That seemed to be such a sensible point of view. It was great to be offered the chance to play alongside some of my childhood heroes, and in matches, week in week out, against the best players in the country. That’s what I wanted to be doing. I would be insane not to give it a go, and Mum was right, I could always come back if I didn’t like it.
So I accepted their offer of a chance to play for the club and was delighted to hear that they had also organised a job for me on a local farm with Ben Pullen, a huge Gloucester fan who owned a farm nearby. There was a flat that came with the place in the team and the job on the farm, and a car too. It seemed perfect for me. I’d be doing the things I enjoyed doing but at a much higher level, so that’s why I made the journey to Gloucester to start my new life that summer.
It’s hard to say, looking back, why it was that I hated it so much when I first arrived, but I think it was the feeling of isolation and the horrible unfamiliarity of it all. I’d sit there, desperately miserable, wondering why on earth I had moved. When you come from a small village, and particularly, I guess, when you are from a farming background, you take some time to adjust to life in a relatively big town. Phil Greening’s parents were fantastic to me throughout this time. I thought about quitting and going home so many times, but they persuaded me to stay and told me that things would get better.
The trouble was, things didn’t seem to get better. There were lots of times, and I mean lots of times, when I couldn’t stand it any more and drove back down the M5 in the direction of Cornwall. I’d get home and Mum would have to talk me into going back to Gloucester, and she’d run through with me the many, many reasons why I should stay there. I know that was extremely difficult for her to do, because she would very much have liked me to stay in Cornwall on the farm, but she knew that the best thing for me would be to go back to Gloucester and give it a good shot. So time and again I would get into my car and drive back, only to get there and wish I was back in Cornwall. It was an extremely difficult time.
It was all the little things that I found difficult. For example, at home on the farm, I’d never had to go shopping at Sainsbury’s or anywhere like that. I didn’t buy food or go to the bank. I didn’t have to buy any household things or think about bills or making sure there was food in the kitchen. All those things that other people took for granted were completely alien to me. And coupled with the loneliness I was feeling, and a great sense of homesickness, it made life very difficult.
Then, there was the club. I’ll be honest, initially I didn’t feel very welcome there. The guys at Gloucester weren’t used to new players just turning up, and they didn’t take to me at all. Guys didn’t speak to you at Gloucester. It was very different from Redruth where I was right at the top of the tree and knew lots of people. Gloucester was very insular and an outsider coming in to Gloucester was unheard of. Back then, players didn’t move to new clubs like they do now, and most of the guys there were Gloucester through and through - born and bred in the place. They didn’t like some young whippersnapper coming in and taking up the coach’s time and potentially taking a valuable place in the team. They were resistant to change and wanted everything to stay as it was.
For a year and a half at Gloucester I was under the radar. I think when I first moved to the club I was fifth-choice prop because there were so many props around. Because I wasn’t one of the leading players, I was expected to act as gopher to the rest of the players during that first year. As the young lad in the set-up I was expected to be the carrier … making cups of tea, carrying bags, rushing around after the other players. Anything that needed doing, I did it. It was a rung culture. You had to work your way up and earn people’s respect before inching your way up the ladder.
I was working on the farm as well as playing at the club, because the sport was amateur in the early summer of 1995 (or ‘shamateur’, as it became known… they couldn’t pay you to play because the sport was, officially, amateur, so they would fix you up with a job, a flat and provide you with a car that was usually given to the club from a friendly local garage eager to support them). But it wasn’t to stay amateur for much longer, and in August that year, when I had just arrived at Gloucester and was struggling to cope in my new environment, the sport was thrown into chaos by the decision in Paris to turn rugby from an amateur into a professional game. There had been a great deal of debate about whether the sport should remain amateur or turn professional, and many players had expressed strong feelings that the sport needed to become professional in order to develop, but despite the fact that the debates had been going on for years it still took us all by surprise when the announcement came through that rugby was to become a professional game.
The response at Gloucester was swift, as they appointed Mike Coley as the Club’s first chief executive. The appointment of Richard Hill as director of rugby followed a month later as everyone involved in rugby set about trying to work out what being a professional sport really involved. Did it mean that we should train all day every day? Or just carry on doing the same training we had been doing? It was all very unclear. The confusion about what professionalism meant to the players was compounded by the fact that a moratorium year was imposed, meaning that we couldn’t be paid by clubs for the first year of professionalism. None of us had a clue what was going on.
I must admit that the whole idea of rugby being professional confused me. I didn’t associate playing rugby with work. I was in it for a love of the sport. When I’d stood there in Pontypridd, listening to the national anthem belting out while wearing an England U16 rugby shirt for the first time, proud beyond measure, it didn’t occur to me that someone should be paying me. I’d been moved beyond words by the experience, and judged it to be bigger and more precious to me than any money that anyone could ever pay me. Rugby was about commitment, fearlessness and playing alongside men who you trusted and admired. It wasn’t about salaries.
What I didn’t realise at the time, and could never have realised, was that rugby turning professional would have the most astonishing impact upon my career. It couldn’t have been better timed. There are lots of things that determine how your life will develop, lots of little things that happen along life’s path that turn out to have huge consequences. This was one of them. I was extremely lucky to have joined a club like Gloucester at just the moment when the sport became professional, because what happened was that the whole focus of rugby changed and it became a time for sweeping out the old and bringing in the new. The players at Gloucester who’d hung onto their places and would keep their spots in the team regardless of how hard they trained or how often they turned up for fitness sessions, were cast aside.
It was a pivotal moment for rugby as it looked forward to a bright, shiny, commercial future. And for a 19-year-old who was feeling frustrated and fed up and in need of a big break, it was definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time.
The turning point for me and Gloucester, and the moment when I started to enjoy playing rugby rather than disliking everything about my new life, was when I realised, truly realised, what a big deal rugby was for the locals, and what a huge passion people had for the sport in the area. I think when I first got there I had my head down and was training and working hard, trying to cope in an alien environment which I didn’t think suited me, but when I lifted my head, looked around and saw that the town was full of rugby nuts who really wanted the team to win, I started to come round a bit and to think that this might actually be a good place to play rugby.
Gloucester is a relatively small town, despite my initial view that it was a big city, and it comes alive on match days. Rugby is a big part of people’s lives and supporters know the names of the players, and understand the sport inside out and back to front. They can debate all the finer
