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- The Observer,
- Sunday May 27 2001
There are days in the office and there are days in the office. A good day might be wiping the floor with Wales in Cardiff, the launching pad for an international season that will culminate in your appointment as captain of the Lions on a tour to Australia and that will flavour your senses with all the exotica that go with such an adventure: The Gabba in Brisbane, the Colonial Stadium, Melbourne and the Olympic Stadium in Sydney. A bad day might be surrendering to more mundane public duty. Saying yes, for example, to a series of promotional interviews at Adidas HQ, Pepper Road, Stockport. The subject: your playing shirt. For the record, it's a red Climalite number complete with granddad collar, grip panels and pockets that dry your hands on contact in one of those spin-off-from-the-space-programme sort of ways. Oh, and with a gaudy purple and green NTL logo splashed across your chest.
The dutiful Lions captain appeared from one-on-one interview number two for a break. He stood on his own for a moment, in a grey T-shirt, blue track-suit trousers and filling a great deal of space between floor and ceiling. Even with a beef and pickle sandwich in his mouth Martin Johnson has presence. Your man is not small: 6ft 6in of upright, broad leanness, 19st of coiled traction power.
He also has the best frown in the business, a glower that has found a natural habitat under the great shelf of his eyebrows. In his previous incarnation as a banker for the Midland, I suspect that when he said that regrettably, Mr Jones, your application for an extension to your existing overdraft facility has been accepted but at a price, nobody stayed around long to argue the case against usury.
He saw me and I think he glowered. He hadn't finished his beef-and-pickle triangle. But this is a player who still does a bit of PR for the HSBC and you can't take the good manners out of a banker, however red the balance of interest. He raised a large paw.
'How's the body?' I asked, conscious of the fact that we were now in May at the end of the longest season on record and that, at club level with Leicester, he had just trumped their triumph in the Zurich Championship final with the thrilling Heineken Cup success in Paris. Now, with the Lions, comes a 10-match tour to the home of the world champions.
'No, no, it's fine,' he said. He then paused and you wondered if this was as good as it was going to get. He hardly has a reputation for verbosity. But he was just stopping to cough slightly on a few crumbs.
'D'you know,' he continued, 'I'm pretty fresh, really. Leicester had the Premiership sewn up so early that there was the chance of a rest then. Then I had a slight injury. Another rest. Then England didn't play against Ireland. And even before all that, I was suspended.'
Ah yes, the suspension for multiple sins against Saracens, the worst of which broke Duncan McRae's ribs. Blimey, I hadn't even shaken his hand yet and we were on to the delicate subject of his disciplinary record.
'So, er, you'd recommend suspension then ... for the sake of freshness?' I tried. This time he did frown. 'It's only happened once.' But he also looked slightly hurt. 'Look, you know what it's like out there.'
I tell you, I was so flattered I clean forgot to mention that the first part wasn't strictly true. He had also been suspended for one Twickenham Test against South Africa in the autumn of 1997 because in the previous Test against the All Blacks at Old Trafford he'd punched Justin Marshall.
But that was that, really. At that moment we were stopped by the PR usherettes who introduced us and watched as this time we did shake hands. We went from the sandwich anteroom into the interview room and did the question-answer thing.
I won't go into what he said in detail, except to say he just came over as a good, decent rugby bloke. He leant back and talked about Leicester. He is fiercely attached to his club. And about England. He is totally committed to his country's elite group and determined to do the right thing, even if that means taking an unlikely stance as revolutionary strike-leader. It was a question of principle, of sticking to what had been agreed. No hysterics - just a leader trying to make sure that a professional structure would be there for the protection of the current England side and of teams to come. He did mention one thing. I was asking him about the time between the Pretoria and Bloemfontein Tests in South Africa last summer when England switched from cautious and hapless to brave and fluid in the space of a week. To the outside world it seemed the moment when the scales fell from their eyes, and that since then they simply haven't looked back. 'I don't know. I can't be precise about any time. It was just a result of work and work and work in training.'
But didn't it suddenly feel different out there in Bloemfontein?
'Look, we're out there in the second Test. It's another match against the Springboks and it's really, really hard. The only thought going through your mind is to suck in your next breath. It's so knackering at that level. You're struggling to do your own job, but you know that everyone around you is going through exactly the same thing. It's so tough out there, just to get an edge over the opposition, never mind work on some great change in the way England play. If something special happened in those 80 minutes it was because of the hours and hours we'd put in on the training field.'
This takes us back to the discipline issue. He is quite right. You live on the edge of exhaustion at the cusp of legality in the company of large, large humans all operating at the limits of adrenal output. Clouts are given and taken. It's not what Martin Johnson, the sober banker would recommend to the schoolboy opening a penny account, but it is the reality of playing on the High Veld of South Africa or against New South Wales Country XV in Coffs Harbour.
Our time was up. The Lions captain had one more interview to do, over the phone. He stepped out for another breather. 'Do you think you can keep this going for long?' I asked thinking more of the promotional day than life in general. 'I may wake up and call it a day in August. Who knows? I can't say. I feel good at the moment. Maybe I'll play on for half-a-dozen years until I'm 37. I don't mind the idea of playing down the grades. I remember the time I went to King Country in New Zealand. I was 20 and we'd lose to Auckland B by 50 points. I stayed an extra season out there, just to play somewhere different while I could. I knew what it might be like once I came home to Leicester, and that was six years before the game went professional.'
He was ushered back to the interview room. I'd forgotten my promotional guide to the Climalite shirt, so popped back in. The Lions captain was holding the phone. He was trying his best to laugh but was definitely frowning. 'No, that's all right, I don't mind talking about it, but I've only been suspended once, you know.'
