Even today, rugby union rarely makes its way from the back pages to the front, but what happened on the field when England met Australia at Twickenham in 1982, when Peter Winterbottom made his debut, was headline news. And that match’s day in the sun (and The Sun) wasn’t limited to that weekend, it’s still being talked about today, more than forty years on. It can be found on almost every round-up of 80s television and sporting moments. Unfortunately for one of England’s truly great opensides, it all had nothing to do with his performance. 

“At half-time,” recalls Peter Winterbottom, “Billy Beaumont was doing his speech on the pitch – because we used to stay on the pitch in those days – and I’m looking at the north end, and a guy ran on in a gorilla suit. Billy said, ‘lads, don’t look, concentrate’. And, I’m looking at the gorilla thinking that’s the issue. And of course, everybody else in the team was looking at the south end, which is where Erika Roe ran on from. And Erika Roe’s mate too, who nobody can remember, but both of them ran on with no tops on, the crowd was going mad…”

With a cigarette in hand, swirling her top above her head, confidence in abundance, Erika Roe’s appearance was impromptu, and ultimately an iconic 80s moment. “It wasn’t a regular occurrence,” recalls Peter, “I mean, not many women had done that. Well, I can’t think there was any women had done that before, and, erm, she was quite well endowed, so, you know, it certainly pleased the crowd.”

While England would win the game 15-11, Peter didn’t finish the match. “I tried to tackle a guy called Brendan Moon, who came down the middle. He was a big, big Australian winger, and I tried to tackle him, and I thought I had, but I got up after the tackle and staggered to the lineout. In those days you didn’t have the sort of concussion protocol that they have now and so the physio came on with his sponge and put it over my face and that was it.

“Then, of course, I watched the video later, I hadn’t tackled him at all, his knee had just hit my head and that was by far my worst concussion. I think I was quite lucky. I didn’t get too many concussions during my career. Not that I can remember anyway… I think possibly nowadays, they would have deemed some of the collisions I had as concussions, but in those days, you just got on with it.”

Peter Winterbottom is a name synonymous with being one of the toughest tacklers in one of the toughest eras of rugby, serving England through the tricky 1980s into the first modern golden era under Will Carling. The ‘Straw Man’ – due to his thatch of blond hair – won 58 caps for England (only the second player to pass fifty caps, behind team-mate Rory Underwood); he started seven Tests for the British & Irish Lions against the All Blacks (in tours ten years apart, 1983 and 1993); he won back-to-back Grand Slams (1991 and 1992) and was part of the England side that probably should have been the first to win a World Cup. 

Born in Otley, he played for Headingley, making his England debut in the Erika Roe match aged just 21. Rugby was balanced with life on the farm. “My uncle was a farmer,” explains Peter, “so when I was young, I used to work there in holidays and then I left school, went to agricultural college, and after that went back to the farm and worked there for a couple of years.”

In rugby, opportunities arise to play abroad – although they were rarer back then – and he had the chance to play in New Zealand with Hawke’s Bay. “I said to my uncle, ‘I’ve got this opportunity to go and play rugby, and I want to take it’,” says Peter. “And he was a bit pissed off, and said, ‘Well, look, if you’re going to go to New Zealand and play rugby, then, you know, you can forget the farm’. ‘Okay, well, I’m going to go and play rugby then’.”

Long before the professional era, it was more of a busman’s holiday, as he still plied his trade on farms in New Zealand. “It was beef and sheep, and I had a great time,” he says. “The Ranfurly Shield was something not many Englishmen will ever experience, but we went down to Wellington and we took fifteen thousand supporters down from Hawke’s Bay. There were thirty thousand in the stadium, and we lost by a point.”

He’d return to England, and farming. “And then obviously, the following year, I was able to go out with the Lions,” he explains. “In those days [1983], it was an eighteen-game tour, so we were there for eleven weeks and some of the games are pretty brutal. They weren’t as physical as the games nowadays, but they were dirtier: kicks, punches, you know, all that sort of stuff. 

“They were tough tours, they were good players as well,” says Peter. “They had a hell of a good Test side. We were close in three Tests, and then in the last, it blew out. We probably deserved to win one of the Tests. We had a lot of injuries, a lot of good players came home, which just didn’t help it at all, and it made it difficult.”

After the gruelling Lions tour, South Africa was next, this time for England. “We got a kicking,” he says. “We lost both Tests, we drew with Western Province, which was a big game, a big game – it was sort of the third biggest game we had.”

The South African hospitality on the pitch, didn’t dampen the wanderlust. “I stayed on with Mike Teague, Nick Youngs and Chris Butcher, and we decided to stay out there and go and play in Durban,” recalls Peter. “We had a few months down in Durban living on the beach at a place called Umschlanger, and we played for the Durban High School Old Boys. 

“The club rugby in Durban wasn’t particularly difficult,” he adds, “and we didn’t play particularly well; we were having sort of a big party down there and playing rugby as well, you just sort of meet so many people. I’m still in touch with people from Durban, you know, and some from New Zealand too.”

We meet Peter in his home in Weybridge; en route we’re passed by assorted supercars, something that reflects the proximity to the famous St George’s Hill private estate, once home to the likes of Nick Faldo, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Jenson Button, now home to an awful lot of very well-heeled financiers. Peter has been in that world too, obviously not to St George’s Hill levels, but he did switch from farming to finance, making the huge leap – demographically and geographically speaking – from Headingley to Harlequins. “When I was at Headingley, Harlequins was probably the one club in the country I hated the most,” he admits, “because I just thought everything that English rugby stands for is Harlequins: too public school and, you know, up their bums.”

Nonetheless, they wanted him and found him opportunities in the city, jobs which he had no qualifications for nor even a vague idea how to do. “It’s sort of quite weird,” he recalls, “you go into the office at seven o’clock in the morning to go and meet whoever, for your first day at work, and you haven’t got a clue what’s going on. I mean, not a clue.”

Given how job opportunities were created, the interview process was also questionable. “I had an interview with one guy who ran a broking company and the interview was basically being in the pub all afternoon. At the end, he said, ‘right, you’re done, start when you want’. I didn’t take that job. I met a mate who had played for London Welsh, and he said, ‘come and work for me, I run a desk’…”

So how did he breach the knowledge gap from farm to finance, livestock to stock? “You make the coffee, and hopefully you get a lunch, and eventually you actually work out what the hell is going on. On a broking desk, it can be very quiet, but it can be absolute mayhem. And when it’s mayhem, unless you know what’s going on,  you have no clue. I did that for twenty years…”

Despite his preconceptions of Harlequins, a club that you didn’t just turn up at but had to be ‘invited’ to play for, Peter was pleasantly surprised. “The club couldn’t have been more different from that [which he expected], even when I joined in 1988. There was John Olver, who I’d been to school with, as captain and then there were the Claxton boys, Terry, Mickey and Gary who, you know, drove trucks and were real London boys. 

“There was a complete array of different people that were Oxford and Cambridge guys and Dick Best was the coach, and he was a quality coach, he knew how to get the best out of people. You’re also playing with people like Everton Davis on the wing and Andy Harriman, fantastic players.”

And Mickey Skinner… “God, yeah, he’s a one-off isn’t he?” responds Peter. “Larger than life character. If you think about what it takes to build a rugby team, a person like Skinner is absolutely critical. He’s honest, upbeat, always having a laugh, tough as old boots, he’s always leading the charge and the tougher the game gets, the harder he plays, that’s the sort of guy you want.”

It’s impossible not to get lost in tales from this era, the final days of rugby’s wild west, before the dawn of professionalism, and with it more television cameras, instant replays and TMOs. “I think it’s a little bit too clinical nowadays,” says Peter. “I remember a game we played against Nottingham in the quarter-final of the cup, and they kicked off. We had this referee, a guy called Colin High, and I don’t know whether he would have been put up at the Petersham Hotel (in Richmond) by the committee or given lots of beer, but Nottingham kick off, one of their second rows got in the wrong place, I punched him, he swung around to try and hit me, missed, and Colin gave a penalty against him, and he was complaining that I’d hit him. 

“We go to the lineout, and Colin said, ‘I saw that, Peter, don’t do it again’. You can never have that nowadays…” he laughs. Respect and metal-studded rucking of any prone player went hand in hand. “I love the old story about Wade Dooley in Paris when I think he got hit by Olivier Roumat,” continues Peter. “I don’t know if he went down, but there was a sort of bit of a fracas and the referee blew his whistle and called Roumat over, and Wade Dooley walked up and said to the referee, ‘don’t you dare send that man off this pitch’.”

Results-wise, the start of Peter’s England era wasn’t the best. “We weren’t very good, in fairness,” he admits. “Through the mid-80s, we were poor. The coaching wasn’t great, there was no real direction for the English team. It was very amateur, we’d come through the era where we had the boot scandal with Adidas [when players had allegedly been given ‘boot money’, which was against amateur regulations], they were clamping down, so it was very amateur. We used to come and meet on a Thursday afternoon before an international, and train Thursday, Friday, then you play on Saturday. Not even club sides do that now.”

In 1987, England finished bottom of the Five Nations table – where they’d largely hovered since a runners-up spot in 1982 – but their lacklustre form was amplified by the first-ever Rugby World Cup. Held in New Zealand, England were beaten in the quarter-finals [16-3] by a Wales side that had finished just one spot above them in the Five Nations championships. “It all changed when we’d gone to the World Cup in ‘87 and we hadn’t performed particularly well there,” explains Peter. “When we got back, they changed the whole management, and a guy called Geoff Cooke came in and he transformed the whole thing.

“What he brought,” continues Peter, “was a whole new sort of professional attitude to the whole party. Fitness became a big thing, I remember him saying to us, ‘Who are the best team in the world?’ ‘New Zealand.’ ‘How are you going to beat New Zealand?’ And we all sat in this room, sort of looking at each other, going, ‘Oh, I don’t know, well, you know, we’ll kick more penalties than them.’ And, he says, ‘You don’t know how to beat them, you don’t know how to become the best team in the world. You’ve got to strive, you’ve got to get your skill level up, and that’ll take a couple of years, at least.’ He said, ‘The only way that you can beat New Zealand is to get fitter than them, that’s your only way.’ And, luckily, everybody took it on board and we went away, and we all got fitter. 

“And, I mean, we didn’t beat New Zealand straight away, it took five years [1993’s 15-9 win at Twickenham], but England did it eventually. But that was the change. He brought Roger Uttley in as the coach, and he would push the RFU into doing things like getting girlfriends and wives to travel to the away games and stay in the hotels.”

The mindset change was also reflected on the pitch. England might have been known for uncompromising forwards – and they had the likes of Wade Dooley, Mike Teague and Dean Richards to keep up that tradition – but now they had Will Carling as captain and the likes of Jeremy Gusccott. “Suddenly, you’ve got a team of tough forwards but also really good, exciting backs.”

The changes started to bear fruit soon after the World Cup. “In 1988 we beat Australia at Twickenham [28-19], it was Will Carling’s first game as captain and we beat them, playing good rugby – I think that was when we first saw the change.

“And from there, it was a period of sort of success, which is great for somebody like myself, because when Geoff took over, I was 28 so I’d been around for a few years, but the last five years of my rugby were the most enjoyable.”

England finished the 1989 Five Nations as runners-up, beating champions France 11-0, but suffering a draw with Scotland 12-12 and narrow defeat in Cardiff [12-9] to put paid to their hopes.

A year later, they were runners-up again (this time to Scotland), before taking a Grand Slam in 1991, just in time for the home Rugby World Cup. “We were playing good rugby, but we’d been to Australia in the summer of 1991 and got beaten badly [losing 40-15], and that was probably a good thing, because it sharpened us up a little bit. We knew that we had to get fitter. 

“We went into the World Cup knowing that on our day, we could compete and while we lost the first game to New Zealand, we managed to get out of the pool and then had a really tough game in Paris against France.”

They won 19-10, then defeated Scotland in the semi-final (9-6), to set up the final with the Aussies. Infamously, England changed their tactics, and ended up losing 12-6. “The way I see it and saw it,” says Peter, picking up a story he’s had to tell a thousand times before, “we didn’t think that we could dominate the Australian pack the way we dominated other packs. So, if we’re not going to do that, how are we going to win the game? 

“Because they had a great back line, it was a conscious decision to sort of slightly play more with the ball, and less of a kicking game. And as it happened, you know, we won God knows how much ball, and we churned it up, we created opportunities and didn’t take them. And the Aussies had one opportunity in their own 22, and they kicked it down the pitch, got the lineout and scored, and that was effectively the difference between the two sides.

“It could have gone either way,” he reckons. “After the game a lot of people are saying, ‘well, you should never have changed tactics. You’d have beaten them had you kept it tight and kept a kicking game,’ but who’s to know?

“And some of the players were pissed off,” he continues. “I remember having a beer with Brian Moore on the Monday morning after the final. We were both at work, and I got to my desk, and by about 10.30am, I said, ‘I’m just sick of this. I can’t do it’. I phoned up Brian, and I said, ‘Right, meet in the pub at 11 o’clock?’. And we did, and we sort of went through everything that had happened. And he was adamant that we should never have changed our tactics. But, I said, ‘well, we did…’”

Even for a career as varied as his, Peter did briefly fall out of love with the game in the late-1980s, after spending a season in South Africa, playing for Transvaal in the Currie Cup. “It was a really hard season in South Africa,” he admits. “Really physical, and it was mentally quite tough as well, especially if you’re the only Englishman playing rugby out there.

“When I came back, I remember sitting in the dressing room with Harlequins going, ‘I really don’t know what I’m doing here’,” admits Peter. “I’d never had that before, I’d always wanted to play rugby and always wanted to get stuck in and suddenly I’m going, ‘I’ve no interest now’.”

The summer off international rugby in 1989 after not getting selected for the Lions proved to be the perfect cure. “I remember watching it on TV,” he says. “I had the summer off, trained throughout, away from the club, just doing fitness training, and watching my big mate, Mike Teague, get player of the series. He was outstanding and I’m watching that from London, thinking, ‘I’ve got to get back out there.’

“And the next four or five years, I was enthusiastic, I really wanted to do it. You don’t realise that players go through that. Now, having gone through that, I understand if a player’s a bit off and if he’s losing his form, that this can happen.”

The game was changing and Peter could see it happening in front of him. As professionalism got ever closer, he knew it had to happen, not least because he knew how tough things could get playing as an amateur. “I remember the 1983 Lions tour to New Zealand and there was a guy called Roy Laidlaw, the Scottish scrum-half, and he said to me, ‘Look, over eighteen games, we average 26,000 people watching and I’m not getting paid, my wife had to go and get free meat from the local butcher because we had no money’. And that’s when you think, well something’s got to change, because there weren’t any financial perks.”

Carling’s era of success – including back-to-back Grand Slams in 1991-92 – changed how English rugby was seen, not just by those around the world, but those at home. “The whole perception of the game was changing and then, we got BBC Sports Personality of the Year and we got Team of the Year and people start recognising you; well, not many, but a few…”

Peter returned to the Lions for the 1993 tour to New Zealand, ten years after his first tour, and he was looking to finish his career on a high. “Rugby is a religion in New Zealand, every time you walk around the corner or go into a shop in New Zealand, you know they’re on you.

“I remember in 83, we were in a place called Hastings, and we went to a school, and I can’t remember who went with me, John Carlton I think, and we’re sitting in a school and you remember a guy called Josh Kronfeld, the All Black flanker? He was one of the kids, and he put his hand up, and this kid said, ‘Excuse me, do the Lions use a man-for-man defence or a drift?’ 

“Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure,” admits Peter, “So I said, ‘I think this is one for John’! But it was just an indication this little kid of ten, knew more about rugby than I did.”

The series ended in defeat despite England levelling it with a 20-7 win in the second Test, before a crushing 30-13 loss brought the tour to a close. “The perfect way to finish would have been winning that last Test,” he admits. “Because I decided I was going to pack up, I knew it was the right time, I didn’t want to be a sort of gnarly old 35-36 year old, who could only punch people.

“I thought, ‘that’s it, I’ve had a good run’, I had no bother calling it a day because, I think I played more rugby in my sort of twelve or thirteen years of playing senior rugby than most people will ever play.”

England could at least savour the second Test win. “One of the great feelings I had during a game was probably when we had twenty minutes to go and [I was] standing at the back of the lineout. I was just thinking, looking at Michael Jones, who’s was a great, great player, thinking ‘there’s nothing you guys can do now, we’ve got you beat, you can play anything, throw anything at us, and we’ll beat you’. And it’s quite a good feeling that and you don’t often get it, not in a big game.”

And so a great career came to an end. He’d have spells coaching with Harlequins in the immediate aftermath of his playing days, and he’d also be involved with local club Esher, with whom he still has a role, but now his focus is on other things. Such as curry sauces. Wafting through the house for the duration of our two-to-three hour chat has been the spiced scent of cooking sauces being conjured up by his wife Trish. “I left the city a few years ago now, and obviously coach Esher, but also my wife’s got a cooking business called Emily’s Kitchen – Emily’s our daughter. She cooks curries, spag bol, and various dishes and we sell it on websites and local markets. They’ve won a few Great Taste Awards, and my job is head of procurement; I go to Bookers and the supermarket, I’m the delivery man, and I’m chief taster.”

He was tempted out of the kitchen for one last game. “I think it was for Harlequins’ centenary or something…  a match between Jason Leonard’s old boys team against somebody else’s team. My wife was sitting in the stand, and I got the ball, and sort of ran, thought I’d pass it, dummied, tripped up, landed on the ball – and I’d had bad ribs previously –  and I stand up, holding my heart, and she’s in the stand thinking, ‘oh, my God, he’s had a heart attack’. I hobbled off then, and that was the last time – I couldn’t get out of bed the following day –  I thought, ‘no, that’s definitely the last time for me’.

“At least I was on the pitch for a bit longer than some of them,” he adds. “The old Scottish second row Neil Edwards, he came on as a reserve, and he ran fifteen yards onto the pitch, stopped and then turned around and walked off. He obviously thought, ‘What on earth am I doing?’.”

With almost sixty caps, Lions tours, World Cups and having travelled more as a player than many of his era, he surely can’t have any regrets? “Oh, loads of regrets,” he says. “I don’t want to go into them all. I think people who say they have no regrets, are talking rubbish.

“I don’t really regret anything I did on the pitch,” he adds, “apart from when I kicked a Frenchman in the head, which was not my finest hour, but apart from that, I don’t really regret anything else.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 32 of Rugby Journal. 

To order the print journal, click here.

When Sadia Kabeya and Ellie Kildunne decided to take a holiday at the beginning of March, they did what one would expect of a modern sports star. They went to Dubai.

What nobody expected was that Dubai would suddenly be under attack following the outbreak of war in the Middle East. “We could hear the sound of missiles being intercepted,” says Sadia very matter-of-factly. “The day we were meant to come back they shut down the airport.”

Back home, news of their extended holiday made headlines as the pair missed playing for their respective club sides, but Sadia took it all in her stride. “We had to stay for an extra week,” she says, “but in the scheme of things, it went by quickly.”

It’s fair to say it takes a lot to faze the 24-year-old back row, who was named as player of the match when England beat Canada 33-13 to win the women’s Rugby World Cup final at Twickenham’s Allianz Stadium back in September. While other England players may be struggling to adjust to their new-found fame since becoming world champions, she is embracing the moment. “Yeah, it has been interesting coming off the World Cup and it has been so weird to have people recognising you in the street,” she admits. “I was at a petrol station, I went to the toilet, came out with my hands dripping wet, then somebody saw me and went… gasp,” she says, mimicking the kind of star-struck look reserved for pop stars.

“It’s something we always wanted, for the sport to be in the limelight,” adds Sadia. “It has taken time, but when it’s happening you can’t complain about it. You’ve got to enjoy it, you’ve got to revel in it and you’ve got to feel grateful for it.”

In any World Cup-winning side there will be players who emerge as stars, with brands lining up to sign them and youngsters desperate to emulate them. In this particular Red Roses team it’s Ellie and Sadia that are riding the crest of the World Cup wave, both named in the Telegraph’s fifty most influential women in sport 2025, although the flanker acknowledges her team-mate, the runner-up in the 2025 BBC Sport’s Personality of the Year, is perhaps a step or two ahead. “I’m really good friends with Ellie and sometimes I think to myself, ‘I’m really busy today and there’s lots to do’,” she explains. “Then I’m with her for a day and I go, ‘oh, no, no, no, my life is not busy’.” 

Ellie may have stolen a march on Sadia on the brand side, but it’s as a role model that the flanker is making her own unique impact – as a black female professional rugby player from Lewisham with the muscular physique to match it. 

We’re meeting Sadia at Gymbox, a swanky gym in Holborn, where she’s hosting a series of one-to-one training sessions with Revive Active, a health supplement brand. Amid the boxes of sachets around the gym, Sadia navigates each exercise with ease, a natural athlete in her element. “I’ve always naturally had more of a built physique, just genetically,” she explains. “When you’re in school, all you’re worried about is how good you’re going to look. What are the boys going to say? And I remember being in a transition period when I was wanting to take rugby seriously, but I was still in school, and I would get comments because people could see my muscles in my blazer. 

“Being able to be strong, I think it’s empowering. I love going out on a summer’s day, showing off my arms and not feeling self-conscious, because I also know what these shoulders do, and what my body does for me. 

“I found you can also be feminine and strong and muscular all at the same time,” she continues. “Also, a reason why I take a lot of pride in it is because if someone saw me shying away and trying to be the smallest character in the room, maybe they would do the same. So yeah, I’ve definitely come to love how I look.”

Born to a Congolese father and a Jamaican mother, both cultures were prevalent in the south London home she grew up in. “My dad’s Congolese, he was born in Congo. I would describe him as a very African man, he’s very traditional, he brings lots of the values his parents taught him which were prevalent in my house. My mum was born and raised here, she’s English and Jamaican. The thing I would say I felt most from her culture was the food more than anything, we’d be eating curry goat, rice and peas, stew with pounded yam.

“All my dad’s family is in Congo, so I would love to go and visit one day and meet my grandparents. I’d love to go to Jamaica, I just haven’t found the time yet.”

Sadia grew up with two brothers, both of whom have loomed large in her life. “I’m very much a middle child,” she says with a little smile, “I really looked up to my older brother. Anything he did I wanted to beat him, but also I was a younger sister, following him around all the time…I think he found me very annoying.

