NFL comes to Twickenham: Martin Johnson welcomes American football to the home of rugby

Johnson shares some sporting knowledge with the Clevelan Browns' Joel Bitonio
Johnson shares some sporting knowledge with the Clevelan Browns' Joel Bitonio Credit: SEAN RYAN/NFL

Martin Johnson remembers a time when American football at Twickenham was an unthinkable prospect. When England’s Rugby World Cup-winning captain began watching the NFL it was on a Channel 4 Sunday round-up show, the best way to follow the game as a British gridiron fan in the 1980s.

Unlike the 24-hour year-round coverage available on these shores for NFL obsessives today, all the young Johnson had to go on was a highlights package. Unfortunately, by the time the games had reached British TV they were already a week old.

“The world has changed. Now I can go on YouTube and watch whatever I want, and it’s not all good," he says "I'm sure you can watch the Icelandic volleyball league if you wanted.”

Those early days of NFL fandom hold a special place in Johnson's heart. “There was a great joy and a bit of mystique about American football when I started watching it.

"I remember those games that I watched on Channel 4, I remember them vividly. Do I remember a game I watched four years ago? No, probably not as much."

The San Francisco 49ers are the team Johnson chose to follow in the 80s, but it will be another Pacific coast outfit appearing at Twickenham on Sunday evening. The Los Angeles Rams make their second visit to the home of British rugby to face the Arizona Cardinals, two NFC West divisional rivals coming into a bit of form.

Tyrann Mathieu presents Johnson with an Arizona Cardinals jersey
Tyrann Mathieu presents Johnson with an Arizona Cardinals jersey Credit: SEAN RYAN/NFL

Johnson has experience as an American football player, appearing for the Leicester Panthers briefly before settling on the path which would take him to the very top of English rugby. His preference was for the more spontaneous sport, and while the games share some clear common ground, he believes few are equipped to make the jump from rugby to American football. “You can be a great athlete and a good ball player but it doesn’t make you are great player at that sport. You are talking the NFL, the top, the best. You’re competing against people who’ve been playing it all their life, and very competitively as well."

Brain injuries are a concerning preoccupation for both sports currently, but Johnson says attitudes have progressed significantly since his playing days.

"When I started there was a culture of ‘get on with it, don’t tell anyone and you’ll be all right’. But now particularly at the top level, people understand more.

"I never got concussion from being high tackled, I got concussion mainly from tackling with either poor technique or just being unlucky that something happened that you weren’t expecting and getting a bang on the head. That’s going to happen, it happens when I am rolling around with my nine-year-old boy on a lesser level."

But it is in the area of tackling that Johnson believes rugby has a few things to teach its distant American cousin. "The great thing with rugby is all you learn from day one is head protection," he says. "That’s the first thing you do with kids, is tell them where to put there head when they are tackling and what they’re doing and to look after themselves.

“I think sometimes with the NFL, they have said so themselves, they get so into the scheme and the tactics, that they forget about their fundamentals."

Twickenham would be the third-largest stadium in the NFL, but is smaller than the Rams' current temporary home at the LA Coliseum. Stan Kroenke's team are struggling to fill its 93,607 seats after their relocation from St Louis in 2016, but Johnson does not believe a capacity crowd at HQ will intimidate quarterback Jared Goff or his team-mates.

“I went to a high school game in the states 10 years ago they had 300 kids just in the band. I mean they have 25,000 watching some games, they are used to the whole thing. I have trained at Twickenham hundreds of times, and it is empty, and you sort of look around it when it's empty and you are training, and it's a big stadium, it echoes.

"But on game day you don’t really notice the fans, you see the edge of the field as you do any other pitch and that’s it.

“You’re playing just a game, you don’t stop and look up and go ‘oh my god there’s 80,000 people watching you’. It could blow your head a bit if you start thinking about it.”

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