Sweet talking with Jones boy

Departing Warriors star Stacey Jones sees the fans' viewpoint in the stand at Ericsson Stadium. Picture / Brett Phibbs

How very encouraging people were about the prospect of interviewing Stacey Jones. "Good luck," they said. "He's very sweet, but he doesn't talk, you know," they said.

So I went to his testimonial lunch on Wednesday and watched the Mad Butcher attempt to interview Jones' dad, Billy. He asked Billy Jones: "What's he been like as a son?" Billy Jones said: "Yeah, he's been pretty good."

The Joneses, I concluded, are not an effusive lot and this is a worry.

When we turn up at Ericsson Stadium the next day, Jones has just finished training and is about to begin working through the list of farewell media interviews. He looks, to employ some sporting lingo, bloody buggered. The other media are sports journos and - presumably with prior experience of the Jones interview - have booked 10-minute sessions. Because I am an optimist, or perhaps just contrary, we've asked for an hour.

We're up last and he's not grumpy, although you can tell he's doing his best to keep that "God, I'm fed-up, when-will-this-be-over" look off his face. The photographer asks if he'd mind climbing up into the far stand so he can have his picture taken in the empty stadium. He is slightly reluctant. "Couldn't we just get the pic here, in the near stand?" he asks. With a little persuasion, he does it, with good grace. Of course he does. What everyone knows about Jones - aside from the fact he doesn't like talking - is that he has lovely manners.

Except when he's playing prankster, which he does with his great mate, Awen Guttenbeil. The last one they pulled on the boys was to put a bowl of HP sauce next to a bowl of ice cream. He is 29, going on six, I tell him. He thinks that's funny. But not as funny as the thought of the team tucking into what they thought was chocolate sauce.

He's a little bloke, everyone knows that too, and he looks quite tiny, up there alone in the stands. I ask him when was the last time he sat in one of the bright yellow seats and he says: "Oh. I don't think I've ever sat up there. I've run up to get footballs I've kicked up there, but I've never sat in the stand to watch a game. It was a good moment, actually." And, "so thanks for that," he says to the photographer. See how sweet he is. Well, that we knew too, but a reflective Jones does come as a small surprise. "You know," he says, "when I was looking down, I was thinking about what it'd be like from a fan's perspective, to look down and see the game." I thought he might be feeling a bit choked up, looking down at the field where he'll play his last game for the Warriors today, thinking about the fans. That is going too far. What he was thinking was: "They're pretty close up there to the ground, really."

Today, he'll run up the grey tunnel and on to the field and he'll be thinking that: "I just want to get out there and play and go a hundred miles an hour and get so tired that I just want to get off the field and get in the changing room and ... that's it." Now that is wistful thinking, I say. He can't possibly imagine he'll get off so lightly. "No," he says, fidgeting, "but I just want to go out and play the game as hard as I can and give my all and, aah, be so buggered that, yeah, so that the emotion won't come."

He asks, at the beginning of the interview, what "this is for?" I tell him that it's not for the sport section and that I don't, actually, seem to have any questions about league. "Right," he says, looking quite tickled at the idea, "that's quite good that."

He's been talking about league, or not talking about league, for the 11 years he's been part of the Warriors. So you can see why he might be a bit fed up with it. But he has a reputation for being even less forthcoming talking about himself than he is about the league. But this is his last week and at his lunch he sat through hours of talk about what being Stacey Jones means to other people. He says he was nervous about this: "I guess I'm happy that it's all over now 'cos for about a month I've been worried." He worried about what people would say and he worried about "me having to get up and have a talk as well".

In the end, he says: "I guess it was like a football game really, to tell you the truth. I always get nervous before a game but then once it's happening, it just goes away. So that's pretty much what it was like."

When younger he would be so nervous he'd be sick before games. He'd also get nervous with the media and with the adulation of the fans.

He says he's more confident now but the whole deal still feels quite odd. Because "it's not just about playing football. It's about dealing with people that want things. That want autographs or media-type things. We can look at ourselves and go, 'oh, we're just footballers, we're not people who can get up in front of people and talk', but that's what happened and you've got to do the best you can. We're not all good at it."

IT IS fair to say Jones is not good at it - and he's taken some flak for it over the years. When he announced he was leaving the Warriors to go the French club Union Treiziste Catalane, he said just that. Which went down as well as a loss to the Broncos.

He knows that people say: "I don't like the limelight and I go, well, 'what is the limelight?' You know, I don't really know what it is." It could be people he's never met, or met for two minutes, who think they know him. "But they don't know everything. I don't know everything about myself. It's a hard one."

That would be a hard one for anyone who has been living in that peculiar place where the limelight shines. But even more difficult for a shy boy who has lived there since he was 17. He says he is still shy, but not as shy as he used to be. And that sometimes what might be interpreted as shyness, "just depends on how I'm feeling, really. I can get out there and have a good time or sometimes I might just feel that this is not where I want to be at this time. And I'll just sort of hide."

So it is as much a sort of wariness as anything. He has added to that natural, public reticence, a guard he puts up to protect his private life. He's suffered the sorts of rumours that can go with a public life. I asked him whether he'd wanted to go to France partly because he could be more anonymous there. He says: "Well, I never really said that. Someone asked me: 'would it be good not to be recognised?"' And he said, 'yes?"' He's not sure, but he probably did. It's a Jones' sort of answer. He does a very good impression of himself answering media questions - accompanied by giggling. "You had a good game?" "Yeah." "What happened on the weekend?" "We lost."

There is one sure way to make him go very quiet and that is to quote back at him the words used at his testimonial lunch: hero and legend and dream-maker. Or the comparisons to Sirs Ed Hillary and Peter Blake. He looks at his knees for a long minute and finally manages: "Yeah, I mean, nah, that's a bit over the top for me."

Anyway, he's a sweetheart - he might be thinking about now that being called a legend is not so bad after all - and he's really not too bad at talking. For a Jones.