“We used to fight, but he’s four years older than me and he quickly became bigger and a lot stronger very quickly, so fighting was off the cards. Then my younger brother came along, and I thought ‘yes, someone else!’.”

It was following around her older brother that introduced her to playing sport, with the athletics track igniting Sadia’s passion.  “I used to love cross country when I was younger, which seems crazy now because I hate running with a passion,” she explains. “I then did 1500m, 800m, and then I went down to the 300m and the 200m. I joined an athletics club, and they said ‘you need to go into field events’. So I focused mostly on shot put and hammer and realised I was probably the best at those events. I should have been doing them all along instead of running!

“I obviously liked the power aspect of field events. But I think I was naturally gifted in the power side even if I say so myself,” she laughs.

Joking aside, she was technically good at both shot and hammer. “But I think quickly I realised I didn’t like the individual side of it. I’m not externally driven to want to get a medal or whatever, and I got bored of it. Then I found rugby, which was much more my style.

“I was very much an aggressive child, so being able to just run around, hit things legally, was the big appeal. Which seems funny because I’m not like that anymore, I’m not aggressive. But at the time I thought ‘this is amazing’.”

Sadia first played rugby at Harris City Academy in Croydon, which led her to joining Streatham-Croydon rugby club as a fourteen-year-old, turning up at a club that could barely rustle up enough players to field a women’s XV. “Streatham is a classic grassroots club, and has a strong family feel to it. When I first joined, they had a women’s team, but it was like a mix of all ages, because there wasn’t enough players to be adults-only. 

“I didn’t actually end up playing any competitive matches while I was there,” she says. “It was a year of training, but it didn’t bother me. I was buzzing with simply turning up to training every week.

“My parents were definitely taken a bit aback, my dad more so, rugby was never a thing growing up in my family. Even though we grew up in London, around lots of sport, rugby never came into the picture.”

That was ten years ago. When Sadia returned home last year as a World Cup winner and a local hero, Streatham-Croydon not only had a women’s 1st XV but also a 2nd XV, plus three girls’ teams and a mixed tag rugby team. In its own way, that is some small indication of how the sport has grown over the past decade. “I came into rugby not knowing anything about it. I never watched it, and all I knew was playing with my friends. We’d rock up to games with plastic bags on our heads to protect our hair and not think anything of it. Like it was just a normal thing to do. I was playing with people who all looked like me, sounded like me, and all had the same upbringing as me.”

After her induction at Streatham-Croydon, Sadia later headed west to Richmond to join a club that is pivotal to the history of women’s rugby and whose members founded the Women’s World Cup. 

Going to Richmond was a culture shock in every possible way. “I was a small fish in a big pond,” she recalls. “When I first went there I was around seventeen or eighteen years old and they had a squad of forty players. I think I was one of maybe four who was a woman of colour.”

She was still a teenager trying to navigate her way through the sport, but also in life, trying to adjust to fit in rather than simply be herself. It still turned out to be an important stepping stone. “I actually had a really good season, even though we were getting battered week in, week out. I was loving it, I was getting good experience there, competing with senior players.

“But from there, joining Wasps was where everything changed for me,” she continues. “I felt like I’d found my people in rugby. It was a club that was very welcoming for anybody.”

Even wider issues of race would be discussed, or least given the airtime if needed. “When I joined it was also at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement,” says Sadia. “I remember the coach saying, ‘Oh, we’re on a Zoom call [with the full squad and coaching staff], let’s just talk about this [Black Lives Matter] because it’s happening, and if you want to say anything feel free’. And I was like, ‘no way is eighteen-year-old me, coming into this new Premiership club and immediately jumping on the Zoom and saying ‘Hey guys, by the way…’.”

Nonetheless, just the thinking of the coach made her feel welcome. “That was huge for me, just feeling included. I was like, ‘wow, this is new, but it’s a good new.’ And then, once the rugby started, everything just clicked as a team.”

While she’s passionate about her south London roots, she’s now very much attached to her Midlands home of Loughborough, moving there after just a year at Wasps. “I’m quite an independent person, so I was excited to live by myself,” she says. “I was a bit worried about the move from big London to a small town, because I love London. Now I feel like I’m never moving back, I can’t do the big cities anymore.”

It was also during that transition from Wasps to Loughborough Lightning that she got her first call-up into the England squad. “Somebody got injured in pre-season. So I thought, ‘I’m here as a placeholder and I’ll just do my best. I will be in and out. But I wasn’t.”

Sadia soon made her England debut, aged nineteen, against Canada, in 2021. “I was riding the wave,” she says. “Obviously I was working very hard but also trying to take in whatever came along. When I got my first England cap I was like, ‘wow, this is kind of cool’. And also there was the coaching setup. They were the most chill coaches ever.

“I don’t think I even spoke to the head coach before my first cap. I think the team sheet came out on the WhatsApp group, I looked at it and went, ‘Oh, that’s my name … and I’m starting!’.

“England didn’t make a huge deal out of it,” she adds, “which was good for me, because you don’t want to get nervous. Obviously, I was proud to play for England but I think I was more proud that my family was proud, if you see what I mean, and for them to say ‘you’re now an England international’.”

Coming into a team packed with experienced internationals as a teenager was inevitably daunting. “I was very quiet when I first went in,” she admits. “I didn’t want to tread on anyone’s toes. It was interesting because Marlie Packer is a huge name in the game, and I think at the time was known for being rough and ready on the pitch, and being quite an abrasive character. When I came into camp she immediately took me under her wing.

“There was already a mutual respect because we’re competing for a shirt,but we’re here to make each other better at the end of the day. So no, everyone was very supportive. The whole journey to that point was just a whirlwind. 

“Then getting selected for the [2022] World Cup, I was competing with Vicki Fleetwood, who’d been around for years and years and was an integral part of that squad, and I knew it was going to come down to me or her for that position. So, I didn’t have any expectations, to be honest. But then I found out I was playing in our opening game at the World Cup, but then I got Covid that week.

“When we landed in New Zealand I was a little bit tired. We were still doing testing every day. So, I did my test, went to sleep, I woke up around 3am, checked it and I went ‘Oh. My. God’.

“I had a Zoom call with Mids [then coach Simon Middleton] who said, ‘we’re still going to play you, we’re going to send a bike to your room and you need to do your workouts in the room until you get a negative result’.”

The tribulations were worth it, considering the end result. “Then playing the opening game against Fiji and to get player of the match,” she explains, “I couldn’t take it all in, which I think was probably good so I didn’t get overwhelmed.”

Sadia played in three of England’s five games as they advanced to the World Cup final, and played thirty minutes off the bench as they fell to a heartbreaking 31-34 defeat against hosts New Zealand. Now three years on, and as a World Cup winner, Sadia believes there was one key change from 2022 to 2025 that got them over the line. “In New Zealand, it was all about wanting to make the other person fail in your position, whereas this time around, I think it was all about building each other up. Because if the person you’re competing with is doing well, you’re going to want to do better.”

The other significant change was the arrival of John Mitchell as coach in 2023. “He was huge on being bonded as a team,” says Sadia. “I think that the last England team in 2022 were very, very talented, but we might not have been quite so bonded off the pitch, and I think the bond you have off-pitch directly correlates to how well you work with each other on-pitch.

“Being able to know each other’s triggers, being able to know how to speak to each other, and also just wanting to work really hard for each other is key. And Mitch was basically like, ‘you guys are going to love each other, and I’m going to make you love each other’.”

Things could have very easily gone in another direction for Sadia. Ahead of the 2025 World Cup, having been forced to miss two WXV tournaments along with the 2024 Six Nations due to injury, it got to a point where Sadia admits she ‘hated’ the sport. “In terms of rugby that was the lowest headspace I’ve been in,” she says. “But in the lead-up to the World Cup, we didn’t shy away from things. We wanted to go and win it. I think previously, we’d been very ‘English’ about it. 

“You don’t want to speak about it, or you don’t want to say, ‘oh, we’re going to win this!’. But we felt like it was actually really important this time around to actually say it, to believe it.

“Then, on the day of the final I felt very calm. We’d always said all the work that we’d done would get us that win. So, you have to trust in that work, whereas in 2022 there was a lot more nervous energy and a feeling that we needed to go out and put in this amazing performance on the pitch.

“The experience of playing in the 2025 final was better than I could ever have imagined,” says Sadia. “Arriving on the bus and seeing everyone waiting for us to get there and then walking out onto the pitch, the national anthems, it was a sell-out crowd ... I mean, we never would have imagined three years ago, when we were coming back from New Zealand, that we’d be playing in front of eighty thousand people.”

A team at any level will usually be a melting pot of personalities, and what comes through so strongly when speaking to Sadia is how tight this England squad is both on and off the pitch. “After the final there were days of partying,” she says. “Me and a couple of the other girls went away together, which was nice, because obviously you spend three months together, training, doing  pre-season and then going through the World Cup. You’d think you’d be sick of each other, but everyone was trying to stay together before we went back to our clubs.” 

Given everything she has achieved so far, it is easy to forget she is still only 24 and there is still so much to do and achieve. “I want to cement myself as one of the best players in the world at what I do,” she asserts. “Someone might say, ‘I want to get World Player of the Year’, but that’s hanging a hat on one award, that’s down to different people’s opinions. Whereas I want to be the best at my tackling, I want to be the best at my dominant carries, and that’s something I can track. If in turn that comes with more awards and accolades, that’s just a bonus.”

Story by Ryan Herman & Scott Duke-Giles

Pictures by Holly Frampton

This extract was taken from issue 33 of Rugby Journal. 

To order the print journal, click here.

When a rugby career spans quite as long as Fran Cotton’s it can be tricky to know where to begin. The time he beat the All Blacks, while playing for the North at Otley? When he was part of the first England side to win a Grand Slam in 23 years? How about the Lions, as a player on the victorious 1974 tour of South Africa? Or as a manager, same place, same result (a series win) in 1997? There’s the picture too, the Mud Man, which we have to get on to, but first, it’s fashion. Rugby fashion, and at a time when some social media types are asking ‘where are the rugby fashion brands?’, it’s fitting to salute the first, the one that bears Fran’s name, Cotton Traders. “Smithy always says it’s lucky I wasn’t called Fran Polyester,” laughs the former England prop, when we visit his farm, just outside Macclesfield. 

For those of a certain vintage, Cotton Traders were the brand that made the rugby shirt a fashion staple, and it was started by Fran and his club and country team-mate Steve Smith. “I say to people, I’ve been married twice, once to Pat [his actual wife] and once to Smithy,” laughs Fran. “I always remember when I met him, because it was when I was introduced to Loughborough rugby, who were famous for fitness, and it was a pretty tough session, and I was absolutely knackered in the shower. I had this little redhead scrum-half next to me who never stopped talking. I couldn’t stand him, and it’s amazing that, when I got to know him, we became lifelong friends. But at the beginning I just wished he’d shut up.”

Smith brought Fran into the fashion world, first with Bukta, a vintage sportswear brand, and then to a division of French Connection, who had bought the English brand. After two years of running it, they decided they could go it alone, and in 1987, they gave us Cotton Traders. “One of the first things that were launched were [replica] international rugby shirts because, in those days, it was a totally unlicensed market, so none of the shirts were actually registered,” he explains. “Anybody could have done what we did, but nobody realised that it was a fashionable thing. It wasn’t something to play in, it was something to wear down the pub, that’s where we were ahead of the game a little bit.”

The replica shirts went down a storm, so much so that the unions started to slowly wise up, realising they may have missed a trick. “We decided then we needed to work with the unions and have licensing agreements,” says Fran, “and the first one we did was England, which was totally unexpected. I mean, this being England, you never thought they would change.”

And yet, they did. “We thought they’d never change the England shirt, the all-white England shirt, but the World Cup was coming up in 1991 and they decided they’d have a special England shirt. 

“It had three bands, two red and one blue, and the fact that you had that design with the rose, determined that together you could actually register that, and protect it, which we did. The fact that we’d done that, then had the committee suddenly, saying, ‘well, what have we done this for, we’ve changed the white England shirt, we need to get out of this contract’.

“And they did everything to try and get out of the contract,” continues Fran. “But we had a contract here for the next seven years, and they tried everything, took us to court, failed, we won, and then, as compensation, they had to add another two years on to the end of the contract.”

Technically, Cotton Traders had the England deal until 1997, but knowing when the timing was right, they sold the last two years to Nike.  “We also did Wales, and South Africa too; have you seen Invictus?” Of course. “In that you see them all running around in Cotton Traders shirts, there was really big branding over there in the training kits, but what people never knew was that the shirt Nelson Mandela wore for the final, was a Cotton Traders shirt.”

As shirt stories go, this is the pinnacle. “The president’s office phoned Cotton Traders to say ‘the President would like to wear a Springbok shirt for the game’,” explains Fran. “But they said it must be the captain’s shirt, it had to have the captain’s number on it, so we had to fly him out a Springbok shirt that he could wear for the final. So that was a pretty iconic.”

Where is that shirt now?  “Oh, fuck, no idea, I wish I had it. Unbelievable, it was just such an iconic World Cup wasn’t it? Even now I can still see the big jumbo jet coming over the stadium, it’s incredible, an iconic moment in rugby history, that.

“We moved on from rugby shirts, in some ways we were too associated with it,” admits Fran, who is now a non-executive director, with the company owned by Simon Orange’s CorpAcq. “But slowly we’re changing the perception of the brand, but rugby is where it started. 

“I do bugger all these days,” he adds. “Unless they ask me to do something.”

Fran Cotton shouldn’t have had such an impact on the union game, it should’ve been league. “I grew up in what was a small mining village just outside of Wigan called Golborne,” he explains. “It’s right in the heart of rugby league country, between Wigan, Warrington and St Helens. My father played professional league for St Helens and Warrington and my brother played professional league for Leigh and Warrington, it was very much a rugby league background.

“I always get asked why I didn’t play league, and the only reason is that I went to a grammar school that played rugby union. Before, I’d never played union at all.”

He was clearly adept at it, and while he may have gone against the grain with his choice of code, his career choice was as expected. “When I left school, I did a mining degree, I was employed by the National Coal Board, I was doing my manager’s ticket,” he says. “I went to Wigan mining college and I joined Liverpool, who in those days were regarded as a first-class club with excellent fixtures.”

Three years of Liverpool and three years of studying mining, while the former proved a fruitful use of his time, the latter less so. “While I was at mining college, the number of mines that closed in the Wigan area made me realise maybe this is not a great profession to be in for the long term. That’s when I decided to go to Loughborough and do a teaching course.”

As well as meeting his ‘wife’ Smithy, and benefitting from Loughborough’s famed sporting education, he also played for Coventry, before returning north and playing for Sale. His debut for England came in 1971 against Scotland, when he caught the eye of Bill McLaren even before he took to the field. “Scotland had never beaten England at Twickenham for 33 years and I always tell this story because myself and Dick Cowman, who was also at Loughborough, a fly-half, were selected together for the first cap.

“Anyway, Bill McLaren, who is still the greatest rugby commentator ever, he was the ultimate professional, and he always used to come and watch the training on Thursday.  Now, in those days,” explains Fran, “you weren’t allowed to meet until 48 hours before kick-off, so we’d meet at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon, at The Stoop, to avoid ‘professionalism’. 

“When we arrived, Bill would be on the touch line, and he came over and introduced himself, and then he used to come back to the team hotel and have dinner with the players and the selectors. He really did his homework. 

“I always remember watching his kind of preview programme on Saturday morning. And he said, ‘England, they’ve got two new caps, a tricky fly-half called Dick Cowman and a big lad called Fran Cotton, I’ve never seen him play, but I’ve seen him eat a meal, and that was impressive.”

The fact Scotland hadn’t won in 33 years naturally meant Fran tasted defeat… and it wasn’t the first, as England struggled during the 1970s, with a five-way tie in the Five Nations in 1973 their best result, largely finishing bottom, until the Grand Slam in 1980.  “It was just the lack of consistency on selection,” reckons Fran. “I mean, I talked to Smithy about this, and I think he had 29 caps for England, and he had twelve different fly-halves in that time, massive inconsistency. 

“It only really rectified itself when Mike Davies took over in the late 70s, and he selected the team with Billy [Beaumont, the captain], that’s the only time you got consistent selection. Before that, the number of times you’d turn up into the England dressing room, look around and say, ‘what is he doing here? How have they picked this guy?’. It was frustrating, because we did have a lot of good players, but they never picked them on the same day.

“[David] Duckham, Smithy, [Tony] Neary, [Roger] Uttley, [Peter] Dixon, we had a lot of great players there but they never picked them on the same day. The best back row that I ever played with, Dixon, Uttley, Neary, they played for the North of England and on two occasions they beat the All Blacks when they were in the back row, yet they never once played for England together.”

Fran does highlight a few good wins. “In 1972 we went to South Africa and beat South Africa, and had an unbeaten tour, then we went to New Zealand and Fiji, beat Fiji  –thrashed them 13-12! – and then we didn’t win a provincial game [in New Zealand], but beat the All Blacks at Eden Park. We beat Australia regularly, so we had some decent results, but there was no consistency to it.

“I never played in a winning side at Cardiff,” he adds. “In fact, we only beat the Welsh once when I was playing, and that was in the Grand Slam year of 1980.

“The worst defeat ever,” continues Fran, “was 1975 when we played France in Paris, where they annihilated us. They had a great pack of forwards. I can name them now: Armand Vaquerin, Alain Paco, Gerard Cholley, Alain Esteve, Alain Guilbert, Jean-Pierre Rives, Jean-Claude Skrela, Claude Spanghero, that was the pack. By God, it was the best pack of forwards I’ve ever played. They were superb. And of course, they’ve always got some decent backs. So yeah, we got beaten up. 

“France,” he adds, “I would say, by some distance, were the dirtiest team that I ever played against. I always remember the first time playing against France, and going into the dressing room, dropping my bag, picking up the programme, having a flick, and reading about Gerard Cholley. And of course, the first sentence was that he was a former heavyweight boxing champion of the French armed forces. I thought, ‘God, I wonder why they picked this bloke!’. And he was lethal.”

“I remember him playing against Scotland, and he actually laid out two people at one maul. How the referee didn’t see it, I don’t know, he hit both of them over the top of the maul, and as the maul broke up, they’re both out on the floor. 

“Well, I mean that level of violence today and you’d be banned for life. People ask if it was a far dirtier game when I played than it is now, and yes it’s very physical today, of course, but by and large, it’s within the laws of the game. In those days,
it was little bit like the Wild West.

“I loved playing then,” he adds, “but I’d like to have played in the current era and under the current laws. One of the big issues when I played was really that contact skills weren’t good enough, so the continuity of the game was stop start, stop start, but you get a lot more continuity in the current game. 

“And of course, as a prop forward, I was quite mobile and a good handler of the ball, and that was a bit frowned upon. They thought, well, he can’t be doing his work in the tight, this guy is out there running with the ball, stuff like that. 

“Now, of course, you’re encouraged as a ball-carrier, so you’re a lot more involved, which I think I would have enjoyed more. But listen, I loved every second of when I played, so I wouldn’t change that.”

Inspired by a TV show on the 1968 Lions tour to South Africa, Lions on Safari, Fran always wanted to play for the tourists, and although picked as a reserve in 1971, he didn’t make it that year, and had to wait until 1974 for his debut. On the pitch, it was incredibly successful, 22 games, 21 wins and one draw, in the last of the four Tests. Off the pitch, other issues came to the fore. “I felt that the politics was nothing to do with me,” he says. “It’s a far bigger issue than playing rugby, so I had no qualms at all about going. 

“I mean in 1974, there was a lot of Peter Hain [famed anti-apartheid protester] and the guys who were protesting, they were even outside the team hotel, where we gathered in in London. I always remember Willie John McBride pulling us all together and saying, ‘Look, you know the protests outside, you know we’ve been told that we haven’t got any access to the embassies in South Africa, or consulates – that’s all been taken away. So, if any of you have got any doubts about going, you need to leave the room now, because, you’re no good to me.’ Nobody moved. So, I thought, that’s it, we’re going.”

He points out, having also toured with England in 1972, that the tours did create some change. “In 1972, we were the first white team, the England team, to play against the coloured African team, and we did the same with the Lions, so we’re breaking ground there. So you were slowly breaking it down in terms of the attitude to apartheid and racial equality.”

Although the results seemed to be straightforward, the Lions were being brutally pushed, so much so Fran came to blows with fellow Lion Sandy Carmichael. “I did, yeah,” he admits, “in Pretoria, just before the second Test. I don’t think anybody really understands the amount of scrummaging we actually did [in training]. We were doing live scrummaging and we’d be doing 25-30 live scrums every day, it was fierce stuff because we had two packs of forwards, and there wasn’t very much between the two. 

“Anyway, I’d been picked in the Test team, and we’re scrummaging, and it’s not going quite right, and we’re not pushing them back. And Willie John turns around to us, and says, ‘Come on, we’re supposed to be the Test team’, and it all breaks up, and there’s a little bit of a fracas. It wasn’t anything, but it was picked up by the South African press, who tried to build it up as discontent, fighting among themselves, this kind of stuff. But it was never, never more than that. It was trivial.”

Although South Africa, ‘picked all the big nasties from Free State and Northern Transvaal’, they couldn’t turn the tide of the series, and the second Test went the same way as the first, the Lions winning 28-9. The third was won, 26-9, with the fourth finishing 13-13. The Lions never took a step back. “The most brutal thing I saw was when a dust-up happened about ten yards from our line, and suddenly JPR ran in from about fifteen yards behind and planted one on Moaner van Heerden, the South African second row. He put him on the floor and stood over him like a boxer, as if saying ‘come on, get up, I’m ready for you’. I thought, ‘God, and this is our full-back’.

“Moaner must have been 6ft 6in, nineteen stone, but JPR… I always remember Willie John saying he is an example to everybody, his attitude, his competitiveness. It was wonderful to turn around and see him at full-back, it was just so reassuring, thinking, if he’s the full-back, they’re never going to go past him.”

