'Your only job is to pour champagne'

I WENT on the first post-Falklands War, England tour to Argentina in 1990 despite having only played in Division 5 for Northern, who I’d joined whilst at College in Newcastle.

- Jon Newcombe

Club, County and Divisional rugby were the stepping stones to international rugby in those days and I was picked for Northumberland and after a particularly good game against reigning County champions Durham, I was selected to play for the North in a televised game against the South West. Who’d have thought a lad from Worthing would end up playing for the North, alongside people like Peter Winterbottom, a real legend of the game!

I was playing in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand when I actually got the letter from the RFU. After College, I’d decided to go over there to broaden my horizons and ended up playing a season for Poverty Bay. It was their centenary year and they had a Ranfurly Shield match against Auckland who were basically the All Blacks in all but name and it was fantastic to play in that as well as against Ian McGeechan’s touring Scotland team. During that six months in New Zealand, Fran Clough broke his leg and they needed a replacement so I was flown over along with Dean Ryan from New Zealand to Argentina which, as you can imagine, was quite a journey at that time.

John Buckton and Will Carling were probably the first-choice centre pairing and then there was Gavin Thompson, from Harlequins, and me who were the second stringers. I didn’t get capped but it was a highly enjoyable few weeks. We were made to feel very, very welcome in Buenos Aires but once you go away to Tucuman and Cordoba, in the north of the country, it was unbelievable. We had a police envoy from the team hotel to the Tucuman ground and as we arrived there was this big Union Jack flying above the ground. I thought ‘that’s nice’ but then someone lit it and it went up in flames.