The former Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry and Midlands full-back talks about his life in the game

My first captain in senior rugby was Brian Moore, at Nottingham. I’d gone there having just played for England U19 Colts and he’d just come back from the 1989 British & Irish Lions tour to Australia and I always remember his first words to me were, ‘congratulations on playing for England Colts but now you start at the bottom again, this is men’s rugby’.
He wasn’t being unkind, it was just his way of letting me know that the hard work started here, and if I ever needed a role model in that...