Fran toured again in 1977, to New Zealand. The Lions went into the final Test 2-1 down, but found themselves 9-6 up with minutes to go and a drawn series on the cards. “Benny [Phil Bennett] missed a touch-finder, which ended up just on the ten-yard line. I think it was Bill Osborne, the centre, who put up a big up and under which was caught by one of our players, but Graham Mourie hit him with a good tackle, the ball just flew out of his arms straight to Lawrie Knight, who scored [giving New Zealand a 10-9 lead]. 

“Even then we should have won it, because we had a five-yard scrum and we’d been so dominant in the scrum, we were confident of a pushover try, but Willie Duggan made the mistake of picking up too early, and they held him up…

“I still haven’t recovered from it,” he admits. “I still think about it now. I was so… depressed is the wrong word… I was so deflated at the end of the game, having played so well, dominated the game, we should have won it easily. 

“We ended up losing it in the last minute,” he continues, repeating, “I never recovered from it; it’s just one of those defeats you just can’t get over. Not many have drawn over there, so to have it taken away in the last minute, and still to have a five-yard scrum after that. Yeah, we still cocked it up, I don’t know. As I say, I still think of it to this day.”

On the wall behind Fran, sits an array of pictures, mostly from his Lions days, with one more familiar than most: the Mud Man. The image is of Fran at the front of a lineout with pretty much only the whites of his eyes breaking up a picture that’s almost entirely filled with mud. It was taken by the late Colin Elsey on that Lions tour of 1977, against the Junior All Blacks. “That kind of typified the tour because it was a very, very wet tour,” he says. “That photograph was taken at the old Athletic Park in Wellington. It had been raining for days and days and they played three warm-up games on the pitch before the main Lions game, so you can imagine the state of the pitch.

“I always remember the photograph being taken because it was in the last minute of the game, right in front of the main stands, and all the replacements bench for the Lions were on the front row of the stand. I’m at the front of the lineout with my hands on my knees looking up at them and, of course, they’re all rolling over with laughter because they’ve realised they can’t get on – nobody wanted to come on – and they’re laughing because all thirty players look like me. 

“I had no idea the significance of it until they were putting on a special game for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee at Twickenham, between the Barbarians and the returning Lions. When the team coach arrived in the West car park at Twickenham, the whole crowd were waving the programme. And I mean, everybody, is waving the programme, and on the back of the programme was that Mud Man photograph – it just showed the impact that it had. It stuck with me for the rest of my life…”

There’s so much to the Fran Cotton story. There’s the time he got banned from the game, after he’d retired. “I wrote an autobiography and Bob Weighill, the secretary of the Rugby Football Union, said, ‘what are you doing with the royalties?’. I said, ‘Well, they’re in my bank account’. He said, I couldn’t do that otherwise you’re professional, so I said, ‘unfortunately I’m going to have to be a professional then’. Because it was £20,000 which doesn’t sound a lot, but in those days, it was a lot, particularly, if you’d just got married.”

There’s the somewhat calm celebration after finally winning a Grand Slam. “Four or five of us from the north went into one of the bars at the North British Hotel, as it was in those days, and sat there and had a couple of beers, and just kind of reflected on twelve years of agony. We just thought, ‘it’s over, we’ve done it’.”

There’s the time he had a ‘heart attack’ on the 1980 Lions tour to South Africa. “I got an infection in my leg, cellulitis, so I was in bed for a week with antibiotics and so forth and then the following Wednesday, we played an invitation team in Stellenbosch, and about twenty minutes into this game, I just became disorientated and had the chest pains.”

The doctors told him he’d had a heart attack. “‘Heart attack?’, I said, ‘I’ve been stomping around rugby fields for fifteen seasons’, but if that’s what the medics say,” recalls Fran. “The following day, still wearing the Lions track suit, I was transferred to Groote Schurr Hospital in Cape Town, which is very famous for Professor Christiaan Barnard, who did the first heart transplant ever. 

“People think I made this up, but it’s absolutely true. When I’m being wheeled in, coming down the corridor is Professor Christiaan Barnard, who recognises the tracksuit. I told him about the heart attack and he says, ‘well, if you need a new one, just pop up to the surgical ward upstairs’.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t a heart attack, but an infection, meaning Fran didn’t need to visit Barnard for a replacement after all.

And there’s the enormous amount of work he did as chair of Club England, a subgroup of the RFU that drove England on the international stage, pushing them  to get involved in the age-grade World Cup (which they hadn’t previously been involved in), and supporting Clive Woodward’s side on to World Cup glory. “Unfortunately it didn’t end well,” he says of Club England. “The clubs disengaged from it, which was silly, and that did cause some problems. I mean, it really caused the departure of Clive Woodward, because when we came back having won the World Cup, the first thing the clubs said – and the man running it was a complete and utter bloody idiot, who knew nothing about rugby  – was that they’d decided that Clive was now getting less access. 

“How crazy is that after winning the World Cup? You know you should be saying, ‘what more can we do? How can we make sure we’re ready for the next World Cup?’. So, things like that really have affected rugby in a big way. 

“I always say, if you look at the current structure they put in place – considering what the RFU have funded and the losses of the Premiership clubs – it must have cost a billion quid. And what have we got? England, fifth in the world, and we’ve got clubs that are financially unstable, it’s not a great picture for a billion quid.”

Fran’s impact and influence has been immense, from Grand Slams and Lions wins to making rugby fashionable and a picture that transcended the game, and we’ve not even got into how he drove the 1997 Lions as manager, how he helped shape rugby on the RFU Council, or his thinking as part of the Andrews Plan, at the dawn of professionalism. He’s got views on everything, not only the current state of the club game, franchising (he’s for it, it just needs to be club-based with proper structure and purpose), the England pathway and the game today, but ultimately he still just loves rugby. “I love watching England play and I’m a passionate England fan, and want them to do well,” he says. “I love rugby because my best friends in life are still the guys I played rugby with. Even during the period where I was kind of exiled from being involved in rugby, I never lost touch with them, and that’s what calls you back to the game, your mates. 

“I always go to the old players’ lunch at Sale FC,” he concludes, “I was there in February and over one hundred players turned up, so yeah, that’s what brings you back, the friendships, the people, you know, rugby people, good people.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Russ Williams

This extract was taken from issue 31 of Rugby Journal. 

To order the print journal, click here.

There’s not even a Grogg on the mantelpiece, let alone suggestions that the house in Usk, a town ten or so miles north of Newport, is home to a man once considered the greatest hooker on the planet and who is now the oldest-living British & Irish Lion.

Ex-Wales hooker Bryn Meredith wears his former greatness so lightly, it’s barely visible. Instead, it’s left to daughter Sarah – who looks after him every day, only returning to her Kent home once a month – to dig out the memories and mementos. And, Sarah – one of three, Lucy and Simon are the others – has handed us a treasure trove. Specifically, a red-covered scrapbook – itself something of a relic – and it’s bursting with cuttings, roughly cut out, sepia, yellowing articles telling the story of a well-lived rugby life.

It’s not a book Bryn’s even looked at; the haphazard arrangement suggests they’ve been put in for safe-keeping and not read, perhaps not even at the time, such is the modesty of this 94-year-old Lion. “I only keep those because someone else wrote them,” he explains.

The headlines scream of his greatness: ‘Prince of hookers’, ‘Master-mind Meredith’, ‘Master hooker’, ‘Ace Bryn’, ‘Meredith is the man’, and the body copy lives up to the hyperbole. ‘When the era of Dai Davies came to an end in 1954, into the Welsh team stepped the prince of all hookers to begin his long reign’, reads one. Another, from a New Zealand newspaper no less, is incredulous at the Lions’ decision to drop the ‘magnificent’ Meredith.

Indeed, when things didn’t go his way, such as not being selected by the Barbarians in 1957, the platitudes went up a notch, one scribe describing him as, ‘one of the world’s greatest forwards and as good a sportsman on and off the field as ever anyone could wish to meet’.

Doubters were always proven wrong. ‘Meredith’s magic blinds Baa-Baas’, screams the report of Newport’s 6-0 win over, naturally, the Barbarians. It goes on to describe Bryn’s performance, scoring the first with a dummy, and a ‘Cliff Morgan-style’ sidestep, before making ‘jinking from a loose maul to create from nothing’ a simple try for John Anderson.

Bryn, it proclaimed, was the, ‘honourable master of British Rugby, forward extraordinary, and doyen of hookers’.

The 34-cap hooker – a record at the time – was almost half a century ahead of his time, with his running game in open play, leaving reporters to liken him to a ‘class three-quarter’, something he didn’t deny in a 1960s’ Q&A, when asked about the secret to his style. ‘I just love to run with the ball,’ he responded. ‘It is every forward’s dream to be a three-quarter’.

It’s something he still firmly believes today.  “You were one of the pack, and if you happened to be at the scoring end, then why shouldn’t it be you?” he explains to us. “I don’t see why a hooker should be any different to any of the others, because you’re all part of the same thing.

“You’re handling a ball all the time, and although you’ve got a certain, specific job to do if you’re in the scrum, that’s only part of it. I mean, the major part of it [rugby] is getting from A to B.

“I used to think it when I first took up the game of rugby, at a club like Newport,” he continues. “When the scrum breaks up, where do you go? When the lineout breaks up, where do you go? Nobody told you, so I worked it out for myself, I’d follow that ball. Wherever that ball was, that’s where I should be.”

And he often was, with a bulging cuttings book full of his try-scoring exploits. But, even before you get to the rugby, you want to go to the start of a life such as Bryn’s, and that means going back a long way, to 1930, the year he was born. Born and growing up just north of Pontypool, by the time the Second World War rolled around, he was almost nine. “I remember the build-up to the war,” says Bryn. “All this antagonism between Germany and Great Britain, all throughout the 1930s, and then Germany started to take over the continent. Eventually what broke them [Great Britain] down, was when they decided that they [Germany] were going to walk into Czechoslovakia, and [Neville] Chamberlain [then prime minister] said, ‘if you don’t get out of Czechoslovakia by the weekend…’ or something like that, and, as I remember it, it was simple as that. And on the Sunday, we were at war with Germany.”

Life changed, although in some ways, it didn’t. What could you do as a child in war-time? “Well, it was more what you couldn’t do,” he says, quickly adding, “not that we did anything anyway, because my father was a worker, physical worker, in the tin plate works, so lived a certain type of [modest] life.

“He’d been a collier before that, like most Welshmen,” says Bryn, “I suppose he did it because there was nothing else to do; all of my family, all my cousins, all my uncles, all worked in the pits.”

Luckily for Bryn, he avoided the same career path as his family, by getting a scholarship to West Monmouth Grammar School. “I went to the grammar school and, basically, if you went to secondary school, you didn’t normally go down the pit. Going to secondary school didn’t stop [all] people going down a pit though, because my eldest brother went and still went down the pit.”

Memories come and go with Bryn, although he’s still remarkable sprightly for a man just over five years short of his century. Rugby was never part of his life until he arrived at the grammar school. “Rugby football didn’t come into it,” he says of his early years. “I didn’t have football boots; who could afford football boots when there’s no food on the table?

“The only time that I became interested was in school, when I was fourteen or fifteen, and there was a notice on a board, about playing for the colts – which was under-15s back then.

“I put my name down, I’d never had a rugby ball in my hand, the only thing I knew about rugby was that you mustn’t forward pass and mustn’t knock on.”

There was one problem though. “I was selected after the trial match, but I didn’t have any boots,” he recalls. “I remember going to the first game, which was at Newport High School, I wore my school shoes.

“That was my first game of rugby,” he laughs, “playing in school shoes. Now, when did I get a pair of boots? Oh, that’s right…

“One of the boys in the team was the son of a farmer, and must have been doing well in those days, because he had a new pair of boots,” says Bryn, picking up the story – one of his favourites, Sarah tells us. “So, he had an old pair, didn’t he? And he stood up in the classroom one day, and said, ‘I got a pair of boots, anybody want to buy them?’ I said, ‘How much do you want for them?’ ‘Two shillings’.

“I had a weekend job delivering papers on a Sunday, and I got five shillings a week for that – bloody good money that was – and so I bought these boots.

“What I remember about this,” adds Bryn, “is that I wasn’t at all embarrassed about wearing shoes in a match, and it was quite something
to be playing rugby in a secondary school.

“But that was my start,” he concludes. “And then those two-bob boots lasted me for twelve months. And then after that, my father did buy me a pair of boots, which lasted me for the time that I was in school.

“After, I was in the Navy, so I managed to buy my own boots…”

With the boot back-story sorted, we move on to what he did in them. The ‘squat and swarthy bulldozer’ [as another paper describes him], was soon picked up by Welsh Secondary Schools. “Cliff Morgan was the same year as me,” he adds. “And then by the time you were eighteen, you were in the forces, you had to join the Navy, Air Force or the Army and I joined the Navy.

“Fortunately, I was able to go to Devonport and Devonport Services were a good side in those days – I don’t know what they are like these days – but they played Newport, Cardiff, Swansea, Llanelli and all the first-class clubs.

“In fact my first two games, were against Ebbw Vale and then Newbridge, you can’t get a tougher introduction than that. I just accepted it, I knuckled down and I suppose it came a bit naturally to me, not that I was attempting to get in the Welsh team or anything like that.”

That said, after he left the Navy, he went to Newport, and according to a ‘Star Interview’ he gave to one newspaper, he considered his position – often second row during his school days – to better his chances of earn a cap. ‘I thought if I was going to get a Welsh cap I should play prop as I would get two chances instead of one. So I decided to ask Newport to consider me as a prop forward which they did. I played prop forward against the All Blacks and a week later Wales picked me as a hooker.”

His career choice was teaching, studying at Exeter University. “I went to St Luke’s, they had a wonderful team in those days, and great reputation,” he explains. “They were producing English internationals, Welsh internationals and they were very prominent at that time.

“It was very impressive to get into that side, I captained them for a season, and then left, and then I had to mess around a bit because I didn’t have a job.

“I couldn’t get into a school in Wales, I had to go into England, and I landed up in Hertfordshire in St Albans Grammar School. I taught there for about four or five years, in charge of the rugby, then I got married.”

The Lions rolled around in 1955, when he was still in England. “I got a letter asking if I would be prepared to go if you were selected,” says Bryn. “But I didn’t know, I’d just got married, I was only on a fiver a year or whatever, teaching was very poorly paid in those days. I thought to myself, ‘well, I haven’t got any money, how am I going to survive? How is my wife going to survive?’ So I wrote to the education authorities in Hertfordshire to ask them if I’d get paid because I might be selected for the Lions…”

They initially said no, due to South Africa being an apartheid country, but as the tour was over a holiday, meaning he wouldn’t be in school for half the time anyway, a second letter eventually saw the education bosses relent.

The flight would take 36 hours, with stops at Zurich, Rome, Cairo, Khartoum, Nairobi and Entebbe before landing in Johannesburg. “The Lions were going to pay for all the expenses in South Africa, so it was just party time, really,” smiles Bryn. “Everything is new, the weather is different, and the food is different, it’s fantastic. Everybody wants to meet you too, it’s terrific, you’re greeting people all the time, and they were greeting you, and it’s all very nice.

“So there we are…” he says, as if summing up what was actually one of the most iconic Lions tours of all time.

The magnitude of the tour was huge. South Africa had not been beaten in a Test series in close to sixty years, and every local side was fearsome, but the Lions’ record of nineteen wins, one draw and five defeats from 25 matches was seriously impressive. Drawing the series 2-2, after winning the first Test 23-22, losing the second 9-25, winning the third 9-6 and then succumbing in the fourth 8-22, was enough for legendary Springbok coach Danie Craven to later write: ‘They live long in our memory, for a long time to come we will sigh with relief when we realise we kept the ‘rubber’ intact against such a side as this. This fact is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of our Rugby’.

“They were tough games,” says Bryn. “They were all tough games, whether you won them or not, because you didn’t know the strength of this region or that county game or whatever.

“It’s very difficult at the time [to appreciate it], because everything is new to us,” he adds, “but now we’ve got the history to look back on we can see how difficult it was.”

Bryn played in all four Tests alongside Bobby Williams and his cousin Courtenay Meredith forming an iconic all-Welsh front row. “There was also Phil Davies, Jeff Butterfield, great centres, and Tony O’Reilly of course.”

Irish wing O’Reilly is one of the most famous Lions of all time, arguably the most famous, scoring 37 tries in the red shirt, a record that’s unlikely to be beaten. “He used to invite me and my wife and the children over to Ireland every year,” recalls Bryn. “He’d have a great reunion, put up a big marquee in the garden, and we’d have a dinner one evening, then we’d have something else another evening, and the following day, we’d be off to the races…

“And all this was included, there was always a car outside you could use and go whenever you wanted to, he was the most generous person.”

Back to the tour, Bryn says off-field entertainment was as epic as the rugby. “We did a safari, everything was laid on for you, and we’d say, ‘we’d like to see a couple of lions, a crocodile or whatever’, and they’d sort it. They even took us down gold mines, just as part of the tour. How could that be a challenge?”

After the tour, Bryn gave up teaching to return to Wales. “Schweppes offered me a job, so I’d be spending my day in pubs, which was very, very good. They were a very good company to work for, and I had no trouble at all if I wanted to take a day off to play rugby.”

The next Lions tour, 1959, would see them visit Australia and New Zealand, but famously Irishman Ronnie Dawson – also a hooker – was chosen as captain. Despite Bryn’s status as not only the best hooker on the planet, but one of the greatest forwards of all time, Dawson’s appointment meant he was likely to pick himself, as was the right of captains back then.  “You’d just got to accept it really,” Bryn says. “And it’s a pity, really, because I don’t think that they thought about that sort of thing…

“I used to say to myself, ‘well, if I was captain, who would I pick? I’ve got to pick myself’. If somebody thought he was good enough to be captain, then I’ve got to support them, that’s how I felt.

“I used to grumble about it,” he admits. “But at the same time, you couldn’t do anything about it.

“I impressed the New Zealand press,” he says. “They thought I should have been in the side and they said as much…”

Nonetheless, Bryn wasn’t selected for the Tests, although there had been a precedent of a captain choosing his positional rival. “It had been done in the past,” says Bryn, “because the previous tour to New Zealand and Australia, Karl Mullen an Irishman, was the captain and a hooker, and he sometimes gave it to the Welsh hooker, Dai Davies.”

The next tour, 1962, it was back to South Africa and Bryn was back in the driving seat again, starting all four Tests, only this time, he was on the losing side for three, a draw making up the fourth. Needless to say, his memories of this have been pushed behind the 1955 vintage in his mind’s pecking order.

His greatest rugby days, he says, were when he reached the next level: club to county to country to Lions. “It’s a progressive sort of thing,” he says.

He never rested on his laurels. “It’s all very well to say, I was good enough last time, I was good enough for the Lions, but don’t expect it again, you’ve got to earn what comes your way.”

After the tour, he retired. Well, tried to. He actually ended up helping out Newport for another season, and then also turned out one last time for Wales, who had asked him to come out of retirement, fittingly against Ireland. He was described as ‘a Peter Pan of rugby’ for playing until 32. The game, in November 1962, had been delayed from its usual March date due to a smallpox outbreak.

While he’d always answer his country’s call, Bryn knew his time was up, one writer commenting, ‘a quiet modest man, who loves rugby football, Meredith is conscious that he is keeping younger men out of the Welsh side’. “Because it was traditional,” Bryn tells us, “as soon as you got to thirty, it was, ‘cheerio’, and it was accepted, and you didn’t have to say it really, other people were probably ahead of you. It was just, ‘you’re thirty now, goodbye’.”

After ‘more farewell attempts than Melba’ – one writer’s reference to the 1920s opera singer Nellie Melba who gave countless farewell concerts – Bryn bowed out against his old rival Ronnie Dawson at Lansdowne Road with a 3-3 draw. He’d missed three games in nine seasons for Wales, a run that included many great wins and even the infamous 0-0 draw with England in 1962.

“It’s the type of people that you meet along the way,” says Bryn of his rugby life, “and most people who played rugby, they were very acceptable anyway, they were playing for nothing.

“This is the whole of rugby football, it doesn’t matter where you go, all the valleys have got their clubs and you’re always accepted in a minute. There’s no sort of ‘side’ to it, or anything like that.

“Rugby is like part of you, part of your life, and you were part of it, and you just accept that, it’s not even a conscious thing.”

And even though he’s not played for over sixty years, he still feels the same. “It doesn’t suddenly end there because you come off the pitch,” he says. “It’s just the beginning of the second half, but with a pint in your hand.”

Not that he wouldn’t answer the call again. “I said to somebody the other day, if somebody said, ‘have a game of rugby’, I would say yes. And I’m 94.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Chris Kennedy

This extract was taken from issue 29 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

Jonathan ‘Fox’ Davies isn’t comfortable talking about himself, but in what has been his testimonial year, celebrating a career that took in almost a century of Wales caps (96), four Six Nations titles, two Grand Slams, two Lions tours and two Rugby World cup semi-finals, he’s had to at least endure it. “I struggle with it,” he says about being centre of attention, as he looks back on a career that came to a close last year, “but it’s been nice. It has made me able to talk about myself better and be more complimentary about myself. 

“Because I was never one to do that really,” he adds, “I was never one to do press when I was playing, it was always about trying to be as boring as you can. If there was no article written about me then I’d done my job.”

But he knows he was good, right? “I know I’ve been successful,” he says, “and I was good at what I did, but I never wanted praise or anything like that. And maybe wearing a scrum cap just kept me unrecognisable.

“I wouldn’t say I was a superstar, I was in a team that had superstars, and as a 13, I realised I had great athletes around me, and I wanted them to touch it, to get the hands on the ball as much as I can. So it would be, ‘George North, you come here, I’ll get you on it’, ‘Jamie [Roberts], I’ll give it to you here’, even Toby [Faletau] when he was in the backline, you’d want to give him the ball… 

“I saw one of my key skills as making sure we got the best out of what was around me. If people say I’m underrated, that’s fine, maybe under the radar I would say, I never put my head up there too much.

“I got to play in that [Wales] team for a long time, so I knew I had to be decent at rugby. Now I can go back to not taking praise and being totally forgotten.”

Given what he achieved, he won’t be forgotten, especially in Ireland, which we’ll come back to. For now, to the beginning. “My dad played rugby – apparently he was very good – it was just local rugby in Wales, then he played when we moved to Birmingham, and I was born there, then we moved back. I never watched him play though.”

