What a Flanker

Epigraph

‘The best revenge is living well.’

Forward

When news broke that I was writing a book about my career, I felt a great disturbance in the rugby community, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror. But do not fear, I won’t be throwing anyone under the bus in the coming pages. Well, maybe a couple of people. But if this book fails and hundreds of unsold copies are pulped, I will atone by having the resulting porridge reconstituted as a trestle table in a home for battered rugby players.

What follows is not a blow-by-blow account of my life. You won’t find out where I was born (Windsor), the name of my first pet (Jet, as in Jet from TV’s Gladiators) or the name of my first school (Papplewick). But you will find out which bastard always skimmed the top off the fruit crumble before Wasps games, why props are still so fat (I’ve no idea to be honest, unacceptable) and what the hell went wrong at the 2015 World Cup. That’s right, there is some serious stuff as well.

I am well aware that I’ve always been marmite (‘Oh, for God’s sake, why him?’ Not my words but those of Ireland legend Rory Best on hearing that I’d been picked for the Lions). But I hope this book shows that I always gave my all for club and country, and just wanted to have a bit of fun on the side. I do hope you enjoy. And to the man who stuck a bottle of beer up his arse and did a handstand on a boat: thank your lucky stars I didn’t name you.

P.S. Yes, I know I spelt ‘foreword’ wrong at the top of the previous page. Needless to say, I will have the last laugh.

1

When Team Socials Go Wrong

The Boat Trip, Pt I

There’s no getting away from it: she’s lost control. Like that old Joy Division song: ‘Confusion in her eyes that says it all. She’s lost control. And she’s clinging to the nearest passer-by.’ When I say ‘she’, I mean me. Because I’m standing on a boat in a wig and a dress, a woman for the day. A skipper in drag witnessing a full-blown mutiny. And when I say ‘skipper’, I don’t mean skipper of the boat. He’s the 60-year-old bloke cowering behind the DJ decks, whose jam-jar glasses can’t hide the terror in his eyes. I mean skipper of Wasps, one of the proudest rugby union teams in England. So, in truth, I’ve got no passers-by to cling to. I’m meant to be the boss. The guv’nor. The rock. People are supposed to be clinging to me. Fat chance. We’ve only been drinking for a couple of hours and already I’m thinking, ‘You’re Captain Bligh and that bloke over there with his pants around his ankles doing a handstand on a chair with a bottle of lager up his arse is Fletcher Christian.’ This is going to get ugly.

That’s the problem with academy kids. They always get giddy and feel the need to impress their team-mates. There might have been a time (doubtful) when a young kid wanting to impress his team-mates quoted an inspiring passage from Shakespeare – ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends!’ – but not nowadays. Instead, they do handstands with bottles of lager up their arses. A week in Hell, with the Devil’s little All Black imps stamping all over my testicles, could not have prepared me for what happens next …

The academy kid flips off the chair and back onto his feet. The bottle of lager exits his arse like a bat out of hell. Closely followed by its former contents. Closely followed by a jet of excrement. The bar ladies below deck have a particularly good view of this literal shit show. They’re screaming and saucer-eyed and clinging to each other as if we’re 10 miles out at sea and under attack from the dreadful spindly killer fish. The vessel’s skipper is open-mouthed. I think I can detect a solitary tear running down his cheek. If this were a scene in a movie, he’d rip the needle off the record and silence would ensue. Instead, people are running in all directions and retching over the side of the boat.

Time to muster as much gravitas as a 6 ft 3 in, 19-stone man can while wearing a wig and a dress. I chuck several fucks into the arse-lager-shit magician and tell him to clean up his mess, before rushing below deck, apologising profusely to the bar ladies and grabbing a bucket, sponge and some Jif. As the academy kid is on his knees, scrubbing the deck clean of poo that should, by rights, still be up his backside, I think to myself, ‘What a tragic episode. But we must carry on.’

