Jason Leonard interview

Regrets? Apart from that still painful loss to Australia in the 1991 World Cup, none worth talking about. Sure, the team that eventually won the World Cup in 2003 was adept at losing Grand Slam deciders, but they’re not regrets, they are part of the story that ended triumphantly on that glorious evening in Sydney.

“The setbacks, the failures, they make you stronger and better. It would be a dull life if everything went your way, if every match was won. If that had happened to me, I’d have ended up half the person I ended up.”

Teams are always weakened by the loss of experienced warriors and how could England not be affected by the ageing and retirements of Martin Johnson, Neil Back and Leonard. Johnson for just being Johnson, Back for his addiction to relentless preparation and Leonard for his east London wisdom, for he grew up in Barking where he learnt about life at 10 and went on to major in street cred.

Who now pulls the young debutant to one side and talks about the secret to surviving that first experience of international rugby? You know that Leonard did it, you sense how he said it: “Hold on, the thing to remember is you only have to think of your own game. Most probably you imagine you should do something special on your debut — you don’t. When I started with England, Peter Winterbottom pulled me to one side and said, ‘Just concentrate on your job, we’ll take care of everything else’.”

Who gives them that advice now? How do you replicate what he had learnt from playing campaign after campaign, year after year? “Don’t let it bother you,” he would say to the younger guy wound up by something the coach had said. “Look, Clive is Clive. That’s the way he is. Just get on with it.” Leonard could offer this advice because he had learnt to roll with the punches.

In his first experience of the French at Twickenham in 1991, he scrummed down against the player who had been an idol of his late teenage years. Pascal Ondarts was the best loosehead of that era and in the very first scrum, he punched Leonard smack on the nose.

Boy from Barking challenged, Boy from Barking retaliates — but not foolishly. In the privacy of the second scrum, Leonard smacked his opponent on the nose. “It was really quite funny. After the ball was cleared, we stood up and saw that each of us had a bloody nose. A look passed between us and there wasn’t a problem for the rest of the game.

“After the game he came to me; he spoke little English, I spoke little French and he said, ‘You get me back’. I nodded and he said, ‘Yes, I respect that’ and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, what am I dealing with here?’ Great player, Ondarts.

“Then in my last club game, I came on as a replacement for Harlequins in the Parker Pen Shield final against Montferrand. There were three minutes to go, we were losing and for some bizarre reason, one of the French players wanted to punch my head off.

“He got red-carded and from the penalty we set up the move that led to a try that won the game. You couldn’t call that experience, just the luck to have the head that this Frenchman wanted to punch. After 14 years with the club, it was a nice way to bow out.”

After rugby, he wasn’t short of things to do. He started working life as a carpenter and when rugby ended, he fancied a return to the construction industry. He is one of six directors in Laboursite Group Ltd, a company that provides services and logistics to the leading players in the construction industry.

Smiling, he says that’s his “honest job”, but rugby remains more than a passing industry. He is “an ambassador” for both the Royal Bank of Scotland, sponsor of the Six Nations, and Royal SunAlliance and, of course, there are the corporate dinners and seminars. All of it is taken in his easy stride, for it helps to keep the wolf from his home at St Margarets, near Twickenham.

“It has always surprised me that people are willing to pay to come along and hear me eat. But you must get the balance right; what’s the point if you agree to so many dinners that you’re actually away from your family as much as you were when you were playing?” Doing business or talking rugby — and often the lines are blurred — he is a natural. For all that he is the most capped Englishman of all time, still the most capped player in world rugby (if you include his five Lions caps); he has never tired of the game, nor has he lost his appreciation for the fame that it has brought. “I still get a kick out of people coming up to me and saying, ‘I just want to shake your hand?’ or ‘Can you sign this?’ Then there is the guy who says, ‘You must really have the hump with all of this?’ I say, ‘No, if someone is courageous enough to ask me, I’m not going to say no. The only thing I don’t like signing is a cheque’. You see it makes me feel good to sign things for people.”

So you ask if Andy Robinson should pick Lawrence Dallaglio and he is away, offering the kind of straightforward advice that verges on indisputable. “If he’s playing well it would be folly if they don’t bring him back. Lawrence is a world-class player, not that dissimilar to Martin Corry, they are both leaders of men. If they’re both playing well, I can’t see why both wouldn’t be in the side, one of them at No 6, and I can’t see any reason to shift Martin as captain.”

