Bill Beaumont: The Autobiography. Bill Beaumont

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was quite a hefty thumping but England were hardly front-runners in the Five Nations during that particular era. There was a lot of chopping and changing and Mike wasn’t the only one-cap wonder by any means.

      Richard was travelling reserve that day in Paris – they didn’t have replacements at that time and you were only there in case someone was taken ill before the game – and that’s as close as he got to a cap. That was a pity because he certainly deserved one – the old Sale warhorse taught me a great deal. He was limited in ability and not the purest of line-out jumpers but you couldn’t fault him for commitment. He was the fittest bloke I had ever encountered and was a massive influence on my career. At that time he was working as a sales representative and he would get up at 5 a.m. every day in order to get all his calls done by 2 p.m. so that he could devote the rest of the day to his punishing training routine. He could literally run all day and was ultra-competitive. The lads at Sale tell how, after he had retired and taken up coaching, he would race against them, claiming he had beaten them all, despite his age. On investigation, you discovered that he only won the last of a series of 50 sprints, by which time the players were hardly capable of standing, let around galloping 100 metres!

      In 1972, just three days after the aforementioned victory over the All Blacks by the North West, I made my county debut alongside Richard because Mike Leadbetter had taken a knock in that game. Richard made more than 100 appearances for Lancashire and he soon handed out advice that ensured I didn’t get ideas above my station. In his gruff, forthright way, he told me, ‘Don’t try anything fancy. No sidestepping or selling dummies or trying to drop a goal – just stick your head up the prop’s backside, shove like a lunatic and contest every blasted line-out no matter where the ball is meant to be thrown. We’ve plenty of prima donnas in the backs to provide the tricks as long as we provide the ball. Just remember you are a donkey, and behave like one.’ As a young man who was already awe-stricken at finding himself in company with players like Fran Cotton and Tony Neary, not to mention ‘Tricks’, I nodded my head vigorously in accord. I certainly wasn’t prepared to try debating my role with him. The game was against Cumberland and Westmorland, now rebranded Cumbria, and I soon realised just how fit Richard was when I saw the speed with which he arrived at the breakdown ahead of me. I fared all right at the line-out but the pace of the game was a new experience and one and that made me determined to put in even more work on my fitness. Fortunately, I enjoyed training and even turned a corner of the factory into a gymnasium so that I could work out during my lunch break.

      I wasn’t picked again during that campaign but I was selected for the following season’s opener at Durham and found myself sharing a room with Richard. It seemed that I still had a lot to learn from this iron-willed man with an equally iron constitution. It was freezing cold but off went the central heating and the windows were flung wide open. Stuffy hotel rooms were not to his liking so I shivered and didn’t argue – I was still in awe of the man. Then there were the mealtimes. I enjoy a good trough as much as the next man, but I have never seen anyone eat quite like Richard. He gorged his way through a mammoth meal in the Royal County Hotel, dragged me off to a back-street pub for a few pints and then, while watching the midnight movie, demolished an enormous plate of sandwiches in the room while I tried to sleep. The following morning he was full of beans, metaphorically speaking, and dragged me, bleary-eyed, down to the restaurant for the sort of breakfast that would have rugby’s modern-day nutritionists slashing their wrists in anguish. He walked it off by frogmarching me up the hill to the cathedral, apparently some sort of ritual for him and one that I continued in the following years. The walk seemed to have the desired effect because not only did it help him to walk off breakfast, it also gave him an appetite for lunch!

      In the Lancashire camp they tell the story of how Richard and Fran Cotton attempted a monster meal the evening before once again taking on Durham. As coach John Burgess wasn’t due to arrive until the day of the game because of business commitments in Russia, there wasn’t the same control over what the players ate. Normally it was a set meal but the players this time were allowed to tackle the à la carte menu instead and both Richard and Fran had ordered so much food that their meals could only be accommodated on two large platters – each – and the unbelieving waiters actually carried the platters around the room so that other diners could see what was about to be attempted. I wasn’t there but I’m told Fran retired hurt while Richard sent clean platters back to the kitchen. If Burgess had known about it then their overworked guts would have been had for garters.

      John Burgess was not a man to fool with. When I first made the Lancashire squad I was petrified of him. He was a bit of a control freak but I had the greatest admiration and respect for him. In many ways he was ahead of his time because his organisational skills were second to none and he really thought about his rugby at a time when sides tended to go through well-tried motions. Before every Lancashire game he would provide each player with a dossier on the opposition and he had newspaper cuttings of all their previous matches. Goodness knows how he found the time to do it all and run a major engineering company at the same time.

      He knew exactly what everyone had to do in every corner of the field and nobody in the Lancashire camp argued with him, not even the top players. A great motivator, he also had tremendous pride in his county and country, although his experience of coaching England wasn’t a happy one. I suppose that when he reached that level he probably needed more than motivation, organisation and set-piece plays. Sadly, there were those in the England camp who regarded him as someone from a different planet.

      I’m certain that he was far more comfortable with players such as Cotton and Neary, who thought the world of him, as indeed I did. He more or less transformed northern rugby after it had slipped into something of a backwater. We weren’t a force in the land by any means but Burgess changed that, in no small part due to his honesty, which invariably shone through. As a player the last thing you want to hear is that you haven’t played well but he would certainly let you know if he thought you had had a bad game, and it didn’t matter if you were a many-times-capped international either. He was a massive influence on all our playing careers and I don’t think many of us would have achieved what we did without him. I for one owe him a great debt of gratitude.

      I played for the county throughout the 1973–74 championship campaign but injured my Achilles’ tendon and had to withdraw for the final against Gloucestershire – a game we lost and that sparked a sequence of three successive title wins for the West Country side. Battles with Gloucestershire were always pretty memorable because both counties took the championship very seriously and, in some respects, it is sad that this particular element has gone out of rugby. When I played it was imperative that you figured in a successful county side because that was the best route to an international cap, considering the strength, or rather weakness, of club rugby in the north.

      Injury kept me sidelined for three months but there was something to look forward to. Lancashire were due to tour Zimbabwe (Rhodesia as it was then) and South Africa in the summer and I was fairly confident of being included in the squad. I had succeeded in forcing out Mike Leadbetter and there was no serious challenger so far as I could see, so I assumed that I would be renewing my second row partnership with Richard Trickey. I had yet to meet a player who later proved capable of challenging the very best – Maurice Colclough. He was a complete stranger then but was destined to become my partner in an England Grand-Slam-winning team and on a British Lions tour. Maurice, a big, redheaded student from Liverpool University, was poised to have a memorable tour but for all the wrong reasons. That he enjoyed a drink was never in dispute and he would have made his Lancashire debut earlier but for the fact that he had to withdraw because of a judicial appearance he had to make in Dublin. In his youthful exuberance he had apparently stripped off in order to swim across the River Liffey and I can only assume that this didn’t go down too well with the local gardaí. Maurice was picked to play in Lancashire’s second tour game in Bulawayo but after a heavy night of carousing he was not really in the best state to sally forth into battle. He tried to fortify himself with a glucose drink, but whilst that provided the propulsion for a wonderful break out of defence it obviously wasn’t too easy to digest because he threw up spectacularly the minute he hit the deck after being tackled. СКАЧАТЬ