Interview: Duncan Hodge, former Scotland rugby player

One thing that has long fascinated me about sport is the period leading up to kick-off. I want to know how the participants mentally prepare, who can’t stop talking and who stays silent, who’s charging at the walls and who’s stuck on the loo, who’s the joker and who’s the smoker (although presumably the latter breed has all but died). And when does this period begin, exactly? Ten o’clock in the morning, a full five hours before the first whistle sounds? “Try six o’clock,” laughs Duncan Hodge.

Oh yes he can laugh now, Scotland’s rugby hero of the 2000 Calcutta Cup, because his playing days are over. Now it’s his job to coach his successors at stand-off in the fine art of kicking, pass on all his experience and try to ensure they don’t get too angsty. But he wasn’t laughing at the time.

“Obviously as a stand-off you had to know everything about the opposition and how, as far as possible, the game was likely to pan out.

I did and I prided myself on that,” says the 27-times-capped Hodge when we meet up in a third-floor Murrayfield suite. “So I didn’t have to be talking about the match on the Saturday but invariably I was. And that was my downfall ... well, not that exactly, but from six in the morning I’d start obsessing about the game, playing it over and over in my head a million times.

“I got incredibly nervous in the build-up to matches, to the extent I’d knacker myself before they’d started. I’ll never forget my first game for Leeds. We were playing Bath on a beautiful afternoon in front of a full house. But in the warm-up I was absolutely shattered. My legs were like lead. The nervous energy I’d expended had just exhausted me.”

And you thought rugby players were all super-confident types on account of their brawn, clubbability and excellent schooling! It’s fascinating to meet one who’s a bit different, more fallible, definitely human. Hodge, 37, took some persuading to talk, joking that an entire set of forwards plus subs must have been unavailable for interview before I’d had to resort to him. But he proves to be open and honest in assessing his career in the game he loves, one that has driven him to distraction.

“Sometimes a few of us ex-stand-offs will get together and discuss the peculiarities of the job,” he says. For Hodge it’s a position like no other. Only the scrum-half touches the ball more, but the stand-off’s touches can be more crucial and, hopefully, incendiary. “I often ask myself: ‘If I had my time again, would I come back as a stand-off. Part of me loved the pressure, but the other part, well ... ”

It’s a nice image, the one of retired stand-offs gathering round a log fire to nurse beers and reflect on life as a ten, all the complexities and all the drama. And it’s amusing to think that in an earlier life Duncan Hodge might have been a jester in a medieval court who, tiring of the fat king’s ceaseless ridicule, decided: “Stuff this. I’m going to return as an international-class, game-changing rugby man-of-action sometime, oh around the end of the 20th century.” Amusing for us, perhaps, but not for him. It should be said, though, that Hodge still managed to assemble a fine body of work as a rugby player. “The nerves usually went as soon as the game started,” he says. And while there were times when he felt worn out before kick-off, there were others when he was still pinging 40-yard drop goals in the final minute.

This happened 13 years ago, enabling Edinburgh to snatch a 38-38 draw with Ulster in the Heineken Cup. “That’s a scoreline which TV and the sponsors would love to see repeated on Saturday,” says Hodge, who’ll be in Dublin hoping for an Edinburgh triumph. “The current personnel will know each other very well. If you look at Ulster they’re very strong up front with a very aggressive defence. One of Edinburgh’s strengths has been their attacking rugby; they love to keep the ball moving.” Something’s got to give, then, and it could be another classic.

“The thing about that game in ’99 was ... ” Then Hodge laughs. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve got a terrible memory, as my wife would be only too happy to confirm.” He’s not, you will have guessed, the type to glory in his rugby exploits on the after-dinner circuit. He claims not to have re-watched his proudest day, the 19-13 victory over England in the Murrayfield monsoon when he scored all our points, and thinks his copy at home is on old-fangled VHS. “So you won’t own a Slambuster T-shirt,” I say, “not even one since cut up and used as rags.” He professes ignorance regarding the opportunistic next-day marketing spin-off with his face prominent as the man who stopped England’s Grand Slam.

It seems reasonable to ask Hodge if he loved playing rugby, really loved it. “Yes, I did, but I loved all sports when I started out: golf, tennis, squash and I was an absolutely mad-keen cricketer. I don’t know if at a certain point I was a better cricketer than a rugby player but cricket was definitely a game where I was more in control. There are times as a stand-off where you’re simply not in control.” He played under-19s cricket for Scotland before having to choose between the sports and going with rugby, but says that opening the batting for his country would have been “the dream”.

In rugby, as for most, there were highs and lows. The highs often had, as the final flourish, a Hodge drop-goal to win, such as Scotland A’s defeat of virtually the first-choice South Africa in 1994 and Edinburgh Reivers beating European Cup champs Northampton in 2000. The lows included more than his share of bad injuries. We’ll return to the highest of the highs in a bit, but the lowest of the lows was definitely the broken leg he suffered in the first game of the last-ever Five Nations, a championship Scotland went on to win in glorious style.