Today, everyone knows Jonathan’s parents for having pubs, his own ‘Fox’ nickname coming from one of the pubs they owned, the Fox and Hounds, in Bancyfelin, just west of Carmarthen, where he grew up. But before that, his dad had a challenging past. “He was a VAT inspector when we lived in England, but he doesn’t like to tell people,” laughs Jonathan. “They moved back west once I was born and bought the pub.

“They had three or four pubs,” he continues, “but they sold a couple, they’ve sold the Fox and Hounds, someone in the family bought it, and also another pub in Carmarthen, the Rose and Crown. It’s been in the family for sixty years, my grandfather gave it to my mum, but it’s still in the family… 

“For me living in a pub was a great upbringing, the pub was the central hub to the village,” he says. “People would meet in the pubs, they’d be there for carnivals, festivals, Guy Fawkes, Christmas – it would all bring people to the pub. 

“The pub was a stop-in for any team that was going from, say, Swansea down to play in Pembrokeshire, or vice versa, they’d stop either or both ways! 

“My dad would see a rugby bus turn up, and he’d shout to mum, ‘get the chips on’. He’d always give them huge platters of chips, filled with salt, just to dehydrate them so they’d buy more booze. At weekends, you’d always see maybe three or four rugby coaches in the pub, having a beer.”

While Jonathan has picked up on his mum’s passion for cooking – she was always in the pub kitchen – he saw how hard his parents had to work. Now a dad himself – his first son was born last year – he’s not keen to follow in their footsteps now rugby has come to an end. “My dad and mum worked relentless hours,” he considers, “I’m not saying they weren’t present, but I don’t want to have to have the pull of needing to make it a success, or whatever it takes in the hospitality industry, to take away from family.”

Given he retired in the same year his son was born, he’s been able to enjoy an extended chunk of paternal leave.  “I’ve been very lucky in one thing,” he says, “because I’ve experienced a lot of time at home since my son was born, most dads don’t get that.”

Llanelli were at the top of their game when Jonathan emerged. Only an ACL injury ruled him out of playing a bigger part of the club’s march to the European Cup semi-finals [where they lost 33-17 to Leicester Tigers] in 2007. “Gareth Jenkins was coach of Scarlets when I was in the academy, so I had a couple of training sessions with him. I really started in Phil [Davies]’s first year [2006], I played a few games in pre-season, but eventually had to have surgery on my knee.

“But the players that were there: Simon Easterby was captain, Stephen Jones, Dwayne Peel, we had Dafydd James, Matthew Rees, Matthew J Watkins, it was a brilliant squad. And for me to experience that… I remember  walking in the changing rooms thinking, ‘fucking hell this is class’. I put my bag down somewhere, it gets kicked off the bench when I came back from training because I was in the wrong spot. It took a couple of days before I found the right spot.

“I probably got a bit complacent,” he admits. “Because when I was training, I thought I’d made it, I was a professional rugby player, but you’re not a professional rugby player until you play week-in, week-out.

“When I was coming back from the ACL, Mark Jones – another international – said to me, ‘as shit as it is, having a long-term injury when you’re so young will make you appreciate it far, far more’, and that was true. Because then, once I got on the field, after nine months off, I wasn’t coming off again.”

He rehabbed for a time with Scarlets legend Regan King. “He was one of the best players I played with, like his skills and his knowledge of the game, invaluable for me,” he says. “The Scarlets were quite clever with how they used the overseas players, we had Regan, and then they brought in David Lyons. I don’t know how much they were paying him, but they got good value, I’d say, because he played week-in, week-out, and he was just very knowledgeable. 

“He was keen to get the boys better,” continues Jonathan. “Rhys Priestland used to say he knew he was playing ten [before the coaches told him] because David would start talking to him on a Monday, about moves. David would have done his homework already and Rhys would be like, ‘wow, I need to be on my game’. I think that’s the way it should be, if you’re an overseas signing, you need to buy into the club and help develop that youngster as well.”

As a lifelong Scarlets fan, he also saw the club depart from his beloved Stradey Park.

“It was sad,” he admits. “Because there was just so much history. I remember as a kid going to watch the Scarlets, and back then, at the final whistle, I’d jump on the field to try and get autographs – I always remember that feeling when you’re getting ready to jump the board and running to as many players as you can.

“So when I played at Stradey for the first time, I’d walk off really slowly, so I could sign autographs because it was all so new to me – at the same time, you’d see Stephen Jones and Dwayne Peel run as fast as they could off, while I’m virtually crawling. 

“It was a proper rugby ground,” he says of Stradey, “and there aren’t many left now, maybe Bath and Gloucester, they’re proper grounds too, but the new stadiums just don’t have that history and the romantic side to it.”

While his first stint at Scarlets coincided with the end of a golden generation, his second – with a two-year hiatus at Clermont in between – at least brought silverware. “We won the league in 2017 [beating Munster 46-22],” recalls Jonathan. “We were playing such good rugby after the Six Nations that I think if we’d still be in Europe, we’d have won that, we just seemed to click.”

Mixed fortunes at club level are contrasted with being central to a golden era of Welsh rugby, not seen since the 1970s. After making his debut against Canada in 2009, he would cement his place by the time of the 2011 Rugby World Cup. “2011,” he repeats. “I think I could have retired straight away and caused myself far less damage if we’d won that. We should have still won the game, it broke me, there were tears.”

Wales, of course, infamously lost 8-9 in the semi-final to a distinctly average France side, having been shorn of captain Sam Warburton with a red card less than twenty minutes into the game. “In 2019,” he says, going forward, “I had an injury against Fiji, so I missed the quarter final and my knee was shot. I was nowhere near my best or fit, and I look back at that with frustration, because leading up to that Fiji game I was starting to play some of my best rugby again, I felt in a real good place.

“I’m not saying we’d have won the semi-final [against South Africa, they lost 16-19], but I think we, or I, would have given a better account of myself. I didn’t have the ability to really run as well as I could have. 

“But,” he says, returning to 2011, “I think when you look at the team we had in 2011 that was the one that got away.”

After the game, he pulled his devastated room-mate Leigh Halfpenny – who’d missed a vital kick – from his slump. “He was distraught,” recalls Jonathan. “He was sat in the room, and I said, ‘look, come and have a beer’. The worst thing is that we then had to play the third- and fourth-place play-off…

“We lost it,” he says of the semi-final. “France didn’t really win it. And I never watched the final, because we were traveling back at that time, but once we landed we heard New Zealand won. I’ve never seen the final, but everyone says that they weren’t great in the final, it was a terrible final, and if Wales had played, we would have won. Chuck a bit more salt on that big gash.”

Six Nations’ titles, and even Grand Slams, were a different matter. “I don’t think I even knew what a Grand Slam was until 2005,” he says, reflecting on how long it had been since Wales had won before Mike Ruddock’s team finally broke the duck. “I remember being at the stadium for it and didn’t quite grasp what it meant. Then in 2008, I wasn’t involved, but that team was a good team. It just seemed well drilled, the coaching was excellent, everyone seemed to know what they were doing. 

“In 2012, my first Six Nations title and Grand Slam, when we came back against Ireland, we never thought we were going to lose that game, even when we were behind, everyone seemed really confident. 

“The World Cup [defeat] probably drove us on, but the way we won was just businessman-like, almost automatic.

“Same in 2013, although we lost to Ireland, in what was probably my worst game for Wales, we beat France, and there was just a confidence about us, even knowing that we had to beat England by seven, we went in with an edge, because at that point, we had all experienced it, we knew what we were capable of.”

Wales completed a 30-3 rout of England, their biggest-ever win, and one that set the squad up for their next challenge, the British & Irish Lions tour to Australia. And we say squad, because almost half of them were in it, with fifteen chosen. 

Wales had toured Australia the year before, running them close enough to give them the belief they could win with the Lions. “I think there was almost that familiarity around us in 2013,” he says, “because of the amount that were picked – and justifiably so – I’d like to think we brought confidence into that team as well.  

“The dynamic of how people are in the changing rooms is always interesting. Before a game, I’d probably be quite relaxed and chilled, whereas some of the Irish players would be talking about what they were going to do, that was their way of getting ready. But the Welsh always had like, a calmness, we’d have a look in our eye, we were ready to go, but there wouldn’t be much talking.”

The tour seemed straight-forward. “Whenever we’d won, we’d go out and enjoy it,” he says. “We were probably lucky that Warby was a captain who didn’t drink.

“It meant whenever he did an interview he’d just say, ‘I stayed in the hotel, had a hot chocolate, went to bed’. He painted us in such an angelic way, but we’d be out having a good time. But boys are different, we wouldn’t judge anyone having their own way of doing things, but we’d all always turn up to play.”

The Irish had a big impact, with Jonathan paying note to how Paul O’Connell, then aged 33, would prepare for games. “Their preparation, the work they did on the computers, analysing the opposition, they were always ready. I think that’s why they played on for so long, it’s something I took with me into my later years.”

But of course, 2013, did have one controversy, certainly if you were Irish, when the return of Jamie Roberts from injury led to Brian O’Driscoll being dropped, in favour of switching Jonathan to thirteen, allowing Roberts to resume his normal role. “I looked up to him,” Jonathan says of O’Driscoll. “I admired him as a player, when we beat them in the World Cup in 2011, I went up and asked to swap jerseys with him, because he was Brian O’Driscoll. 

“Then on the tour, we played the first two tests together, and we roomed with each other, we got on well. I wouldn’t say we were destined to be best friends, but I was focused on playing for the Lions and giving as good an account as possible.

“I didn’t think I was going to play,” admits Jonathan. “I went out on the Sunday, had a couple of beers, I say a couple, probably too many beers, because we had Monday and Tuesday off. And I also thought I wasn’t going to play, because Jamie’s fit, and it’s Brian O’Driscoll.”

He also admits he probably had too many because he felt impending doom. “I was frustrated, I thought I was playing some of my best rugby, and I just didn’t think he’d be dropped.”

But he was. “I had a message,” recalls Jonathan. “‘Can you come to the coach’s office?’. And I was like, ‘Oh, here we go, getting the bullet’. And then Gats said, ‘Look, you need to learn the role for such and such move at thirteen’. And I just started laughing. They were asked why I was laughing, and I said, ‘There’ll be a shit storm coming now’.”

The team was announced, and when the players got onto the bus, Brian walked up to Jonathan – who sat in the middle, due to not being senior enough for the back – shook his hand, then carried on to the back seats. The ‘shitstorm’ wasn’t from the playing side.

“I don’t recall much talk about the selection at all,” he says. “Although that’s probably because if people were like ‘what the fuck is Gats doing?’, then they’re not going to have me in the conversation, are they? So, if they did, they hid it very well.

“Social media was a bit in its infancy, and there was a bombardment after the team announcement. I remember one Tweet, which went, ‘just arrived in Sydney, might go and find Jon Fox and break his legs #justiceforBod’.”

The press weren’t much better. “I think the first question was live on Sky Sports, and it was ‘Jonathan Davies, you’ve been picked ahead of Brian O’Driscoll, what makes you a better player than him?’.

“What a shit question, just trying to get a reaction.

“I wouldn’t have changed the experience,” he adds, “because it made winning the series even sweeter. My selection was justified, the whole selection was justified. A lot of people at the time were crying out, ‘how can he pick so many Welsh players?’. But it showed in the results. And you know, look at this tour [2025], there’s a lot of Irish players involved, but that’s because they’re the best team. And in 2013, we were the best team.”

When he looks at today’s Welsh set-up, he knows that his generation ‘papered over the cracks’ of the system, and he firmly believes too many young players are put into the system. “There weren’t as many players in academies back then,” he says. “My analogy is that they were almost fishing with a line, instead of a net, so they went for real quality and invested time into those smaller numbers.

“Instead of now having eighty in the under-18 group doing weights, there’s twelve of you,” he continues. “My first coach in the academy picked me up from school because I couldn’t drive, and we’d go to a local gym for one-on-one, and we’d do weights and fitness, or sometimes we go to Carmarthen and meet Ken Owens and Rhys Priestland – there was just three of us in that group for two years. I just think that’s creating an elite environment, an environment that you know you want to aspire to be in.

“I remember kicking with Neil Jenkins, because he’s a skills coach with the academy, I felt inspired. I’d go into school the next day and I’d be saying, ‘Guess who I was kicking with last night?’. I felt really lucky.

“There’s just too many numbers,” he continues, “it’s making it almost easy to be involved at that level. Professional rugby is hard, playing international rugby is testing, so I think the sooner we can build resilience and get people to understand the opportunity they have, the better.”

He also points to a decade of failure at under-20 level in the Six Nations as finally coming home to roost in the senior squad. “That hasn’t been good enough, we need to change this. I think little changes will give big gains.”

That said, when it comes to the regions, he believes one big change should happen. “Ospreys getting 2,000 in the Swansea City stadium [2,832, against Benetton], I remember going there on Boxing Day and there’d be 20,000 people there. I do feel sad for this current generation, it’s not the same. 

“I think we should have three clubs, regions, identities,” he says. “I don’t think the product we put on the field now with four is good enough, I think if you take it down to three, you have more quality in three teams, you create far more competition. The Premiership this year has been amazing, and that’s because with all those teams that have unfortunately gone, the market has been flooded with more quality, they’ve gone into different clubs. You’re aware then as a player, ‘right, so and so has just lost his job, I need to make sure that I’m playing well’. I think if there’s less opportunities, you get better players.”

How would he structure it? “East, west and north? Having a team in north Wales is an untapped resource in terms of, you know, sponsorship…”

A rugby version of Wrexham FC? “Hopefully,” he laughs, “we’ll have some Hollywood superstars funding Wrexham RFC. 

“I’m not saying it will work,” he says of three sides, “but it seems more logical.”

Jonathan has plenty of considered thoughts on rugby, where it’s been, where it can grow, how it can grow, and how Wales discovers a next generation. “We’ve got to be positive about it. I don’t know whether I’ve sat here and been quite negative, but rugby is an amazing game when it gets it right, and I think we just need to make sure that our ultimate goal is to make things better.” 

Jonathan is also trying to make things better off the pitch, with a charity called Working Options. “It helps sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds understand how many different careers are out there, and look at their talent to what suits them,” he explains. “Because when I was sixteen, I had no clue what career I would want to get involved in, if it wasn’t rugby. So, thank God I was half-decent at rugby, because I’ve put it off until now, when I’m not playing to work it out. I’d have been working in the pub if it wasn’t for rugby.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Francesca Jones

This extract was taken from issue 30 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

Auckland-born Denny Solomona was a league sensation, scoring 42 tries in a single year for Castleford, before moving to union where he would wreak similar havoc for defences, racking up 47 tries in 98 games for Sale. He even scored a match-winning try on his England debut against Argentina, sitting down and dizzying myriad Pumas defenders in the process. 

After such a career, there are plenty of places, or pitches even, that Denny Solomona thought he might have stood on eight years on. Perched on the sideline of a sixth-form college pitch in Wigan, issuing instructions to a group of part-time players in his role as head coach of Orrell, a team currently plying their trade in the Counties 3 ADM Lancashire and Cheshire league (level nine in the rugby pyramid), almost certainly wasn’t one of them.

Once upon a time, Orrell could stake a genuine claim to being rugby union’s answer to Icarus: a club that soared into the upper echelons of the English game only to tumble spectacularly, brought low by a mix of financial misadventure, shifting priorities and, quite literally, fire. The days of toppling rugby’s giants in the John Player Cup, of lifting Lancashire trophies, of finishing just behind Bath in the old Courage League One – undone by a single, cruel drop-goal against Wasps – feel not so much distant as mythic.

And yet, every week, a team still pulls on the black and amber jersey, representing the only union club in a town where rugby league is woven into the local DNA. 

Aside from the colossal pull of Wigan Warriors, the area is dotted with more than a dozen amateur league sides, leaving Orrell a curious anomaly: a former union force, stubborn, proud and slightly out of time.

Today, they face Ormskirk, who have made the trip across the county hoping to spoil what’s quietly becoming, for Orrell, a season tinged with cautious optimism, stoked, in no small part, by the presence of Denny, a man whose own story feels as unpredictable, and as stubbornly unfinished, as the club he now leads.

“Through coming here to coach, I feel like I’ve found a bit more respect and passion for the game,” explains Denny. “I’ve always had a kind of love-hate relationship with rugby, because I’ve done this for so long, it was all I knew. From taking a step back and then going back into rugby with Orrell, it’s kind of rejuvenated that whole reason why as a young kid Denny started playing rugby in the first place.

“I’m very open and honest about all the ugly sides of rugby; it’s all the pressure, it’s that you can’t leave rugby at the club you’re playing for. When you’re at home, you’re always watching rugby, how your upcoming opponent plays, what their little habits are. 

“There’s the frustration and the sleepless nights because you’re nervous. There’s the politics of rugby, working out how to react to not getting selected because you’re just out of favour. It’s brutal that one person’s opinion of you can dictate your career; if you’re out of favour with the head coach, you’re done for.”

From an early age, it was clear that Denny had the kind of instinct you don’t coach, the quicksilver ability to see space where others saw structure. Having moved to Australia and learnt rugby league, by nineteen, he was already lining up for Melbourne Storm’s first team, a precocious teenager with the desire to get to the try-line seemingly hardwired into his brain.

He moved quickly across hemispheres to London Broncos, and then to Castleford Tigers, where over two seasons he scored an astounding sixty tries in 45 games.

Then in December 2016, with two years still inked into his Castleford contract, Denny walked away; not just from a club, but from a code. He turned his back on league and joined Sale Sharks in the Premiership. The decision, abrupt and unapologetic, invited lawyers into the room. Eventually, a sum in the region of £200,000 changed hands and Sale got their man.

After ten tries in eleven games for Sale, it didn’t take long for the national conversation to begin. Three months in, he made himself available for England and Eddie Jones, ever the opportunist, called him up for the summer tour of Argentina.

In his first Test, Denny came off the bench and did what he’d always done, scored a try. It was the match-winner and a headline-stealing debut.

However, that try in Argentina would be his only one in an England shirt. Not because the talent had dimmed, but because timing, like form, is fickle. Looking back, even he concedes the moment of his breakthrough arrived at precisely the wrong time. 

“I was competing with Anthony Watson, Jonny May, Elliot Daly, all at their peak,” remembers Denny. “They were all playing Lions, playing really well at their clubs and consistently for England. It was tough as they had been growing up through England as well, they’d all done under-18s and 20s together. 

“It was just probably the wrong time, wrong everything really, but that’s nothing against those guys, they were all playing amazing. I’d never say I should have been playing in front of a certain person, because every one of them had their own right to play in that jersey. I realise now that you have got to take every opportunity, and unfortunately, I might not have done.

“I had a goal, but I wish I’d reframed my goal, because once I hit it, it was like there was nothing else to achieve and that’s no fault to anyone else but myself. I became an international rugby player, that had been my goal for the longest time. Once I played for England, I didn’t know what was next. 

“That was a mindset I had, that’s what killed me; maybe I should have made it my ambition to be the best England winger. That’s my only regret in rugby, not being able to shift that mental goal I had.”

Denny remained with Sale until 2021, with the standout moment being their 2020 Premiership Cup victory over Harlequins. From there, he played five times for Dunedin Super Rugby outfit Highlanders before hanging up his boots and returning to the UK, where he began a plumbing apprenticeship. 

Today, he owns and runs Pasifika Plumbing and Heating, but, as withso many players before him, Denny found leaving rugby behind an impossible reality to confront. “It was my first job outside of rugby and the transition was difficult. Especially because I had a newborn at the same time as moving back to England, and it probably wasn’t the best time to consider retirement because there was so much stuff happening in the background. 

“It was adding another plate to spin, and at the time, I already had three or four plates on the go,” says Denny, exasperation creeping into his voice at the memory. “But my partner and I, we’ve learnt to ride the wave sometimes.”

When he returned to the UK, he set up home in Orrell. “I was playing for Rossendale at the time, I had just started up my own business as well as having three young kids. It was a busy time, and it was a trek to get to Rossendale. I’m very family oriented, so it wasn’t really working out for me. 

“I spoke about this with Colin Ratcliffe [sponsor of Orrell RUFC and a keen supporter of Sale], who mentioned Orrell. He gave me a lesson in the history of the club and said ‘do you want to play or coach?’, and I told him I’d be mostly interested in coaching.” 

Denny had little interest in pulling on the boots to roam the wing again. At just 32, it seems his playing days are behind him. But from the moment he arrived at Orrell, he sensed potential; untapped, overlooked, but undeniable. This was a club with history, pride, and every reason to feel forgotten. It didn’t take long for his mind to start whirring with ideas, drawn to the possibility of building something meaningful.

“I told the committee to leave it to me and that I would try my best. I didn’t promise we’re going to win the league, but with a bit of structure, we could win at least a couple more games than we did last year.

“I have brought in a structure of how to play the game, training and a pre-game routine. These lads were not used to meeting at a certain time, they rocked up just before warm up, they warmed up and played. 

“I’m getting guest coaches as well, like Jacob Ford, George Ford’s little brother. I’ve had Ben Curry, who’s obviously a current England player. Getting those boys to lead sessions is a win-win. What I get is a personal breakdown specialist and a forward specialist. What they get is great experience teaching drills, and the opportunity to develop their coaching. By getting these guys to coach, hopefully the players can understand that we’re trying to get Orrell’s status back.

“I want us to be a tough team and a physical team; I want us to tackle hard, I want to run hard, I want to be a team that when our opponents get home they’re like, ‘shit, I’m a bit sore here’. But I also want to play an expansive game, I want to run it from the 22, I want to run it from the try line.”

Coaching with a philosophy which very much aligns with Denny’s current modus operandi of ‘riding the wave’, it would be easy to cast aspersions about the seriousness or potential longevity of Denny’s tenure at Orrell’s helm. But those doubts are quickly dispelled in conversation with the man himself. 

“I’m not here for one or two years, I want in for the long run,” he assures. His confidence feels far more grounded than the usual bravado of a young coach. There’s a compelling magnetism about Denny, strengthened rather than diminished by his healthy scepticism towards the top levels of the game.

