My Life in Rugby with Duncan Hodge: ‘It was great to score all 19 points v England’
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The former Scotland, Edinburgh, Leeds and Watsonians fly-half talks about his life in the game
I WAS a mad-keen cricketer growing up and, in March 1994, I was selected to go on a Scotland cricket tour to South Africa. I couldn't go because of university exams and also the fact I was also part of the Scotland U21 rugby set-up. My only sporting regret was not going on that cricket tour as opening the batting for Scotland would have been the dream. But I can't really complain with how things turned out.
That same summer age 19 I toured Argentina with the senior Scotland squad after Craig Chalmers cried off. It was at that point rugby took over as we toured every summer and cricket fell by the wayside.
Playing for Watsonians really helped my progression. I found myself in a team with three Lions in the backline: Gavin and Scott Hastings and Roger Baird. They were all part of my childhood memories so it was great to play with them and be mentored by them. I was also picked to play 10 for Scotland A when we beat the Springboks at the Greenyards. I got exposed to a lot of top-level rugby early which was great.
When you are young, you don't feel nerves. But I did struggle with pre-match nerves in the early stages of my pro career, to the extent I'd knacker myself before the match started. As a stand-off you had to know everything about the opposition and how, as far as possible, the game was likely to pan out. From six in the morning I'd start obsessing about the game ahead, playing it over and over in my head. I struggled to eat on the morning of a match and everything had to be taken in liquid form. I'll never forget my first game for Leeds. We were playing Bath on a beautiful afternoon in front of a full house. But in the warmup I was absolutely shattered. My legs were like lead. The nervous energy I'd expended had just exhausted me.
My first Scotland cap came off the bench against France at the Parcs des Princes, the final game of the 1997 Championship. Craig got a bang on the head early on. He stayed on for a while and I eventually came on for the last 20 minutes and we got thumped. There was no night out in Paris, we flew straight back to Scotland because a few of us had to fly out to the Sevens World Cup in Hong Kong the next morning.
In 1999, I started the first game of the last-ever Five Nations – the game where John Leslie caught my kick off and went in under the posts for the fastest try in international rugby – but I only lasted something like 50 minutes after I broke my leg. It was my own fault because I'd gone for blades over studs on my boots. I missed a penalty to touch, raced after the ball to make up for my mistake, and knew Shane Howarth had a hot left step which I tried to defend and my blades stayed in the ground, my leg rotated and I heard a crack. Gregor Townsend replaced me and
“The big joke is that we are still current holders of Five Nations Championship” scored a try in every game of the tournament so he didn't do too badly! The big joke of anyone in that team is that we're still current holders of the Five Nations Championship.
Thankfully I got fit in time to make the World Cup squad later that year. It was a bit bizarre because we played our pool games in Murrayfield so it didn't really feel like a World Cup, certainly not the same as it does now. I played in four games, against South Africa, Uruguay, Spain and the quarter-final play-off against Samoa. I was on the bench against the All Blacks but didn't come on when we wore orange jerseys.
After being overlooked for the first three games of the 2000 Six Nations, I came back in for the Wales game. We ran them close in defeat the week before we played England, who were going for a Grand Slam while we were attempting to avoid a whitewash. There was a lot on the game and, obviously, England were huge favourites. I've since heard of people who gave up their tickets to the game because they thought we had no chance. But we had a really positive training week and had identified a couple of little tactical things that could maybe work to our advantage. And with it being a huge game, at home, there was certainly no lack of motivation. All of us felt we hadn't done ourselves justice and knew if we didn't win, we would have the wooden spoon and it would be seen as a disaster of a season.
To be fair, they should have been out of sight by half-time, they were camped on our line and should have scored but didn't, and I think we got up to halfway to nick a penalty and we went in just 6-9 down instead of something like 3-16, which would have been game over. The weather turned in our favour and we ended up winning, 19-13. I scored all the points. I suppose there are worse things to be remembered for! I was pretty superstitious around boots and socks and things like that, but I can't recall doing anything different before kick-off, it was just ‘one of those days', I suppose.
For the try, I dived on the ball as it popped out of the ruck, but because it was so wet, it immediately slipped away from my grasp as I put downward pressure on it. I remember jumping up straight away to look at the ref, to say it was a definite try, and he gave it. I wasn't one for big celebrations, it wasn't my style, but I was ‘in the moment' and I think I did a bit of a fist-pump. I managed to calm myself down a bit for the kick but the adrenaline was still pumping and I think my kicking routine was about 20 seconds shorter than usual. Nevertheless, it still went over.
In 2001, I got a good run in the No.10 jersey after Gregor got injured in the first game against France and pretty much kept it for the start of the following Six Nations. We lost to England and I played badly. I always took defeats incredibly hard as it was but that one was particularly painful. No one knew what to say to me; I was absolutely gutted. There were other defeats where I did want to talk, right away, and analyse what had gone wrong to death. Other guys didn't, and that frustrated me. It's only later, when you're a bit more mature, that you realise everyone's different, that just because others move on quicker from a defeat, it doesn't mean they don't care.
The biggest highlight from my time with Edinburgh was probably in 2000, when we beat the reigning European champions Northampton at Franklin's Gardens when I dropped a goal in the final minute. I didn't practise drop goals that much but I did have a habit of popping over match-winning ones and that one was particularly sweet.
After six seasons or so, I decided it was time to try something new and I moved down south to Leeds. It was great to be coached by different people, meet new people, and I really enjoyed it. I still look back very fondly on my time there. We won the Powergen Cup in the second season. Unfortunately, I suffered a really bad Lisfranc injury in the first game against Gloucester and missed the rest of that season. It was scary because the first thing the surgeon said to me there was a chance I wouldn't play again. Thankfully, that wasn't the case and I played on for a couple more seasons, back up in Scotland with Edinburgh.
The transition into coaching took me to the 2007 and 2011 World Cups, as kicking coach with Scotland, before I took on the attack coach role which I did for four years. My last coaching game for Scotland was at my fourth World Cup in 2015, the infamous quarter-final defeat to Australia when, by rights, we should have been playing Argentina in the semis. After that, I continued to coach at Edinburgh and was lucky to do some work with Fiji through my connections with Vern Cotter and four of the lads who played their club rugby in Scotland. That month was probably one of my best-ever coaching experiences. I also spent a couple of weeks with USA Rugby.
Then, after 15 hugely enjoyable years involved in professional coaching, I decided to take a step back and spend more time with the family. To help fill the gap, I started up a coaching business called Accelerate Rugby, which is aimed at 10-16 year olds, and is designed to help fill the training gap in the development of Scotland's most promising young players.