The cynically hard-hearted will have regarded the injury as fortuitous. As soon as Hodge departed the scene, Gregor Townsend was moved to stand-off and Scotland were transformed. With the latter orchestrating one display of buccaneering back play followed by another, culminating in five first-half tries in the Stade de France. Typical of him, Hodge is pretty hard on himself when recalling the events of 1999.

“The injury happened as I sprinted to try and make amends for a kick that missed touch so, really, I got what I deserved. It was incredibly tough having to watch the rest of that tournament. The chance to win something with Scotland doesn’t come along very often and of course I was extremely proud of the guys but I was jealous, too.”

In those days, Hodge was portrayed as the dependable, somewhat conservative option at stand-off while Townsend was Mr Flair. Accepting this debate contained some over-simplification, did he mind being cast in the less glamorous role? “Not at all. I must have sat on the Scotland bench for Gregor about 30 times, never getting on, but he was a great player and remains a good friend. If you ever saw me play for Watsonians you might have thought I had some flair, but Gregor was more successful at taking his flair to the next level, the international one. So would Scotland have still won in ’99 had I not got injured? You’d be hard-pressed to say I could have done what Gregor did, scoring a try in every game. That was fantastic.”

The next level; it’s still a Scottish problem. Like everyone involved, Hodge expected the international team to do better in the last Six Nations and is “gutted” they didn’t. “There’s no hiding from what happened. We can talk about fine margins but, speaking to the players, it’s obvious that international level is a lot different to the pro level as it exists for Edinburgh and Glasgow. Some of the mistakes and things that hurt Scotland just aren’t being experienced by our guys week in, week out. That’s why Edinburgh getting to the Heineken semis, after Glasgow had done well a couple of seasons back, is brilliant.” He still believes there’s another fine Scotland team just about to be born, and speaks with some authority about the talent coming through in his old position. “Duncan Weir, Harry Leonard, Matthew Scott and Stuart Hogg are lads I’ve known since they were 17 and it’s very rewarding to see them develop.”

He sincerely hopes their careers won’t be afflicted by the bouts of nervousness he suffered a good few hours before pulling on the dark blue shirt. “I remember my first cap, coming on late in the Parc des Princes in 1997 with the game already gone. But I’d thought I was going to have to replace Craig Chalmers within the first 15 minutes and I was like [wobbles chin]: ‘Oh my goodness!’

“I struggled to eat on the morning of a match and everything had to be taken in liquid form.” He couldn’t stomach defeats either. “When we lost I took it incredibly hard. In the 2002 defeat by England I’d played badly. I didn’t want to be at the post-match dinner, didn’t want to speak to my girlfriend at the time. No one knew what to say to me; I was absolutely gutted. There were other defeats where I did want to talk, right away, analyse what had gone wrong to death. Other guys didn’t, and that frustrated me. It’s only later, when you’re a bit more mature, that you realise everyone’s different, that just because others move on quicker from a defeat, it doesn’t mean they don’t care.”

Hodge succeeded in completely conquering his demons to become far more chilled-out when the Leeds coaching staff were quick to detect his nervousness and refer him to a psychologist. “He asked me: ‘Why do you get so nervous?’ I said I thought I needed to think about the game, over and over, and he just told me to do something else: walk the dog, watch a film, vacuum the house.” You imagine Hodge being able to eat lunch off the carpets after he was done with them, so did he wish he’d found the cure earlier? “Of course, but the thing I’ve most got to be grateful for is not meeting my wife, Zoe, until this really nervous guy had almost vanished. Her dad, Wallace McMaster, played for Ireland so she understands the rugby mind. Even so, I wouldn’t have wanted her to encounter the old me!”

Does Hodge sound like a freak? I don’t think so. He obviously cared deeply about playing for Scotland, if a little too deeply for his own good, and being a grumpy loser is nothing to be ashamed about. And of course there were times, when still saddled with his issues, that he managed to play an absolute blinder.

How often does a grateful nation bring up 2000 and those 19 points? “Oh, I get that a lot.” A good thing, I say. “Well, it’s not ideal for someone like me. Zoe and I were at a dinner party recently and another of the guests, a rugby-daft fellow I’d never met before, produced his smart-phone during the meal to play Bill McLaren’s commentary on my try.”

Presumably his poor memory can just about muster up an image of that moment. “Yes, and I can still see Gordon McIlwham, Jason [White] and Budge [Poutney], their faces lighting up while I’m wondering if the ref is going to award it after the ball had squirted away in all that surface water. Simon Shaw and [Iain] Balshaw are in the picture too. Looking like doom.”

That was the first time the Calcutta Cup was played on a Sunday, which curbed the post-match formalities but didn’t stop Hodge carrying on the celebrations at a notable rugby watering-hole, Montpeliers in Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield. “I was there with my mum and the rest of the family. A bottle of champagne was plonked onto our table. Three times that happened and I didn’t know any of the people who’d bought it for us. That was a big moment for me. I think as sportsmen we can sometimes get too wrapped up in our game so that it cocoons us from reality. Well, it does for some of us, anyway. But that night really hit home to me what it meant to play for my country, and to help us win.”

So, he didn’t give an answer earlier: if reincarnation was available, would it be at stand-off? Hodge laughs. “I’m still trying to work that one out.” Rest assured, though, this is a casual inquiry. He’s no longer tormenting himself.