An essential release

I know what you’re thinking: how can professional sportsmen be so unprofessional? How can an England international allow such shenanigans to go on in his midst? I sometimes think the same. Then again, you try keeping control of a squad of professional rugby players let off the leash after a long, hard season. And, let’s face it, young men are known to be quite daft. Groups of young men even dafter. And groups of young sportsmen dafter still.

But perhaps a more compelling explanation for professional sportsmen’s occasional lapses in professionalism is because they spend so much time being professional. Being a professional rugby player is bloody hard work. It involves a lot of sacrifices. Getting battered and bruised in training and on match days. Repeated blows to the head, snapped and twisted muscles and broken bones. Eating the right things, drinking the right things, keeping strictly to the rota. Going to bed early and hardly ever going out. It’s not like working down a mine – we love it and we get paid well – but it takes its toll, physically and mentally. So the odd team social serves a purpose. It’s an essential release and bonding experience, not much different to a miner having a few pints in the pub with his mates on a Friday night.

There are two main ways a team bonds: by suffering on the field together, in training and on match days, and by sharing nights out together. I look at team socials as like a play or a film. Not that anyone else would want to watch it, but they are little pieces of human drama for those that take part. Team socials have their heroes (the team-mate – normally Danny Cipriani – who walks off with the most beautiful woman anyone has ever laid eyes on), their anti-heroes (the team-mate who sticks a bottle of lager up his arse, does a handstand and shits himself) and their villains (the team-mate who punches someone for no good reason). There are the jokers (the team-mate who can destroy a man with a single quip, while reducing the rest of his pals to eye-watering, stitch-inducing laughter), the fools (the team-mate who gets drunk, falls over and suffers a comedy injury), the foils (the team-mate who kneels behind a man who then gets pushed over, preferably into someone’s garden), the eternal victims (the team-mate who spends all night chatting up a woman only to get custard-pied – again), the stock characters and bit-part players (the team-mate who passes out in the toilets after a couple of tequilas or is found curled up under a table, mumbling about mummy). A great team social has comedy, farce, absurdity, cruelty and tragedy. And preferably some singing.

I hesitate to compare rugby players to soldiers. God knows those boys and girls do a more important job than we do, but there are similarities in the way we behave when we’re not on the front line or field of play. Team socials, for soldiers and sportspeople, are about building camaraderie. They are about creating communal history. Team socials top up the well of comedy, so that the lads can keep going back for laughs, time and time again.

Professional rugby players, like players in any team sport, are adults who never stop laughing like children. Because nothing in the world bonds a team better than laughter. I must have laughed 100 times every single day for 18 and a half seasons. Everything I did – and I did a lot of stupid things – I did for the story. It’s like that line delivered by Jeremy in Peep Show, after Mark has made a tit of himself again: ‘At least you’ve got a funny story to tell.’ All I ever wanted was to sit at the back of the coach, swap stupid tales and make people giggle.

Abominable visions

I’ve never really recovered from my first proper team social. I was a teenager playing for Maidenhead when we went on tour to France (the clubhouse coffers must have been a bit bare that year), taking in the exotic rugby outposts of Boulogne and Calais. I was just about old enough to have the odd shandy if I asked nicely, but the dads in our group, excited beyond belief at being away from their wives for a couple of days, were under no such restrictions. And when groups of middle-aged men are away from their wives and under no restrictions, things often go horribly and disturbingly wrong.

One traumatic evening, I was wandering around the hotel, no doubt bored and wanting a piece of some action, and heard an almighty racket coming from the bar. Curious but also slightly scared, I gingerly pushed the door open and was greeted by the sight of my father dancing on a table, as naked as the day he was born. The abominable vision shocked me to the very core. You can’t un-see something like that: your father, legs splayed, backside exposed for all to see, cock and balls swinging in time to some banging Europop. I caught his eye, then quietly closed the door, hoping no-one else had seen me, and sloped off to bed. We never spoke of this episode. But it’s why I haven’t been able to look him square in the eye for the best part of 20 years. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, having revisited the scene in my dreams. I’ll start muttering to myself, ‘The horror … the horror …’, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.