Having been through plenty in his own career, there’s a wisdom and wariness behind his words that belie his age, and it’s enough to make people believe that change might finally be coming to Orrell. That belief was bolstered by their opening game of the season: a commanding 26–7 victory over Colne & Nelson, giving Denny’s coaching career the perfect start.

“Coaching’s not daunting, in the sense that I am not questioning myself on the details of how to coach,” says Denny with simple confidence. “It’s all relatively easy. The difficult part is understanding how the players will react and how you can communicate best with your players, that’s the hardest thing.

“I didn’t want to come in and bring new tactics and drills in all at once, because these lads, they work nine to five every day of the week, so they only get one hour to really train or release some of the frustrations or energies on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so I don’t want to bombard them with too much stuff.”

There’s something grimly fitting about the biblical rain that greets players and spectators at Orrell’s first home game of the season. At a time when Denny’s arrival should signal renewed hope, the heavens seem determined to dampen proceedings, quite literally, as supporters seek shelter in a conservatory area, hastily repurposed with a makeshift bar.

Bill Lyon, president of Orrell and the club’s foremost authority on its storied history, has been around long enough to be wary of false dawns. He began playing for the club in 1966, and represented Lancashire from 1970 to 1978, lining up alongside Fran Cotton, Bill Beaumont and John Carleton, who went on to become Orrell’s first British & Irish Lion. Carleton was later followed by the likes of Steve Bainbridge, Dewi Morris, Austin Healey and Dan Luger, who all donned the famous red jersey as well as the black and amber of the Lancashire club.

Bill recalls those early days with fondness and is always eager to share stories of Orrell’s lofty past with anyone willing to listen. “I was lucky enough to start when I did,” articulates Bill, “because that was when they reintroduced the County Cup. We beat Liverpool in 1972, and winning that opened the door to enter the national competition, which became the John Player Cup. Orrell started to pick up some of the bigger teams in the cup which led gradually to ever better fixtures.

“When we notched victories in the John Player, people began to be very complimentary about the style of rugby. In the 80s we just had a gigantic pack, and teams used to come to Edge Hall Road and, frankly, get destroyed. We were in the top division, with the big boys, then in 1991 we were runners up to Bath.

“During that 1991 season, every week ten of the fifteen players were local lads. By local I’m talking about a five or six mile radius around Edge Hall Road. We operated in this way and were number two in the country, and that hasn’t happened since and won’t happen again.” 

Between 1990 and 1995, Orrell stood alone in the Courage Leagues as the only village club among a field of city-based sides. Their very existence in a rapidly evolving rugby landscape was beginning to feel increasingly anachronistic.

The arrival of professionalism in 1995 only widened the financial gulf between Orrell and the rest of the top flight. The club dropped two divisions to the third tier, and a decision was made to sell.

Dave Whelan, former owner of Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors, completed the purchase in 2002. With financial backing over two seasons, Orrell surged from the third tier to finish as Championship runners-up.

The club’s committee announced a £10 million investment plan over five years, with Whelan openly dreaming of ‘drinking red wine away in Toulouse’ in the European Cup in the not-too-distant future. “I was there at the end-of-season dinner in 2004, where Whelan announced his grand plan for the future,” says Bill. “He said he was pushing all his resources towards a drive to the Premiership. What actually happened shortly after, was a sudden withdrawal of his support for Orrell. 

“He was pulling the plug with around twenty contracted players, an Australian coach, all gone at a stroke. So from there we were left high and dry. We sort of soldiered on until 2007, but common sense prevailed and we approached the authorities to say, throw us down to the bottom, because we’ve got to start again.

“I’ve no real hard evidence of this, but you got the sense that as the money got more involved, then the volunteer aspect started to fade away a little bit. We were an exceptional amateur club, but professionalism killed us really. We had huge fundraising functions which were always well-attended, because people still cared. But the sense of shift was palpable.”

The impact of those turbulent years still lingers as the latest iteration ofthis famous club takes to the field at St John Rigby College. Today’s side carries the quintessential Orrell ‘local lad’ spirit, with broad Lancashire accents echoing around the ground as players fire each other up before kick-off.

On the touchline, Denny exudes a quiet, watchful presence, occasionally breaking his focus to toss a ball with his son, proudly dressed in full rugby kit.

Today’s match coincides with the Orrell Proms, a music festival at the nearby cricket ground, where Orrell sometimes play due to their somewhat nomadic state.

It speaks volumes about the club’s recent revival that, where once they struggled to field even one side on the weekend of the Proms, they now have two in action with the seconds playing over at Winstanley College.

From the whistle, Orrell look sharp, meeting tackles with force and intent, drawing hearty applause from supporters on the sidelines, some of whom once packed down in the club’s fearsome 1980s forward units.

It doesn’t take long for Orrell to open the scoring; some slick passing and wing play leads to a well-worked try and a 7-0 lead, putting Ormskirk immediately on the back foot. 

David Robinson, chair of Orrell, charges from the crowd to update the small scoreboard at one end of the pitch, where the score remains unchanged until half-time, with Orrell absorbing a sustained spell of Ormskirk pressure.

A key source of pain in Orrell’s decline has been the loss of their historic home ground, Edge Hall Road. Known for its fearsome atmosphere and physically dominant home sides, it was more than just a fortress, it was the indisputable heart of a club. That’s what made it all the more painful when the original clubhouse was destroyed by fire and, in 2007, the club was forced to leave. 

“The famous quote is when Harlequins played us in the old John Player Cup they said they were beaten by a team that’s basically a lay-by on the M6,” remembers David. “So we went from that lay-by on the M6 to being a force to be reckoned with, and a huge part of that was Edge Hall Road. I actually live on Edge Hall Road now. There’s one pitch left, and the other three pitches are a housing estate. 

“When the clubhouse burned down, that was like a line in the sand moment,” continues David. “There was so much history there, and it was gone overnight. When I came back to watch Orrell again, I went with some friends, we all had a beer and walked down. We were stood on the terrace, and then there was no clubhouse there, just the pitch. It almost took my breath away to see that virtually everything had gone. It was just heartbreaking, really.”

With one pitch still remaining at Edge Hall Road, amid renewed talk of a new dawn at the club, it seems only natural to consider a return to Orrell’s spiritual home. “Personally, I have mixed views about returning to Edge Hall Road,” explains David, with a sense of gravity entering his voice. “I know there’s a lot of people of my generation and older who would like to see us play there again. It’s now owned by Wigan Warriors and Wigan Athletic. 

“The owners have invested a lot of money in it in the last twelve months, so there’s a clubhouse now, there’s a fabulous gym, the pitch is of great quality. They’ve started to improve the old stand and put new floodlights up. 

“I have had some early discussions with people from Wigan Warriors about using it, but my personal opinion is that I don’t see it as a place to play every home game, for cost reasons. 

“I think it’s an opportunity to give players something to buy into and hopefully attract players if we could play several games there a season, that would work. I think in terms of longevity and being able to attract players in, having our own base is a benefit.”

Wandering around the touchlines and speaking to gathered fans on the topic of Edge Hall Road and past glories, there is a yearning for yesteryear. To some extent, it’s only natural for nostalgia to seep into any conversation about Orrell. But for those working to make the club as good as it can be right now, its constant presence can become wearing, something David feels with particular sharpness. “The fact that we were a league one club and we’re not anymore is the source of a lot of local negativity. People say ‘it’s not as good as it was’, and ‘it was great in our day’, that’s only to be expected. 

“Sometimes I have to take a good, long, hard look at myself and stop myself from saying that, because what we had in our day has gone, and the players now don’t know any different, so we have to make it as good as we can for them.” 

The second half begins in both earnest and error, a scrappy sequence of mistakes and opportunism that sees Ormskirk pounce on Orrell’s lapse in focus to cross the line, only for the home side to return the favour moments later, capitalising on a loose ball to score. The background hum of the nearby M6, which had hovered benignly over proceedings like white noise, seems to swell, not quite to a roar, but something with edge, as Ormskirk begin to exert real pressure, turning a string of penalties into points and nudging the scoreboard to 21-14.

Orrell respond again, levelling the scores with another try, and suddenly there’s a different kind of noise: sharper, more urgent voices rising from the sideline, the mood tipping toward something charged and expectant. 

In the middle of it all stands Denny, still, composed, his gaze flickering between the breakdown and the backs. Occasionally, his daughter climbs onto his shoulders, granting himself the best view in Wigan, and lending the whole scene the air of a tableau: part grassroots drama, part family portrait.

At 21-21, with the match balanced on a knife edge, Orrell’s openside flanker and captain, Dan Huxley, begins to imprint himself more firmly on the contest; a flurry of tackles, a raised hand in discussion with the referee, a presence felt wherever the game is most alive. “I played my first game when I was seventeen, and I’m 28 now, so it’s been an up and down eleven years,” notes Dan with typical Lancastrian affability and diffidence.  “I became captain at eighteen. It was daunting at first, because I was the youngest player on the team when I was first selected captain. My granddad was captain for a long time, so it’s family tradition.

“I’ve always played with my cousin, who’s just retired. My brother, my dad, and all of my uncles have played. My granddad played with his cousins. So, there’s a lot of Huxleys in there. Everyone knows everyone, you can’t get away with anything, put it that way.”

A joiner by trade, Dan runs his own building firm, Huxley Construction, which appears as the sponsor of Orrell’s training wear. A decade as captain, his commitment to the cause has never been in doubt, leaving him at a loss when the fortunes of the club hung in the balance for several years.  “When Covid hit, a couple of those lads who were nearing thirty had kids and half our team didn’t really come back,” remembers Dan. “Our coach at the time had been struggling with his business, and then it took off so he left to do that. It was impossible to get lads back down, commitment was just out the window. I remember being so frustrated, at times last season it felt like we were staring down the barrel a bit. 

“But with Denny coming in as our new coach, he’s brought along some new faces and some quality younger players are playing their first season in adult rugby. 

“We’ve had a good pre-season, which we’ve not had for the past probably three years, and then the past couple of weeks, we’ve had fifteen-on-fifteen at training.”

With the score stuck at 21-21 and time running out, Orrell continue to hit hard and run the ball as tempers flare on the pitch and the referee is keen to act swiftly on any perceived slight on his authority.

Off the pitch, veteran spectators on the sidelines note the transformation of the side with genuine astonishment. “We’re used to watching them forty or fifty down at this stage,” one of them chuckles. This transformation is not at all lost on Dan.

“The way we’re playing now, it’s night and day. People watching the first game of the season said they couldn’t believe it was the same players out there. 

“The biggest thing is we’ve got so much more structure. We’re not the biggest pack, we’re somewhere near the smallest team in the league, but our strength is our speed and fitness. Denny’s recognised this and got us running the ball way more which opens up the pitch for us, and it helps when you’ve got England players leading sessions,” Dan laughs.

“Ben Curry was dead good, he came across a bit nervous himself, I presume that he’s not done a lot of coaching because he’s been concentrating on playing. 

“It’s more than just the lessons we can get from his drills, it just keeps the lads interested because Denny is actually pulling some strings and helping the club. He won’t be a one-season wonder, he’s genuinely interested in helping.” 

Being around the club for as long as he has and his association with the Huxley-Orrell lore, Dan reckons he’s got a pretty good read on the club’s history. When asked about captaining a club who everyone accepts were stronger in the past, he emits a laugh which verges on the exasperated. 

“People saying Orrell was better back in the old days is just something you get used to,” says Dan wearily. “I’ve learned to take it with a pinch of salt, a lot of those men were great players and big lads too, but I don’t think they’d cut it in the current game.

“I say that even though every male family member I’ve got has played for Orrell. As kids, we were all around, growing up around the place and I’ve heard every story, probably ten times over. They’re special, but they can feel a bit distant I suppose. The club’s in my blood, and I feel as though we’re making the first small steps of something special. Sometimes you get a sense of these things.”

With time running out and the score still locked at 21-21, the mood alongthe touchline begins to shift as one by one, the gathered supporters start to reconcile with the idea of a draw. 

For a side that’s grown familiar with frustration in recent seasons, a win and a draw to open the campaign is far from a poor return, even if, given the chances they let slip in the first half, Orrell might reasonably feel they should have been out of sight.  

Still, there’s one last act to come. Orrell’s forwards dig in and drive into the breakdown, forcing a final opening as Ormskirk’s defence begins to tire. 

The ball finds its way to outside centre Kieran Herbert, who arcs through a fractured line and dots down for a last-minute winner, the kind of try that stirs echoes of his coach’s playing days without straining for the comparison. 

He’s quickly surrounded by team-mates, and cheers rise up from the sideline as the result sinks in. Soon after, the crowd filters back into the conservatory, the low hum of post-match chatter carrying the lightness of early-season hope. 

It’s even more fitting that, when everyone arrived at St John Rigby College, the rain was hammering down with a threatening intensity, throughout the contest, right to the last, Orrell’s current home remains bathed in Lancashire sunshine.

Story by Scott Duke-Giles

Pictures by Russ Williams

This extract was taken from issue 31 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

The most striking thing about Jim Carlin is his voice. Deep and commanding with perfect West Lothian tones, it used to boom out around amateur football pitches up and down Scotland in the 1980s from his time as a football referee. These days, it is put to more artistic use as Jim performs as a baritone chorister in the Linlithgow RFC male voice choir, the only rugby choir in Scotland, based in the West Lothian town, halfway between Edinburgh and Falkirk.

We meet him before Linlithgow take on Dunfermline in the Scottish National League Division Four at a chilly Mains Park, with the two teams sitting in fifth and ninth respectively. As we stand outside the clubhouse, looking out on a pitch which will soon host a muddy contest, Jim’s voice echoes around the ground and his breath, made visible by the cold, dances before disappearing as he tells us how the idea came about. “The choir was formed in 1991,” explains Jim, who is its chair. “Clubs would come up to Linlithgow for Five Nations internationals, and principal among those were several Welsh rugby clubs with whom we had a long-standing relationship. 

“Of course, when the Welshies would come up here, they’d sing their socks off. They’d turn around and say, ‘aren’t you going to sing anything?’, and we’d mutter the words of the first verses of about three songs, it all became a bit embarrassing. 

“So, the original idea was to be able to reciprocate when visiting clubs came and give a good account of ourselves in the singing stakes. But over the years that has developed; we’re by no means a professional choir, but we’re a very good amateur choir, all built from those very humble beginnings of embarrassment.

“We’ve ended up touring China, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Ireland and in May we’ll be entertaining, for the second time, a choir from Bordeaux.”

According to Jim, you don’t need any link to the rugby club to join the choir, though about half of its 44 members do have one. That healthy membership puts the choir in a position many grassroots rugby clubs would envy, nearly enough to put out three XVs. 

And when they rehearse or perform, they happily move beyond the songs you might typically expect from an all-male choir. “We sing right across the board,” Jim explains with a smile. “We sing Scottish favourites, as you might imagine, but we do some classical stuff and some popular anthems. The songs from the shows are now very popular, so we’ll do songs from Les Miserables, for example. 

“And we take on the classical stuff, like the Soldiers’ Chorus and bits from the Hallelujah Chorus. It’s a very broad church as far as the music is concerned, which makes it more entertaining for members, because you’ve got to be on your toes.”

The choir rehearses weekly at the rugby club and a few weeks before our visit to Linlithgow found itself entertaining the Scottish national side. Gregor Townsend’s men dropped in midway through the Quilter Nations Series, seeking a brief escape from their Edinburgh hotel, and between plates of food, air hockey, darts and cards, were serenaded by Jim’s choir, an unexpected soundtrack to elite rugby’s carefully managed downtime.

“All told, they were there for about two hours, they brought out their own caterer, and then we came on and did three or four numbers for them just before they headed back to the solitude of the hotel. We didn’t do them much good, obviously, because then they got themselves stuffed by Argentina.”

Linlithgow is a historic town of around 13,000 people in West Lothian, roughly twenty miles west of Edinburgh. It sits alongside the stunning Linlithgow Loch, which stretches for 1.4 kilometres and is today alive with fishing boats, all hoping to land some of the premium trout that call the loch home.

We’re here as part of Vodafone’s clubs.connected programme in partnership with Scottish Rugby, which is helping to connect grassroots rugby clubs across Scotland with connectivity, improving matchday operations and overall efficiency.

Ever-present on matchdays is the club’s enthusiastic secretary, Ken Richardson, who moves around the premises with notable alacrity. An authority on both the history of Linlithgow RFC – he quite literally wrote the book for the club’s fiftieth anniversary in 2020 – and the town itself, Ken finds time to talk us through its distinguishing features, shortly after explaining how the club managed to cook a vast paella for the entire Scottish squad and staff beneath a makeshift gazebo.

“There’s quite a few unique features in Linlithgow,” Ken explains, gathering himself post-paella chat, “one of which is a ruined royal palace.”

There has been royal residence in Linlithgow since the twelfth century, but King James I began rebuilding Linlithgow Palace in 1424, transforming the aftermath of a fire into what would become a grand royal ‘pleasure palace’. 

Its decline came gradually after the Union of the Crowns, before a fire in 1746 reduced it to the romantic ruin that now overlooks the loch, impressive still, but resigned to history. “The Jameses came here to hunt and for general revelry I suppose,” says Ken.  “It was quite popular with James III, James IV, and then Mary, Queen of Scots was born in Linlithgow Palace.

“The town still retains its High Street, which is fitting as Linlithgow was built around the single street, this is something you can still recognise here.

“Aside from the royal connection, it’s really a traditional market town. It had its own little industries alongside the loch, tanning and all sorts, but that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s very much a commuter town for Glasgow and Edinburgh now.”

The arrival of the railway in the 1840s came to define Linlithgow as surely as its royal past. The main Edinburgh to Glasgow line still runs through the town, placing it just twenty minutes from the capital and thirty from Scotland’s largest city. 

For those who work in either but prefer to return each evening to a smaller, steadier life, surrounded by nature, a historic centre and handsome Caledonian architecture, Linlithgow presents itself as an attractive place to settle. “The town’s population wasn’t as big up until it started growing again in the 60s and 70s,” explains Ken who moved there in the early 1980s. “The housing estates built up, and gradually the town became populated with mostly young couples and families.

“If you go around the town now, you’ll see a lot of these houses that were originally built have got extensions fitted on them. Point being, that generation are still here and young people are moving elsewhere. The last few years have seen a slight shrinkage in the size of the town, because there’s so much desirable property and it’s become very expensive relative to some of the other growing towns nearby. 

“People bringing up young families and so on might have a harder time living in Linlithgow, and it’s not as if we can build loads of new houses as there’s a cap by the local authority put on the developments in the town.”

Sadly, the choir doesn’t sing on matchdays, when attention is firmly fixed on the rugby rather than its associated harmonies. Not yet tempted by the West Lothian chill where today’s visitors Dunfermline are made to warm up, Linlithgow’s players head for the indoor training centre, roughly the size of a five-a-side pitch, to work through their lineouts, rucking and passing.

As Linlithgow move through their final pre-match preparations, Dunfermline retreat to the changing rooms and turn up the music. Founded in 1893, the visitors carry their history loudly, while Linlithgow, established in 1970 as the town itself expanded, remain the newer presence. “The club was founded by a group of local rugby players and quickly grew on the back of an influx of people with a rugby background moving into the town,” explains Ken. “Once established, a youth section soon emerged, and this grew with the support of a couple of teachers at the local school, Linlithgow Academy,” 

Linlithgow made a strong start in the 1970s, rounding out their first decade with a Murrayfield Cup victory over East Kilbride, a side competing two leagues above them. Progress came steadily, and in 2009 Linlithgow reached their peak at 40th in the old Scottish league structure. Then restructuring, fewer national leagues, more regionality, leaving Linlithgow to settle into a long residency in East Region Division 1. They stayed there for the better part of 15 years, before storming the division in 2023/24 with an unbeaten season and climbing back into the newly slimmed national set-up. Now, in National League 4, they find themselves roughly 46th in the Scottish league structure of Scottish club rugby, as close as they’ve ever been to the heights of 2009. 

In the 1980s, Linlithgow could field six adult men’s teams every weekend. Today, the club offers a broader range of rugby than ever before, better reflecting the community it works hard to represent. It’s a point that resonates deeply with club president Jean McKeown, the first woman to hold the role in Linlithgow RFC’s history, whose own rise mirrors that evolution.

Jean’s family moved to Linlithgow in 1993 and her husband played rugby at the time and as a natural support, she helped out with the pie teams. Their son Calum then went through micro and mini rugby at the club. “It’s always been a big part of his life,” she says “even when he went to university in Glasgow he continued to play for Linlithgow.”

You must have liked to see him getting stuck in? “That’s what he’s supposed to do,” she extolls drily. “Or at least that’s what they tell me. The thing is, it’s quite difficult to tell them apart, covered in mud and all the rest of it.

“I didn’t get involved with the actual running of the club until I finished working in 2018 when the previous finance director was giving up. I’m not an accountant, but I know my way around finance, that was my profession. So I said, ‘oh, I can help with that’”.

From there, Jean was elected president before the 2021/22 season, and her primary focus has been on better connecting the club with the local community. This has primarily been borne out by Linlithgow’s thriving youth section - with juniors playing from u13 right through to u18, and seven groups of ‘wee reds’ who train on evenings throughout the week. 

“We work hard to put ourselves out in the community,” Jean explains, “our Development Officers go out to different schools around the area, and I think we do a very good job of raising awareness of rugby in different schools, and trying to get boys and girls playing rugby. 

“Children nowadays have access to so many different sports, it’s quite a challenge to get in there with everybody else trying to attract attention.

“Developing a girls’ section will be a big focus for us going forward, and I think we’ll get there one day, especially with our great volunteer support from mums and dads. 

And having a thriving youth section can only serve to benefit the senior squad, something that is already paying off for Linlithgow. 

“I think the statistic is something like 41 guys played for the first XV last season,” Ken chips in, “and 37 of them came through the youth system. That’s something that makes us immensely proud, and you wouldn’t get that if we weren’t an amateur club.” 

With kick-off imminent, the dark, brooding clouds above Linlithgow are pierced by winter sunshine, lending a brief touch of apricity to the otherwise harsh West Lothian afternoon. As the home side run out to applause and cheers, captain Fraser Mochrie, very much one of the local lads behind Ken’s oft-cited statistic, passes on a few last-minute instructions. When we meet him, he proves as affable as they come, sporting a moustache he admits may soon fall victim to his girlfriend’s complaints. He spends much of his working life suspended somewhere between Aberdeen and Norway as an instrument control technician on an oil rig. So when he claps enthusiastically as the teams assemble for kick-off, he has the look of a man grateful to be back on terra firma. “My schedule can be a little tough,” explains Fraser, “I’ve just spent three weeks away, now I’m home for four weeks, then I’m away for another three weeks, and then I’m home for five weeks. 

