Blindsided Read online

  It has all evolved very quickly and I don’t think it was any surprise that the two clubs that ended up in the final of the 2014 Heineken Cup were Saracens and Toulon. They’ve both got pretty good players, yes, but they’ve also got the strongest ethos and culture. Having met a lot of the current Saracens guys, I know that ethos and culture is a very big part of their make-up. The club feels like a family.

  It always irritates me when journalists make blanket statements about professional rugby. Recently a guy at The Telegraph published something that included me among players who’d come to England just to make money. I had an illuminating exchange with him, and it’s very rare that I feel the need to do that. I felt my integrity, values and honesty were being called into question, so I phoned him and said, ‘Mate, I still live here, for a start.’ Then I said, ‘And go and ask any one of my teammates how hard I worked.’ Finally I said, ‘You’re absolutely right about what you say. Some people did come with that attitude. But don’t put my name in among them.’

  Did he apologise? No. He said, ‘Point taken. I didn’t really mean it like that. But you were a big name . . .’ I said, ‘A big name maybe, but I’ve still got a reputation that means something to me. So don’t bracket me where I don’t deserve to be.’

  We left it at that.

  THIRTEEN

  BLINDSIDED

  I CONTINUED TO WORK in England with Nick Leslau for Prestbury Investment Holdings and began working for Sky, commenting on Premiership games on the weekends, in 1998. In 2000, we moved back to Italy so that Isabella could be close to family and friends. I’d travel back and forth to work for both Sky and Prestbury, according to how my meeting schedule looked. It worked really well for a couple of years, and whenever I came over for any length of time—three weeks or more—Isabella and our son, Louis, would come with me and we’d stay in the two-bedroom flat in Mayfair that I bought in 2001. It was a great little place, with car parking right in the centre of London. I got it for a really good price.

  I remember flying home from Australia on the morning of 9/11. I was in Paris, going through to Venice. In line with me were a whole group of passengers who were waiting to connect to New York. I was lucky. I got on my flight, landed in Venice, went home and fell asleep on the couch.

  Sometime in the afternoon, Isabella woke me up, saying, ‘Look at this, look at this!’ Dazed and jetlagged, I opened my eyes. It was just around the time that the second plane was hitting. I said, ‘What did you wake me up to watch a Die Hard movie for?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s real!’ That was it, I sat watching for the whole day as the events unfolded.

  I had to travel to London the next day. Originally Isabella and Louis were going to come with me, but I ended up going on my own. I’ve never seen a flight so empty. There was almost no traffic on the road on the drive from Heathrow either; it was a very eerie atmosphere. Our flat was very close to the US Embassy. I remember getting up very early one morning, jetlagged, and wandering over to Grosvenor Square. There was a book of condolences there for the public to sign; I remember feeling extremely emotional about it all. All those innocent people in the financial district who lost their lives, and those who died on the planes. I thought about the people in the queue in Paris heading for New York too. They probably would have been stuck there while US airspace went into lockdown. It’s situations like that that make you thankful you weren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The commuting continued for another couple of years. It was tiring, but it was a good way of getting the best of both worlds. I could do my Sky work on the weekend and schedule some meetings on the Monday or Tuesday, then zip back to Italy on the early-morning flight from Gatwick and be sitting at home by mid-morning. It worked really well.

  Then Thomas arrived in 2003 and it became more problematic for Isabella to travel with two young kids. Also, I got a bit worn down by it and found that, more and more, the opportunities in the UK were better than sitting in Italy, as nice a place as it is. Also, Louis was getting to the age where he was saying, ‘Daddy’s going away again?’ It just wasn’t fair on anybody. So Isabella and I discussed it and we both said, ‘Why don’t we go back to living in London?’

