Talk of the Toony: The Autobiography of Gregor Townsend. Gregor Townsend
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exhibition of sevens rugby from the South Sea Islanders. The annual sevens season in the Borders is the region’s rugby heartbeat, and the five spring tournaments are still an established part of Borders life. The abbreviated form of the game was the brainchild of Ned Haig, a butcher from Melrose, where the first ever sevens tournament took place in 1883. Melrose Sevens today draws crowds of up to 15,000 and it was a pity and a mistake that the SRU did not give the town the right to host the Scotland leg of the IRB Sevens circuit.
The 1991/92 season – my first full season with Gala – was delayed because of the Rugby World Cup. This coincided with my first weeks at Edinburgh University where I’d enrolled to study history and politics. The season started well as we got our revenge on Stirling, winning 31–9. I made a break that led to a try and featured Kenny Logan falling for an outrageous dummy that was shown on the BBC’s Rugby Special as part of their intro for the next few years, much to Kenny’s irritation. Gala were undefeated going into December as we prepared for the biggest game of the season, at home to Melrose. This was one of two matches in a month that got me a reputation for being brilliant one minute, lousy the next.
It was a bitterly cold day and the pitch was barely playable from an overnight frost. This hadn’t deterred 5,000 supporters turning up at Netherdale. Melrose made a dream start to the contest, galloping away to a 28–3 lead after only twenty minutes. Apart from a try from their hooker Steve Scott, the other three Melrose scores all came from mistakes by yours truly. I learned some harsh lessons as a bout of nervousness led to two fumbles and a loose pass. A paralysing feeling had enveloped me but I came back to score a cracking try late in the first half. We lost 28–16 and, although I was devastated by the start I had made, I knew that once I had recovered my composure I had played really well. James Joyce once remarked that mistakes are the portals of discovery – I discovered that day that temperament is a key factor in achieving sporting success.
I thought that the Melrose game might have dampened down the expectations that had been building up around my play, but less than two weeks later and after only three months of senior rugby, I was selected to play for Scotland ‘B’ against Ireland. At eighteen years old, I was set to become the youngest ever B cap. I spent a week giving press interviews and being photographed for the Scottish papers. I remember one dodgy photo I had to have taken with my dad, which for some strange reason involved us both cleaning my golf clubs.
An article appeared in the Daily Telegraph that had the headline ‘Scot set to rival Barry John’. It quoted John Jeffrey as saying I was Scotland’s ‘outstanding hope for the future’. The Telegraph had even managed to get in touch with Barry John himself: ‘I have only seen him on video and heard rumours. Although I wouldn’t want to burden the boy with unnecessary expectations, there is clearly no limit to what he might achieve.’ While flattering, I found it daft and I believed that it was both a reflection of the state of the game (which at the time was dominated by kicking) as well as a lack of rugby stories since the end of the World Cup.
It was nice to hear illustrious people say such things, but all I wanted to do was play and improve – expectations weren’t in my control. There’s a quote from Henry Ford that you can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do. I wanted to be judged on how I was performing in the present, not on whatever potential I had. All I could do was remind people that I hadn’t done anything to justify this talk, remind them of my mistakes; and together with the media I helped build up my image of being ‘prone to errors’. The irony is that I spent the last few years of my career trying to tell them I wasn’t prone to errors after all.
For the B international we stayed in Edinburgh’s opulent Balmoral Hotel, which was in a different world to the room I had been given that year in the university halls of residence in the same city. My room was G1 – something I wouldn’t forget in a hurry. G1 meant the first room on the ground floor, situated next to the main entrance of the halls. This frequently meant I’d get a restless sleep as drunken students arrived back at various times through the night talking loudly or singing. This wasn’t as bad, though, as the times I would hear a knock on my window, followed by the request, ‘Could you open the main door? Sorry, I’ve forgotten my key.’ It drove me mad. I lapped up the luxury of the Balmoral and felt that this was a much better way to prepare for a game.
A few of the Scotland team were congregating in the hotel lobby as I wandered about after dinner.
‘Toony, you want to come for a walk along Princes Street with us? It’s a tradition the night before a big match, and it’ll help you sleep later.’
One of the others suppressed a laugh at this, but I couldn’t see what the joke was. I agreed to join them for a leisurely walk. We were a group of around half-a-dozen, all from the Borders, which was comforting to me – not just the fact that I knew the other players, but in that I presumed that Borders rugby guys would know how to best prepare for a match.
After making it to the end of Princes Street we skirted by the Castle on our way to the Grassmarket. Up ahead, my Gala team-mate Gary Isaac shouted back to me, ‘We’re stopping at the next pub for a drink, before we turn back to the hotel. It’s just a lemonade – you coming with us?’
‘Of course’, I replied.
I didn’t want to walk back on my own and everyone else seemed keen to get into the pub, in fact they seemed to start walking more quickly than before.
We had walked up a hill at the end of the Grassmarket into darker territory. We stopped and were now facing three pubs, all of which did not look the most salubrious of establishments. What I later realized was that we had been drawn into Edinburgh’s ersatz red-light district – affectionately known by locals as the ‘pubic triangle’. This had not happened by coincidence. Within seconds of entering the bar, most of my teammates were seated next to the stage where a stripper was well into her routine.
Like any hormonal teenager finding himself surrounded by half-naked women, I was initially in a state of shock. I tried my best to relax, and after ten minutes it’s fair to say my mind was no longer on the fact that I was making my debut for Scotland B the following day. Just then the door to the bar swung open and in walked the three members of the Scotland management team. We had been busted and thoughts were running through my head that we’d be sent back to our clubs for a lack of professionalism. However, it turned out that the Scotland management had arrived not on a search and rescue mission, but clearly with more personal agendas. We quickly made our excuses and left, although we couldn’t shout to one of our team-mates at the other end of the bar. We left him stranded, beer in one hand, stripper in the other. Curiously, neither players nor management ever mentioned the incident again.
The next day I played a game that was almost the reverse of my performance for Gala against Melrose. On this occasion, I played some of my best rugby to date for the first sixty minutes. I don’t think I had ever kicked as long and as accurately, and my half-back partnership with Andy Nicol was going very well. However, just after the hour mark I committed an absolute howler, which saw the Irish take the lead for the first time.
From a scrum near the halfway line I called a pretty standard backline move called ‘Dummy rangi, rangi’. This may sound like something that is shouted at a toddler’s birthday party, but all it involved was that I ran across the field with my inside-centre dummying the outside centre before I finally gave the ball to the full-back on a scissors pass. However, for whatever reason, full-back Mark Appleson stayed out wide as I took off on my lateral run. In attempting to show him that he was supposed to be running towards me, I stuck out the ball in one hand. Irish centre Martin Ridge didn’t need a second invitation and stole the ball from my fingertips to run in unopposed from fifty yards. In hindsight, this was not my wisest career move to date. Just to rub salt in the wound, I dropped a ball close to my goal-line near the end of the game – another mistake which resulted in an Irish try. We lost the match 29–19.
Press cuttings now began to appear with words like ‘mercurial’ and ‘enigmatic’ used to describe my game. These were to stay with me for the rest of my career. After the disappointments of the Irish match I had the chance to bounce back immediately as I was selected at stand-off in the National Trial for the Reds (possibles) against the Blues (probables). We blitzed the shadow