Gavin Henson: Centre of attention

Gavin Henson broke the players' code of omerta in his book about the Lions tour. Are his former team-mates about to take their revenge?

Henson is perfectly familiar with the stresses and strains that attach themselves to a big-name sportsman who unashamedly worships the cult of individual from a position deep within what is meant to be a team environment. When he started taking the field with his highlights and his tan - does he shave his legs before sticking them under the grill, or after? - and his boots of many colours, he might as well have painted a bull's-eye on his chest for good measure. By his own deeds and on his own account, he made himself a target. And that was before he struck up a relationship with the singer Charlotte Church.

"I'm not easy with this business of talking about myself," he said before last year's Test with the Springboks in Cardiff - the first game of a season that would see him land a siege-gun penalty to defeat the bloody English and earn him a place in the annals, that would result in him contributing to a first Welsh Grand Slam in more than a quarter of a century and make the cut for the Lions tour of New Zealand. "But I do like it when people talk about me. I like the feeling of being under pressure, of operating under a weight of expectation. I think that brings out the best in me." In other words, he thrives by placing himself near the edge of the precipice.

All of which is fine and dandy. Better players than Henson - the likes of David Campese and Stuart Barnes spring easily to mind - saw the value in doing things their way and to hell with the rest of the planet. But when a mere 23-year-old puts his name to a ghost-written book full of whines and whinges and direct criticisms of fellow players, some of them team-mates, and negotiates a serialisation deal with a Fleet Street newspaper by way of making himself an extra few quid, he ups the ante to a stratospheric degree. And as the laws of physics dictate, what goes up must come down.

Henson may well find some of his peers descending on him like a ton of bricks. Those tourists who accompanied him on the Lions trip, a frustrating experience for the many rather than the few, will allow him his lambastings of Sir Clive Woodward, the head coach, and Alastair Campbell, the spectacularly miscast director of communications, on the basis that the buck stops with the men at the top. What they will not accept is his criticism of unnamed fellow players, for that goes directly against the grain of what the former England full-back Jason Robinson, an unhesitating critic of Henson's betrayal, calls "the teamship ethic".

The word amongst those who joined Henson in the trenches in New Zealand is that his grasp of collective responsibility was weak, to say the least, and his self-obsession insufferable. They were profoundly underwhelmed by his prolonged sulk after being omitted from the side for the first Test in Christchurch and were angered by the distance he put between himself and the rest of the squad when injury ruled him out of the last week of the itinerary.

As one former Lion, a veteran of three tours, muttered caustically: "If you have an issue with selection and you want to make your point, fine. But then you shut up about it. If I was in this squad, I'd have had Henson up against a wall by now. His attitude is destructive."

Brian O'Driscoll, the Lions captain whose own musings will be on the shelves by the end of the month, was nowhere near as pointed when he sifted through the fallout from Henson's initial salvo last week, but his displeasure was obvious nevertheless. "I don't think you do yourself any favours by giving it out about team-mates in a book, rather than saying it to their face," he said, ignorant of the fact that in Henson's next outburst, he would himself be accused of gouging during the climactic Six Nations Championship match between Wales and Ireland last March. "I have some comments to make on how I thought the tour went," O'Driscoll continued, "but none of them will involve criticising my colleagues."

This, by and large, is how the majority of professional rugby folk see it. Two Lions coaches, talking privately last week, agreed that Henson, now in the last stages of his recovery from a groin injury, had too much time on his hands at present and was being badly advised by those around him.

By contrast, David Moffett, the chief executive of the Welsh Rugby Union, was willing to go public with his fears and criticisms. "My major concern is who, at the moment, is providing the safety net for Gavin," he said. "He's a young guy, with a huge amount of potential, but none of us want him to be the sort of person who is remembered for kicking a goal against England and going out with Charlotte Church. Somebody out there has to get control of the situation and look after him. I think the best place for him to be is within the team environment, and the quicker he can get himself fit, the better it will be for him."

Henson's book, My Grand Slam Year, is not, in itself, the sports publishing industry's answer to Ulysses. It breaks no new ground, although it may, like many players' autobiographies and diaries, come close to reinventing the English language in a manner way beyond the imaginings of James Joyce. Rugby types were telling stories out of school long before the Ospreys centre was a twinkle in his father's eye, and if some books minimised the impact of the spilling of the beans through comedy (Gareth Chilcott), others were both bold and unapologetic in breaking rugby's code of omerta (Mike Burton).

But by and large, those who offered a warts-and-all account of their experiences in the land of thud and blunder waited until retirement before allowing someone to put pen to paper on their behalf. Henson's career has barely started, even though he has been flagged as the future of Welsh rugby since he was a moody 18-year-old learning his trade at Swansea. Unfortunately for those who consider his literary offering to be as ill-conceived as it is ill-timed, chipping away as it does at the very foundations of that "teamship ethic" described and defined by Robinson, the public spat it has generated ensures its success as a business venture. There will be more of these publications, not fewer, and they threaten to knock the problems caused by players' newspaper columns into a cocked hat.

Wisely, Woodward stamped down hard on such columns last summer. Had he felt able, he would have banned them outright. As it was, he introduced a censorship regime of which Mary Whitehouse herself would have been proud.

"If I get so much as a sniff of people not giving of their best or moaning about their own situation, I'll ask them to go home," he warned before departure. "I've laid down my position on this in black and white. If someone isn't prepared to be a Lion until the plane home touches down at Heathrow, I'm not interested in him."