  We’d sold the flat in Mayfair. It went very quickly. It had gone up in value massively and we couldn’t justify sitting on it. I thought it would be much better to cash in and have the money in the bank. I guess I looked at what that flat was worth in comparison to what you’d get for the equivalent money in Australia and thought, ‘This is crazy!’ I still miss that flat, though. We had a lot of happy times there and I wish that I still owned it. Instead, we stayed in hotels in London until we decided to move back permanently.

  We’d enjoyed living in Hampstead when I’d first arrived to play for Saracens but we also had some friends who lived in Richmond. The Sky studios were close by at that time too, and it seemed a great place to bring up a family. It’s a lovely area, so in the summer of 2004 I took Isabella there for a weekend to have a look at a few houses.

  We had a Pimm’s on Richmond Green, sitting outside a beautiful old pub called The Cricketers. It was a glorious summer evening; there was cricket being played on the green . . . We said to each other, ‘It’s not a bad place, is it?’

  Then we went for a walk along the river, had a nice dinner somewhere and it was at that point that we said, ‘Richmond’s all right. I think we could live here!’ We bought a house, had some work done on it and then moved from Italy in July 2005. We’ve been in the London area ever since. I continued working with Nick and Nigel at Prestbury until 2006, when our youngest son, Nicolo, was born. Then I got an offer from my good friend David Coe (who passed away, sadly, in 2013) to take up a position with an Australian firm called the Allco Finance Group. I worked with Allco for the next couple of years. David and I had met while I was working with Robert Jones Investments back in 1990—we’d had a close friendship ever since and he was best man at my wedding.

  WHEN THE FINANCIAL MARKET crashed in 2008, the Allco Finance Group went under, triggering the closure of the London office where I was working. For me it had been a full-time, five days a week job: assisting with setting up a European property fund, attempting to raise capital, searching for deals—the whole gamut of commercial property work. I was reasonably senior; it was a big commitment and, in addition, I was working for Sky on the weekends. For a guy with a young family you could say my plate was very full.

  And then, in the summer of 2008, the black clouds appeared on the horizon of the entire financial market. Because we were the UK office of an Australian parent company, we were a little distant from the issues. We weren’t kept in the dark; we just weren’t facing bleak news head-on every day as they were in Sydney. In a sense that wasn’t such a bad thing. In Australia, Allco was on the front page of every newspaper. In London, if I was at a dinner party and I told people where I worked, they probably wouldn’t have even heard of Allco.

  Morale was low, though, and I recall taking the London office for a night out to cheer the staff up and to talk to them about their fears—I just wanted to support them. The uncertainty was really starting to unsettle the Allco workers, and it wasn’t just us—the whole world was in the same state of fear. Then, when Lehmans went under in September 2008, everything started to collapse. That was the tipping point of the whole process. It was a huge moment. All the staff in the London office of Allco, including me, lost their jobs. I felt terrible for everyone.

  For the first few months of 2009, with the entire financial market having fallen off the edge of a cliff, I have to admit that things were pretty scary for us as a family. I’d lost my main source of income and was trying to get a new job by going round all my contacts in the commercial property world, and other sectors. I had a lot of those. While everyone was very helpful, they were all pretty nervous about their own jobs and if they were doing anything, they were cutting staff at that time, not looking to hire. There were just no jobs around and for the first time that I can remember, I had
no real idea what to do next.

  On reflection, that period taught me an awful lot about how people behave when put under extreme pressure. To see normally calm people climbing over others to save themselves was quite the eye-opener. It’s not something I’d ever want to go through again, but the lessons I learned were very useful and clear. It seemed to me that when the pressure was on the concept of teamwork went out the window for some people. Understandably I suppose, a few people retreated into themselves and started looking out only for their futures. It was interesting to see who did what under pressure. The scenario reminded me of the 1995 World Cup quarter-final against South Africa. Everyone deals with stressful situations differently and I logged that information for future reference.

  People say, ‘When one door closes, another one opens’, but that’s not always the case in the economic market. One door shuts, they all shut. I wouldn’t say I got down about losing my job and not quickly being able to find another, but I did ask myself a few questions. Most importantly: ‘How can I turn this around?’