“I am home more than I’m away,” he continues, “and I’ve done a six-month secondment in the office which was one of the reasons that I stuck my hand up to be captain this year.  I miss rugby so much when I’m away, I even picture training and playing games sometimes when I’m floating in the sea somewhere. The more involved you get, and especially this year as captain, at times I feel a little bit helpless and a little bit guilty not to be involved.”

While Fraser admits to this quiet sense of guilt, his commitment to the club is unmistakable, not least in his role as the driving force behind RedsFest, Linlithgow’s answer to Glastonbury, held last May. Built around a sevens tournament and bolstered by live bands, DJs, craft beers, ciders and food stalls, the event was conceived as both a fundraiser and a community gathering. “It was a serious undertaking,” Fraser assures us, “it was months in the making, but it was an absolutely brilliant day. We’ll be back in May of this year and we need to retain our title as champions of the sevens tournament.”

Back on the pitch, the game begins with Dunfermline launching a high kick just as a fast train from Glasgow to Edinburgh tears past along the touchline. Another roars through fifteen minutes later, by which point Linlithgow are already 21-0 ahead, having burst into the match with three early tries. They break tackles, win penalties and repeatedly force their way up field, where quick hands allow them to slice through the visitors’ defence with disarming ease.

Much of the action unfolds at the far end, leaving supporters clustered near the clubhouse craning their necks for a glimpse, and just before the break Linlithgow add another try to carry a commanding 26-0 lead into half-time. Fraser jogs off the pitch at the break, slapping the back of a team-mate who bears more than a passing resemblance to him; it’s his brother Euan Mochrie, who’s operating as blindside flanker.

Today there are two Mochries in the starting XV, though Fraser tells us that on some Saturdays, there have been three. “It’s been pretty cool playing with my brother since I’ve been in senior rugby and in the last couple of seasons, our youngest brother, Aidan, has broken into the first team. It’s been awesome playing with all my brothers, I think my dad’s head just about fell off the first game there were three of us on the same pitch.

“I’ve never had the draw to play for anyone else. Whether I had the skill or not, is very debatable, but I’ve never wanted to play in any other teams, I’ve always been quite happy just playing local club rugby.

“Even though it might be getting more expensive for the boys to live there,” continues Fraser, “I think that they’ll come to play rugby here, even if they might live in the surrounding towns where housing is more affordable. For most of the boys Linlithgow is still home.”

As Linlithgow emerge for the second half, those gathered urge them to be relentless. Dunfermline briefly interrupt the rhythm with a well-worked try out wide, greeted loudly by their travelling support clustered on a grassy knoll beside the pitch, but any suggestion of a comeback is short-lived. 

More sharp work from winger Ruaridh Stewart quickly restores the gap, before sustained pressure draws Fraser into the line; he spots a sliver of space and flops over for a try of his own, his moustache momentarily straightened by a grin as team-mates pile in around their captain.

Ken appears soon after, smiling broadly and insisting we must be Fraser’s good-luck charm, celebratory ale in hand. 

Linlithgow keep the ball moving right to the end, and when fellow second-rower Kieran Cochrane adds another try to make it 47–5, the final whistle feels more like a formality than a conclusion.

It’s been a good day for Linlithgow, but like the rest of grassroots rugby they face challenges. Clubs such as this are the beating heart of many communities, but in an ever-challenging market, they have to maximise opportunities. They have to work hard on relationships with the town, with people, staying connected with members past and present, and find ways to connect first time with members of the future.  

Ken charts how the club clung to both players and finances through Covid and its aftermath, before turning to the quieter, more persistent struggle of making a grassroots club appealing to young people in an age thick with distractions, technological and otherwise. 

The latter is being helped in part by the frequent use of the indoor training centre, where the Linlithgow side did their warm-up. It is used for kids rugby and football, with Ken sure that is the club’s best connection to the local community. 

Financial and availability challenges are faced by clubs across the country, but with Linlithgow in mind, Ken is clear about who Vodafone’s clubs.connected scheme with Scottish Rugby is really for, and why it matters here to have a fast and reliable connection and opportunities to pass on the benefits to our community.  “Vodafone’s partnership with grassroots clubs helps take the strain off the volunteers who run the club,” he says, “and that’s the biggest thing really. As far as technology is concerned, none of us are experts, the club is run by volunteers, so when it comes to specifying what we need going forward, it’s quite tricky.

“That’s why Vodafone’s programme will be great for us, because we’ll have expertise guiding us through any technological challenges. 

“Our till systems are connected to it, our Wi-Fi is connected to it, we’ll have our alarms connected too, and all of these things need to work for the club to survive. 

“If any of those things – tills, Wi-Fi, alarms – go wrong, it’s a real challenge, because trying to fix them when you’re not an expert is a pain. You’ve got to track things down and phone people up. 

“Having a contact we can rely on is the key thing for us, because we can just ring them up if there’s a problem, and as volunteers, that makes our lives a whole lot easier.”

As our conversation with Ken wraps up, people continue to drift back towards the clubhouse, where the early stages of a Linlithgow Saturday night begin to take shape, ales poured freely, Tennent’s following close behind. 

As the light fades, and the voices inside the clubhouse begin to rise and mingle in something approaching harmony, we’re reminded that only so much can change, organised or otherwise; people will always sing at Linlithgow RFC.  

This article was brought to you in partnership with Vodafone clubs.connected. Get your club connected now, for more information visit scottishrugby.org/vodafone-clubs-connected

Story by Scott Duke-Giles

Pictures by André Silva

This extract was taken from issue 33 of Rugby Journal. 

To order the print journal, click here.

The Scottish Highlands are almost as rich in myths and legends as they are natural beauty. A mountainous region in the most northerly chunk of Britain, this 26,000 square kilometres of rugged charm can be beautiful. Shaped by weather that rolls in from the North Atlantic and brushed by light that lingers long into summer evenings, the Highlands can feel elemental in the truest sense of the word. Those who call it home live in step with its rhythms, where shifting skies and vast horizons are simply part of the everyday. In winter the daylight may be brief, but it arrives sharp and silver over the mountains and glens; in summer it stretches deep into the night, bathing some of Europe’s most dramatic landscapes in a clarity and colour found nowhere else.

Life here is shaped as much by the mental landscape as the physical one, testing resolve while also forging a powerful sense of belonging. Though the Highlands account for almost a third of Scotland’s landmass, they are home to just four per cent of its population. Communities are threaded through small villages, towns and the city of Inverness (48,248), where distance is a fact of life and people extend warmth as practice. But remoteness can carry its own challenges; here, rates of loneliness and suicide sit above the national average.

Community can be everything, knowing people are there – even if they’re a good drive away – is all-important, which is where rugby comes into its own. Specifically, in Inverness, there’s a beacon in Highland RFC.

On Thursday nights that community is doing its thing, with both the senior men’s and women’s squads training side by side. For an hour and a half, regardless of the weather, the fifty or so players gather under floodlights.

Rugby Journal is here with Vodafone, whose clubs.connected programme with Scottish Rugby is helping Highland strengthen its ties to the local community, something that carries particular weight in this part of the world.

Before training begins, we meet Jodie Standen, who plays hooker for Highland’s women’s team and works in marketing for a local mountain biking company. She won’t be taking part tonight, sidelined by an injured ankle, but she knows better than most the value of connection up here. “I’m originally from Fort William,” she begins, “around eighteen months ago I moved up to Inverness for work, and I hadn’t found my people yet. I was very aware that I was alone up here, and needed to try and make some friends, which for adults seems to be hard.

“I always liked watching rugby,” she continues, “but never played it. I saw on Instagram that the women’s team were doing a ‘come and try’, and I just thought to myself  ‘what have I got to lose?’. From my first message, they were super supportive, they offered me boots and kit to make sure I had everything I needed. What I remember most was how keen everyone was to talk to you. It felt like they were taking an interest in me as a person.

“I never felt embarrassed that I didn’t know what I was doing,” she adds, “because no one made a big deal about that; they were just glad to have you there.” 

Jodie’s experience is far from unique. Inverness may sit only fourteenth among Scotland’s cities by population, tucked in just behind Ayr and Perth, but as the self-styled capital of the Highlands it is also the fastest-growing city in the country.

With more young people arriving and looking to find their way into rugby, Highland have been careful to put structures in place to support them should that transition prove difficult. “We’ve put mental health ambassadors in place,” explains Jodie, “so if players feel like they need to speak to somebody within the club and they want some support, there’s a collective of us that have the knowledge to speak to people, give them advice, or to just be a trusted face.

“We did a social media collab with a local mental health movement called Headspace Highlands, where there was an isolated microphone in the middle of the pitch, and players spoke into it about how much the club means to them, I got quite emotional watching it back. 

“I feel as though mental health issues are still stigmatised up here. I’m lucky, because I’ve found that in my own personal life, when maybe things haven’t been going right, the first people I want to go to are my team-mates.”

Having discovered the club and realised rugby was something she wanted to pursue, Jodie was soon thrown into the thick of it, in an Inverness derby, no less. Initially handed a watching brief, she quickly found herself coming off the bench against Inverness Craig Dunain. “Initially, I didn’t want to play, and they all told me to bring my boots down, and that if I got the bug, they’d put me on. I was on the bench, and someone cracked their head open. It was quite intense but I just stood there saying, ‘put me on now!’. 

“I’d never grown up around team sports, but there was something so infectious about the camaraderie and atmosphere that made me desperate to be a part of it all.

“Being surrounded by everyone who wanted me to make that first impression on the pitch made me sure that this was the sport for me.”

“I knew I was going to be a forward, like, I’m not a fast runner, but I am quite strong. I remember going to my first men’s game and my captain told me I should give number 2 a go - I said yes having no idea what I was in for. I’ve been grafting in the front row ever since and I love it. Our team’s lineouts are really strong - the best in the league I’d say!”

The women’s side continue to gather momentum, promoted from Arnold Clark Caledonia North Region League Division 1 (tier four of the women’s game) and playing in a regional play-off series which began in January with a defeat to Wigtownshire.  

On the men’s side, Highland’s first XV compete in National League Division 2 (the third tier of Scottish men’s club rugby) and are captained by Scott Fraser, with Davie Carson as head coach. Both men join us briefly before training gets under way. “You’re lucky to catch this big-shot today,” says Davie, slapping Scott on the back. “He’s been selling cows all day.” Scott works on a farm and has spent the day at market. He has also played for Highland since the age of ten. His first ever coach? The man sitting beside him. “Yeah he’s been my head coach for 25 years. He knows when to crack the whip,” says Scott, with a smirk, “but he’s got really good people skills and he knows how to get the best out of folk.”

Davie first pulled on a Highland shirt in 1982, during a period now recalled with a certain rose-tinted clarity, when sevens trophies accumulated and the club routinely fielded four sides every Saturday. 

Founded in Inverness in January 1922, Highland has spent more than a century embedding itself in the life of the city, playing regular friendlies and entering cup competitions in the first fifty years of its existence.

The introduction of the Scottish Rugby Union league system in 1973 proved a decisive moment as under the captaincy of Nairn MacEwan, Highland rose from Division 4 to the top tier in consecutive seasons, with MacEwan earning twenty Scotland caps and lifting the Calcutta Cup alongside fellow Highlander John Frame in 1971. It was the first time a team from the Highlands had broken through into the top tier of any Scottish sport.

In the decades since, the club has continued to send players into the national game, from George Mackie to Jamie Dobie and Jade Konkel, with Paddy Kelly and Jake Henry currently representing Scotland sevens.

And yet, for all that history and occasional silverware, the club was precariously close to slipping away altogether. “I took the reins in 2013 when we were at our lowest in Caley Two North  [Arnold Clark Caledonia North Region League Division 2], which is where our thirds are playing now,” Davie adds. “When we played down there we had about a dozen people and their dogs coming down to watch. We were at a really low ebb, the training numbers were down with just ten or eleven senior players coming to training.

“But we were getting 25-30 coming to under-18s training at the same time, so we just told a few that if you want to play for Highland firsts, all you’ve got to do is train twice a week. Luckily, we had a few lads staying in the area for work, rather than disappearing for uni, and threw them straight into the first team. 

“There’s still two or three of them playing for us now in the firsts, including this laddie right here,” he says, giving Scott a playful shove, “which is pretty remarkable. We were down so low, but there was so much unity because we were all so motivated to get our club back.

“We went through that 2013/14 season unbeaten and that sparked everything,” continues Davie. “You get a winning team, and you get folks starting to drift back to watch and see what’s happening.”

From that low point, 2013 proved unexpectedly galvanising. Victories in the Caledonia Bowl and National Bowl accompanied promotion in the 2013/14 season, followed by four further rises that echoed the club’s surge of the 1970s and ultimately carried Highland into National League Division 1.

Looking back, Davie is quick to credit Nairn MacEwan, whose influence continues to loom large whenever the club’s history is told, and to whom he traces much of his own coaching success. “I got so much out of being around him,” he says. “His rugby philosophy was so far ahead of the game back in the 80s, he was just way beyond his years. It would have been really nice to see him coaching a side in this era, because everything teams are doing now, he had already thought of back in the day.”

Scott listens as Davie speaks about Highland’s past, but it is when the conversation turns to 2013 that a grin breaks across his face.  At just eighteen, Davie placed his trust in Scott, asking him to step into adult rugby at a moment when the club most needed reasons to believe. Scott has remained a fixture at fly-half ever since, taking on the captain’s armband in 2020.

Asked what sets Highland apart, Scott doesn’t hesitate for long before an answer comes. “The aways man,” Scott says with a little shake of the head. “I know the island boys [Shetland and Orkney] have to travel loads too, covering the distance we do at our level is pretty crazy.

“You could say our geography is our biggest weakness, you could be away at seven in the morning and back at midnight for some of these games, it’s not just going away for the afternoon. But there’ve been some great memories on buses over the years, it makes us unique, and I like to think of it as one of our biggest strengths, because we’re such a tight-knit group as a result. 

“There’s plenty of times you get up in the morning and you think, ‘oh God, how much longer can we carry on doing this?’ But on the whole the aways are brilliant and you have to give a lot of credit to the families, wives and girlfriends of all the players that are involved, because they make a lot of sacrifices for us to be able to play. The amount of times that they have to scrape us off the floor when we’re getting off buses is probably not ideal.”

Memories of away days drift in, Scott recalling the long ferry journeys to far-flung corners of Scotland, often undertaken in fancy dress and with a sense of collective mischief. Not long after, he and Davie head out to the pitch, where the leaner nights of a decade ago, when ten or eleven players might trickle in on a Thursday, feel safely consigned to memory. This evening, thirty or so Highland players line the touchline, taping ankles, draining water bottles and easing themselves into motion as training begins with sprints and drills before settling into a team run ahead of the weekend’s home fixture against Falkirk.

Inside, away from the cold, sits Karen Cameron Latif, the club’s president. A litigator specialising in property disputes and one of the busiest figures in the Highlands, she nevertheless devotes herself to the rugby club with a consistency that keeps her here most nights, and most weekends too. “I suppose I always thought that the club’s president would be a former player or a coach,” Karen says, “someone high profile like that. I’m a person who likes to get my head down and do things behind the scenes, so I hadn’t anticipated I would be in this role, but I’m very proud of being the first female president this club has had.

“I’ve become a professional groupie, the embarrassing rugby mum of the whole club it feels like.”

We’re sitting inside Highland’s new clubhouse, where the clean sheen of fresh timber and glass is softened by signed shirts from the club’s more heady eras, relics of the 1970s and again of the 2010s, lining the walls. 

On Saturday afternoons, with Highland playing only metres away, the match is livestreamed back into the room, carried into the warmth so supporters can follow every phase without braving the more perilous edges of a Highland winter. With Vodafone and Scottish Rugby’s support, that small but civilising luxury becomes easier to sustain. “The council decided to put a road in, which meant we lost one of our rugby pitches and our old clubhouse was demolished. They built this wonderful new facility with a 3G pitch in front of it. 

“I think that really revived enthusiasm for rugby in Inverness, because now you don’t need to sit in a deck chair with a hot water bottle or a flask of tea anymore, you can actually sit in the warmth and watch your kids play outside.

“Even though Scottish people are waterproof, sometimes watching rugby in the north of Scotland is literally like being in Singing In The Rain.”

Highland may have solved the problem of frozen supporters, but as Karen explains, other challenges remain, many of them specific to life as a club in this far corner of the country. The travel alone can test commitment and logistics in equal measure: long journeys, sudden shifts in weather, and the financial strain of a typical Saturday that might see four senior teams criss-crossing the country by bus, alongside ten youth teams from under-13s through to under-18s doing the same.

The club’s rise since 2013 brought momentum and belief, but it also brought scale, and with it the familiar, stubborn problem of volunteer fatigue. It is here that the Vodafone partnership finds its logic, easing pressure on those who give their time and helping the club stay connected to its community in a part of the world where connection carries particular weight.

As we step back out of the clubhouse to catch the closing stages of training, we run into Rudi Urbach, Scottish Rugby’s area director for rugby in the north of Scotland. When told about Vodafone’s partnership, which will involve free-of-charge connectivity for twelve months and referral codes for rewards for members and sponsors, he perfectly articulates why keeping clubs like Highland connected matters so much. “I think Vodafone’s programme will benefit not just the club but the community as a whole,” asserts Rudi. “It will provide more opportunities for the club to engage with their surrounds and the communities they serve, and it will make their communication of a higher quality, from digital quality all the way through to marketing and branding. 

“Ultimately,” he continues, “what we want is to work with partners like Vodafone to help tell the stories of people involved in clubs like Highland. Our communities are remote, and connectivity in this part of the world really isn’t always great, we’re disconnected by geography.

“Rugby clubs having good connection becomes that link for communities. Up in this part of the world, the quality of communication becomes really important; people talk with one another, they share stories and ideas.

Rudi brings with him a breadth of coaching experience, shaped first in his native South Africa at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and later in Scotland, where he led Dumfries Saints and went on to coach Scotland Women’s under-18s.

In his current role with Scottish Rugby, he oversees a team of sports development professionals and regional officers working across schools and clubs to strengthen rugby in the north of Scotland, tracking playing numbers and securing external investment with the long view of sustainable growth.

“I truly believe that the sky is the limit for rugby in this region,” Rudi continues, “my true wish is that clubs like Highland and the other 28 clubs we’ve got in the north of Scotland become central to driving sustainable communities. We want to use rugby as the vehicle to make these communities thrive again, especially those in remote communities. 

“Rugby’s got a really important way of connecting people up here. Every weekend we’ve got hundreds of teams traversing hundreds of miles on buses and sometimes aircraft to go and play fixtures. Ultimately it’s eighty minutes on the rugby pitch, but it’s mostly the hours on the bus connecting with your team-mates, and the hours after the game when you’re connecting with people from other communities, having a drink with the team you’ve just played. That’s just the players, then you’ve got the spectators and the sponsors who contribute widely to making clubs like Highland work. Rugby’s a vehicle for giving people opportunities to get together.”

To underline his point, Rudi pauses and gestures towards the fading embers of training. Despite an important home fixture against Falkirk looming at the weekend, with Highland still pressing their case for a return to National One, the men’s side are loose and unguarded, larking about, flinging balls at one another and breaking into easy laughter. 

On the adjoining pitch, the women are still at work. The sounds of the session, laughter, shouted encouragement, the dull thump of boot on ball, seem to exist in a kind of vacuum, contained by the vast silhouettes of the Five Sisters of Kintail and the Cairngorms, which wall this place off from the rest of Scotland. 

Any potential drawback of that isolation is quietly undone by the spirit on display at Highland RFC tonight, and that, as anyone connected with our sport will tell you, is what matters most. 

This article was brought to you in partnership with Vodafone clubs.connected. Get your club connected now, for more information visit scottishrugby.org/vodafone-clubs-connected

Story by Scott Duke-Giles

Pictures by André Silva

This extract was taken from issue 33 of Rugby Journal.

To order the print journal, click here.

Rugby pioneers are often lauded, sometimes even knighted, or at the very least given a nod of acknowledgement at the end-of-season dinner and dance, but the forward-thinking Staff and Gentleman Cadets of Royal Military Academy Woolwich just don’t get enough credit. And when we say forward-thinking, they really were, coming up with a concept for a challenge cup more than a century before the RFU actually got its act together and launched one. You could suggest, by RFU standards, that’s a quick turnaround, but this was 1875 – twenty years before league broke away – and with the ‘gentleman cadets’ even putting up £150 to fund the silverware. And people got jittery. A sub-committee was set up to look into the concept, but eventually the Governor of RMA Woolwich, no less, got cold feet and pulled the plug. ‘But the RFU, though it had been tempted by the munificence of the RMA’s offer, was always basically against a National Cup’, wrote AW Ramsay, just over a century later, when president of the RFU.

That he did so in the programme of the 1980 Twickenham Cup final between Leicester and London Irish, shows how far the RFU shifted its position on the concept, even if it took some time for the idea to come to fruition. 

In those early days, rugby union was always panicked by the notion of organised competition: more eyeballs, more public interest, more money, it was only going to end up one way: professional sport. 

But some of those who were involved in the sport at club level would try to push the needle, such as Bedford at the 1967 AGM, where they had the audacity to suggest a knockout cup. Gilbert Cook said to the club reps:  ‘The Bedford club feel that a competition should be played annually on a knockout basis for a cup.

‘We suggest that a competition would attract great interest and support from both players and supporters, and it would be likely to increase the playing standard of the game in England.’

They found unlikely support in arch rivals Northampton and a 1968 knockout cup seemed to gain traction, only for it to ultimately get out-voted 426 to 115.

Rugby, it was considered, wasn’t supposed to be watched, only played. But the idea of a cup captured the club game’s imagination; it wouldn’t go away, eventually returning to the table in 1970, when the executive committee of the RFU met at London’s Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. There could be a cup, but there was ‘no obligation for final at Twickenham’. And also, most pertinently, ‘no matches in the qualifying rounds and beyond should take place on a Sunday’. 