Part of this resulted from the notorious antics of the Lions' midweek side in New Zealand in 1993, when certain players went "off-tour" with the help of several vats of wine and permitted their performances to reflect a clear preference for Pinot Noir over press-ups.

But it also stemmed from the journalistic contributions of Matthew Dawson and Austin Healey during the tour of Australia eight years later. Dawson had rather more support for his condemnations of the management, not least from the captain Martin Johnson, than Healey attracted for his fourth-form rantings about the Wallaby nation in general and the second-row forward Justin Harrison in particular, but as the criticisms were published on the day the Lions produced one of the great Test performances in their history, the England scrum-half lost every corpuscle of credibility in his veins.

And now we have Henson, between the hard covers of a book as well as the pages of a newspaper. Those who fear he is an accident waiting to happen - a gifted sportsman with an exhibitionist streak, a big-money earner in a low-wage economy, the photogenic boyfriend of a celebrity singer and the obvious butt for every beer-swilling hard case in town - may well be proved right, along with those increasingly dubious of the ability of time-honoured sporting principles to withstand the lure of the five-figure advance.

Naïvely, the Lions management delayed payment of the final instalment of the players' wages for 90 days, in the hope that this would stop them talking out of turn. But news becomes news when it is printed, not when it happens. Ultimately, Woodward could not deliver on his proposed code of confidentiality, and as the World Cup-winning coach used to be able to do everything, it is reasonable to assume that the horse has now bolted for good.

Gavin Henson on...

Sir Clive Woodward, Lions Coach

"I have still got a lot of respect for Clive but his preparation of the Test team was poor. I also felt his tactics and his game plan were out of date while I was shocked to see how little actual coaching he does."

Alastair Campbell, Lions Media Consultant

"Campbell told us he could tell the New Zealanders 'wanted it' more than we did. He said they'd shown more commitment than us and that some players just hadn't put their bodies on the line. 'You didn't want it enough,' he said.

It was unbelievable crap. The idea that in a Lions Test - the pinnacle for any player - people hadn't put their bodies on the line was just insulting. As a player, you can [only] take that sort of stuff from ex-internationals who have been there themselves."

Brian O'Driscoll Lions Captain

"As I was on the ground, O'Driscoll came in [in the Wales-Ireland Grand Slam decider last March], but instead of just trying to rip the ball clear of my grasp, he also decided to pull my hair and tried to gouge my eye for good measure. 'How do you like that, you cocky little fucker?' There was a real flash of anger in his eyes. I don't know what had wound him up. It may have been something I'd said in the build-up."

His Fellow Lions

"There were too many players who spoke up just for the sake of it. I lost count of the times players went on and on just because they thought it would sound impressive. They were in love with the sound of their own voices."

Wales and Welshness

"I honestly believe that three years of living in Wales does not make you Welsh. Neither does having a Welsh grandfather if you were born and raised overseas. You either have to be born in a country, have parents from there, or if we're going to have a residency rule, then it should be more like five years."

Opposition Players

"If someone has a cheap shot at me - a punch, a stamp, tugs my hair or tries to gouge me - I'm more likely just to say, 'What's your problem?' than rise to it. The players I really can't stand are the ones who act like dicks on the field - cheap shots off-the-ball all the time - and then try to be your best mate when the game's over. There are a few of those about."

Quotes from 'My Grand Slam Year'

The world of rugby on... Gavin Henson

SIR CLIVE WOODWARD

"All I can say is that I wish him well in his future career."

BRIAN O'DRISCOLL

"I've got a book coming out at the end of the month and I have some comments about how I feel the tour went. But none of them will be criticising my team-mates. I hope it's more objective. Gavin is 23 but I wouldn't say he's inexperienced. It's just the way Gavin wants to vent his frustration. It's an individual thing. It doesn't do anyone any favours by giving out about team-mates in a book and not saying it to their face. I don't think it's just inexperience that has seen Gavin vent his frustrations in this manner. There would be young guys in the squad that wouldn't do it this way. So, it's a personal thing in the way Gavin has handled it."

JASON ROBINSON

"There are times when you just have to bite your lip and pull together. Everyone has got their opinions in such a large group and, if you've got a problem, then you should either go to that person and tell them your problem with them or keep it to yourself. I just don't think it coming out like this is the best way to go about it. It doesn't reflect well on the Lions or on Gavin."

SENIOR LIONS PLAYER

"He was only interested in himself and how good he looked. I never had a drink with him on the trip and I assume he spent all his time in his room."

BARRY JOHN

"During the coming weeks and certainly during the Six Nations, it will be interesting the kind of reaction he gets when he walks into a room. When he bumps into fellow Lions I think it's fair to say he can expect a reaction - certain words will not be complimentary. What would you expect after accusing your team-mates of revelling in the sound of their voices? Gavin Henson has most definitely upset the applecart... He is young, at 23, but should have been better advised. Gavin claims there is no code of conduct among the players - but let him be in no doubt, not everything in life has to be written down to know when you are doing wrong. He must pick up the vibes, if it's not blindingly obvious. I'm not surprised by the reaction of Brian O'Driscoll and I think those on the tour would be virtually unanimous in saying: 'Gavin, you've got it wrong.' I'm sure Gavin's book will sell well, but it's a case of being able to go to bed at night with a clear conscience."