Gregor Townsend - Talk of the Toony - The Autobiography of Gregor Townsend

After making it to the end of Princes Street we skirted by the Castle on our way to the Grassmarket. Up ahead, my Gala team-mate Gary Isaac shouted back to me, ‘We’re stopping at the next pub for a drink, before we turn back to the hotel. It’s just a lemonade – you coming with us?’

‘Of course’, I replied.

I didn’t want to walk back on my own and everyone else seemed keen to get into the pub, in fact they seemed to start walking more quickly than before.

We had walked up a hill at the end of the Grassmarket into darker territory. We stopped and were now facing three pubs, all of which did not look the most salubrious of establishments. What I later realized was that we had been drawn into Edinburgh’s ersatz red-light district – affectionately known by locals as the ‘pubic triangle’. This had not happened by coincidence. Within seconds of entering the bar, most of my teammates were seated next to the stage where a stripper was well into her routine.

Like any hormonal teenager finding himself surrounded by half-naked women, I was initially in a state of shock. I tried my best to relax, and after ten minutes it’s fair to say my mind was no longer on the fact that I was making my debut for Scotland B the following day. Just then the door to the bar swung open and in walked the three members of the Scotland management team. We had been busted and thoughts were running through my head that we’d be sent back to our clubs for a lack of professionalism. However, it turned out that the Scotland management had arrived not on a search and rescue mission, but clearly with more personal agendas. We quickly made our excuses and left, although we couldn’t shout to one of our team-mates at the other end of the bar. We left him stranded, beer in one hand, stripper in the other. Curiously, neither players nor management ever mentioned the incident again.

The next day I played a game that was almost the reverse of my performance for Gala against Melrose. On this occasion, I played some of my best rugby to date for the first sixty minutes. I don’t think I had ever kicked as long and as accurately, and my half-back partnership with Andy Nicol was going very well. However, just after the hour mark I committed an absolute howler, which saw the Irish take the lead for the first time.

From a scrum near the halfway line I called a pretty standard backline move called ‘Dummy rangi, rangi’. This may sound like something that is shouted at a toddler’s birthday party, but all it involved was that I ran across the field with my inside-centre dummying the outside centre before I finally gave the ball to the full-back on a scissors pass. However, for whatever reason, full-back Mark Appleson stayed out wide as I took off on my lateral run. In attempting to show him that he was supposed to be running towards me, I stuck out the ball in one hand. Irish centre Martin Ridge didn’t need a second invitation and stole the ball from my fingertips to run in unopposed from fifty yards. In hindsight, this was not my wisest career move to date. Just to rub salt in the wound, I dropped a ball close to my goal-line near the end of the game – another mistake which resulted in an Irish try. We lost the match 29–19.

Press cuttings now began to appear with words like ‘mercurial’ and ‘enigmatic’ used to describe my game. These were to stay with me for the rest of my career. After the disappointments of the Irish match I had the chance to bounce back immediately as I was selected at stand-off in the National Trial for the Reds (possibles) against the Blues (probables). We blitzed the shadow Scotland team, winning 27–18, and my performance exorcized a few of my Murrayfield demons. While I was probably still too raw to have any chance of being included in the Five Nations, it was now obvious that rugby had become an integral part of my life. And more than that, it was about to take me all over the world.

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