LONG READ Johnnie Beattie: 'Royal Marines, sabotaged rowing machines and drinking from cement mixers' - a player's eye view of pre-season

The fear is palpable. Anxiety courses through the group, reducing some of the meanest, fittest and most muscular sportsmen on the planet to rubble. Questions bounce around your head like ricocheting bullets: what’s about to happen us? Will anything I do here impress the staff? Are my hamstrings going to survive? The sense of unknown and lack of control was too much for some boys to handle.

The first day of pre-season sends shivers down a rugby player’s spine like nothing else. It’s the most nervous and scared you will ever feel walking into a club. With the northern hemisphere pre-season in full swing, players across Europe and South Africa will have been wrestling with all the emotions and all the doubts I recall so vividly.

I’ve seen some shockers over the years. I played with Rob Harley, a notoriously tough, abrasive flanker who had no regard for his own safety and made a record 267 Glasgow Warriors appearances. One year, he’d worked so hard and played so many minutes, the strength and conditioning coaches told him to do nothing during the summer. Rob took them at their word. He came back 15kg overweight, with a belly, and had lost a lot of gym strength. It was so hard to get him back in shape that over the next two months, they absolutely broke him. It was verging on cruelty.

Another year, we got brutalised at Scotstoun: down-and-ups, burpees, fartlek training, and the dreaded bronco running test – the dirtiest word ever uttered during pre-season. It was heinous. We thought we’d got through the worst of it, but were promptly whisked off for 10 days with the Royal Marines in a small town called Arbroath in Northeast Scotland. Now those guys really were trying to break you. Your first task every day was to get in the sea – water temperature 8C – at 5am, then get out and blast through press-ups and sit-ups. Oh, and you’re in full khakis for this, so imagine the chafing. Sand gets everywhere. Boys had double weights sessions, gun runs, obstacle courses, then sleep deprivation through the night, camping in tents and taking turns on ‘watch’ patrolling the grounds. RAF Condor was gross.

As a rule, professional rugby players are robust enough to grit their way through the physical extremes. The psychological humiliation is much worse. Especially when you’ve done nothing to deserve it. In 2006, I had been training with Glasgow’s senior team then gone off to play for Scotland at the U20s World Cup. The strength and conditioning coach had verbally given me time off after the tournament. Unfortunately, nobody had told our head coach I wouldn’t be present on the first day of pre-season. He rang me up. “I can see all the boys here, but one has not reported to training – where are you?”. That wasn’t an easy question to answer, because I was in Manchester Airport, about to board a flight to Cancun. S**t. Holiday cancelled, I was on the next train back to Glasgow, and needed a lift from my dad to our pre-season camp. My first pre-season with the top team in front of all the boys. Having been sat on my backside travelling all day, I trained the next morning and tore my hamstring. Tremendous.

Nobody was to blame for that, but I have seen some grim cultures created during the pre-season. In training with Scotland before the 2011 World Cup, we were playing a game of unstructured touch. I threw a miss-pass off my left hand to Graeme Morrison, and he was so scared of dropping the ball, he chose to let it bounce. There was such an environment of fear over making errors. Although the pass was good, because the ball hit the deck, I was made to do a lap of the entire Murrayfield complex. I knew then the writing was on the wall for my Scotland career. I wasn’t picked for the World Cup squad and later that season, signed my first contract in France.

The following summer, I rocked up, a pasty Scot in 37C heat, fearing the worst on the opening day of Montpellier’s pre-season. Fabien Galthie was our coach and had a reputation for exacting standards. My mind flitted back to the Marines and the broncos and wondered what type of madness the French would concoct.

Day three was a series of intervals on the rowing machine. The players decided they didn’t much fancy that, so they cut the cords to the meters which collect the data from the rowers.

We went down to the local athletics track and did a 1500m run, which has limited transferability to an actual game of rugby. When do you ever jog for a mile at a steady state during a match? Then bear in mind we had four boys over 150kg in weight, all of whom were walking by the end. I remember finishing at the same time as the great Georgian Mamuka Gorgodze, who was delighted to have matched his new Scottish friend since he was 10kg heavier than me. Fabien, though, was satisfied. “Boys,” he said, “you’ve done really well – let’s go down to the port.” For the rest of the afternoon, we helped fishermen take oysters out the ocean and had a few glasses of white wine with them. That was day one of pre-season. RAF Condor, it was not.

