Six Nations: Botched Italian job left Budge Pountney a broken man

He might come up at some point, but ideally not when the game is on. Italy does not hold great memories for the Scotland flanker. His role these days is as a swimming instructor for the Hampshire franchise of Water Babies, spending several hours a day teaching children from newborns to four-year-olds how to keep afloat.

How Robinson might wish for a bit of Pountney buoyancy where he is. But he at least has his sympathy.

“No, no, don’t ask me about Italy,” he says, when we finally get around to talking rugby. “Can we talk about something else?” He laughs, but it is not his usual bubbly version; more a nervous one that reveals deep scars.

“To be honest, if there was one game in my whole rugby career that I could erase, the first match against Italy at the start of the Six Nations in 2000 would be the one. Definitely. Horrendous.

“There was so much fanfare around the first-ever Six Nations match and Italy were loving it, being part of the whole thing, which should have been great. But you could just feel us as a team starting to get nervous. Nobody would say anything about it, but you could feel it.

“I have no idea why. We had finished the last championship as champions for God’s sake, and then we’d had a difficult World Cup, but reached the quarter-finals and lost an emotional occasion to New Zealand [Pountney scored his first Test try against the All Blacks].

“But in Rome that day things got tight, and as we got further into the game I remember thinking ‘s**t, this isn’t right; we could lose the first game of the Six Nations to the Italians’.

“I don’t think we under-estimated them, and that’s not meant to sound arrogant, but they were not up to Six Nations speed at that stage. They were very physical, got away with a few things, but that’s the game, and they worked hard buoyed by a passionate, excited crowd. And that was it. Diego Dominguez – kick, kick, kick, kick ... we faltered. They won. And I broke my nose, so it was painful game mentally and physically.

“And every time I went back to Northampton from Scotland games that season, the boys were playing the theme tune from ‘The Italian Job’; every bloody week. Until the last game of course, when we had nothing to lose and beat England.

“Unfortunately, though, nothing takes away the memory of Italy, and I was injured when we returned there in 2002 and so never did make up for that. Did we have to talk about that?”

We have now, and it provides a timely reminder of the difficulties posed by Italy on their own soil, the Azzurri having taken great delight from launching a new era for Italian rugby at the start of the 21st Century by beating the reigning Five Nations Champions.

For Pountney it was a sobering wake-up call to the realities of playing for Scotland. He had been a key part of the Northampton team that won the Heineken Cup only a week before, a Saints side that featured other exile Scots in Craig Moir, Mattie Stewart and Don Mackinnon, and was captained by Pat Lam, who would go on to coach the Scottish forwards before returning to New Zealand and reviving the Blues.

Born and bred in Winchester, Pountney was persuaded to tie his colours to the Scottish mast by Ian McGeechan, his coach at Franklins Gardens in the late 1990s, who discovered the strong and skilful flanker to have a grandmother from the Channel Islands, which, under the elastic international rules of the time, permitted children and grandchildren to choose which of the four home nations to represent.

Pountney had flickered on the England Richter scale, but had been passed over as too small for a Test back row at ‘just’ six feet and around 14 and a half stones. For McGeechan he was the perfect size, however, for the kind of nose-to-the-floor openside who stopped opponents playing and provided a swift linking player in attack.

Those were different days and one still cannot gloss over the irony of Pountney’s new rugby sideline, acting as an RFU citing officer. It is not lost on him. It may not suit the RFU, but Pountney was only an obvious candidate on account of there being fewer players in the game who know what to look for in the uglier side to rugby than Pountney. When he played, he was usually in the thick of it. “It’s very different now – players don’t have time to think about it, let alone try something,” he said. “They are a lot more savvy than we used to be because they know they are being watched a lot more. Yeah, there was a lot of it going on when I played, but back then the clubs could cite, so it would be tit-for-tat, whereas now we have citing officers like me!

