Jonny: My Autobiography (31 page)

We are getting closer and closer to our goal, but we’ve stopped playing. Pretty much from 1999, we’ve tried to take the game to the opposition and, when necessary, switched into three-point mode. But here, we’ve been starting in three-point mode. We’re almost ensuring that these games become tight, edgy affairs when they might not actually need to be. We’ve been safe and conservative. We’ve not committed to playing like us. The same approach just won’t cut it from here on in.

The agreement is this. We have to go out and win these games, rather than trying to protect a lead before we’ve even got one. And, it seems, this
is what everyone wants to hear. This is how we’d all rather play anyway.

Personally, though, I am feeling the pressure. And my real concern is that the media view of the way I am playing is the view held inside the camp. I need to know. Are the guys in the team blaming me like the outside world is?

When Johnno asks me, in the way that Johnno does – Wilko, are you all right? – I tell him. We may not be playing the way we play as a team, we may not have our same structure, but it just seems the blame is all coming down to me. Whatever happens on the field, it’s me who takes the shit.

Johnno is so matter of fact. He says he understands the flak I’m taking. He says the whole team needs to get the feeling back. It’s never one person’s fault, and in this case, it’s certainly not mine.

It makes a world of difference to hear this. I feel the support, too, from Catty, Lawrence and Hilly, and the effect is instantaneous. It gives me the energy to get back out on the field.

When we head for training, the sun is out and there is a buzz about the squad. It’s exciting to feel we’re back on track, and Mark ‘Ronnie’ Regan feels one of his trademark tricks is called for.

Sometimes Ronnie’s gags are welcome and sometimes not. We have a game, the Circle Game, which is very basic. You make a circle by touching together your thumb and forefinger, and if you can distract someone into staring at the circle, you are allowed to punch them on the arm. Ronnie loves the Circle Game. He once famously put the circle in front of Phil Greening’s face when they were opposite each other in a scrum. His masterstroke was lying down in the hotel toilets, putting each arm under the door of two neighbouring cubicles in which two England players were sitting and showing them the circle that way.

This time he pulls another trick. He slides in behind Simon Kemp and rips down the doctor’s shorts. The doc is left in front of about twenty
newspaper photographers with his shorts round his ankles and it’s just too funny a sight not to laugh. This is rare, but today Ronnie’s trademark joke actually works a treat.

Compared with the Samoa game, my warm-up for the semi-final goes well.

Part of the routine is to hit goalkicks from the goal-line, aiming at the single post. It helps me to visualise the exact line of the flight of the ball. Here in the Telstra Stadium, I hit one, it strikes the central part of the post and doubles back to me along the exact same path. I barely have to move to catch it. I want to laugh about that, but I’ve got just over half an hour until kick-off in one of the biggest games of my life. I need to get my brain into gear.

After all the criticism of the last few weeks, our forwards are now fired up, and against France, at last, it clicks. We concede an unfortunate early try, but after that we just kill it. We prepared for, and longed for, a dry day and it pours down. Our pack, however, are so dominant and they push forward so well that even in these difficult conditions, I can more or less pick and choose what I want to do and when.

And when we drive forward so effectively, France have to put more and more forwards into the mauls to stop us. This means their backs have no inside support in defence, their wingers are forced to come up and help and it frees up the back field. Now we can kick into space and turn them.

We get lineouts in return, we win them and we drive them. Our forwards smash rucks and dominate the physical battle, they pretty much ensure the victory is ours. I drop three goals near their line, we keep the scoreboard ticking; with 25 minutes to go, we are already more than a score ahead.

And right at the end, as the clock is running down, standing on halfway as we reset a scrum, I glance at the scoreboard, which reads 24–7, and I spare myself a thought. At some point, Jonny, you’ve got to start embracing these situations. We’ve come back and as a team we have attacked it together; individually, you’ve had pressure on your shoulders and you’ve kicked all 24 points. We’ve now made it to the World Cup final. Just for once, give yourself a break. Even if it ends here, you’ve done OK.

We play Australia in the final and so, of course, the scale of the Australian media coverage rockets. My problem is trying to avoid the damn stuff. I don’t know how they do it, but some of the guys sit there at breakfast and read it all. They consume stories about themselves or other people whether they’re rubbish or not. It must just mess your head around.

