SCOTLAND last won at Twickenham in 1983, around the time the Jonny Gray and Ross Ford disciplinary case began. If they defy the odds this afternoon, hopefully it’s not Alasdair Strokosch who’s tasked with leading the celebrations.
The seconds after Greig Laidlaw knocked over the winning penalty against the Wallabies in 2012 may stick in the collective memory longer than the actual kick, never mind the 80 minutes of sodden grind that went before.
Laidlaw is swept up by Ross Rennie, who’d held the ball still in the Newcastle gale for the Jedburgh man to strike. Chris Cusiter, Richie Gray, and Matt Scott join the embrace, and then come Strokosch and Joe Ansbro. Approaching the huddle from either side, they pile on top with sickening synchronicity. Strokosch, who’s already discarded his scrum cap, dunts Ansbro to the left of his forehead and sends him crashing to the turf. He’s still laughing at this stage, but Nick De Luca wanders over and says: “Mate, I can see your skull.”
“All I was thinking was, ‘my wife’s going to kill me’,” Ansbro smiles. “Your face changes every week in rugby, but this wasn’t even during a game. We went back to the dressing room, and James [Robson, the Scotland team doctor] was straight into action. All you could see was white — my skull. To make matters worse, my sister-in-law was working out there as an equine vet, specialising in eye surgery, and she’s banging on the door saying ‘can I stitch him up?’. I was thinking, ‘please, God no’.”
The reality wasn’t much better. Ninety minutes he lay there, shivering in his soaking kit, as two Australian doctors applied 48 stitches to the wound. “Two internal layers of 15, then 18 on the outside. They kept saying they were doing too good a job, given that we’d just beaten them, and James is there reminding me I’d ruined his celebrations. Mine weren’t exactly great either.”
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Such was the strength of the anaesthetic, Ansbro couldn’t feel his forehead for five months afterwards. He missed the following week’s win over Fiji, then had the dubious pleasure of returning in the tour finale. “Just what you want when you’ve got 48 stitches in your head: Samoa.” Ansbro scored as Scotland won 17-16, but it was to be the last of his 11 caps.
Two months later, August 2012, he was preparing for the new season at London Irish with a friendly away to Munster. A nothing occasion with a devastating outcome. Ansbro went in for a tackle on Casey Laulala, Munster’s quick-stepping centre; the sort of thing he did 12, 15 times a game as a thoroughly brave midfielder. It was to be the last act of his rugby career.
“In my mind it was a free shot. He was going to catch the ball and I was going to tackle him as he caught it. Off I went, charging into him, head down, engaged, ready to make a big tackle. He’s moved last-second and I’ve ended up going head-first into his hip. I lost consciousness momentarily, then woke up in a lot of pain. It wasn’t ‘I don’t feel anything’; it was the complete opposite. It felt like my face was on fire. I couldn’t stay still. The medics were trying to hold me down, but I was in so much pain. As I went to get up, I felt something move and immediately put myself back down. The rest is what it is.”
From an early stage, it was clear that Ansbro had avoided paralysis, but a triple fracture of the C1 vertebra at the top of his spine was hardly cause for jubilation. For three months, he had to wear a metal “halo”, a frame that keeps the neck secure by dint of four screws going into the skull. He couldn’t sleep lying down, which gave him plenty of time to scare the kids in his own childhood town, Gatehouse of Fleet in Dumfriesshire.
“I looked a bit like Frankenstein,” he laughs. “I’ve actually kept it [the halo]. It’s in my room, and I’ve put it back together. It was hard to do without a body, but I’ve always been good at Lego. At Christmas, we use it to string the lights along.”
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Ansbro considers himself lucky. Having read Matt Hampson’s book on his hospital bed, he’s all too aware of how it could have gone. He tried to return, but very quickly it became apparent that neither body nor mind were having it.
“I talked a good game initially, but with a spinal injury, it’s always going to be tough psychologically, especially the way I play,” he says. “That blatant disregard for self-preservation; I had a faith in that system, I enjoyed it.
“But all of a sudden I was second-guessing. Even now I’m not sure I would go into a game of full-contact. Even just a pub game. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was at much higher risk of having a similar injury. No-one signs up to the game to break their neck, but you always know it could happen. When it did happen, I had to be honest with myself. The chances of it happening again had gone up. That was decision enough for me.”
He misses it, of course he does, but the sense of what might have been works both ways. “I’ve always felt I dodged a bullet,” he says. Life doesn’t look too bad these days, as he stares out over the rolling greens of Harrow School, where he’s now putting his first-class honours degree in natural sciences from Cambridge to good use as a biology teacher. Following in the footsteps of Roger Uttley, formerly head of physical education at the school, he’s also doing some coaching.
“It’s full-on but it’s fun,” he says. “Even when I was trying to come back from the injury, I knew there was more to life, and between the SRU, London Irish, the RPA [Rugby Players’ Association] and my family and friends, it’s been as smooth a landing as I could have had.”
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Every so often, his pupils ask about that night in New South Wales, and look quizzically at his forehead to see if there’s any evidence. Much to their disappointment, the answer is an emphatic no. “The footage will pop up on a rugby feed and they’re like ‘Sir, have you seen this?’. I say to them, ‘I don’t have to, I was there’.”
He was there and then he was gone, but Ansbro is a man for the here and now, and it seems to be treating him just fine.