Such a disturbing experience might have left a more delicate soul scarred for life, but when I finally came of age and it was my time to get involved, I dived right in. No holds barred. Full tilt. Right in the thick of it. A psychologist might deduce that my unbridled enthusiasm for team socials was a coping mechanism, me trying to assert control and take ownership of chaotic situations. Or maybe they’d just say I was a bit of a dickhead. Not that I had much choice. Just like no-one had a choice back then. It was drummed into me from the very beginning that team socials are as integral to rugby as scrums, line-outs and filling a team-mate’s shoes with shaving cream.

I was still at school when I went on Wasps’ pre-season trip to Poland, a fresh-faced 17-year-old about to enter the upper sixth. And while I was a bit nervous about the training side of things, I was terrified of what might happen if we were allowed a night on the beers. I’d been told about some horrific initiations, including the time Lawrence Dallaglio was dangled by his ankles from a balcony by Dean Ryan and his captain Mark Rigby. It was only when one of the other back-rows, Francis Emeruwa, a softly spoken giant who put the fear of God into everyone, told them to stop, that they did so. I dread to think how hard Emeruwa was, because Ryan and Rigby were no shrinking violets. Lawrence would have been a teenager, like me, so I had sleepless nights thinking about all the things that might happen to me in the Polish boondocks.

We were in Poland for 10 days, training four times a day, with one evening off. But that’s all it takes. Some brainbox had organised a trip to Auschwitz the following day, so the plan was to go out for pizza and a few beers. I didn’t believe in drinking – when I was at school, I ran the school bar but never took advantage because I thought it would affect my fitness – so I told myself I was going to turn up at this restaurant and stay well out of the way. I hated hangovers with a passion. They killed me. And who wants to be hungover at Auschwitz? The last place in the world you want to be hungover is at Auschwitz. Are you even allowed to be hungover at Auschwitz? But I soon learned that trying to stay out of the way at a rugby team social is like trying to avoid punches from Mike Tyson while stuck with him in a phone box.

So there we were, a few of us younger players, tucked away in the corner of this open-air restaurant-cum-nightclub. And over swans first-team fly-half Alex King, holding two pints of lager. And the first thing ‘Kinger’ ever says to me is, ‘Haskell, Lawrence doesn’t think you can drink. Show him you can.’ Not only is Lawrence the current Wasps captain, he’s also the Godfather, not doing much apart from lurking menacingly and sending his foot soldiers on various errands with the message: ‘Make him an offer he can’t refuse.’

I think, ‘Let’s just get this over with,’ grab a pint and chin it in one. Five minutes later, Fraser Waters swans over and says, ‘Haskell, Lawrence doesn’t think you can drink …’ Another pint chinned. Five minutes later, Paul Volley swans over. Same chat, same outcome. Five minutes later, Josh Lewsey swans over. Five minutes later, Simon Shaw swans over. After about six pints, Lawrence finally deigns to swan over himself. ‘Good to see you drinking,’ he says, with an evil glint in his eye. ‘Have another one.’ Now I’m absolutely steaming and starting to panic. Do I make a tactical retreat? No, that’s not a good look. Just grin and bear it. But what about Auschwitz? ‘Never mind Auschwitz,’ says Mark Denney, all two of him, ‘have another drink …’

There followed a kangaroo court session, beloved of rugby teams all over the world, during which Peter Scrivener, forever injured, won the stealing a career award and Josh Lewsey the most likely to get shot by your own side award. But after about 10 pints, I was feeling very dusty indeed and had to be rescued by Shaun Edwards, chief deputy to Wasps head coach Warren Gatland. Shaun grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said to me, ‘Right, kid, I’m taking you home.’ But to get home, we had to walk through the woods in the dark, so now I was shitting myself because I found Shaun scary even when I was stone cold sober. Mercifully, I made it back to the barracks – which is what our accommodation was – located my room and found Rob Howley, the great Wales scrum-half, shirt off, shredded to the bone and eating jelly babies on his bed. I remember thinking, ‘I thought these people were elite professionals, and all this guy appears to eat are jelly babies and toasted cheese sandwiches.’ Rob, clearly not a fan of Polish food, had even brought his own Breville toastie-maker and a bag full of condiments. The room, which had no windows or air conditioning, was like a sauna, my mattress felt like a Jacob’s cream cracker and we’d run out of water. Well, I’d run out of water, was too scared to ask for any of Rob’s and too drunk to venture out of the room. As a result, and despite my colossal alcohol intake, I had the worst night’s sleep ever, a fitful few hours of tossing and turning punctuated by terrifying thoughts of how I might disgrace myself at Auschwitz and the odd beer-fuelled nightmare.

