Jonny: My Autobiography (39 page)

After that, I go straight to tell Martin Brewer that I’ve got that pain in my appendix again.

No messing about this time, the appendix is swiftly removed. A month of the season is lost, but I recover quickly and soon I’m starting again – again.

I feel so proud to be a part of this Newcastle team. We have developed a
pattern – begin the season well, start to struggle as the winter weather kicks in, improve with the arrival of spring and the dry running conditions. When we are struggling, some snap decisions are made and some new signings arrive, and we get the impression that it isn’t always Rob Andrew who has the final say on who comes in. I start to wonder if it isn’t down to Dave Thompson, the owner, and whom he has been reading most about on the internet.

The issue is we never really have size in the forwards, so we have to find other ways to compete in the winter months. The result is a training regime run by Blackie that is about as impressive as any I’ve ever been a part of. All of us love the training. Speed, movement and skills are emphasised, and having a structure that means the number on your back becomes largely irrelevant.

When we get it right, it feels great. We play Leicester at Welford Road, a really tough place to go, and I just about survive a tackle from their scrum half, Harry Ellis, where he dives at me while I am taking a clearance kick and flies in at my planted leg. But the point is that we earn ourselves a draw yet we play so well we know we should have won.

Harry’s hit on me could easily have broken my leg but my studs released their grip on the turf, thank goodness, and I went flying instead. It’s nice to escape an injury for a change because there is an autumn international series on the horizon and I am determined to carry on this run of games. In fact, I am so determined that I choose to ignore the growing pain in my groin.

I start to feel a wrench there whenever I begin my kicking, but I don’t want to get it checked, so I don’t tell Martin Brewer about it, or Blackie or Sparks. I don’t want them to tell me I need a rest. The way I see it, the problem might go away of its own accord. When I kick, especially on my right foot, the first few are really sore and then, after eight or nine, it’s not so bad.

We play Gloucester and then London Irish, but the groin pain isn’t easing. In fact, it has become permanent. Time to bite the bullet, and suddenly another entire autumn series disappears before my eyes. Mentally, I am finding this really hard.

The diagnosis is not great. I’ve retorn everything that was repaired in my first groin operation five years ago. On top of that, I have torn a big part of my adductor muscle. I need another hernia repair operation plus a tenotomy, which involves cutting the adductor cleanly so that it can reheal perfectly.

The tenotomy is the most painful operation I have ever had. When I come round from the anaesthetic, I literally fight off the nurses because I am half-conscious and in complete agony.

What do I do now? Focus on the Six Nations. That is my target, but even that will be tough. Maybe not the start of the Six Nations; maybe I can get back halfway through. My goals are slipping. Everything is slipping.

I have the operation in mid-November and, in the new year, start training with Newcastle again, but it’s a case of one step forward, two steps back. As soon as I try any sideways or unpredictable movements, I feel the groin tear slightly and have to wait for that to heal before I can train again.

This starts to form a cycle and is desperately frustrating. One day, when I’m back training with the team at Darsley, I break the line with just scrum half Lee Dixon to beat, but as soon as I side-step I feel it go. I just hand the ball to Dicko and walk to the end of the hall, sit down next to the ice bucket, grab a load of ice and start icing it. It’s no longer a surprise. It’s not even
anything to make a song and dance about. It’s just a case of there it goes again, that’s another two- or three-week step backwards. The Six Nations slip out of the frame of possibility.

So I go for more scans and discover a big hole in my adductor muscle. The best hope I have of playing any rugby before the end of the season is to undergo an intensive course of herbal injections – three at a time, every other day, high up on the inside of the groin. Painful and unpleasant. Plus another occasional injection to draw out blood from the hole in the adductor.

Improvement is negligible and it’s getting to the stage where I can’t see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s now clear that I might never find my way back to where I want to be.

When I am fit enough to kick, I go for sessions on my own at Darsley and I am so desperate to get it right, so driven by the annoyance and fear of not getting it perfect, that the anger I feel inside begins to express itself physically.

