Rugby: Healy Prepares for a Noisy Departure

Austin Healey has every right never to speak to yours truly, who landed him in a whole heap of trouble during and after the Lions tour of 2001. He was ordered by disciplinary tribunal to pay...

‘Do you know,’ Healey interrupts - he can butt in even on an intro - ‘the biggest bollocking I ever got from Clive [Woodward] was over a diary. No, not ours, but one I did way back, in the build-up to an international. I wrote that the nickname of Dave Alred, our kicking coach, was "Devil’s Head". Clive said nicknames should never be revealed. He banned me from doing another one.’
So, what about 2001? ‘Clive wasn’t coach of the Lions, was he?’

As I was about to say, as he prepares, at the age of 32, to make his utterly unconventional exit from rugby, it strikes me that Austin Healey neither lingers on regret nor wastes time on grudges - despite appearances to the contrary.

After the recent, bitter encounter in the Heineken Cup between Neath-Swansea Ospreys and Leicester, the game in which Gavin Henson elbowed Alejandro Moreno in the face and earned himself a seven-week ban, Healey’s new outlet for his musings - he now has a column with the Daily Mirror after two Lions’ tours with The Observer - rang him up to see what he thought of the incident.

The gist of the reply was: ‘Next time Henson plays against us, we’ll have him.’

‘Are you sure you want us to print that?’ checked the Mirror. ‘Print away,’ said Healey breezily. The paper did so and their columnist was ‘severely reprimand’ by his club.

We are talking about this latest scrape with authority at the Tigers’ training ground. Healey was having his photo taken, puffing vapor into the air, reluctant to put his hand on a metal rail, so cold was the weather.

‘What happened,’ he says, ‘was the Mirror rang me five hours into the lads’ Christmas session. We were on vodka-beer turbo-shandies, plus some stuff they were spiking them with... So, yes, Henson had to have it.’

Had he been severely reprimanded by the club? ‘No, they said it was about time somebody told the truth.’

The trouble is that what Austin truly thinks about Henson is much more akin to admiration than vengefulness. One reason - another is the march of time, and not even Healey can talk his way out of that - why he is making plans to leave rugby is that the game grows ever more thinly populated by people who challenge systems and methods, by players prepared to take risks.

‘I’m falling out of love with rugby,’ he says over a fajita lunch back in the clubhouse. ‘No, it’s not that. I want to get out before I start to fall out of love with the game I’ve been playing since I was five.’

He is not going without having a testimonial year, without making himself available for Leicester on a part-time basis once the first month of next season is out of the way. But this is the beginning of the end of the age of Healey, and it appears he is not going with many regrets.

‘I don’t want to resent the game, but there’s too much self-protection around now. Especially among coaches and management. The players are not allowed to do this in such and such an area of the field, not allowed to question what to do over there. Not allowed to ask questions, full stop. The good thing about players like Gavin Henson is that they insist on asking questions, of trying things that are out of the ordinary.’

This is not a swipe at the entire game. Healey has a list of coaches who have bucked the trend: Woodward and Brian Ashton, two who coached him during his 51-cap career with England; Dean Richards and Pat Howard, former and current coaches at Leicester; and Shaun Edwards, the assistant coach at Wasps.

‘They spot things other coaches don’t see. They don’t automatically go for the big bloke ahead of the small one. They appreciate skill. They’ll encourage players to do something to win a game rather than drum it into teams not to do anything that might lose the game.’

If these were the mould-breakers, were there others who had made a less favourable impression? ‘With [former Leicester coach] Bob Dwyer, it wasn’t so much a question of what he wanted his players to do, but just how he treated us. Maybe he thought because I was so chippy I didn’t need a pat on the back sometimes, but he was always running me down. If I asked how he thought things were going, he’d say, "OK, mate, but I reckon Kardooni [Aadel, scrum-half at Leicester in the late 1980s to early ‘90s] is doing it better than you." Sometimes you’ve got to build people’s confidence.’

This is a bit surprising from Healey and takes a few fajitas to get through. It is almost as if it is his thought of the day: why I’m quitting the game that stinks.

Only Healey could claim to be out of love with his game at precisely the moment when he is surprising everyone with the quality of his play, playing a full part in Leicester’s progression to the Heineken Cup quarter-finals. He’s back near his impish best, so authoritative and responsible at scrum-half, so energetic and daring when coming off the bench to play on the wing.

He’s a romantic old soul, really, with a sort of built-in gauge of when it’s time to change tack. He is taking his thoughts on weariness with rugby down a slightly different path, suggesting that the state of the club game in England is sending Howard [Leicester coach] home to Australia, and that he, Austin, is currently playing his best stuff for quite some time precisely because he has stopped worrying about worrying, when he suddenly says: ‘I do have one regret.’

You don’t do regrets, Austin? ‘I do. I wish I’d had stitches much earlier. When my sister Ashley was about five or six she fell off a swing and had a big gash in her chin. And I watched her having stitches put in. After that I was petrified of them.

‘Then last season, I had my chin opened up and had to have five stitches. And you suddenly realize they’re nothing at all. All those years with Birkenhead Park, Waterloo, Orrell and Leicester... if I’d known, I’d have dived into a load more rucks and things. Or perhaps not. Anyway, since then, I’ve had loads. Look ...’