When I woke up the following morning, I could still taste cheap Polish lager and Rob Howley was on his second bag of jelly babies. All I could think was, ‘I can’t go to Auschwitz. I’d like to go to Auschwitz. Actually, that’s a lie. Auschwitz is not a place you ever want to go, but it’s somewhere I feel I should probably go.’ Whatever I was thinking, my immediate desire was to stay in bed for as long as possible. But realising that that probably wasn’t going to be an option, I dragged myself out and went in search of the only person more drunk than me the night before, Garth Chamberlain. Garth was the same age as me but even less experienced at drinking. In fact, before that trip, Garth had never touched a drop, so when the boys made him drink, it was like taking a wrecking ball to a temple. When I tracked him down, he was cowering in the shower, sobbing. Through bubbles of phlegm and snot, he explained that not only had he been made to drink 10 pints, he’d also drunk tap water, so was wrestling (not very well) with the twin demons of alcohol poisoning and dysentery. Apparently, when Garth’s room-mate found him crying and being sick, Garth had claimed he was dying and demanded an air ambulance be called. A few wise heads, by which I mean some senior players who were still quite drunk, comforted him by telling him that he wasn’t dying but now he had drunk the tap water he’d probably end up in a body bag. As you can imagine, this was music to Garth’s anxious ears. The details are hazy, although I do recall being very jealous, because Garth managed to dodge the trip. Bastard.

About 20 minutes later, I was wedged into a seat at the back of this rickety old shitbox of a coach with no aircon. And who sat next to me? Prop Craig Dowd, All Blacks legend and the only man more hungover than me. Craig was very much an old-school Kiwi – ‘do not speak until you’re spoken to’ – who already hated me because I’d chipped his tooth in my first-ever Wasps training session, when we went head-to-head in some wrestling. Picture it: hardened, humble Kiwi and gobshite English public schoolboy, all aboard the coach trip to Hell. How could we not end up as best friends? The reality was, while this coach was rattling along, bunny-hopping through potholes, bouncing my head off the window, all I could think was, ‘Do not spew on Craig Dowd … do not spew on Craig Dowd.’

I was on that coach for four hours. And it’s not like we were on our way to a water park, where we could pass out on a sunbed for the afternoon, we were on our way to a place where over a million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. Craig fell asleep after about 10 minutes, having drunk all the water, and I wasn’t able to move him for the rest of the journey. And his legs were spread so wide that by the time we arrived, I’d lost all feeling in my thighs.

I got off the coach and retched a couple of times, before being taken on a guided tour with the rest of the lads. Each room was more horrible than the last, and my head was spinning the whole time. ‘I can’t be sick here. Not at Auschwitz. Never at Auschwitz.’ That might have been the most taxing and depressing two hours of my life. I managed not to puke and finally located some bottled water that at least eased my Hitler-shaped horror of a hangover. But just as the world was starting to feel a little bit normal again, I had to endure another four hours of Craig Dowd’s extravagant manspreading. The chat was non-existent, the heat unbearable and the smell most foul. Take it from me, Craig Dowd is not a man you’d ever want to sit next to on the Tube, or any mode of transport for that matter. But even though the next few days’ training were an appalling slog, I’d done what I had to do to be accepted: worked hard, played hard and fulfilled my off-field commitments.

