Putting 50 points on the Aussies was a highlight

IT was only through an accident of birth that I was born in England (in Northampton) while my dad was travelling around the country working in the oil industry.

- Jon Newcombe

I was months old, my parents are Scottish, and I see myself as nothing other than 100 percent Scottish. I’m not that precious about it but I did actually manage to keep my place of birth shtum until Glasgow played Northampton in the Heineken Cup and some of the local journalists picked up on it and phoned me up.

As a kid, I was sports-mad. I was a keen rugby player, keen golfer, keen cricketer and I played a whole bunch of other sports as well, whatever I could play basically, but I never had any understanding that sport could be a job until Sean Lineen spotted me playing in a school sevens competition and rang me up and invited me down to Glasgow’s academy. I’d missed out on all the age-group stuff after tearing my hamstring at the end of my first season of senior club rugby with a team called Cartha Queen’s Park, so I was fortunate that he was prepared to take a punt on me.

In the 2005/06 pre-season, I managed to get a few minutes against Newcastle. It was great to be on the same pitch as people like Jonny Wilkinson. That gave me a taste of it straight from school and, later on that year, I managed to make my competitive debut as an 18-year-old against GRAN Parma.

Two years later, I signed my first senior contract and I was competing with Dan Parks for the No.10 jersey. Probably the game that sticks out in most people’s minds as my breakout game was a match against Bath, down there, in the 2008/09 Heineken Cup. I had one of those games where a lot of stuff came off. It was an extraordinary game, it ended 35-31 to Bath despite Thom Evans’ hat-trick of tries. I also scored an intercept try and could have got another right near the end to win the match but I didn’t quite have the legs to go the length.