Hawick Balls helped us slay Boks giants
ON the Friday night before a Scotland international, it is tradition after the team meeting prior to dinner that the captain gets a few moments alone with his players to share his thoughts. Daunted by the prospect ahead of captaining for the first time I went down to Hawick on our day off, on the Thursday, to see Mum and Dad who were on their weekly visit to see Nana – what better place to get some inspiration?
Our game against South Africa was in November 2010 after Papa (Bill McLaren) had passed away in the January of that year and I wanted to visit his gravestone before heading over to the shop where he used to buy Hawick Balls (sweets) as I wanted to get a couple of tins to for the boys at the hotel.
During his commentary days, whenever players and coaches used to come up to him, Papa reached into his pocket and pulled out a selection of sweets – normally Hawick Balls – and he’d say, ‘go on son, have one of those, it’ll give you an extra yard of pace’.
I used this as the content for my Friday night chat – “boys whether you have one of these sweets or not I want you to use Hawick Balls to plant a seed in your head to be a yard quicker than the South Africans in every facet of the game – if we aim for a yard but everyone only wins their personal battle by an inch, we’ll win the game”.
Even with this positive mindset, I remember lining up in the tunnel and looking across to the opposition captain, Victor Matfield, and seeing the behemoths around him and thinking, ‘Christ, we’ve got a long afternoon ahead of us against the world champions’. But we went out there and found a way to win getting over the line thanks to 21 points from the boot of Dan Parks.
It was a day made for Parksy – all about playing for territory. We didn’t have the same attacking prowess that the current squad has but we knew that if we played to our strengths and put
our strong pack in the right areas, we would stay in the fight, and that’s exactly what we did. A day I’ll never forget.
My first cap four years earlier in 2006 wasn’t so memorable, ten minutes off the bench against Australia with the game gone and I missed a routine tackle on Chris Latham that he scored from. It’s the games that I started or had proper influence in from the bench that really stick in my memory. One of those was the next time I played against the Wallabies, in 2009. I came off the bench quite early on, in horrendous conditions, and did a pretty good job. Matt Giteau missed a conversion and we won 9-8. It was a huge win for us at the time as we were under a fair bit of pressure.
My first World Cup in 2007 came early for me and I played only a bit-part but, in New Zealand in 2011, I captained in two games and came off the bench in another. We were tucked away down in Invercargill for the first eight days and we played Georgia and Romania in really horrible conditions; they must have thought us Scots would enjoy the weather in the most southerly point of New Zealand.
Our tournament hinged on the Pool game against Argentina in Wellington. The conditions were brutal, the wind swirled around the ‘Cake Tin’ stadium, and it’s one match whereby if Andy Robinson had his time again, he might have kept Ruaridh Jackson and me on for the whole 80 minutes rather than replace us at the 60-65-minute mark. Argentina scored with a few minutes to go and won 13-12 which left us needing to beat England in the final Pool game, and by a decent margin, to make the quarter-finals. Frustratingly, I wasn’t involved in that game after being dropped out of the 23 altogether.
To get to the top of the game, the building blocks have to be put in place first. From my perspective my first memories were charging around Goldenacre with my brother Gregor while my Dad (former Scotland international, Alan) was still playing, in the mid-80s. From there, we moved up to Dollar and I started playing in the minis section at Stirling County as well as the Dollar Academy school team – great days. By the time I was 15/16, I was being selected for representative stuff – Midlands Schools and Scotland U16s. My final two years at school were some of the best days of my career playing 1st XV rugby at Dollar Academy and Scottish Schools.
During my time at Edinburgh University, I played for four years at Heriot’s RFC, a club with a rich heritage. Then, the Monday after I finished my final exam at University, I started my professional career with Edinburgh. Though I had sampled the pro environment in spells during my University days becoming a full-time professional was a steep learning curve! I loved my three years with Edinburgh, but with Mike Blair and the experienced Graeme Burns there, I didn’t get the game time I felt I needed to develop.
In 2006 Gloucester took a bit of a punt signing me on a two-year deal. It was a huge opportunity as they were a club really going places. Pete Richards was starting scrum-half at the time and England’s number one, so we had a good old tussle and I managed to get myself into the first team before Christmas.
The squad was littered with young exciting players like Ryan Lamb, Olly Morgan, James Simpson-Daniel, James Forrester and Anthony Allen, and had a bruising front row including French duo Patrice Collazo and Olly Azam. Alex Brown never missed a game in the second row; Pete Buxton was our ‘glue man’ and someone you could always rely on; Luke Narraway and Jim Hamilton were big characters and if you cut Andy Hazell, he’d bleed cherry and white.
It was a brilliant group to be involved in and, in my first two seasons, we topped the Premiership only to be stung by the play-off system on both occasions. The year after, playing in the opening round of the Heineken Cup, we played arguably the best 25 minutes of rugby I was involved in during my career, scoring four tries playing into the wind against Ulster at Ravenhill. From there we went on to make the quarterfinal against Munster, but they turned us over in an arm wrestle at Kingsholm.
Moving to Gloucester definitely enhanced my Scotland claims because I learned a lot in a different environment and played my best rugby in the six seasons I had there. Dean Ryan’s game plan was all about movement and playing from ruck to ruck at pace, a style that really suited me. Having a former Scotland scrum-half Bryan Redpath as a mentor and coach was also of huge value in developing my skill set and game understanding. I played just over 150 games for the Cherry & Whites and will always be a big fan of the club. We won an LV Cup and had some great days, but it is a shame we weren’t able to get one of the big trophies.
I was gutted with the way my Gloucester career ended. In the February of 2012 I tore my adductor off the bone, and I missed the final third of the season. It was a bad time to be coming off contract while also being injured as there was a lot of politics with a change of management and ownership. Sadly, I didn’t get the chance to play for Gloucester again although I did get back to Kingsholm that summer to play for the Barbarians against Ireland which was pretty special.
After a period of uncertainty Newcastle came in for me and I signed on the understanding that, although they were languishing in the relegation zone they couldn’t go down as Championship winners London Welsh didn’t have the infrastructure to be promoted. All the High Court stuff then unravelled, Falcons were relegated, and I finished my career by helping them win promotion back up to the Premiership. In the final game of that season, with a year to run on my contract, I injured my wrist against Bedford and the specialist said I was one injury away from a wrist replacement – my time was up.