Boys out of the barracks

My first proper team social at Wasps – as in when I was a fully paid-up member of the first-team squad, aged 19 – was after we did the Premiership–Heineken Cup double in 2004. That was never going to be a quiet one, and rightly so. The theme was Hawaiian, so I turned up at the Mitre pub in Fulham in a Hawaiian shirt, a pair of flip-flops and some expensive Burberry jeans I’d got for Christmas (but not Burberry check – my fashion sense has been questioned down the years, but even I’d balk at wearing Burberry check jeans). If I remember rightly, and there’s a lot I don’t remember rightly about that evening, it was the first time I’d worn them. It was a beautiful early summer’s day in London, I could smell the barbecue from across the street, and when I walked in with my mate James Wellwood the kitty cash was already flying. Any man who has been in a similar situation with his mates will recognise that these are classic ingredients for chaos.

The second Fraser Waters clocked my outfit, he said to me, ‘Mate, that outfit is not Hawaiian.’ Fraser is so posh it hurts. In fact, he’s a big posh sod with plums in his mouth. But he was also an unbelievable rugby player, a top team-mate, tough as nails and an animal on the piss. And now he sounded properly affronted. I felt like a recruit being shouted at by a sergeant major during uniform inspection, but I decided to fight my corner.

‘Everyone looks like this in Honolulu,’ I finally replied, indignantly.

Big mistake. I’d provoked the mob.

‘Haskell, you wanker!’ said someone.

‘That’s not fucking Hawaiian!’ hissed another.

‘Cut his jeans off!’ shouted someone else.

With that, Martin Purdy and Simon Shaw, who I always suspected were gorillas in human suits, grabbed my arms. There is young man strength and there is ‘dad strength’. Dad strength doesn’t come from lifting weights in the gym, it naturally develops with age and from doing battle in thousands of rucks and mauls. And Simon Shaw had ultimate dad strength, which made resistance futile. Fraser pulled out a pair of scissors – from where, I do not know – and started hacking away at my very expensive and beloved jeans. Trevor Leota and Phil Greening were scrabbling about on the floor, putting their big sausage fingers into the holes Fraser was cutting and pulling furiously, and about 30 seconds later I was wearing a pair of denim hot pants, so short that they had even cut the pockets off and my boxer shorts were hanging out of the bottom.

Fraser then turned on Wellwood. It was like a scene from a 1970s slasher flick – the assailant, fresh from a kill, a crazed expression on his face, brandishing a pair of scissors. Five minutes later, Fraser had fashioned Wellwood’s brogues – handmade, Church’s, probably cost him (or more likely his mum and dad) about 500 quid a shoe – into a pair of flip-flops. But because Fraser wasn’t a shoemaker, especially after 10 pints of Stella, the flip-flops soon disintegrated. So to save him from walking about barefoot for the rest of the day, the lads gaffer-taped the strips of leather to his feet and calves, so that Wellwood now looked vaguely like a posh Hawaiian in calipers.

Unprovoked mob attacks aside, I soon realised that drinking could be a good laugh. Chatting shit in the sun, swapping funny stories, taking the piss. Back then, there was no pretence of organised fun. It was a simple case of herding everyone into the same space, drinking as much as possible, seeing what panned out and hoping no-one died. Before that day in the Mitre, Tom Rees hadn’t been much of a drinker either. But Phil Greening spotted him hiding in a corner nursing a Coke, marched over, shoved a pint into his chest and roared, ‘Drink this, Robot Nause!’ (Reesy was nicknamed Robot Nause or Robot Wars or Rees Bot, all because I told everyone that his dad and him built robots in their garage and once appeared on Robot Wars with a machine called Thunder Claw. All lies, of course, and I probably wouldn’t have made it up if I’d known how big my team-mates’ appetites were for morsels of nonsense that painted anyone in an unflattering light.)

‘Sorry, Phil, I can’t,’ replied Reesy. ‘England Under-21 training tomorrow.’

It was like that scene from the screwball comedy Old School. Remember Will Ferrell as Frank the Tank? Phil was looking at Reesy in utter disbelief, as if Reesy had just told him he was going shopping at Home Depot in the morning for wallpaper and flooring. Maybe Bed Bath & Beyond, but only if he had time.

