Martin Johnson

No.

Because you know, Martin Johnson, he's obsessed now.

One of the other great second rows.

Really?

This is a true story.

There's a story of Martin Johnson and that Martin Johnson, the players would go to Jono, so led the 2003 team to win the World Cup.

There's a story that goes that the players would go and say, you know, John, I was trying too hard.

Training too hard.

yeah

full of old school, Martin Johnson's, Graham Roundtree's, Darren Garfield, sorry for those that don't know their rugby, but they were my schoolboy heroes.

And you fall into that environment and you don't feel like you can stick your head above the parapet to challenge any of the thinking of your old public schoolboy.

You get your head down or you get filled in and you get into training.

debut, watching the documentary, it struck me that your debut, I hadn't quite pieced it together timeline-wise because I'm incredibly young, but it was 1996.

Which is really interesting that your career, long career, very successful career, spanned lots of different eras of rugby, therefore, because you did it for so long.

But actually, that was a really, you mentioned the old, the old boys who were there, you know, Martin Johnson and Roundtree and all those people, all those guys.

That's a different era of rugby.

We got to see that.

Lawrence Delaglio and Martin Johnson and stuff.

And it was great to work alongside them.

You know, they were ranked number one in the world and they went on to go and prove why they were at that time.

They had a lot of players who had been around for a while, who were able to get others to get better, make others better, drag people through.

I mean, you look back at Martin Johnson, but you've got Corey, you've got all the players that were around him at that time.

And you've got that same sort of potential feel here.

Of course, it won't come to fruition unless they can actually win something.

And they'd stopped listening to him.

And, I mean, at that time you had Cor, Bloody Hell, you had Delalio, you had Dawson, you had Johnson.

All three of them wanted to sort of have it out with a referee and stuff like that.

And when I got on the pitch and we had a dominant scrum for the majority of the game, but the referee just started... about 10 minutes, 15 minutes prior to me coming on, taking a dislike to our scrummaging.

I've got to say that now.

They had one with, it was, oh, the comedian, tall, tall comedian.

And he was with Martin Johnson, Jack Whitehill.

That was it.

And then you add that to, to the magician sitting up, or the madman in whichever way you wanna look at him, up, up in the stands sending all the messages on, and you, you marry that together and there's a lot of great ideas.

In 2003, England had Clive Woodward in charge, and Martin Johnson often says, you know, "Woody would come down with 10 great ideas.

The players would say eight of them are rubbish, and they'd keep two of them." And it's about, you know, sorting out the great ideas from the completely bonkers ones.

And we've seen a couple of bonkers ones from Rassie, but you know, it's ma- it, it makes it fun, doesn't it, but, 'cause you know e- eventually you'll get the right ones.

a

half time came around he was like screaming on the physio bed and I'm like going shit I'm going to have to go on here and I genuinely thought I was a competition winner I was like I'm in this squad with Martin Johnson Laurence Delio Jason Leonard all of these absolute legends of the game and I'm going I feel so out of place And I didn't get on actually in that game.

I got capped, like I say, against Romania in that game that was sandwiched in between them.

But at that stage, of course, you just keep going and you deal with it in the best possible way.

arguably especially that we know how short rugby careers can be for some people but all the way through to the top level of just getting drafted straight into the England side that must have been crazy and giving you a lot of lessons what do you reckon was the most challenging part about it all of course you mentioned you were thrown into the deep end with being pushed straight into the spotlight straight away from your side of things what was the the deepest difficulty you went through

I'd probably say there are two noticeable ones.

The first one was obviously Martin Johnson was the captain.

I remember sitting in a meeting room and we would have gone through his spiel about what was going to happen during the week and how we were going to play the game and stuff.

So sit back and relax and enjoy this People Performance Podcast.

So welcome to the People Performance Podcast with me, Martin Johnson.

And me, Leon McQuaid.

Leon, how long has it been?

And this is where Andy's Man Club changed because back in the day when it was just real and raw, we'd sit and talk about books, wouldn't we? We used to have Reverend Tony Cotson, the LFC chaplain in there, yourself.

But we started having a bit of a problem where...

Not every club has the benefit of having a Martin Johnson in the room.

Not every club has the benefit of having Reverend Tony Cotson.