LEINSTER FEATURE:Hooker George Chuter tells JOHNNY WATTERSONthat life at Leicester is not a place for a faint- hearted player
SWING AROUND by the spire of St Peter’s in Oadby town, where grey, moss-covered slate tombstones stand like windbreaks along a crumbling church wall. Down the hill and sweep to the right over the painted roundabout and The Oval Leicester Academy sits on the opposite side of the road to Oadby Town FC. Residential, unadorned, it’s an unfussy town. For a club like Leicester it should be just so.
The football club is where Leicester players decant when they are in demand from the media. They cross the narrow road from the Academy to a threadbare pitch with a red stand running down one side, its corrugated tin roof bleached and peeled by the midlands weather.
One of the biggest clubs in the Premiership, Leicester Tigers has never been tempted to show an extravagant side. It’s as if one of the English giants of the game thrives on demonstrations of frugality, a twin to the club ethos of subordination to the team and hard work. Leicester stands by such inheritances and ingrained traditions and demands that their players never drift from those moorings.
Hooker George Chuter has been with the Tigers for nine years. Since he told François Pienaar in 2000 he wanted to bum around Australia, America and England rather than play professionally for Saracens, he has done his time in Oadby and Welford Road. Pienaar tried to halt him first, but in his wisdom he was persuaded that the needs of the former Brunel University student were better served by him closing his locker and walking.
“It is a grind,” says Chuter. “People don’t see the day-in day-out stuff that it entails. A lot of down time, when you sit twiddling your thumbs. Young guys who don’t have distractions, haven’t lived outside of rugby, don’t really have any thing to fall back on apart from a PlayStation. It can get boring and when you get bored, eventually you get drained.”
Arriving back in boot camp in 2001, he was unfit and had not played or watched rugby for a year. He’d been to see the Olympics, visited his girlfriend in America and looked up school friends across England.
Twenty-five years old, he was again hungry but eager and in Leicester needed both impulses to survive. On the inside you become part of the club family but Chuter – like the brooding laureates of the squad, Martin Johnson, Martin Corry and Lewis Moody – battled even for crumbs.
“When I first joined, it took about three years to get Darren Garforth to stop calling me a Saracens bastard,” he says. “You either buy into Leicester or you’re out. You’re not forced out, you just find yourself not comfortable. You cannot change the club. There is too much history here, too much strength of character.”
Chuter is one of the old boys now. Venerable, respected with all the scars, cards and trophies. He’s a lively hooker, likes the all-action game of the frontrow and sees his position as the ideal rugby platform. The aggression, the power, the strength, the technique all appeal to his nature in the way that cricket did not.
His childhood was immersed in weekends larking at the boundary as his father played with Derek Underwood and Alan Knott. Like his son, his father knew his own mind and turned down a professional cricket contract to become an architect.
Chuter’s gap year refreshed him for the game but life in Leicester in 2001 was attritional and occasionally explosive. The mind-set was that no player ever took a step back and he had to adapt. “It was very different, very different from Saracens,” he says. “It was a real shock. Perhaps not so different these days but back then when I joined they had a real old firm of Martin Corry, Neil Back, Darren Garforth and (Richard) Cockerill was still playing. Real old school.
“Hard core. For me it was a culture shock coming up from Saracens, which was not really a playboy club but we were the new upstarts, new money and we’d been quite successful. We had that sort of image of flash Londoners.
“François Pienaar was obviously a Southern Hemisphere- influenced player and coach and in sessions we worked with bags and had minimal contact. Coming up here it was all knocking hell out of each other Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. That was what they did. It was a massive shock to me.
“It took a while to get used to it. I’d been out for over nine months and to find myself in a Wednesday morning defence session with some of the best players in England was a wake-up call. But I survived it.”
There is a law of the jungle story that goes around. It involves a Leicester mid-week training session in the Johnson days during which England flanker Moody and Samoan winger Alesano Tuilagi, have a disagreement on the pitch and square up to each other. Johnson sees the fracas possibly escalating and decides to separate the two. He walks over to the eyeballing players and pulls Moody away from Tuilagi. The incensed Moody ill-advisedly takes a swing at the captain. Seconds and one punch later Moody is unconscious, Johnson glowering over him.
“That was true until four or five years ago,” says Chuter. “When I joined the club it was rare that you didn’t have something happen because there were so many guys competing for 15 places on the team. With a lot of competitive guys playing for limited spaces, there’s always going to be that flash point.
“We did a lot of contact. A lot of lineout and mauling. Live scrumming. Live defence. You wanted to impress the coaches, wanted to get in the team, get one over on your opposite number. But you can’t carry on like that now. The intensity of the game is so much that you’re spending Monday, Tuesday almost recovering from the match. The guys are bigger, stronger, quicker – you just can’t knock hell out of each other all week and expect to perform on a Saturday.”
Chuter will tell you that Leicester has managed to hold on to a lot of what made the club originally great. He talks about the 1980s when they won three Gillette Cups with a knuckle of old school players calling the shots. Guys like Peter Wheeler that fed into players like Dean Richards and John Wells who joined in the mid-80s. They then fed through to Johnson and he fed through to Corry and now Corry and Cockerill are passing it on to younger guys.
“We’ve maintained the legacy of the past,” says Chuter. “No, we don’t train the way we used to but the core values are still there, the honesty, the hard work. We’re not a flashy club. There’s no room for prima donnas here. They get chopped down pretty quick if they last at all.
“We’ve managed to maintain that and I believe it goes a long way to achieving success.
“I think the depth of the squad is an element too. You don’t get to two finals – three finals two years ago – with a small squad. You need a big squad who are working together and for the same thing and that all comes down to the ethos and the mentality of the players. We’ve a great tradition of people staying with this club for a long time, for most of their careers in many cases. Some people call it a clique, incestuous or insular but it works for us and it always has. We’ve shown that there is still a place in the game for a club mentality.”
Chuter finds now that young players come to him and ask how he possibly engineered the long walk away from Pienaar mid-career. He says to them it was a risk but worth it. You look at his green eyes and there’s spirit and great energy still there.
There has to be. Life at Leicester, in the Tiger pen, makes it that way.