‘Haskell, why is your mate Rees bot not drinking?’ said Phil eventually.

A brave man, and a good friend, might have told Phil to piss off and leave Reesy alone. Instead, I smirked and shrugged, and suddenly Reesy was surrounded by baying team-mates.

‘Robot Wars! We’re gonna hit you ’til you drink!’

All these lads started piling into him, hitting his legs, around the back of the head, in the gut. Have you ever seen the film Scum? Well, it was a bit like that. Except with a load of big posh blokes. I half expected Fraser to come flying in, swinging a sock full of billiard balls. But still Reesy resisted. He was curled into a ball, shouting and screaming about England training, until he realised that the only way to stop them hitting him was to agree to drink. And the second Reesy took his first sip he was Frank the Tank, a straight-shooter transformed into a beer monster: ‘Fill it up again! Fill it up again! Once it hits your lips, it’s so good!’ The last I saw of Reesy that day, he wasn’t running down the middle of the road naked, he was spewing in a urinal. And in case you were wondering, Reesy did make it to England camp the following day – and trained the bloody house down. They’d never seen him play so well. Maybe it was the guilt. Maybe lager just agreed with him. But he never stopped drinking.

The rest of that day is pretty hazy. I do recall Purdy playing the guitar, making up a song about team-mates to the tune of Damien Rice’s ‘Cannonball’ (a song that is still sung at Wasps today, with lyrics tailored for current players), and someone creeping up behind him and setting his linen shirt on fire. Typical Purdy, he just carried on playing while people were putting him out. I also recall Purdy (who got a double first from Cambridge and now makes furniture in France), who had one of those early fitness watches that told him his heart-rate, running on the spot in the middle of the dancefloor – a massive second row, with a bottle of lager in one hand, properly sprinting, knees up to his chest. He actually did that quite often, way more than anyone else would think was normal. If someone asked him what he was doing, he’d say, ‘What the fuck does it look like? I’m doing a fat burner,’ and he’d carry on running for another 20 minutes.

It’s difficult to say whether Lawrence Dallaglio was there that day or not. It’s quite likely that he swanned in at some point, although Lawrence always had something else on and didn’t like to mix with the rabble – or what I like to call ‘bin juice’. Bin juice are those players who, when they turn up to pre-season training, get issued with a bib and a tackle bag, act as cannon fodder for the first team, have a lot of awkward conversations with coaches about selection that never happens, get roped into all the community commitments but come into their own at team socials, get steaming and cause lots of drama. Don’t get me wrong, bin juice players are integral to any successful team, essential for the group’s energy and morale. Because if the bin juice goes off the boil, they’ll bring the house down from the inside. Not that I blamed Lawrence for his reluctance to wade into the bin juice nonsense. He was the skipper, after all, a Wasps legend, an England World Cup winner, a British and Irish Lion. He couldn’t be seen slumming it with bin juice, not when they were cutting off clothes, making people drink and setting people on fire.

After hours of drinking in the sun, we all decided to move the party to Purple, this horrific nightclub attached to Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground. As we were strolling down the Fulham Palace Road in the lazy early evening, surrounded by roaring football fans and families heading to dinner, Kenny Logan grabbed me from behind and Paul Volley gripped the bottom of my exposed boxer shorts and gave me a horrific wedgie, which led to my boxers being torn in half. Paul chucked the two tattered pieces of cloth into a bin and with that, him and Kenny took off down the Fulham Palace Road, crying tears of maniacal laughter. I was left standing there, like Alan Partridge and his tiny shorts with the perished inner lining, my boys firmly out of the barracks. What to do? Going home wasn’t an option. I’d never hear the last of it, and I lived in the butt fuck of nowhere. So I made the best of a bad situation, balanced one testicle precariously on the gusset of my denim hot pants and left the other one hanging. One out of two ain’t bad. Although I do sometimes think, ‘If camera phones had been around back then, I might never have played