Michael Owen. Michael Owen
at the end of the first year. It is definitely possible to study while playing rugby, but I had neither the foresight nor the commitment to do it and I left university after completing eighteen months of a business degree.
I didn’t have an official agent then, but I didn’t need one: I had Ceri Sweeney. I was offered a three-year deal with Pontypridd on £3,000 a year. I signed straightaway and was chuffed to do so. Ceri went in after me and was offered the same. He refused to sign, saying he couldn’t survive on that. So the club more than doubled his contract – and mine too as they felt that we should be on the same wages. Ceri was the best agent I’ve ever had and he didn’t even get his 10 per cent!
During this time, Pontypridd started to lose players. Neil Jenkins and Martyn Williams went to join Lynn Howells at Cardiff; Kevin Morgan went to Swansea and Dayfdd James went to Llanelli. Some of the older players retired but Lee Jarvis came back from Cardiff. Lee was a superb outside half who could and should have been a legend for Wales and had only left Pontypridd in the first place because Neil Jenkins also played in his position.
On top of all this change, a number of players picked up injuries during pre-season, including Chief, while Geraint Lewis was in the World Cup squad. They were my competition and I’d have to play really well to get into the team. I had started training for the new season as soon as the previous one had finished. A club trainer would have helped – there would have been someone to ask advice – but there was nothing like that available to me. I used bits and bobs of the information that I had been given at various times and although it required self-motivation, the hard work paid off.
A chance was opening up for me and in my first senior XV start of the season I scored a try in a 20–6 win over Canada and was named man of the match. I was delighted. As a young player it is vital to get an opportunity early on and show what you can do, so that coaches are prepared to pick you in the more important games. The local paper said ‘The Pontypridd Man of the Match was number 8 Michael Owen. The 18 year old, star of Wales’ youth World Cup campaign, was always in the thick of the action with his powerful running and superb ball handling and capped his display with a try’. I also played against Saracens in pre-season and remember getting absolutely smashed by François Pienaar, which hurt like hell. The club may have lost a host of players, but I felt we would still do OK. Lee Jarvis was coming back and was a genuine match-winner; and we also had Paul John, whose father Dennis had played with my dad, at scrum half. We had a number of mentally strong, competitive sportsmen. Matthew Lloyd was brilliant to me, giving me loads of advice and, with Chief on the sidelines through injury he exerted a huge influence on the team. His knees were shot, he could barely stand and he would always moan about training, but was brilliant during matches.
With Geraint Lewis away on World Cup duty with Wales, I started the first league game, away against Glasgow, and kept my place for the initial half a dozen fixtures. We won the first five only to lose the sixth in Llanelli. After the World Cup, when Wales had lost a group game to Samoa and then a quarterfinal to Australia, I lost my place. I could understand Geraint coming straight back into the team because he was a top player, but I felt I should have definitely stayed around the team. However, I wasn’t involved at all until the end of December. I crashed back to earth with a real thud. A week after playing for the first XV at Llanelli against many of the current Welsh team in a televised match, I was turning out for the Pontypridd youth team on a schools’ pitch in Maesteg.
Although I didn’t stay in the first team at Pontypridd, having just turned nineteen, I managed fourteen first XV games that season and also scored the odd try, including a real gift against Swansea, when Pontypridd won their first game at St Helen’s in twenty-seven years. One of the best was against Colomiers in the Heineken Cup, when I came off the bench. The atmosphere at the match was incredible because, the previous week, Pontypridd had played Colomiers in the Heineken Cup and their prop, Richard Nones, had been sent off for eye gouging. He was subsequently banned for two years afterwards. The Colomiers fans were really intimidating. They were throwing industrial toilet rolls at the dugout and holding giant cardboard forks as the French term for gouging is forkette. Nones even came on before the game to present a shirt to a young player, which stirred the crowd up even more.
Pontypridd had a really young side and when I came on after thirty minutes for the injured Geraint Lewis, we were already 33–0 down, but no one gave up. We scored three tries, I got one of them after a scrum against the head and, although we lost 38–21, I felt as though I’d stood up for myself and done well. Afterwards, Sven Cronk, who’d been gouged by Nones, came over to tell me how well I’d done by getting stuck in and not being intimidated. That meant a lot and gave me a lot of confidence.
Around this time, the Welsh coach, Graham Henry, named four teams for a Welsh trial. I was in team four with Ceri Sweeney and we played Team Three, which had players like Sonny Parker and Alix Popham. Everyone was talking about the new way ahead for Welsh rugby and whether the man they called the ‘Great Redeemer’ was the right guy. The big talk was whether Liam Botham would play for Wales and Henry’s decision to drop Scott Gibbs, Craig Quinnell and Dafyfdd James from Team One. I may have been in Team Four, but I was encouraged when Rob Howley named me in a newspaper as a player who could make a big impact in time for the 2003 World Cup. In a Six Nations’ guide, Henry did the same, but said I was someone who ‘needs to play’.
I was picked as a replacement for Wales Under-21. Alix Popham was the Under-21 captain and played in front of me. He wasn’t playing for Newport at the time but was still rated higher than me by the Welsh management, based on what they had seen previously. Just by being in the Pontypridd team I felt that I deserved to be ahead of him because I was proving myself each week. I played from the bench in four out of the five championship games but never got a start.
After the club’s brilliant start to the season Pontypridd went on to secure European qualification at Bridgend, a match during which I had to have twenty stitches put into a head wound that was inflicted by our Tongan hooker Feoa Vunipola when he tried to pick-and-go from a ruck that I was at the bottom of. In the same game I set up the winger Geraint Lewis for the winning try with a chip ahead. We beat Llanelli 29–12 in the final game of the season and I was named Man of the Match.
That summer I was chosen to go on a Welsh development tour of Canada. At one point, there was talk that as many as eight Pontypridd players would make the cut but, in the end, only Ceri and I were selected. This was a very different experience for me as the squad contained a real mix of young and experienced players. I remember feeling a bit out of it, on the fringes at times. Some of the management treated you a bit differently on that tour, probably because there were so many older and established players, and I felt on the periphery of things as the second youngest player there. Graham Henry was also on the trip, but he remained pretty detached from us, just observing, and when he did speak to us he was quite harsh.
We played five games and I started the first game in Newfoundland against Eastern Canada. I was moved from number eight into the second row and played in a 32–17 win over Young Canada in Alberta, too. I preferred number eight, but Henry wanted me to play more at blindside. The team won all five games, but I didn’t play against Canada A, which was the main game. We pretty much went coast to coast and the tour was an amazing experience, I was still only nineteen years old and I wanted to be more involved. When I got back, my mother had saved a cutting from the Daily Mirror. Graham Henry had written a piece about the tour, mentioning all the players. According to him, I needed to work on a couple of things but had a top attitude. It’s funny looking back at that trip. You could eat whatever you wanted and go up and order anything you wanted, with the WRU picking up the bill, but I can’t remember doing any weights. It’s totally different today and, with hindsight, it was a way of doing things that created a terrible culture, but that was just how Welsh rugby was back then. There was a massive drinking culture on that trip, too. In short, it was all a bit of a holiday, but the boys who were partying hardest were still somehow managing to play the best. Coming away from the tour, I felt that the coaches didn’t appreciate what I could do on the pitch.
That summer, John Bevan left the WRU to take a job at Monmouth School, but wrote me a letter. Here’s what he said:
I hope you have enjoyed your time in the academy and have taken