Ollie Sleightholme - Brings a tear to the eye
The former England wing Jon Sleightholme speaks to Alex Lowe, The Times’s rugby correspondent, about watching his son, Ollie, follow in his red rose footsteps.
Ollie Sleightholme has started his England career with a bang, scoring twice against Australia and finishing another beauty against South Africa last weekend. The 24-year-old is rapidly making the Allianz Stadium a home-from-home, given it was only five months ago that he helped Northampton Saints win the Gallagher Premiership title with a try in the final.
It is almost 20 years since Ollie’s father, Jon, treated the headquarters of English rugby as his own playground, winning trophies here with Bath and 12 England caps, including a try against Ireland that helped to seal the 1996 Five Nations title.
Jon has been asked frequently in recent weeks about the pride he has felt in watching Ollie carve out his own successful rugby career but we start this conversation on a slightly different note. I ask him, “How does the pride you feel in watching Ollie pull on an England jersey compare with the pride you felt in doing so yourself? I would imagine it is very different.”
Jon takes a moment. “It is,” he says, before trying to work out how best to articulate the emotions.
“Let me kind of give you a bit of a scenario. When I scored my first try for England against Ireland in the 1996 Five Nations championship, as it was back then, I remember talking to my family afterwards about how they'd all been celebrating in the stand when I scored.
“When you're playing on the pitch, that is obviously something you don't get to see or enjoy. You don't get to celebrate with the family. I have had that opportunity over the last two weeks.
“It was a really incredible moment for the family to see Ollie scoring. To be there with all the family, I've now got to experience what they experienced. That's really quite something. It is very, very special.
“In some ways I could feel again what I felt when I was out there. But I am not, because it’s Ollie doing it now. Ollie's going through the same journey, albeit the route is very different nowadays. But it is the same journey that I went through.
“I'm trying to put it into some kind of a picture for you. My parents were there, sitting next to me. They were both in tears when Ollie scored. And they said, ‘It’s exactly the same as it was when we watched you’.
“It's quite remarkable, really. For that to happen is quite something. I don't think the word proud really kind of does it justice to how we all feel, but certainly how I feel.”
The Sleightholme family met up with Ollie in the Spirit of Rugby function room in the stadium after the game, just as Jon had done almost two decades earlier. “I remember seeing my parents after the game in 1996 and it was in the same restaurant at the stadium,” he says.
“It was just like throwbacks for me. It’s like you're revisiting the whole thing again, but it's not you. It's Ollie. You know everything that's going on. You can feel every emotion. You understand it. But it's not you. So you're just sat back, almost observing. Which makes it stressful as well, because you know what they go through.
“My folks said it was an incredible experience to watch me do it. And then to be there with them. We basically re-lived it.”
I asked Jon if there is a temptation, having been there and done it, to try and prepare Ollie for everything. Or is it important to allow him to navigate his own way down the path of Test rugby?
“I took a step back from the technical, tactical stuff when he was 15 or 16 and progressing into the senior academy set-up at Saints,” he says.
“I have a deeper understanding of how he's feeling than most people do because I've walked in those shoes. But I let him find his own way. If he wants to talk to me about the game, he wants to ask my advice he can.
“I might ask a few general rugby questions but I will not bring it up.
“He's got a daughter. I've got a granddaughter. She's six months old. So whenever we're together, our time is occupied by a wonderful, beautiful little girl. And we're very blessed.
“He's only 24 years old, but he's had some tough things to deal with already in his career with some pretty serious injuries.
“The way he's handled himself through all of that adversity has made him a much stronger person. I said at the time that it would, because the true measure of what stands people apart is how they deal with that stuff when it happens.
“The one area I have been there is when he’s been out of the game, to give him some perspective and support, because they are difficult times and I have been there.”
Ollie’s debut came on the summer tour of New Zealand. The family have always believed he had the ability. “To watch him rubber stamp what we all thought really, that he was capable of being an international player,” Jon says.
“He's got that little bit of X-factor to play on the international stage that you need.”
I finish the conversation by asking whether Jon is happy to have played in the era he did, in the early days of professionalism, or would he have liked to be where Ollie is now?
The training environment at Northampton and England only serves to highlight how naive the game was to high performance in the early days of professionalism.
“Players just trained in the day, instead of after work, and coaches essentially thought they had to work the players 9-5.
“The one thing you look at now is, ‘How good could I have been if I'd have had some of that level of physiology knowledge, sports science knowledge and strength and conditioning stuff that is around now?” Jon says.
“I immensely enjoyed the era I played in. I have a lot of incredible memories. So to say you want to change things would be wrong.”
