase, I was
constantly exhausted during
games, working my nuts off
running into brick walls, but I
could never affect the game.
I hung on at Test level for
a few years, expecting the
magic to return. The writing
was on the wall, though,
when a new coach told the
press I was “a very different player” who
now did “lots of the unseen stuff”. Oh no,
the dreaded unseen stuff! Finally I had
to accept I’d evolved into a glue player.
Ironically, once rugby had lost its
status as some huge deal, like the
hopes of a nation rested on how many
rucks I could inspect, I fully embraced
my role as a journeyman. Now I could
inhabit a romantic notion of
myself as an honest artisan
going straightforwardly
about his work. There is
comfort and simplicity in
that. And honour. nONLY IN
RUGBY
WORLDPICGetty ImagesOur former pro provides a unique insight into the game
Looking for ‘glue’
Eddie Jones at
England training