Michael Owen. Michael Owen
Kenny Rogers would always be on the cassette player. Listening to it over and over I learned all the words and I think Kenny would have been proud of my baritone voice. That song has stuck with me and is the only one I can call on if I have to get up to do a number. It was brilliant for getting everyone to know each other. After a few weeks when everyone knew your song you felt like you were performing to a packed arena as everyone on the bus belted it out.
That first season at Pontypridd in the youth team, in 1997/98, was one of the best and most enjoyable in my life. I played every game. There was a brilliant team spirit and on the way back from games in England at places such as Gloucester, we would all have a drink and a singsong on the journey home. Before every game, our coach Gary Lucas, who had a really gruff voice, would give a big passionate speech and he would always finish with the same line: ‘Come on boys, you can do it, I love you boys; I love you more than my wife.’ He also used to tell his son Garyn, who came to every match and now plays for Pontypridd RFC, to …‘behave or you can go shopping with your mother next week.’
We reached the latter stages of the Wales Youth Cup, but lost to Cardiff in the semi-final at the Arms Park. At the end of the season I was named Player of the Year. That season there were trials for the Wales Senior Schools team at Under-18 level. I was a year below Under-18 and was aware that it was a big ask to get selected, but the trials were all about impressing at every opportunity; both at the county games and during the gruelling weekend camps. I did enough to get selected and two games stand out for me: a county game in Pontyclun and another one for a Wales XV against London Counties. I played out of my skin. Even now I can remember how excited I felt and how desperate I was to do well and get picked. It seemed to spur me on when the stakes were high. It felt like being on autopilot sometimes when I was playing well.
We were due to play Scotland at Waterton Cross, the home of South Wales Police RFC, but they had to move the game to the nearby Brynteg School field. I was playing at number eight and Alix Popham was at number seven. The weather was absolutely terrible and the pitch was a mud bath, but we were brilliant. We were 27–0 up at half time and cruised home 54–0, scoring ten tries in the process. We broke the record for the biggest ever margin of victory by a Welsh schoolboys’ team. ‘Seldom can a Welsh eight have played as well in the 74-year history of schools rugby,’ wrote Huw Thomas, schools rugby correspondent for the Western Mail, afterwards. Our coach Wyn Evans didn’t smile much, but he looked happy then. The only bad thing that day was that the showers weren’t working properly after the game. We were covered in mud and absolutely freezing!
I played in the next game against France, which we also won, but the games came in blocks of two around the school holidays, so now we had a big break. We were all given a training programme to follow between the two blocks of games. My parents had bought a multi-gym, which they put in our garage. Our big goal was the penultimate game away to England at the United Services Ground in Portsmouth. Before school I would do weights or go running round our local field. I remember doing interval training in the early morning and getting some strange looks. I just wanted to do the best I could and being given a programme to follow for eight or so weeks was perfect for me. I followed it diligently. I loved it and really enjoyed striving for a goal. Building up to the England game, I felt like a boxer. I didn’t realise then, but that was the perfect metaphor.
We knew the game against England would be tough because they were very strong and had players everyone already knew would do go on to do well, such as Andrew Sheridan, David Flatman, Steve Borthwick, Alex Sanderson, Adam Balding, Andy Goode and James Grindall. We lost narrowly, 11–10, but the game wouldn’t be remembered for the play. England had 80 per cent of the possession and tried to batter us through their forwards; an approach that led one newspaper to describe the match as ‘one of the most violent schoolboys’ games ever.’ I had a fight with Sheridan, who was massive even then, and was given a yellow card. Afterwards I spoke to Alex Sanderson, who was a really nice guy and seemed pretty humble for England’s star man. He obviously never took the game at Portsmouth to heart as when I signed for Saracens years later, Alex gave me his spare room for my first week on the team.
We then played in Ireland against an Irish Schools team that contained Gordon D’Arcy and Paul O’Connell, who I’d later go on a Lions tour with. I was also nominated for the 1998 Mail on Sunday Welsh Rugby Bursary Award. I was 6ft 5in tall by this time and 15 stone and was often compared to Mervyn Davies, as he was the same size when he first played for Wales. The Wales Under-18 forward coach, Richard Jones, told the Mail on Sunday that I was ‘very much like the young Davies, quite gangly at the moment, but he’s got a good engine inside him and his work-rate is tremendous.’ Richard Jones rated me and told me so, which was great. Those were the sort of attributes that people often ascribed to me, which was flattering, but I’m not sure I took it all in. Adam Jones, the second row, won the £5,000 bursary, but John Bevan, the WRU’s Director of Coaching, was really encouraging and told me that I had ‘very good hand-eye coordination for a big lad.’
In May 1998, my brother David got married and later in the summer I went on a Crawshays youth tour to South Africa. The tour cost £1,000 and the organisers put up half. The other half of my fee was paid by an organisation called the Friends of Pontypridd, who paid £500 apiece towards the costs for Peter Burridge, an outside half at Ponty, and I to go. A teacher at school, Karen Crowley, also gave me some money to go on the tour, which was a lovely gesture. She was a former PE teacher and was pretty tough, but had a heart of gold and was very encouraging. It was a brilliant experience. We stayed at an Afrikaans school called Affies in Pretoria and got to go on safari and to Sun City. Robert Sidoli, Mark Jones and Adam Jones, the second row, were also there. We played four games at the Afrikanse Hoer Seunskool Festival in Pretoria and won them all.
The season had been incredible and the Pontypridd first XV coach Denis John told one local newspaper that the two youth players he was monitoring closest were Gareth Turner and me.
After the first season at Ponty Youth I was made captain, which was brilliant as I was still a year younger than everyone else. Ceri Sweeney transferred to Ponty Youth from Glyncoch for that season, having been involved with Wales Schools A team the year before. The biggest goal this season was the FIRA World Cup being staged in Wales. Wales had previously had separate schools and FIRA teams, but the WRU took over the FIRA XV and the qualifying age shifted from 1 September to 1 January. This was in line with England, Scotland and France (although not Ireland) and meant that players would be four months younger than had previously been the case. The team coach for the FIRA World Cup was John Bevan and the WRU director of rugby Terry Cobner came along to see the squad early in the process and explain how important this was going to be.
I had become a member of the Welsh Elite Academy, which was brilliant, but my season started badly when I was forced to miss the first two months of it because of an operation on my back. I was off school for six weeks and couldn’t play rugby until the New Year. That meant that I missed the first Wales friendly of the season in Romania, but I was made captain of the Pontypridd youth team that would go on to win the Wales Under-19 Challenge Cup against Newport, 32–15.
Although I was frustrated at being so inactive at the start of the season, I had been training with the first team a few times. The most nervous I have ever been in my whole career was before that training session with Pontypridd. These guys were legends, but I was lucky to have played cricket with Gareth Wyatt and Geraint Lewis and knew them a little. Although I didn’t really know the players – and was in awe of people like Neil Jenkins and Dale McIntosh, who we all knew as ‘Chief‘ – I didn’t feel out of place. There were some great characters in the first team and Neil Eynon, the prop, used to commentate on the games of touch we used to play and would give all the players names of famous players from the past. He christened me ‘Peter Brown’, the Scottish back-row forward from the 1970s.
1999 began brilliantly when I got a phone call on New Year’s Day from Dennis John. There had been some injuries over Christmas so on 2 January I would be on the bench the first XV, along with Ceri Sweeney, for a league match at the Talbot Athletic Ground against Aberavon. Pontypridd won 49–21 and although I never got onto the pitch, I remember sitting in the clubhouse afterwards, having a drink with Chief and the other first-team players and felt as though I was part of it. It was great.
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