I don’t know what it is, but my frustration is so intense I start shouting at the walls, screaming obscenities. But I punish myself for my mistakes too. When my left foot lets me down, I stamp down hard on it. At one stage, I am so livid that, before I know it, I am sinking my teeth into my hand, trying to bite right through the skin between my thumb and index finger. It immediately starts bruising, the pain is intense.

Imperfection, knowing that I still can’t master what I am doing after all the time I’ve spent on it, all the effort, all the sacrifices and the heartache – it just makes me so angry at myself. In my mind, I have visualised perfect outcomes of every kick, but when my practice doesn’t match that, I have to
take it out on something, so I start tearing my T-shirt apart. This becomes habitual; I start getting through way too many T-shirts. I’ll be alone in Darsley, wearing half a T-shirt, my voice either hoarse or completely gone because of all the yelling, and a bruised left foot – all purely because I have let frustration get the better of me again.

By the end of a long kicking session, I will invariably have found my way back to an acceptable skill level, and with my sanity thus restored, I look at myself and wonder: what the hell am I doing?

I have now been injured pretty much solidly for two years, and could hardly be further from fulfilling my life goals. Everything feels so far away now. Toby Flood is playing ten at Newcastle, Charlie Hodgson for England, and they are good players playing good rugby. I could not feel farther from the field. I no longer feel needed or valued. Everything I have done and become is fading and I am failing in every way. My natural instinct is always to attack the situation, but the enjoyment and desire just isn’t there any more. My mind is fighting me.

The frustration is finally starting to take a serious toll. Sleeping is a problem. Graeme Wilkes, the Newcastle doctor, gives me the sleeping tablets I ask for but they don’t seem to work.

For the first time ever, I seem to have lost the drive. Motivation has fizzled out. My fiercely obsessive mind, which has always given me the upper hand on the pitch, has latched on to this negativity and turned on me in a bad way. The negative thoughts won’t stop. My obsessiveness, my most powerful asset, has become my undoing.

My mind is way too active to allow me to sleep, but then I don’t feel I can get up and face the day. I don’t want to face the pressures I put on
myself, or the expectations that I feel are constantly placed on me, which I know I can’t meet. I feel torn in half.

I don’t know what to do. I start turning up late for rehab sessions; some of them I miss entirely. I never would have stood for this sort of behaviour before.

And I can’t escape. There’s simply no way I can concentrate enough to read a book. The thought of the effort it would take I find depressing. And when I watch TV, I take nothing in. I can watch a two-hour DVD and all I see is the outside of the screen and some flashing images on it. I don’t even know what the storyline is.

My mind is totally preoccupied with anything it can find that is negative and destructive; and it causes me to feel panic and my heart to beat quicker. My obsessiveness has vacated rugby completely and started to drive my thoughts downwards, tossing endless dark, nasty images through my head.

To try a new tack with my groin problem, I go for a week’s residency at the Olympic Medical Institute, a specialist centre attached to Northwick Park Hospital in north London.

One of the exercises is to run against a strong current in the pool. The idea is to run for as long as you can, and if you don’t run hard, you just get swept to the back of the pool. This is the kind of a challenge I usually relish. The old me would be asking what the record was then flick on the Tunnel Vision switch and drop into that zone where pain and tiredness get blanked out – like training with Blackie, or the England cone test. It’s what I do, my way of showing the world that I’m too strong, too hungry and too proud ever to be beaten.

But I don’t really want to be here in this pool, and I am acutely aware
of every kind of tiredness. On the side of the pool, the phyios and trainers bark all the usual motivational stuff at me. Come on! You can do it! That sort of thing. Who are these people? I don’t know these people. They don’t know what I’m going through. They don’t care.

I fight the current as hard as I can, but I get pushed to the back. I try again. Same thing.

This isn’t me. It’s like someone else is doing it. It’s like so many people I’ve watched over the years who have looked for excuses to give up. Here, I guess, I’m doing the same.