Day three was a series of intervals on the rowing machine. The players decided they didn’t much fancy that, so they cut the cords to the meters which collect the data from the rowers. That meant there could be no scrutiny, no judgement and no comparison with our scores later in the season. We did the session, but the data never reached the S&C staff. I think Fabien secretly enjoyed the subterfuge.

Next, he took us to a camp in Tignes, 2100m above sea level in the French Alps, where one of the stadiums was named after him. Shameless, really, but the team bonding was phenomenal, and France offers you alternative ways of doing it. The big boys got something from hiking the mountains. They weren’t being flogged on a patch of grass, which you can do anywhere. We were out on the lakes in pedalos. Mamuka put together the biggest barbecue I have ever seen and stood over it like a mafia boss ensuring the meat was perfectly seared. My initiation was singing a French song and the only one I could learn semi-convincingly was a nursery rhyme.

 

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Another year, we went to an olive ranch outside Montpellier. Mohed Altrad was the sponsor so his Altrad cement mixers were filled with Ricard. The new boys had to swig the liqueur straight from the cement mixer under Mamuka’s watchful eye.

The French would take you off-site to a different rugby club in the region and strip things right back to clubland. They wanted you to connect with the community. Castres is such a small town and the rugby team is the locals’ religion. When I played there, our coach Christophe Urios sent us orienteering as a pre-season challenge. You had to get fully kitted up in your Castres gear, visit the town butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, do all these checkpoints and introduce yourself. I remember a tug of war contest involving a teenage Antoine Dupont, who we could see already was going to be special. There was even raft-building, where you had to construct your vessel and paddle it from one side of the lake to the other. It was all team-based competition. It was way more fun while also challenging you physically and helping you get to know your teammates. A totally different vibe to the punishment you get in the UK.

Back home, you know pre-season will be a slog lasting 10 or 12 weeks. In France, it’s the opposite – their season is the marathon, and getting you through those games is the major focus. They can’t afford to break you in July when the Top 14 often starts in August and runs until the following June. It was more of a social reintegration and a warm-up for the physical aspects of gameplay.

It’s not still as light touch today, of course. Towards the end of my career, I did pre-season with a young Dupont and Anthony Jelonch which wasn’t stellar for my self-esteem. Antoine was just different. Jelonch had 10kg on me aged 18 and could run like the wind. He was still a kid. “Holy s**t,” I thought. “They do not need me at this club.”

When you’re young, you reckon you can take on the world. You have this arrogance. Pre-season is novel. You can recover quickly from one day to the next. Once you’ve had six, seven pre-seasons, you know what’s coming, you fret about not meeting expectations and recovering in time to get through the next day when your body has serious mileage on its clock. You are invariably managing one niggle or another. And you might have kids by then, who do have an unfortunate habit of disrupting your sleep.

The scale of France, the volume of player and the level of athlete they can call upon is frightening. In Scotland, it felt like we had to wring everything we could out of our players in pre-season. Physically, I never felt better than after a Scottish pre-season. You come out like He-Man, you can run through brick walls, you’re as strong as you’re ever going to be during the season, and as a ball-carrier, you are primed to do some damage. That’s a nice place to be. Without doubt you became a better athlete, but France has many times more athletes.

The weird contradiction of pre-season is the lack of pressure. Yes, you’re being grilled, but there are no matches and therefore no defeats. No big, collision-based injuries. Nobody is down. It’s exciting; there are new personalities, new hazing rituals, a freshness which everyone embraces. As hard as it is, it’s probably the lightest time mentally in a rugby player’s calendar.

That changes quickly when August becomes September, and pre-season friendlies are replaced by the cut and thrust of league fixtures. Honestly, those first few matches don’t feel normal. What you’re doing feels so alien; you’re trying to make your body do things that haven’t become natural again. It takes time to readjust to the demands of battle. For today’s players, that battle is fast approaching.