Without wishing to appear rude, I try to sit somewhere slightly apart from them, like at the end of the table, and just keep my head down. I don’t want to see the press, but it’s all there, under my nose. I see they’ve got a picture of me on the front page, or the back, or both, and I don’t want to look, but at the same time, I’ve just got to know what it says about me. What’s the headline? I get annoyed at myself for taking a glimpse but I can’t help myself. And whatever I see, good or bad, it just adds to the pressure.

It’s impossible to relax. The team room in the Manly Pacific, where I spend a fair bit of time, has a beautiful view of the beach and the ocean. But every time I look out, I see people in their hundreds, almost all in England shirts, on the street below. It makes you realise there’s so much to lose.

Every day when we go for training, we walk through reception, out of the hotel and straight on to the coach, and the fans are there, all cheering and
shouting and trying to pat you on the back. And when we get back, it’s the same. It might be three days until the game, but I can’t escape. I feel as if every day is match day. Increasingly, they chant my name, and although I love the support, it makes me feel under more pressure, thinking of all those people I could let down.

I don’t actually enjoy the chanting. It’s draining everything I have. And it feels so uncomfortable with the team. This isn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want it to be about me. I feel as though I’m cheating them.

On the Wednesday before the game, I’m in my last press conference before the final, probably the biggest I’ve ever sat in, and I hear about what’s being said and what’s being written. The journalists want to know if I am concerned about what Australia are going to do to stop me. What tactics might they use to take you out of the game? Their questions criticise the type of rugby we’ve been playing. They don’t realise this is a complete misunderstanding. Against France, we were dying for dry conditions so we could run the ball.

I walk away from the top table at the end, nervous and caught up in it all, and a guy walks up to me and says good luck for the final. He puts his hand out to shake mine.

Thanks very much, I say, returning the handshake. And at that moment, another guy next to him takes our picture with a professional-looking camera. It is only then that I register his white T-shirt, which has a picture of me in my kicking stance and a red circle with a line through it over the top and the words ‘Say no to kicking rugby’.

There are two different worlds operating here. There are the people writing about it and then there are the people living it. The intensity of the environment makes the gap so obvious, and there is simply no way to make the media understand what we’re going through.

But subconsciously, I take some of the press-conference questions back
to my room with me, and I wonder will they try to take me out of the game?

On our day off, some of the boys go down on the beach that we can see from the team room. I’d love to join them, but there’s no way. There are too many people with cameras and too many of them are press. I don’t want to give them the pictures they want. I might be making my life harder, but I refuse to let them win.

So I take off with my dad. I meet him in the parking lot under the hotel, where he is waiting with his Australian mate Scotty and Scotty’s young son Ben, and we drive half an hour up the coast to a small cove. Not many people there, and none of them would know to shout my name. We have a picnic and mess about with a football. Just briefly, I have escaped.

The following day, I try another escape with Bilks and manage to sneak on to the beach unnoticed. I wear a hat and sunglasses, and sit up against a wall, watching people walk past, not relaxing for a second, in constant fear that the next passer-by in an England shirt will be the one who blows my cover.

It’s not that I’m trying to avoid having to talk to people. I’m merely trying to avoid this constant reminder of what lies ahead. I just want to think about something else for a few hours.

The thing is, this is my goal. This is what I wrote down when I was ten, and all those other times. But I can’t remember the last time I smiled properly, and enjoyed it. I’m trying my best to embrace this amazing opportunity but I’m not even close.

On the day of the final, I lie on my bed in the hotel reading a book by Michael Connelly,
Angels Flight
, which Blackie sent me. I’ve been speaking to Blackie regularly. He knew I’d be struggling this week.

I look at the clock next to me and think to myself I’ve got four hours till we meet as a team and leave for the Telstra Stadium. Four hours is good, four hours is a lot of time. I feel like I could stay here all day, never leave this room.

I get back to my book. I check the clock, read for a bit, check the clock, read for a bit. In bursts of a minute or two’s reading, I escape, and then it all comes back. The final.

The clock says three hours to go. A part of me is thinking I want it to stay paused on this moment for the next two years, ten years, twenty years. I want it to stay at three hours to go because I don’t want to go any nearer to this game. And another part of me says I just want the time to disappear, I want to be on the field now. It’s a constant battle between wanting the moment I’ve trained for all my life to be here, and wanting it never to arrive.

I make my phone calls, the ones I make before every game I play – to Mum and Dad, Sparks and Blackie. I talk about the game and how I feel, how I’m going to draw on a life’s work in about eighty-five minutes of rugby.

Increasingly, I understand that in this game, there is no running away.