Simple Minds? No, I put up posters of David Sole

ALLAN JACOBSEN FORMER SCOTLAND PROP AND ALL-TIME APPEARANCE RECORD HOLDER FOR EDINBURGH

- Jon Newcombe

WHEN I was a boy growing up in the 80s I didn’t have posters of Simple Minds or The Proclaimers up on my bedroom wall, instead I had posters of props of the day like David Sole. I’ll never forget the Calcutta Cup match in 1990 and the slow walkout, it was unbelievable. I was in the schoolboy enclosure at the time, and you could feel the energy in the stadium. I loved going there as a kid and, over time, I must have been to Murrayfield for well over 100 Scotland games, as a fan or as a player. It was actually on the bus to one game as a mini-rugby player where I got my longstanding nickname. It was 1985 and one of the lads had just seen the film The Goonies. He pointed to me and called me Chunk after one of the lead characters who, it’s fair to say, was on the ‘chunky’ side.

Having gone to that Calcutta Cup Grand Slam match in 1990 it was all I could think about … all of the time. And 10 years later my dream of playing for Scotland came true when I ran out for a Scotland XV v Barbarians match. That Barbarians team had literally the best players in the world in every position – people like Jonah Lomu, Craig Dowd, both the Brookes, Tim Horan etc. Not that long before I was playing in the amateur leagues and playing Jonah Lomu Rugby on the PlayStation with my mates, so it was hard to take it all in, being on the same pitch with these legends.

With Tom Smith playing really well as first-choice loose-head and only one prop on the bench – normally a tight-head, it was a couple of years before I first got capped, against Canada on a tour to North America in 2002. I was in and around the squad basically for four, five, six years before I was a regular starter. I just had to keep plugging away.