“It is still there, because that’s rugby. It’s about the rough and tumble isn’t it? That’s why a lot of us play it. You are on the edge; it’s physical, you give out as much as you take, and that’s part of the deal and part of the fun. It’s only when it transgresses beyond a few knocks to someone getting seriously injured that you have to step back a bit.

“I played by the sword and lived by the sword. I got beaten up and gave a bit out. I was never looking for cheap shots, but I believed that rucking was rucking and if you were on the wrong side, well … Sometimes I was stuck to the ball a bit too much and I’d look at the video and think ‘ooh, I should have moved there’, but you take the punishment for the team.

“Ex-players are never whiter than white. We all transgressed the rules, did things outside the laws of the game, but if you didn’t complain that was alright. The ones who gave it out and then complained – they were the annoying little buggers. Usually scrum-halves, but then we had a couple who were tough as old boots – Bryan Redpath and Gary Armstrong – and they actually quite enjoyed it. That’s Scots for you!”

Pountney is pleased to point out that he was only once shown the red card in his career, and he thought it was harsh, but coming the week before he was due to lead Scotland for the first time, the memory of it brings a shiver. “I thought that was me – the captaincy gone before I’d got it, and maybe even Scotland,” he says.

“It was three minutes into a game the weekend before against Leinster at Donnybrook. Eric Miller came over the top of a ruck and just lay on the ball, and my knee accidentally caught him on the head [sure it did], and referee Joel Judge saw it clear as day and I thought ‘oh oh, here comes a yellow’.

“When he pulled the red out I was surprised to say the least, but as I sat for the rest of the game in the stand watching – we had already lost to Biarritz, Edinburgh and Leinster at home – my thoughts turned to the Scotland game with the USA.

“I’d been asked by Geech to be captain, and it was an amazing feeling to think I would lead the team out at Murrayfield, with the US, Australia and Samoa to come, and then the Six Nations. But we had the small matter of a disciplinary tribunal in Dublin that night, and I thought I’d get a few weeks. I remember going into it and there was this big Ulster man chairing it. I mentioned to him that my wife was from Belfast too, and he asked me what school she went to. I told him and he said his kids went there too, ‘what a funny coincidence’.

“And then it was ‘well, I think the red card was punishment enough son, you’ll be fine for next week’. Brilliant!”

Pountney went on to lead the Scots to victories over the USA and Samoa, the flanker joining Chris Paterson, John Leslie (2) and Gregor Townsend (2) in scoring tries, and Townsend claiming a 33-point haul.

The Hampshire lad cannot overplay how much he loved playing for Scotland, and wears a broad smile as he recalls the highlights. He had his low points too. He lost a testicle to a succession of injuries to the ‘crown jewels’ which threatened his ability to have children, but eight-year-old Naeve and Jed, nearly three, are great testament to the wonders of modern medicine, and belief.

His suffered a series of injuries to his hands, shoulder, back and knees, before his career ended on a sad note when he quit the international game disillusioned with what he felt was an unprofessional atmosphere at the SRU, a drive on the pitch under McGeechan and Jim Telfer to keep pace with the fast-improving pros of England, France and the southern hemisphere constantly undermined, in his belief, by actions of SRU committees.

He caused a furore when he walked out of the training camp and revealed the depth of his frustrations with the SRU in The Scotsman just before he was due to lead Scotland in the 2003 Six Nations, and after helping Scotland to a first autumn whitewash with wins over Romania, South Africa and Fiji. He says he wishes that that had never happened. The troubles he faced, that is, not what he said.

“It was amazing to play for Scotland and to captain the team was such a special experience that it’s impossible to put it into words. It is one of the greatest honours, perhaps the greatest, you can be asked to do. I see it on the captains’ faces now, the pride they feel, and being given that honour even once is just amazing. Your parents are as proud as they could be, your wife or girlfriend is incredibly proud of you and it is a great memory to have.

