The Gloucester wing is enjoying himself back at the heart of a winning team ? and silencing the doubters
Tom Voyce is suffering a severe case of swings and roundabouts. Just now the Gloucester wing is struggling to find time to go wild boar shooting in Turkey. Now shooting is something Voyce loves and not so long ago he could have vanished for a month without anyone at Gloucester missing him. Not now, though. The invitation will have to wait.
From being a bystander as Gloucester pushed their way up the Premiership table, Voyce has suddenly moved to the very heart of a team that is eyeing a place in the end of season play-offs as they prepare to play Harlequinson Saturday, and his tries have also helped win the club their first bit of silverware in eight years. How times change.
From the start of the season until well after Christmas, Voyce could not get a game worthy of note. The best he managed were starts in the either in the early rounds of the Amlin or LV Cups. In the league there wasn't even a place on the replacements' bench. For a former England player with two Heineken Cup medals in his pocket, plus three championships and other assorted silverware, it was starting to look like the end of an illustrious career. The family farms in Cornwall beckoned. "I thought there might not be so much for me here," said Voyce after training this week. "It was weird because I never doubted myself, but we had three or four good wings and I had to just sit patiently." Which is what he did.
Christmas came and went, as did Voyce's 30th birthday in January with James Simpson-Daniel and Lesley Vainikolo ever present on the Gloucester wings unless the 21-year-old flyer Charlie Sharples was drafted in to give the England Test players a rest. Voyce did not get a sniff unless it was Agen or Rovigo. He did not even make the LV Cup team for La Rochelle either home or away.
The best Voyce, a wing with a career record of scoring better than twice in every three games, could manage was a try in the 60-7 walloping of Agen and another, also in the cup, against Leeds. "I didn't want people to think my career was ending because I was only 29 and I believed I had a lot of rugby in me, but it was just the question of getting that opportunity.
"I was fortunate at being the age I was and what I had gone through with Wasps and Bath had made me strong mentally and rugby changes quickly. You think of Steve Borthwick, he was England captain one day and then he was nowhere to be seen. That's how the sport can be and I've got to say I was fortunate."
Voyce admits that his "good fortune" were the injuries which Simpson-Daniel and Vainikolo suffered, allowing him to make his first start in the Premiership against Wasps, the team he had left to join Gloucester 18 months earlier. Since then he had hardly stopped playing and scoring.
He got two against his other former club, Bath, and on Sunday took only seven minutes to open Gloucester's account in the LV Cup final against Newcastle. It was pure Voyce, the wing stepping between would-be tacklers to force his way over the line. "I may have had six months when I wasn't playing any rugby. Now look at me again. I've been fortunate to win another trophy and I'm enjoying everything," says Voyce, who has not missed a start since that Wasps win. Best of the lot, though, was Bath and the chance to silence a few doubters.
In the middle of those early-season difficulties, Voyce's father died suddenly and Bath was the first game his mother had seen since the death. "There was a little bit there because it was the first time mum had come to watch a game since dad died. The whole family was there and it was a great place to put the doubters away," said Voyce who was at Bath for six years after being spotted as a 15-year-old playing in Truro. "People were questioning whether I had lost my pace, but with the second try I just wanted to put two fingers up to them. I learned from Shaun [Edwards, head coach at Wasps, where Voyce also played for six seasons] that when your back is against the wall that's when you like to play best. When you get it easy you can sit back and relish the stuff, but I love it when someone says I can't do something. I'll go to ten times the lengths to prove them wrong."
Which is some clue to how Voyce got through the bad times and how he plans dealing with the considerable changes which are happening at Gloucester following the death of their owner Tom Walkinshaw. With Walkinshaw's heirs and advisers settling on strict budgetary limits, Gloucester are losing some of their prime assets. Dave Attwood, one of the stars of England's summer tour of New Zealand and Australia, is heading for Bath; Nicky Robinson, currently in the form of his life and man of the match in last weekend's final, is moving to Wasps; while the England prop Paul Doran-Jones has signed for Northampton, leaving Voyce a senior voice at a time of change.
"Gloucester is going through a changing phase ? monetary things like that," says Voyce, "but there is fierce competition for places and that competition [last weekend's final] has given everyone a taster. It was nice for me, but it was so much better for the boys that hadn't won anything before. Now, guys like Luke Narraway have got a taster and if they are against Leicester or Saracens in a final, which we hope to be, they now know how it feels."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/mar/25/tom-voyce-gloucester
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