In January of the following year, the cup was announced, just shy of the RFU’s one-hundredth birthday. They said two years of consultations had taken place, the reality was closer to one hundred – mutterings about a cup were almost as old as the RFU. 

Snappily named the RFU Club Competition, it would feature 32 clubs, chosen by status and, where that wasn’t enough, regional play-offs, such as Cheltenham facing Lydney to represent Gloucestershire and Somerset. Lydney won, and their prize was a visit to Bristol. Other plum ties in that first round of the first-ever cup saw regional rivalries play out, including: Bath v Gloucester, Penryn v Plymouth Albion, London Scottish v Harlequins, London Irish v Saracens, London Welsh v Oxford and Sidcup v Blackheath. 

Over four knockout rounds, the cup saw great games: Halifax’s 13-9 defeat of Jack Rowell’s Gosforth; glamour side London Welsh fielding eleven internationals in a second-round 7-33 win at Saracens, where 5,000 poured into Southgate’s Bramley Road. The Welsh looked unstoppable, until they were stopped in the next round with a narrow 4-9 defeat by Gloucester in front of 7,000 at the Old Deer Park. Gloucester were lucky in the semi-final too, it seems, taking ‘victory by thuggery’ according to one account, in their 6-6 draw with Coventry which, as they were the away side, was enough for them to go through at the expense of their hosts. 

Wilmslow were perhaps the shock side, admittedly with Steve Smith among their number and with a growing reputation, as they reached the semi-final at the expense of Harlequins, following a 7-16 win in Twickenham, only to be despatched by Moseley, 18-10.

And so, with the knockout rounds completed, it was Gloucester and Moseley that met in a Twickenham final. There was a 10p matchday programme, simply made in black and white, with the budget allowing a sparse use of red ink. It might have been understated by today’s standards, but it still told the most vivid stories, with the notes making mention of nearly all the Gloucester side being ‘home produced’, born in and around a city, ‘famed for three things: ‘cathedral, elvers and rugby football’.

Elvers are tiny eels, caught in the Severn for six weeks in the spring, in case you weren’t up on Gloucestershire river-life. Because of the eels, Gloucester fans were known by some as ‘Elver-Eaters’, with elver nets said to make the occasional appearance at games. More of that later though.

Ten and a half thousand fans had gathered at Twickenham; with £10,000 in gate receipts, each of the 32 participating clubs earned £240. A big chunk of the support came from Gloucester. “I think we as a club really did embrace the cup,” explains Robin Cowling, the loosehead prop for Gloucester that day. “We weren’t a typical rugby club, we were really a working men’s club – we were closer to Wales in many ways, we even played one fixture a week in Wales – and we desperately wanted recognition for what we were doing.

“The paper would make up a league table, and we were leading that, and there were other bits and pieces [of recognition], yet we didn’t produce any England players; we were a club with a big chip on our shoulders to say the least. We weren’t fashionable, we weren’t Harlequins or Cambridge University or anything like that, so the cup fell into our hands, it was just what Gloucester wanted, so that everybody had to recognise us.”

Not that everyone was happy about their involvement. “John Reason of the Telegraph hated us, he said we had no hope,” recalls Robin. “We had all our games away from home: Bath, Bristol, London Welsh, Coventry. And he always slated us, sometimes he wouldn’t give your name, he’d say ‘left hand side of the scrum’. But we had a captain, Mike Nicholls, and a committee man Peter Ford, who revelled in this position of not being typical, and I think we brought something special to it.”

Such was their desire to win, they even took time to read the fine print. “We knew the rules,” says Robin. “The game against Coventry [the 6-6 semi-final draw], they didn’t know the rules of a drawn position, but we did. When the game was a draw, they thought it would be a replay at our place, but we knew we’d gone through as the away team.

“We had targeted the whole thing, and our crowd absolutely loved it.”

While not ‘fashionable’, Gloucester were at least one of the elite clubs when it came to fixtures. “Nobody could break into that,” says Robin, “it was ourselves, Coventry, Bedford, Moseley, sides like that, and no side could break into that fixture list; it was traditional, we all played certain sides on certain dates, for fifty or sixty years … it meant the cup was an opportunity, for sides like Wilmslow, and others, to break into it.”

The conclusion of the cup run didn’t just bring the players and the fans to Twickenham, it also brought some other, albeit temporary locals to the home of English rugby. “Elvers are a real Gloucester speciality,” says Robin, picking up the slippery tale. “And April, when the final was played, was when the elvers were in the river. They’d travel all the way from Mexico, via the Gulf Stream, up the River Severn, and it was only Gloucester people who knew how to catch them. Gloucester people all had their own tump – a lump in the ground – where you could stand and net the elvers as they came up stream.

“One memory of that final win [Gloucester won 17-6] was coming off the pitch dripping wet with elvers, because after the final whistle, the fans had poured buckets of them all over us – and they were astronomically expensive too. Revolting little slimy things they were though.”

The win was huge for Gloucester: the club had put on coaches for fans and family, and with no limit on tickets, much of the city had headed to south-west London. The players were the pride of the city, even being taken to the Houses of Parliament by the local MP for a celebratory dinner.

The cup continued to grow, eventually gaining sponsorship through John Player cigarettes in 1976, with Coventry (’73 and ’74) and Gosforth (’76 and ’77) becoming back-to-back champions, only Bedford breaking their hegemony in 1975’s win over Rosslyn Park, who became back-to-back final losers a year later. 

By the time Gloucester returned to Twickenham in 1978, with a crowd swollen to 24,000, it was to face Leicester. This time Robin was on the other side, albeit not on the pitch. “I was injured on that first final, but played the next three,” says Robin. 

Gloucester did win a second final (6-3), but Leicester were a team coming of age, and made up for it with three consecutive wins, from 1979 to 1981, against Moseley (15-12), London Irish (21-9) and Gosforth (22-15). “It was a period of huge change,” continues Robin. “For the [Gloucester] final we [Leicester] had a very small emblem [of the shirt maker] on our shirts, but we were told to take it off, it was advertising. 

“We were also the first side to have advertising boards around the perimeter of the club to get sponsorship: we very, very forward-thinking, and so was our coach, Chalkie White – he was ahead of his time.”

It was all about the detail with Chalkie. “It was at a stage when half-time meant you had a bowl of oranges, but one September, Chalkie weighed us before and after the match and found we were losing 10lb of moisture, so he made us drink water. It was always a myth that you should never drink water during a game, but he changed that.

 “Leicester were way ahead of their time,” repeats Robin. “Pete Wheeler, who was captain, realised you needed to recruit and not just rely on who came through at Leicester, so he went out of his way to recruit players like Clive Woodward. Recruiting? People had never heard of it!”

The team that won the cup continued to change the game, the sides were peppered with greats of the game, not only Wheeler, but Les Cusworth, Dusty Hare, Paul Dodge. “He was in the Leicester first team at seventeen,” says Robin. “Chalkie would leave the forward work to us, but his real knowledge was how to play with the ball after that. We were way ahead of other teams when it came to retaining the ball, and it was very much a fifteen-man game, Chalkie wanted the front five to catch and pass, which at that stage had never been heard of. We always practised catch and pass with all of us, never separated.” 

With each final win, Leicester improved. “We got better at it as time went on,” says Robin. “Pete Wheeler would even have his false teeth ready to put back in for the interviews afterwards.”

Gloucester are something of a bookmark between eras, as if to continually remind the game of their importance. Leicester’s era of absolute dominance was to come to an end with the emergence of Bath, but not before the men from Kingsholm had returned for another final, against old adversaries Moseley in 1982. They drew 12-12 but this time, a draw wasn’t enough to give them victory, and the cup was shared, the sides tossing a coin to see which side got the trophy first.

Leicester had another crack at cup glory, one of only two more final appearances in the 1980s, when they succumbed to Bristol 28-22 in 1983. The sides had been roared on by 34,000, marking another benchmark moment for the cup’s growing fame.

As is the norm with rugby, the cup was so big, it became a bargaining chip. Depending on when you read this, Mike Tindall’s Rugby 360 plan to bring together the elite of the game in some new made-up format featuring sides that have also not yet been thought into existence, could be headline news, or already consigned to the digital dustbin of ‘game-changing ideas’. But, there’s one of these for every generation, going right back to that league breakaway. For the 1990s, it was Kerry Packer, and for the 1980s, specifically 1983, it was David Lord, another Australian, who wanted to take the best players to form a world championship of rugby. So, before the 1983/84 cup could even begin, players had to sign loyalty pledges, which they duly did. With that done, the Bath show could finally begin.

“We were the whipping boys of the west country,” says David Trick, a four-time cup winner with Bath, from 1984 to 1987, who joined the club in the 1978/79 season. “We would win by forty points one week, then lose by forty the next,” he continues, “we had a pretty good set of backs and not many forwards, but Jack Rowell had joined the year before and things were changing. Gareth Chilcott had joined just before me, Roger Spurrell six weeks after me, then this psychopath Dutchman with a Welsh accent, Michel van der Loos, came from Ebbw Vale. With Cooch (Chilcott) in the front row, van der Loos in the second row and Spurrell in the backrow we had this spine in the forwards. And in the early days we’d play the Welsh sides a lot and it would be scraps all day long – none of which I got involved with – but with those three, there’d be a scrap early on, and then the opposition would be, ‘oh, hang on’, and that would be it, they helped us earn respect, and people then realised we could also play rugby and wouldn’t just roll over.”

Such was Bath’s standing in the game when David arrived, cup final appearances were the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. “The only measure we had was how many games we won or lost, and I think we’d win more and lose less every year.”

As the side developed, defeats started to hurt more. “We played London Irish in the quarter-finals a couple of years before we first won the cup; we were at home, and we lost 3-6,” says David. “To be honest we could still be playing now and the score would be the same, but that was the first time the cup meant anything. A lot of the lads were absolutely gutted, we were one step away from a semi-final, and Twickenham was the next game after that.”

In 1983-84, they reached their first final, facing Bristol, the reigning champions. “We weren’t favourites, Bristol were dominant team,” says David, who had made headline-writers very happy when he scored a hat-trick against Bristol in a previous campaign. “Whenever we beat them, they’d then go and beat us the next time.”

The final, played in front of 25,000, saw Bath edge out their rivals 10-9. “I said this to Jack [Rowell, then Bath coach] many times, but the first time we won the cup in 1984 was such an amazing feeling that I never had that feeling again. I had it once, and never thought I’d get past it, I certainly didn’t think we’d crack on and win it again the next year. Jack always smiled when I said this to him, and said, ‘the hardest thing to do was win the first cup: then you’ve got something to work with, you know how to do it’. Jack said it was all about building something, but it’s all cyclical, and he never ever expected it to be quite as big as it was.”

Rowell had cup pedigree. He’d helped Gosforth to back-to-back cup wins in 1976 and 1977, and work took him to the south-west and Bath, a side he’d coach for sixteen years, before inevitably taking the England job. “I had to introduce Jack at a function, and I said to the audience, ‘when Jack was the coach of Bath, during one ten-year period, there were nineteen trophies to be won, and he won thirteen’. Jack looked at me when I sat down and said, ‘Tricksy are those stats true?’ ‘Yes, Jack.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, I checked.’ And he smiled at me and said, ‘It’s just I don’t remember losing those five!’ And that summed Jack up in a way.”

The maiden final win, was followed by three more on the bounce: London Welsh (24-15), Wasps (25-17) and Wasps (19-12). “I remember the third time we won the cup, against Wasps, and I genuinely remember as we walked off the pitch, thinking, ‘no one will ever do this, win three cups, again’, and a year later we won it again.”

The crowds increased, adding almost 10,000 fans from that first final to the fourth, Bath fans were getting used to success. “It was such an unbelievable time to be playing rugby for Bath,” says David. “Fans would be planning days out at Twickenham before a ball had been kicked at the start of the season, it would be ‘last one out of Bath turn the lights out’ as the blue, black and white army made their way up to Twickenham, it was phenomenal.

“We used to do those bus tours around the city [when we won],” continues David, “and literally thousands would turn up to watch. It took your breath away.”

Stuart Barnes, who’d switched from Bristol to their vanquishers Bath by the time of the third final, had previously pointed to the players’ bond with their fans as key to their success. “We used to drink together [with the fans], at the Pulteney Arms, and the cup would always turn up at Lansdown Cricket Club on the Sunday after the final,” says David. “All players felt that supporters did play a big role in the overall success of the club. 

“There are two key things in my opinion,” says David of Bath’s success. “One is recruitment, because every single year there was nothing drastic, but one or two players would come in, one or two eased out, and you’d just hope you weren’t one of those eased out. It meant you’d have a young Simon Halliday come in from Oxford University, or David Sole and Richard Hill from Exeter, all very good players.

“You still had Bath players, born and bred, but that recruitment made a difference.

“The other thing,” continues David, “was that you’d focus on one skill for part of every single session for an entire season: twenty minutes on one single facet of the game, such as support play, just so it was really ingrained in everyone.”

Four years, four cup wins changed everything. “It started the legacy of Bath,” says David “I put an awful lot of that success down to Jack Rowell: we had good players, and a fantastic environment, and before then we were the poor relation to Bristol and Gloucester.  I used to say when the leagues were first formed, while we quite rightly deserved to be in the top league, if you looked at our overall history, the real place was probably mid-table in the second division. But those good times, there had never been anything quite like that; what Jack built was phenomenal. And because of that, all these years later, a local guy [Bruce Craig] sold his company, and bought the club to try and do it again. He did say it’s taken a lot longer to build something significant than he thought, but it’s absolutely worth it…”

Bath didn’t do cup upsets in that era, but one winter in 1985 – as regular readers of Rugby Journal would know – after consecutive games were hit by the weather, they sought out a ‘friendly’ against the only west country opposition whose pitch wasn’t frozen. “We took the entire first team squad down to Brixham, only myself and I think one other didn’t play, and they beat us [9-6]. 

“We got to the final of the cup that year and before the final the captain used to read out the telegrams we’d received and there was one from Brixham wishing us all the best because they wanted to be the team that had beaten the winners of the John Player Cup! We duly obliged.”

Bath had an intensity unlike any other side of the era. “Before each game our forwards would go into the bath or shower area and have a talk, while us backs sat around and chatted in the changing room,” explains David. “We could judge the intensity of the match ahead by counting how many times they used the f-word, and the absolute record was not for a final but for a quarter-final against Leicester: 53 times they managed to get that word in and they were only talking for three minutes. They always fired themselves up for Leicester.” 

The fifth year didn’t happen. “We played Moseley and lost 4-3 [in the quarter-final],” says David. “This was another case of us still not winning the game even if we were still playing now. We even put the ball down on the five-yard line thinking it was the try line. I had a kick to win the game, and that was only because nobody else was kicking well. Stuart Barnes had taken some and it hadn’t worked out, Phil Cue had a go and it didn’t work out, and I was the third person. It was literally the last kick of the game, and Spurrell threw the ball at me, and said, ‘put it over’, ‘no problem Rog’… It was 35 metres out, just slightly to the right, and I struck a pearly, it was going from boot to middle of posts, then fifteen metres out, it just turned left, and hit the left-hand upright. We were never destined to win that one. We’d won four times, and played two or three rounds and won every game, twenty-odd wins – and one draw against Orrell – and this was it.

“The travel agent had to rearrange the trips for those 40,000 people that were going to the final from Bath and that changing room… people say you only ever remember one or two victories, but you absolutely remember defeats and that changing room after losing wasn’t a pleasant place to be. God, I remember sitting there in silence, until after about ten minutes Jerry Guscott stood up and said, ‘Well, there’s fuck all we can do about it, so let’s get on it’.” 

The cup had become big news, front and back pages, cities emptyingwhen their club reached Twickenham. Prize money continued to rise: in 1988 the pot was £136,625, three years later it was £1m over three years, with a renewed deal with Pilkington, put in place after a successful Rugby World Cup. Rugby was changing.

World records fell too: the 59,300 fans at the 1989 Leicester v Bath final – which both clubs had asked to be counted as a league game too, to reduce fixture congestion – was the biggest club game ever (although a Japanese game did soon topple it with 66k). Bath won that 10-6, then made it a double the year after with a 48-6 drubbing of Gloucester. They allowed Harlequins a win the following year, before returning to the winners’ podium in 1992, when Stuart Barnes popped up in extra time to secure a 15-12 win. Leicester then took the cup in 1993, before a second run of three Bath triumphs began. 

Bath wouldn’t even be beaten on attendance, breaking the record again in 1994 as 68,000 watched them defeat  Leicester 21-9. This time Jon Callard’s boot helped them to victory with three penalties and a conversion to supplement a try apiece from Tony Swift and Mike Catt. 

In 1995 they beat Wasps 36-16, then drew another record crowd (75,000) to Twickenham as they defeated Leicester 16-15 in 1996.

Callard had been part of the squad since the 1990 demolition of Gloucester. “I was very fortunate to have a good [rugby] upbringing at Newport,” explains Jon. “But going to Bath was just a complete eye opener. No disrespect to Newport, they had a couple of coaches, but you go to Bath and they’ve got forwards, backs, fitness guru Tom Hudson, sports psychologist, and the training was ahead of its time, so detailed, so thorough, so planned, all aspects of game covered. Moving to Bath, you had such an array of stars, wow, you either pull your socks up, or you’re going nowhere.

“Everywhere you looked it was internationals galore,” he says. “Richard Hill, Nigel Redman, Gareth Chilcott, this personality you saw on TV, then Tony Swift, these guys playing for England, Graham Dawe, Richard Lee, Damian Cronin, Andy Robinson, John Hall … If John was a player today, you’re talking about a £1m player, he was phenomenal, his strength, aggression, a hard man. Then there was Halliday – one of the first outside centres to really take people on, and the pace they had staggered me, it was the same through all the side, not just Guscott, everyone had pace, it was striking.”

Cup games meant preparing like pros. “We’d always stay in a hotel the night before the game even if we were just going to Bristol,” says Jon. “It just meant we could get together and have a glass of wine because we weren’t together all the time – it was just this group of different people: doctors, accountants, marketing managers, school teachers, chauffeur, sharing stories.”

As Bath’s dominance continued, naturally rivals started to look at their methods. “More people got wind of what Bath were doing,” explains Jon. “We were ahead of our time in training and people cottoned on to that, and the finals got more intense. 

“They’d get built up more [by the media], it didn’t just get a couple of column inches the day before, it was building up for two weeks before, there was a lot more scrutiny, a lot more focus. The day after [the match] filled pages, and Monday papers too… there was a definite change in the wind.” 

Even the most golden eras have to come to an end. “Professionalism came in, and it’s sad really,” says Jon, sorry to see the romance of cup ties against lower-division clubs gradually disappear. “Gosh, we had some scares along the way. We played Wakefield away [1996, 12-16], they were a good side, and we won by the skin of our teeth. That came down to their hooker, delaying a throw in, giving away a free-kick, we tapped and went in under the post in front of a Yorkshire crowd baying for our blood. That’s what the cup could do, you weren’t just staying in your cocoon. You might be going to the Forest of Dean as Saracens did when they had to play Lydney and had a right going over by the locals [eventually winning 0-40], but the cup brought everybody out. We can never go back: health and safety (the gap between amateurs and professionals), you can’t have it nowadays.”

Bath’s descent from the top was almost aligned with the decline of the cup. “I felt professionalism was the moment that dragged Bath back,” says Jon. “The baton was handed over to Leicester and Wasps, they bounced into professionalism better than Bath. Because, even though Bath were the first [English] European winners [taking the 1998 Heineken Cup, with a 19–18 win over Brive], we were struggling domestically, because I felt a lot of our good squad players got ripped apart, the cheque book came in, guys that were fantastic squad players were being offered lots of money to go elsewhere and took it.”

The side that won the European Cup was an ageing one, featuring the likes of Ieuan Evans, Nigel Redman, Phil de Glanville, Jeremy Guscott and Callard. “It was ageing, but we had experience, and in a one-off cup final, we could do the business…”

Playing time for the elite was another factor in both Bath’s and the cup’s decline. “I remember losing to Richmond in the cup [17-29 aet],” says Jon, “then the week after we had to go to Bordeaux to play Brive in the Heineken Cup final, you can’t win them all.”

Bath’s last domestic success had come in the 1996 final, fittingly against Leicester in an ill-tempered 16-15 win in front of 75,000. “The infamy of that Leicester cup final with Neil Back [who famously pushed the referee]. They scored a try from our lineout, we got a penalty try to win it, but we were shocking.

“One of the things with Bath was that it was not how bad you were doing, it was how well you could find a way to win. There was a belief that you got, the longer you were there, that you got more comfortable with not panicking when you were losing. If they scored, it was always, ‘don’t worry we’ll get that back’. There were harsh words, it was brutal, but it bred winners.”

Just as the cup had started eras, it also signalled the end of eras. Even for Bath. When Leicester crushed them 39-28 at the Rec in the fifth round of the 1997 tournament – before going on to take the cup with a 9-3 win over Sale – the most famous club of them all were in turmoil, and club legend John Hall (who had won five cups as a player) was removed from his role as director of rugby. Bath, even though they were still to become European champions, were no longer feared, the era was over. 

Like any true cup competition, unless you’re a Bath fan, the best partwasn’t necessarily the eras of dominance, it was the days in the sun for the small clubs. The upsets. Such as when Orrell beat Harlequins 25-7 at Edge Hall Road, leading the losing captain Mike Mason to famously lament his side, ‘were beaten by a (bloody) lay-by off the M6’. That win signalled a change in times. The Guardian’s David Irvine wrote: ‘Orrell are sweeping like a breath of fresh air through English rugby. For too long the aristocrats of the club game pottered along complacently – snug behind the same old fixtures, the same predictable opponents, year in, year out –  until now, when this maverick Lancashire side, who respect neither reputations nor records, have squeezed through the keyhole of knockout competition, and exposed the dull, stereotyped first-class game for what it is!’

Some upsets didn’t quite materialise, such as when Southend hosted Gloucester and gave them a scare, before losing 6-12. Gloucester needed two late tries to secure victory, with Southend leading 6-0 for most of the match.