He takes his sock off over the fajitas and shows me the webbing between his toes. ‘Lewis Moody was holding me under the water in the pool one day during a recovery session, and I struggled so hard I kicked the ladder and turned the water red. All he said was, "Why did you get in such a panic?" ‘Cos you were trying to drown me, Lewis.

‘Anyway, in all the years when I was terrified of stitches I had this good-luck ritual. Actually, I shared it with Will Greenwood who had heard Andy Northey do it at Waterloo, too. Basically, it was this: before I went out on the field I’d say to myself quietly what Andy Northey used to scream out loud as he left the changing room, "I’m Andy Northey and I’m fucking iron!"’

Not ‘I’m Austin Healey...’ but ‘I’m Andy Northey...’ A little something went out of the game when Healey overcame his fear of sutures.

Any other regrets? ‘I wish I hadn’t kicked Kevin Putt in the head. That was probably my worst moment.’ It was 1999: Austin, obviously lost in the red mist, kicked the scrum-half clean on top of his barnet, an offence that earned him a 72-day ban.

‘I came back the day before Wales played England at Wembley. I was put on the bench. I was begging Clive to put me on when Scott Gibbs went over for the try that won Wales the game.’

Wasn’t it always likely that, with a temperament like his, he was going to find himself in a bit of trouble? ‘Well, I’d call myself fiery, but not violent. I’ve only ever been in trouble three times. Only once on the field, and that was the Putt thing. The other two were fights. The first involved the police in the end. And the second, er, involved the police. But I was going to somebody’s rescue then.’

His finest hour, we suddenly find ourselves discussing, came in the Heineken Cup final, when Leicester played Stade Francais in Paris at the Parc des Princes.

I suggest it might have been the following year, when he scored in the final minutes to beat Munster in Cardiff, but, no, he is adamant. ‘We were playing against a French side that had to move all of 20 yards across the road, from their home ground to the venue for the final. It was us against the world, we told ourselves. Nobody said a word before the game. There was utter silence. We were so fired up that it nearly all kicked off before the game had even started.’

You see, there are common themes. A violent prologue was nevertheless averted and we were treated instead to the enthralling final of 2001, that reached its climax with a break by Healey and his pass to Leon Lloyd for the match-winning try.

Strangely enough, Healey is quite matter of fact about his golden moments. He doesn’t mention the break, preferring to set the result in the context of team experience, or how the celebration ranked in Leicester’s pantheon of memorable nights out. Pretty high.

He is equally unemotional about the last time he played for England. This was in 2003, before the World Cup, when he still thought a break was something he did naturally to win games, rather than the snap of serious injury.

But snap is what happened in April 2003. ‘I snapped the anterior cruciate ligament in my knee. The surgeon said I might have to retire. I thought at the very least I’d be out for nine months. I could have taken a million quid in insurance and walked away. But to give you some idea of what the game means to me really, and not just how I feel about it here and now, I decided to get myself right.

‘Four months later I played for England in Marseille against France. What slightly annoyed me was that they selected the World Cup squad on 10 September and they weren’t going to play in Australia until October. I knew I hadn’t been right in Marseille, but I thought with a bit more time...’ Does ‘slightly annoyed’ really cover what he must have felt? He repositions himself on his chair and bends his left knee as far as it will go, which, in truth, is not very far. ‘That’s about 25 per cent of what it should be doing. I’m not the player I was. I’ve never been the same since that injury.’

The point here is that Healey can say such a thing about himself because at the moment he is playing very, very well. He has reached a point where he knows that worrying about the game only makes him play badly. So, why worry?

Part of him wants to retire, convinced he is genuinely disillusioned with the way the game is heading. Part of him is glowing in the knowledge that he can perform at a high level by doing less.

What it means in practice is that the Healey testimonial year and his conversion to a proper job will only pull him partly out of rugby. Protracted farewells and part-time dedication rarely lead to anything but messy departures, but it is the sort of challenge that may keep a rare radical spirit burning.

I don’t mention this at the time. He will only interrupt to tell me that he never did pay the Lions fine, by the way. Something like that. But if anyone can make a success out of going slowly, it is Austin Healey.

Austin on the Lions

2001:

‘There’s this 17-stone ape [Justin Harrison] standing over little old me and I’m saying: ‘Hit me, hit me.’ If he had, he’d have been sent off. That would have been a shame.’

‘We were reffed out of it. He was a bit harsh, that Paul Honiss. As social organizer on tour, I arranged for a horse’s head to be placed in his bed.’

‘I don’t really care about what the Aussies think. They can shout as loud as they like about how proud they are to be Aussies. Well, other people are proud to be what they are as well.’

‘Judging by the press reaction, you ‘d think I’d rounded up every baby kangaroo in the land and drowned them in front of a class of orphans.’

2005:

‘If there is a lesson for all of us in the northern hemisphere it is that we must take risks and play to win. It sounds daft, but it reveals how boring we have become.’

‘The All Blacks cheat superbly. Off-the-ball tugs, late tackles. Fantastic. On behalf of all rugby players I can only congratulate a side that gets away with so much. No, I mean it, really.’

‘I’m not sure what Clive Woodward will end up doing, but if he were going into politics you’d have to say that his ‘Vote for Clive’ bus has just had a puncture. No, the engine has blown up.’