  In one of quite a few periods of deep reflection and self-evaluation—the kind of staring-unblinkingly-into-the-fire mood you end up in when you lose your job and have a young family to support—I came to the realisation that the one currency I would always have is who I am. That’s not meant to sound in any way arrogant or egotistical; it’s just a fact of life. People know who I am. So, combining that fact with my decent background in business, I thought to myself: ‘How can I use these strengths to my advantage in a business sense?’

  The obvious solution was to take on the sort of role commonly taken up by ex-sportsmen, whereby my name, network and reputation would be used by a company to make introductions and forge relationships with others.

  To be honest, it was the kind of role I’d intentionally steered away from in the past. I didn’t want to be sixty years of age and still relying on something I did back in 1984 to make my living. In the same way, I have absolutely no problem with the afterdinner circuit and I’m very happy to have it as an option, but I didn’t want it to be my living. That’s just a personal choice. Lots of guys do choose that as a way of earning money after their playing careers end and most of them are very good at it and like doing it. I’ve been in the audience at a few of these dinners and I always enjoy them. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to achieve something else. The ex-player side of things would always be in the background as a nice bonus if I needed it.

  I felt the same way about going back to play rugby in a social capacity. Even now, when I’m down at Richmond on a Sunday with the kids, a lot of the dads and coaches from the boys’ school play for the Richmond Heavies. They’re always going, ‘Why don’t you come down and play?’ My knees are so bad nowadays that I can hardly run, but on top of that I have absolutely no desire. I think that rugby for older guys is a great thing and should be encouraged, but it’s not something I’ve ever been interested in doing. I always felt that I’d had my fill of getting knocked around on the field. Also, I’ve always had a feeling that there’s bound to be one guy in any opposing team who’ll think, ‘Here’s Michael Lynagh. Let’s give him a bit of a hit.’ Then he’d tell all his mates about it in the pub later.

  I think that the key for me is that I’ve always kept rugby in its place. It’s given me a huge amount, but I’ve never felt that it should define me as a person. It’s something that I did, not who I am.

  I was at a lunch the other day and I met this guy who said he’d met Lawrence Dallaglio, the former England captain, at a function, but hadn’t previously known who he was. This guy openly admitted to Lawrence that he knew nothing about him. My first thought was, ‘I bet that was really refreshing for Lawrence.’

  I attend a lot of functions and when I sit down beside someone and they say, ‘Look, I know nothing about rugby’, I go, ‘Ah, thank God! How nice.’ Any slight pressure there might have been is suddenly off me—‘Let’s talk about something else. That would be really good.’ Amusingly, some people I meet actually apologise for not having any knowledge of or interest in rugby. There’s no need—I always love to talk about other subjects.

  I’m not saying that it’s bad to talk about rugby or that I’m not happy to. I’ll admit that I used to wish I could resist conversations about it, but then I realised that I couldn’t run from my rugby career. It will always be part of me and in some cases it’s actually a very useful common ground when I first meet someone in a business situation. I’ll talk about it and enjoy doing it. But I have plenty of interests outside it too.

  I’ve never had a desire to coach, either. I like helping people, but not necessarily in a formal, structured capacity. You see a lot of the guys go back and coach goal-kicking—that’s great. Passing on knowledge is always good. I’ve done a bit of it. But I think I’d find it a little frustrating, being a guy for whom things came reasonably easy from a natural ability perspective. Also, I’d rather not be tied to a week-in-week-out coaching situation when I had other things I wanted to do.

  From a rugby perspective, the Sky stuff was keeping me involved at precisely the level I wanted. I like the game; I like watching the game. My Sky work wasn’t a seven days a week thing, but at the same time it maintained my profile, not just in rugby, but in all aspects of business and personal life. Just to walk away from rugby and never have anything to do with it again would have been difficult, and a little unrealistic. To keep it going on the media side was as much as I wanted.