The word is that Robinson is not keen to bring back Dallaglio? “Andy is a forward-thinking guy, he looks at the people coming through, those who are going to bring something new to England, so you can understand why he doesn’t want to go back. But one other thing Andy is and that’s honest. He was as a player and he is as a coach. If Lawrence is playing well, he will have him in the frame.”

Last season England lost narrowly to Wales, France and Ireland in the Six Nations. “Lawrence is a character, very emotional about playing for England, and his passion was missed last year. Perhaps his experience would have tipped the scales our way.”

Apart from the restoration of Dallaglio, Leonard believes Robinson must use this Six Nations as a testing ground for next year’s World Cup. For him, the England coach has been too reluctant to try out new players in matches that matter. “We are only talking about one or two, selected at the right moment and for the right game. I was very disappointed by the way Mathew Tait was used, put in against Wales at the Millennium stadium and then left out for the game at Twickenham when he would have had the home crowd urging him on.

“Unless we start blooding players, we will end up going to the World Cup with players that we’re not sure of. Yes, you want to win every game but you must also plan for the World Cup. The other thing Andy has to do is find a way of improving our back play. Apart from a period in 2000, England’s back play has not been good enough and we’re back to that situation where we have to dominate up front to win the big games.”

THOUGH Leonard is by nature affable and agreeable, he is not without an edge. He has never bought into the perception of Sir Clive Woodward, the messiah responsible for England’s World Cup victory in 2003. He recently told a story, confirmed by Dallaglio, that Woodward told some senior players the reason he dropped Jonny Wilkinson for the 1999 World Cup quarter-final against South Africa was because he dreamt the fly-half lost England the World Cup.

Leonard needs to explain this. “When England won the World Cup, it created an unbelievable buzz in the country. Keith Wood said to me, ‘Jase, I have never supported England in anything, ever. But for that one day, I wanted you guys to win. I put aside 800 years of hatred on the day of the World Cup final’. The Welsh lads, even some of the Scots, wanted us to beat Australia, and in the euphoria it seemed it was all down to Clive.

“He put the processes in place, he got the finances, hired the coaches, and I don’t think we could have done it without him. But after the final, I was reading about this man who had it all. Well, actually, he wasn’t the best man-manager I worked under, that was Geoff Cooke. He wasn’t the best coach, that was Ian McGeechan. He wasn’t the best forwards coach, that was Dick Best.

“Clive was good, but he wasn’t that good. After the final it was Clive this and Clive that and the one person who didn’t receive the plaudits he deserved was Martin Johnson. But after the Lions tour, I think people have a better grip on things. Martin was responsible for a lot of the good things that happened in that England set-up.”

Woodward rang Leonard after the “Wilkinson dream” story appeared in print and wondered what he had done wrong, to which the answer was “nothing” but that Leonard had been asked for an example of the coach’s eccentricity and came up with the obvious example. Woodward has since publicly stated that it is untrue to say he dropped Wilkinson because of a bad dream.

What did you think when you saw the denial? “What I usually think in relation to Clive. He probably believes he never told us this, maybe he doesn’t remember it. Well, me and Lawrence remember it, I’m sure a couple of the other players can remember it as well. It was the same when Clive told a room-ful of journalists in 1997, ‘Judge me on the World Cup’ and then after the World Cup said, ‘I never said that’.

“But you tolerated that kind of stuff because it was Clive being Clive. It probably just slipped his mind. I wasn’t having a dig at the guy, I was just explaining how eccentric he could be. On the other hand, I don’t think we could have got into the position we were without Clive’s involvement. He changed the culture for England’s players; got us into first-class hotels, made sure we travelled first-class and was brilliant at putting the processes in place.

And maybe his greatest quality was that when the captain or another senior player stood up and said, ‘That's not right’, Clive listened and was open to persuasion. It was a good atmosphere where everyone felt they could contribute.”

PERHAPS Leonard’s dispassionate take on Woodward comes from having been around so long and seen so much. He talks about the team of 1991, especially the forwards, and wonders aloud how they compare with the pack of 2003. It is a question he wants to answer himself: “If you transported the ’91 pack to 2003, I think Deano (No 8 Dean Richards) is the only one who might struggle to adapt. On the other hand, if you took the 2003 pack back in time, I don’t think anyone but Martin Johnson would get into the 1991 side.”

He makes this case in the easy, matter-of-fact way that is his style. For 20 years he played rugby, mostly at the highest level. Now he works out three times a week, mostly to allow him to eat what he likes, and he settles for talking rugby. Some would see that as a poor trade. Not Leonard, though, an old soldier still much in love with the rugby life.