“I do wish it ended differently, but I still stand by my decision. I made it for the right reasons, at least in my head. If you’d asked me a couple of weeks after the decision, I’d still have said I loved playing for Scotland, but I just didn’t like the crap behind the scenes that I felt stopped the team achieving what it was capable of and maybe if I hadn’t been captain, and didn’t feel the responsibility I did for standing up for the guys, it might have been different.

“I think, looking back, that it was perhaps the contrast between professional rugby on the field, which was moving at a very fast pace, and the game being stuck in the amateur era still behind the scenes and the SRU not being able, or willing, to keep up.

“I really felt for the lads. They were a great bunch of boys and we had a great team ethic, a great laugh and got on really well, which is sometimes difficult when lots of different cultures come together. You always have a few dust-ups here and there, but that team really worked hard for each other, for that Five Nations Championship in ’99 and put everything into playing and trying to win for Scotland.”

With time the darker memories have faded and the brighter, shining ones come to the fore. He says he has enjoyed the chat because it has brought it all back, and he admits he is as passionate now watching the TV screen when Scotland play, shouting the team on.

“It’s been another tough championship hasn’t it? It’s hard watching, but that’s us; that’s Scotland, and now we’ve got another Rome weekend where we have to pull it out of the bag.

“The difference this year is that in 2000, we actually deserved bugger all because we didn’t play well in any of the games until we met England at the end, whereas the boys this year have actually played well in a lot of the games, and the stats back that up with the line-breaks, the passes, the threat in attack which is growing, so there doesn’t appear to be a lack of confidence.

“They haven’t been able to keep the momentum going when they make breaks, and that just needs heads-up rugby, getting the ball away, two passes, and breaking line again. But international rugby is so quick that it’s harder now to see the opportunities – you’re almost playing on instinct, which is not easy for young guys coming in, even if they are very good.

“The Italians have played some good, physical and nice rugby at times this year, which they haven’t always done, but the key for me, for our guys, is that they can’t go into this worrying about the history of the tournament, the records, the run of defeats, the wooden spoon and whitewash and all that kind of stuff. They need to see this is a single, one-off game and just play it, and I’m confident they will beat the Italians.

“They are scoring tries now so that’s not an issue, and they can’t look back. It’s about what’s in front. OK, it’s not what they had hoped for and I know what that feels like, but if I was in the dressing room today I’d be saying: ‘Do it now. Forget about what’s gone before, what chances you thought you had or should have had, and let’s start from here. Play consistently and concentrate for 80 minutes and we will win’.”

As for the pressure, particularly on the coaches as they seek to end that six-game losing run, he said: “I think this squad is capable of a lot more than they have produced this year and the players and coaches will know it’s there, so they have to keep that belief.

“The forwards have competed well this year, and played some really good rugby, but the backs have just played in patches and sat back a little at times and that is maybe down to some different players coming in.

“We always get excited before the Six Nations and think the team is going to be right on the mettle, and here’s another season where it’s fallen down. But all too often these days coaches have a bad run and they are suddenly chopped, and the players are left to start again, their confidence shattered, and get to grips with a new coach. As I understand it, Robinson has the confidence of the players, so the SRU have to stick with the guy whatever happens this weekend. He understands the Scottish game now, the people, the players, so give him a bit more time and see where he takes it.

“Geech and Jim were amazing coaches but we didn’t always win. They were given time to make sure the players could learn, adapt and play, and they claimed the big championships.”

Checking the timetable for the next swimming lesson, Pountney added: “Look, I think we can all see improvement. There are some real fantastic players who are quite young; Stuart Hogg still a teenager, Lee Jones just coming into pro rugby.

“I think Scottish rugby is on the up, and so you need people to get behind them, keep the expectations high and push them to take Scotland onto a new level, and go for it; just go for it. Don’t look back.

“Too often in Scotland people hit a default of complaining about a lack of success, or expecting failure even. There have been signs of a good time for Scotland coming, but I’d agree that they could do with making it more obvious in that horrible place this weekend.”