‘You had to earn the right to wear the shirt’
My Life in Rugby with Jackson Wray
The former Saracens and Bedford Blues back row talks about his life in the game
I'LL never forget walking in at Saracens for the first day of pre-season following the South African takeover in 2009 and everyone had name tags on. There had been a complete overhaul of the first-team squad with about 20 new players and staff brought in. It was largely a bunch of relative strangers gathered together in a room. With my surname, people used to joke that I was the son he (Nigel Wray) never had. But I soon managed to get rid of that!
Brendan Venter was our new DoR but he didn't need any introduction to me or Will Fraser as we'd been mentored by him in South Africa after we'd been given an opportunity to train at the SA Rugby academy at Stellenbosch as part of some sort of partnership with the Saracens academy. I remember Brendan's message about what we were going to create on that first day of pre-season as clear as day. Looking back, what transpired was just incredible.
Every part of that journey was pretty ridiculous really – we went from being a team that had good players but hadn't achieved that much and never really stood for anything – to winning all those Premiership and European trophies. It is quite special for me to have been there the whole time and to have also shared the journey with some of my best mates.
I loved every bit of it, even the bad stuff. The salary cap breach was a proper test and I am proud of the way we handled that as a playing group. It could have gone one of two ways but it brought us even closer. It taught me a helluva lot, it taught us a helluva lot. When moments like that come along you really see what you are made of and it was pleasing to see that we had the environment that we said we had and stood up to the test. The best thing about Mark (McCall) and all the coaches over the years is that we may not have always got things right but the connection between the players and the coaches has always been unbelievable.
If things like the salary cap breach had come out five years earlier who knows what would have happened but by then, we had enough credit in the bank for us to stay tight. Our first game after the news broke was Gloucester away. It was during the international window so I was captaining a very young group and you probably couldn't have picked a worse fixture for us at the time. We took an absolute pasting from the fans; they were throwing fake money from the stands and all that kind of stuff but we rode it out and won.
To beat Racing with 14 men after Will Skelton was sent off was another real show of fight because we needed to win to get through and effectively keep our season alive. Europe had become the focus by that point because the second big points deduction meant relegation was a certainty. Not that we let our standards slip in the Premiership, far from it. Ultimately we didn't have anything to play for but we still won 13 games and would've finished second if it wasn't for the points deduction. Those games were highlights because it showed what we were all about.
The season in the Championship was tough, even for someone like me who had played in it before whilst on loan at Bedford. Chuck in the fact there were no fans, and it made it even harder. It was such a strange year. It was the longest pre-season in history and obviously there were all the Covid restrictions which meant we ate lunch in our cars after training and things like that. Losing the first game at Pirates made for a pretty miserable trip back but, at the end of the day, we got the job done. The pride in our performance never waned whether it was Nottingham away in front of no one or in a Premiership final.
“I had to fight for my place because there were so many amazing players”
During my time with Saracens we won five Premiership titles and three Heineken Champions Cups and those matches and the other finals that we made but lost, were like my internationals. For me, that was the pinnacle. There were periods where I was frustrated and disappointed that I didn't get capped as obviously I wanted it. I can remember once looking back through programmes of finals I started in. Going down the team sheet in each and looking at the badges beside every single name apart from mine. I was the exception. But I was very content with my lot and, to be honest, it was hard enough anyway to stay in the Saracens team to worry about anything else. You are not owed anything by being there a long time, you have to earn the right to wear the shirt. You want to be starting European Cup finals and I managed to do that. There is nothing in me really that regrets anything. I was very fortunate to experience an incredible amount of big games and to share that with some incredible guys and players is plenty.
Some of my most memorable times at the club were actually in the international windows when a lot of the lads were away, because I and some of the more senior players had to take on the responsibility to bring the best out of the squad. Those periods are crucial to where you are at the end of the year and it is crucial you navigate them without dropping too many points. It's different this year but in all other years outside of a Rugby World Cup year, you're playing maybe eight to 10 games without international players and it is incredibly important that you have an environment that means you can still perform. We'd lose up to 10 players at some points and we'd have to go to a Newcastle or a Bristol who might only lose one or two and you are having to try and get something out of it. Those were brilliant challenges for us.
I've always had to fight for my place in the team at Saracens because there have been so many amazing back row players in the squad. Competition drives stands and I'm proud of how many finals in which I was given the chance to start and proud of playing in more than 300 games for the club. For my 100th game, Harper, my eldest, was six weeks old and was there, for my 200th game we had two children by then, and for my 300th game, I had four there. I doubled the number of kids for every 100 games! Part of the reason I managed to play so many games was because I stayed relatively injury-free. It's quite ironic, my worst injury (a ruptured rotator cuff) happened in the final and I'm currently recovering from a shoulder operation. I'm injured and I'm not even playing anymore.
‘Do I miss it?' is a question I get asked a lot. Not yet is the answer. I have lots of good stuff going on, and now that I am working in the City, I'll be able to go and see West Ham play in midweek more often. I'm working as a business development consultant with Dowgate Wealth and I also work with Will Fraser on 100 & First. It's a consultancy that uses real-life experiences to drive change. As someone who did a degree in psychology, seeing at first-hand how people react in a cauldron (pro rugby) where things change quickly and emotions run high was fascinating. In the City, it is the same, just drawn out over a longer period. I think it was very valuable to experience what we experienced over the years, good and bad. Those lessons learnt set me up for life after rugby and helped me get to the position that I am in now.