  So what else did I want?

  Well, I’d always wanted to create what I considered to be a ‘new’ Michael Lynagh—Michael Lynagh the property person who used to play a bit of rugby, as opposed to all the emphasis being on my rugby identity.

  But given the situation I was in, I didn’t have too many options. I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for things to happen. I’m not good at that. I always like to have some kind of plan in place so I decided that I had to use what I had at my disposal: the currency of me. I should say, too, that I was very lucky to have the Sky TV work in the background, because it at least kept some cash coming in. My former colleagues in the commercial property and finance sector weren’t as lucky. They were unemployed with few prospects, and I really felt for them.

  So, over the year and a half or so after Allco collapsed, I created a portfolio of companies that were happy to use me as a means of being introduced to other companies. In some cases I sat on the board as a non-executive member, because I thought that the more involved I was, the better chance I had of getting traction when forming business relationships.

  I feel it’s much better to be able to say: ‘Look, my name is Michael Lynagh and I’m a non-executive director on the board of this or that company . . .’ than calling a business person and saying, ‘Hi, I’m doing some work for company X . . .’ or worse, ‘I met Joe Bloggs at Tesco the other day. He makes widgets and you are a buyer of widgets. Let’s all get together . . .’ I personally feel that it gives you far more credibility as well as an enhanced knowledge of the company generally, and I always tried to promote that. I was hopeful that my idea would open a few doors for me, but I also knew that I’d probably need to be more proactive than I’d ever been before. Preparation was the key.

  I had to research and understand the minutiae of not only the companies I was approaching, but also the particular individuals within those companies who made the key decisions. With the whole global economy shaken up by the economic downturn, it became obvious to me that my proven organisational, leadership and teamwork skills—on the rugby pitch as well as in subsequent roles—were the qualities that might open a few doors for me. I was determined to make these attributes that I’d spent a lifetime developing work in my favour.

  AS PART OF THIS reinvention process, I had to do a fair bit of travelling, though I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of spending more time away from Isabella and the kids. Our youngest son, Nicolo, was six and Louis and Thomas were getting to the age when they increasingl
y needed their dad around. I knew that and I felt the tug of regret every time I went away, but these were tough times and I had my family’s financial wellbeing to consider. Like it or not, I had to put myself out there to network and one such trip involved a few meetings and opportunities in Singapore.

  So on Tuesday 10th April 2012 I was on my way to Singapore for a speaking and networking engagement—and for the first time in my life I missed a connecting flight. I got the initial flight from London, no problem, but there was a long layover in Dubai. I was in the lounge, fell asleep, and on waking suddenly ran the entire length of the airport to the departure gate, only to find that they’d already closed the flight. What was frustrating was that the door to the air bridge was still open and I could see the plane, but they wouldn’t let me board.

  So then I had to look for the next available flight, which turned out to be twelve hours later, but on a different airline. No matter what happened, I had to be in Singapore by 7am on the Thursday to play golf with the organisers of an event. The original plan had been to arrive the night before. I called the organisers and told them what had happened. ‘No problem—just get here whenever you can.’ They were very reasonable and understanding. So I booked the flight and endured a fourteen-hour wait in Dubai before I flew to Singapore, arriving just in time to go directly to the golf course. I was already pretty exhausted and it wasn’t going to get any easier.

  After the golf, I finally made it to my hotel around 4pm, whereupon I met a business colleague for drinks prior to going on to a dinner with some friends. I got back to the hotel around midnight. I was up again the next morning to play more golf in the steamy Singapore heat, prior to yet another drinks function. You’re probably thinking, ‘What’s he complaining about? Playing golf, going out for drinks—in Singapore’, but I’m just trying to get across that there was a lot going on and I was short of sleep. Saturday was clear until the evening, when I was due to address five hundred or so people at a rugby club charity dinner.