Sam Warburton - Open Side - The Official Autobiography

I do well at a Cardiff Blues academy training session and get taken on there. They pay me £50 a month, which for a teenage boy is the dog’s bollocks. No paper round, protein shakes whenever I want, travel expenses too. Happy days.

Not quite. The coach is really down on me, giving me three or four out of 10 when I know I’ve played much better than that. Not just one game or two, but every single time. Maybe he’s trying to motivate me, but if so there are better ways of going about it. I’m not a professional player, not yet. I’m a schoolboy who like all teenagers keeps a lot of insecurities tucked away behind the façade. Am I good enough? Am I tough enough? Am I wasting my time here?

Just as bad, he keeps putting me in the second row. I’m not a second row. I’m a 7. That’s where I play, that’s where I’m best.

One night, after another three out of 10 in the second row, I come home in tears. I go straight to the multigym and smash out as hard a session as I can manage, way harder than normal. I’m at it for an hour and a half, fuelled by rage and frustration, pumping weights until I can’t move my arms, screaming at the walls.

‘Sam!’ It’s Mum. She’s standing by the door. I don’t know how long she’s been there. ‘Sam, what’s going on?’

I tell her. She takes me inside the house and calms me down.

The next day, I realise something: the lesson that both this incident and the golf coach have taught me.

Not everyone has my best interests at heart, and not everyone’s going to play fair. The only way to deal with it is to make myself so good that they can’t do anything other than pick me, and pick me where I play best.

The only person who sets my boundaries is me.

I play for Wales Under-16s that year. Not at 7, ironically, but at 8, which is the next best thing. I don’t mind 8 – most of the skills are transferable. It’s still the back row, and I’m a back-row player.

On Friday nights, our mates start to go out into Cardiff, and they invite Ben and me along. We usually say no. Because we’ve always had each other, because we’ve never needed to bike over to someone’s house to find someone to play with, we’ve never really needed anyone else.

Besides, Fridays are when my granddad Keith comes round, and we sit there watching Friday night sport on TV. Wrestling, boxing, football, rugby league, whatever. Me and Ben and Dad and Keith, while Mum and our elder sister Holly roll their eyes at these cavemen on the sofa.

Dad introduces me to heavy metal. Specifically, he introduces me to Anthrax; and even more specifically, to their track Refuse to Be Denied .

Refuse to be denied.

Refuse to compromise.

I listen to it while running the streets at night. Seven – that number again – seven words in the chorus that sum up my entire philosophy.

Refuse to be denied.

Refuse to compromise.

I never stop trying to get better.

On Saturday mornings I watch Super Rugby on TV. I sit there with pen and paper, and whoever’s playing 7 – Richie McCaw, George Smith, Schalk Burger – I note down everything they do in the game. Tackles, rucks, carries, turnovers. In the afternoon I play for the Blues Under-16s, and when we’re given our own statistics for the match I compare them to those of the pros. So I might get something like eight tackles, 16 rucks, eight carries and no turnovers, while McCaw would be on 21 tackles, 40 rucks, 18 carries and five turnovers.

You’ve got a bit of a way to go here, old son, I think to myself.

But having a way to go doesn’t matter if I’m on the right path. I start jackalling – trying to steal the ball at the point of contact – in school matches, just like I’ve seen McCaw do. No one else my age is doing that. They don’t even know what jackalling is; they just tackle and ruck.

One of my teachers, Steve Williams, was a flanker for Neath, so he does one-on-one breakdown training with me too. It all helps me improve.

Ben and I play for Welsh Schools together. He’s a fabulous player, in many ways better than me, and that’s not false modesty on my part. He plays at outside centre, and his footwork and handling are absolutely brilliant. His hero is Brian O’Driscoll, and it shows.

One match, he suffers a shoulder injury, and a freakishly bad one too: serious nerve damage. The doctors tell him that continuing to play is really risky, and that the injury’s only going to get worse under contact. Besides, he wants to be a physio, and for that he needs strength in his upper body.

He’s 16 years old, and his rugby career is over. I couldn’t be more gutted if it had happened to me. Rugby is something we both live for, something we share. I feel his pain, his anguish and his frustration as though they were all mine.

From now on, I resolve, I’m going to play every game not just for me but for Ben too. I will carry his career, the one he didn’t have, in my heart and on the crest of my jersey. I will achieve the things he couldn’t, not because he wasn’t capable but because he wasn’t given the opportunity.

2006. After about a year, I manage to stop throwing up whenever I see Rach. It’s such a relief when this happens.

‘Sam,’ Rach says.

‘What?’

‘I think it’s time you met my parents.’

And the throwing up starts all over again.

Rach challenges me to a game of badminton. She’s playing for the Wales senior team by now, so I know she’s pretty good, but I reckon I can have her. I’m taller, quicker, more powerful, and I’ve got good hand–eye co-ordination. This might even be quite easy, I think.

It is easy. It’s 21–0.

To her.

She does me up like a kipper, hook, line and sinker. There’s not a single rally that lasts more than three shots. She’s always one step ahead of me, teeing me up one side and then putting the shuttlecock the other, or driving me deep to the back of the court before dropping it just over the net. I’m sweating and swearing and throwing my racket. There are a bunch of kids watching, and they’re all laughing: look at Sam Warburton, being beaten by a girl.

It’s the way you’re moving, Rach says. You’re turning like a boat, slow and cumbersome. Watch my feet. Look at the shuffle, quick steps side to side. You don’t need to keep twisting your body this way and that.

Right, I say. Race over 10 metres. I’ll definitely beat you.

Ten metres there, ten metres back, she replies.

No way, I say. She’s so much smaller than me that she’ll turn much quicker, and any advantage I have in straight-line speed will be cancelled out.

Finally she agrees just to the ten metres there, and I do beat her.

We play tennis on holiday. I beat her. We play again. She beats me.

That’s 2–2 in the Warburton–Thomas Cup. We agree to leave it there for the sake of our relationship. Otherwise in a few years’ time we’ll be going to the lawyers, and when they ask why we’re getting divorced we’ll both simultaneously say ‘sport’.

2007. Ben and I opt for the same A levels: chemistry, biology and PE. We revise together, and make it count; not the usual ‘Oh, I spent ten hours in the library’ stuff, conveniently forgetting that half that time was coffee and chat, but constructive and regimented, applying the principles of rugby training to revision. Half an hour on, ten minutes off, and repeat. Work out targets for sessions and stick to them.

A couple of months before the exams, I get a phone call. The bloke says he’s from the Welsh Rugby Union, and can he ask me a few questions. Sure, I say.

‘Where’s your dad from?’ he asks.

‘Originally? London. But his folks are from Lancashire.’

‘Like Warburton’s bread?’