Or when Aspatria, in horrendous conditions, and with their brass band sinking into the mud as they played, almost turned over Rob Andrew’s Wasps, losing 6-13 in front of a home crowd of thousands. The cup is rich in history for sides like Aspatria, who the season before had taken the scalp of Moseley (6-3), only to lose, for the first time, to Wasps 39-7.

Right until the very end of its status as a nationwide competition, the cup delivered upsets, the final, proper one, coming in 2004 when Pertemps Bees, aka Birmingham-Solihull, of Division One (today’s Champ) overcame Warren Gatland’s reigning English champions Wasps 24-28 at their Adams Park home. 

From Bath’s final win in 1996 until the last all-English knockout cup in 2005, the winners were varied. With professionalism taking root in the game, it was reflected in the sides that triumphed in the knockout competition. A Saracens side laden with galacticos such as Francois Pienaar beat Wasps 48-18 at Twickenham in 1998, before the defeated finalists then took hold of the domestic game with back-to-back wins in ’99 and ’00. Then it was the turn of Newcastle in 2001 (and again in ’04), and London Irish, before Gloucester did their thing with a 2003 win over Northampton, over two decades since their last, and three since their first. 

So, the last four English cup finals were won by four different sides with Leeds Tykes perhaps giving the cup competition a fitting farewell in 2005, getting a 20-12 win over a Bath side that, while a shadow of its former self, still gave the fans one more Twickenham cup day, with much of the 60,300 crowd wearing blue, black and white.

An Anglo-Welsh era, a closed shop featuring the English Premiership clubs and the four Welsh regions began strongly. London Wasps beat a strong Scarlets 26-10 at Twickenham with 57,212 in attendance; swiftly followed by Leicester and Ospreys playing a brace of finals, and sharing the spoils – a  41-35 win for the English in 2007, a 23-6 win for the Ospreys in 2008 – while also bringing in the fans, 43,312 and 65,756 respectively. 

Even in its final year as a competition the clubs sort-of cared about, the cup would deliver, with a 50-12 romp for Xavier Rush’s Cardiff over a strong Gloucester side, not to mention an attendance not to be sniffed at of 54,899. Then came the definitive end of Twickenham’s domestic cup days: the final was moved to Sixways, capacity 12,067, and a period of questionable interest began, before the Welsh clubs left in 2018, and the competition fell into disrepair.

A number of reasons were behind the cup changing to become effectively an A-league for developing players: workload of the elite players; the media, and fans, switching attention to the burgeoning Premiership and Heineken Cup; and because of the latter, sponsors not having the spend to make it worthwhile for the clubs to put out their big guns. 

Such is the lack of clarity on where a cup fits in and what it should look like, in this 2025-26 campaign we’re back to Prem clubs only, after a couple of more interesting seasons with Champ clubs involved.

Sadly, for the game, cup competitions are struggling across the board. The Papa John’s Cup was intended to give grassroots clubs a route to Twickenham every year, but it was damaged irreparably by walkovers (96 out of 216). Terry Burwell, who not only played in the cup for Leicester, but has also been involved in the knockout cup administration for so long – he may well have been on the Staff and Gentleman Cadets of Royal Military Academy Woolwich’s sub-committee – believes the lack of interest in cups at the top level has now spread all the way down the pyramid. “In the community game, when we looked at the future competition structure, we asked players specifically if they wanted league and cup fixtures, and there was a strong consensus they wanted a variety of competition,” says Terry. “The reality with the Papa John’s Cup was that the players wanted anything but cup competitions, with significant problems caused with walkovers. And so we removed the cup from regional leagues, and introduced play-offs.

“Then we asked the clubs lower down, at county level and below, if they wanted all their cup fixtures at the end of the season, or some during, then maybe a semi and final at end of season – we also gave the option of no cup. They said yes [to keeping the cups], but already the number of walkovers from the early rounds has been quite shocking, so they clearly don’t want a cup either.

“League rugby is all-consuming now,” continues Terry. “And we’ve got some decisions to make about whether we keep shoehorning the cup into a season. Is it what players want? We know we don’t want more league games, because of player availability and weather, so it’s probably better served to have a fixture list with reasonable breaks, giving time for players to regroup.

“I think,” he admits, “even as someone who enjoyed the cup with Leicester, and Newbury, we’re probably seeing the end of an era. It’s a great shame, clearly cup rugby was special. The cup was the foundation of competition in English rugby.  

“There was something in a result in a day that made it unique, whereas with a league programme, you could go down and lose to a side, but you’re still sixth, or know if you win the next week, you’re back up to fourth, you get another chance. Cup rugby doesn’t do that. 

“The cup created an element of jeopardy, and it’s a shame we’re going to miss that, but times move on. We’ll probably have one last throw of the dice with national cup competitions, and the counties will continue to find a way.”

Nonetheless, the cup has earned its place as an important part of English rugby history. “The cup was a catalyst for change from the amateur era,” says Terry. “We had the Anglo-Welsh merit table, but structurally there was no competitive programme, so the cup served the purpose of being the birth of the competitive era, and now they’ve come out the other side of the tunnel, because, from a commercial perspective, you get greater engagement for a whole season.

“Competitions have to evolve,” he says. “And, now we’ve got another cup in the Nations Cup, it’s quite simple in its design, it’s going to have a North v South, Ryder Cup challenge, so it’ll be interesting what happens with that.  

“Cups were a big day,” concludes Terry. “So, it’s very sad, they were the catalyst of change from amateur to professional era, the driver of professionalism but, now, ironically, professionalism has been the catalyst in the demise of cup competition, so it’s gone full circle.”

And, ironically, so have Bath. A legacy that began with winning the only cup on offer forty years ago, has now rediscovered its rhythm, winning silverware once again – European and league titles –  and it’s the same name on the cup, it’s just a different cup(s).

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by The World Rugby Museum & Getty Images

This extract was taken from issue 32 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

The competition, run by award-winning print quarterly Rugby Journal, attracted more than 3,500 entries, with entrants submitting over 7,000 images across eight categories. As well as announcing Bronze, Silver and Gold for each category, there was also a Grand Prix winner, with every shortlisted entry appearing in a year-long exhibition at the World Rugby Museum.

Such is the growing status of the competition, photographers travelled from across the world to attend, with nominees arriving from Brazil, America, Mexico, France, Belgium and Germany. “Rugby Photographer of the Year has reached incredible new levels, truly painting a portrait of the rugby world around us,” said Alex Mead, Editor-in-Chief of Rugby Journal. “The judges were overwhelmed by the incredible standard of entries, which meant even reaching the shortlist was an incredible achievement.”

The winners represented the global game at all levels…

Grassroots, sponsored by Vodafone, was won by Andrew White with his picture of players coming out at Stockwood Park RFC, Silver was secured by Australian-based French photographer Anna-Laure and Bronze by Jacob Bird of Pontyclun RFC.

Action, sponsored by Keith Prowse, was won by New Zealand’s Blake Armstrong with his striking image of Moana Pasifika's Tom Savage and the Highlanders’ Oliver Haig colliding under the roof at Forsyth Barr stadium. Silver was taken by Australian Holly Hope and Bronze by Germany’s Martin Schneider.

Landscape, sponsored by World Rugby Museum, was won by Adrian Frost with his image of grassroots rugby in South Africa, with a backdrop of Table Mountain. Cara Williams captured Sheppey RFC to win Silver, with Bronze awarded to Romain Perrocheau for his sunset show of Bordeaux v Montpellier.

Spirit, sponsored by Kamado Joe, was won by Ryan Pierse with his famous shot of the Allianz Stadium’s South Stand at the Rugby World Cup final. Silver was Nicola Selim Babauglu for their image of Italy celebrating a Six Nations win over England. Bronze went to American Kyle Helson.

Portrait, sponsored by Nyetimber, was won by American photographer Nina Fishman, capturing a player with his face half-buried in the grass. Silver was English photographer Russ Williams’ portrayal of Plymouth Albion’s Rhys Williams, and Bronze another entry from France, Sebastien Bellaval.

Women’s, sponsored by Rhino, was won by French photographer Aubin Lipke, with Silver secured by Billy Stickland for England’s post-World Cup win celebrations, and Bronze by Nick Elliott.

Young, sponsored by Premier Sports, was won by Hong Kong’s Hadrian Yip, with English photographer Harry Monahan taking Silver and Finlay Addis securing Bronze.

Portfolio, sponsored by Sporting Eric, was won by Fred Ellis with his unique portrayal of the England team. Silver was Alice Gough, who covered the Women’s Rugby World Cup, and Bronze was Samuel Simpson-Pattison.

The Grand Prix award for overall best rugby photograph was secured by Blake Armstrong, with judges saying his image, ‘was completely unique, displaying excellent technique, creativity and instinct in equal measure, it’s a picture rich in stories’.

All shortlisted images appear in the new edition of the Rugby Journal, which can be ordered via therugbyjournal.com/subscribe.

The exhibition at the World Rugby Museum is open now.

The world’s biggest rugby photography competition has revealed its shortlist for 2026, with all finalists appearing in an exhibition at Allianz Stadium, Twickenham.

This year’s Rugby Photographer of the Year, organised by the Rugby Journal, in partnership with World Rugby Museum, received a record-breaking 3,500 entries across eight categories.

The award celebrates the individuals who capture the essence of the game, from its raw physicality to its quiet, emotional moments. Whether positioned pitchside in front of packed stands or documenting grassroots rugby in all conditions, these photographers play a vital role in telling the stories that define the sport.

Entries were received from across the globe, more than 30 countries, reflecting rugby’s diversity and reach, with photographers highlighting everything from match-winning moments and bone-crunching tackles to the camaraderie and culture that exists beyond the final whistle. “The judges had an incredibly tough time choosing the shortlist, with nearly every category including over 600 images,” explains Alex Mead, Editor-in-Chief of Rugby Journal. “It wasn’t just about technical excellence and natural flair for their craft and passion for their sport, it was also about originality, we were looking for unique images that tell the story in a unique way.”

All shortlisted entries will have their work featured in an exhibition at the World Rugby Museum inside Allianz Stadium. They will also be invited to the exclusive awards evening at the World Rugby Museum on 16th July, where the winners will be announced. 

Winners will be selected across each category, with one overall Rugby Photographer of the Year crowned. The shortlisted images are all showcased in the latest issue of Rugby Journal, which is available to purchase now at therugbyjournal.com/subscribe

Rugby Photographer of the Year is sponsored by Vodafone, Nyetimber, Keith Prowse, Kamado Joe, Premier Sports, and Rhino.

The Rugby Photographer of the Year shortlist is as follows:

Grassroots sponsored by Vodafone

1. Hugo Fitzgerald - A moment of calm amongst the chaos!

2. Sebastian Miller - The Chase

3. Danté Kim - In the mud, we’re all the same

4. Tubula Ole Ntome Titus - A slippery affair!

5. Jacob Bird - Pontyclun RFC

6. Andrew White - Game face

7. Paul Vinicombe - Cleve RFC

8. Tim Smith - More than just teammates

9. Eden Riddell - York Women’s Rugby Union

10. Kyle Gage - Crash

11. Simon Dowley - WRFC

12. Gregory Sabin - Grassroots

13. Andy Painter - “Taking a moment” - Ryan Dunne - Old Ruts RFC

14. Adrian Frost - Eyes on the prize

15. Nick Elliott - Taking to the field

16. Mackenzie Dunford - The fight

17. Amanda Murphy - Band of Brothers

18. Nick Dawe - Watford RFC

19. Susi Baxter-Seitz - The cutest chaos

20. Anne-Laure - Watching - Manly Oval

Portrait sponsored by Nyetimber

1. Saoirse Byrne - KCL Men’s Rugby captain runs out at the London Varsity

2. Celso Marrero - Visually impaired rugby final

3. Jeremiah Ong - Silence after the storm

4. Nicole Moriarity - Krewe unleashed

5. Holly Hennessy - Old crescent rugby club, Shannon Hennessy

6. Nina Fishman - Coach said “get low”

7. Oscar Herrera - Locked In

8. Chris Lutanga - Morphin time

9. Jake Miles - Moments before kickoff

10. Olivier Espagnol - Indomitable Gaul - Obelix

11. Patrick Khachfe - Tom Dunn

12. Thomas Kieffer - Budapest Exiles RFC, Louis Gilham, Budapest Rugby Center

13. Sebastien Bellaval - Téani Feleu — The bloody Amazone from Grenoble

14. Katlyn Portugues - Pretty tough

15. Richard Haines - Ready to rumble

16. Nick Elliott - Battle Wounds

17. Darren Bridges - Vaha’akolo

18. Elsie Kibue-Ngare - Rosie & Marlie

19. Laurence Courage - Framed by history

20. Russ Williams - Portrait of a Plymouth player after their loss at Rotherham away

Action sponsored by Keith Prowse

1. Kirk Hayley - Maltby Rugby Club

2. Camilla Allan - Frozen in time

3. Rhys Hafod - Wales, Louis Rees-Zammit, Principality Stadium

4. Martin Schneider - Out of reach

5. Samuel Simpson-Pattison - Worcester Warriors rise again at the Sixways stadium

6. Graham Landbeck - The rainy season

7. Holly Hope - Force in one frame

8. Peter Watt - Try of the Round

9. Lilli Hillier - A snippet of time

10. Blake Armstrong - Top down punch up

11. Abby Blair - Thomas College, UMF WRFC, Biddeford Maine USA

12. Melissa Levin - Canadian 7s vs Fiji HSBC 7s

13. Bastien Eveno - Paul Kwaku Brown-Bampoe against Bristol Bears

14. Nick Timothy - Mighty Medway

15. Sarah Hurley - Jump for joy

16. Pablo Ordas - Bayonne-Bordeaux, aerial battle

17. Patrick Khachfe - Guy Pepper

18. Elizabeth Terry - Impact

19. Brendan Buckley - Hang time

20. Olly Woodburn - Summit

Landscape sponsored by World Rugby Museum

1. Adrian Frost - Vlakkeland

2. Bob Bradford - Harlequins Big Game 17

3. Daniel Copley - Huddersfield RUFC Women under the Lockwood Viaduct

4. Rhys Hafod - Aberaeron RFC, Aberaeron

5. Amy Beverley - Aspatria RUFC

6. Bryan Robertson - The home of 7s rugby

7. Clare Gelderd - Women’s British Police Tour South Africa (landscape)

8. Susi Baxter-Seitz - Rainbows above the Park

9. Erick Garita Gonzalez - A morning of rugby in La Sabana Park

10. Katrina Laurila - Scrum beneath the rolling hills

11. Lilli Hillier - Rocky Mountain Rugby

12. Sara Dechance - Austin storm

13. Cara Williams - View from Sheppey RFC

14. Dieter Lloyd - Scotland vs Wales U20s at Merthyr RFC

15. Paul Geudon - The Chilterns

16. Oscar Herrera - Calm before contact

17. Gruffydd Thomas - Lightshow spectacular

18. Romain Perrocheau - Bordeaux Montpellier Top 14

19. Peter Bowyer - The game played in the hills

20. Jamie Walliker - Ladies’ Night kick off in Hong Kong

Spirit sponsored by Kamado Joe

1. Christopher Wright - The Hongi

2. David Howlett - Clean your boots

3. Andrew Lewis - Two young Welsh fans

4. Beth James - Smiles all round!

5. Ryan Pierse - Womens World Cup Final, Twickenham

6. Shanni Davis - Pride, passion, family

7. Cédric Minot - The Court

8. Kyle Helson - Heartbreak in the final

9. Karen Yeomans - Commiserations

10. David Mellstrom - Days gone by

11. James Andrews - Surfing the Blue and Gold

12. Mike Egerton - USA

13. Celso Marrero - Visually impaired rugby final

14. Milan Boolsen-Lotz - Pride of the School

15. Brendan Buckley - A world of colour

16. Justin Cliffe - Determination

17. Bethan Jones - Bound by the game

18. Nicola Selim Babaoglu - Italy v England, history made

19. Patrick Khachfe - Finn Russell

20. Rebecca Rose - The joy of U14’s rugby

Women’s sponsored by Rhino

1. Carly MacKinnon - The afterglow

2. Mapicha - Breaking the defensive line

3. Sebastien Bellaval - Émilie Boulard - Blagnac, February 2026

4. Billy Stickland - Celebration spray

5. Andrew Cornaga - Tackle!

6. Nacho Hernández - Las Leonas

7. Corinne Votaw - Kate Zackary - Carrying on

8. Brendan Buckley - Empire State victory

9. Nick Elliott - Try time

10. Ryan Pierse - Meg Jones, Allianz Stadium, Twickenham, Rugby World Cup Final

11. Andrew Boyers - Champions

12. Adrian Dennis - Japan chase Jorja

13. Aubin Lipke - “Wear it with pride” (Léa Gallet, Stade Villeneuvois)

14. Gabriela Rojas Moreno - Dont stop us now

15. Ruby Kedian-Daley - Didsbury Toc H Rugby Club, Ciara, Didsbury

16. Nicole Moriarity - Pushing through

17. Nick Browning - Growing the game

18. Riccardo Spadetto De Paulis - Shadows of Scotland

19. Donald Chandler - Focus

20. Michael Mullins - Women’s rugby - Texas style

Young sponsored by Premier Sports

1. Lily Brits - Above the valley, Cape Town, South Africa

2. Madison Tutt - Rugby Clube de Loulé, Tyrone, Algarve, Portugal

3. Charlie Smissen - Leicester Tigers v Gloucester Rugby

4. Henry Hanna - Taped up

5. Ollie Hayes - Crunch

6. Bruwer Bornman - Waiting on the game

7. Zac Body - Ampthill Rugby

8. George Arghir - Cambridge Rugby, Levi Rewti

9. Thomas Bradburn - War in red: Every inch earned

10. Harry Monahan - Worcester Warriors return to Professional rugby

11. Finlay Addis - Warmup Led by Chinnor’s Nick Easter

12. Hadrian Yip - HKFC 10s

13. Billie Tate - Number 8

14. Charlotte Hartley - Triumph and Despair

15. Jacob Hughes - Brumbies Vs Fijian Drua

16. Leo Greenberg - Colorado Monarch 15s

17. Ari McDonald - The true spirit of rugby

18. Finn Marshall - 150 years of rugby history

19. Max Owen - Racing 92 Gaël Fickou

20. Cuchulainn White - Strathmore RFC

Portfolio sponsored by Sporting Eric

1. Fred Ellis - On the road with England

2. Samuel Simpson-Pattison - Rugby portfolio

3. Liam Carroll - Oisterwijk Oysters season 25/26

4. Rhys Hafod - Rugby portfolio

5. Patrick Leung - Championship with Hong Kong, China

6. Alice Gough - Rugby portfolio

7. Giorgio Palmas - The visitors

8. Olivier Espagnol - Women’s rugby time

9. Sebastien Bellaval - Deep in the fight

10. Lily Miles - Reframing women’s rugby

11. Susi Baxter-Seitz - Chasing rugby

12. Kelty Fitzgibbons - New England Free Jacks

13. Davey Wilson - North American rugby in a year

14. Ryan Pierse - Rugby portfolio

15. Brendan Buckley - A global sport

16. Andrew Lewis - Rugby portfolio

17. Adrian Dennis - From the touchline

18. Luca Antunes de Souza - Marchi - Estádio Nicolau Alayon - São Paulo, Brazil

19. Bethan Jones - Cornish by blood. HRFC by choice

20. David Howlett - Why we love rugby - IYKYK

It may have been constructed to keep people out (the Romans), to keep people in, or to mark the border between ancient kingdoms: nobody knows for sure, but Scot’s Dyke, the fourteen-kilometre-long trench that stretches across North Yorkshire from the River Swale to the Tees has been a topic of fascination since it was formed, a couple of thousand years ago. It houses several burial barrows and beneath one of them, legend has it, lies a crock of gold still waiting patiently to be unearthed.

Today, along that ancient passage sits Richmondshire RFC, a rugby club celebrating their fortieth anniversary this year and forever in search of their own ‘crock of gold’. The club, as the name suggests, are based in Richmond, North Yorkshire, which locals will happily tell you is the ‘original Richmond’.

Richmondshire ply their trade in Yorkshire Four North, the tenth tier of English rugby and the lowest rung of the RFU pyramid. And at present they occupy the very bottom of it. Their league position is hard to argue with, given only recently they’d marked two full years without winning a single game.

Rugby Journal has made the trip to the historic market town to watch them face Nestlé Rowntree RFC, named after the confectionary empire, who have travelled down from York. Rowntree’s, as they are known, arrive with a record of sixteen wins from sixteen this season and the rather unsettling distinction of not having conceded a single point since Christmas.

The night before the game we meet a gentleman known to us only as The Fridge, a former Richmondshire prop who set us up for the match in store. “It’s a shame you’ve come up to see this one,” he says with a shake of his big head, “they’re likely to get pumped.”

Being ‘pumped’ has been the harsh reality for Richmondshire in recent years as they have battled away at the bottom of the Yorkshire leagues. Yet this season has brought the faintest hint of a turnaround. In late January Richmondshire finally broke their long and painful winless run – stretching back to January 2024 – with an improbable 19–15 victory away at Aireborough.

For head coach Stephen Michael, known exclusively as ‘Smurf’, it was almost too much to take in. “One of the lads said to me with a few minutes to go, ‘I think we’re gonna win it Smurf’,” he begins. “I said, ‘listen, if we don’t win it, I’m not bothered’. The shift these lads put in, they had already won it for me. When the final whistle went, I had to have a moment, because I was choked up. 

“I was like, ‘oh no, I can’t go overboard here and have everyone see me crying’. So I gathered myself, but it was just brilliant to see them all elated. Then we beat Leeds Mods [Leeds Modernians] at home in the next game, which was a tight game that could have gone either way. But to be fair, I didn’t think we looked like losing it. So that was two in a row, London buses and all that.”

Along with The Fridge, Smurf’s nickname rather befits his physical stature, but there is a gruff air about him and a clear determination to start winning games regularly with Richmondshire. He is convinced the side has come a long way in his three years in charge, and earlier this season he began to notice the first green shoots of improvement. “I think it’s hard in this league. Since they’ve joined it, they’ve struggled,” says Smurf matter-of-factly. “We’ve had some cricket scores against us and it’s awful as a coach and as players to get those scores against you week in, week out. But the lads just seem to have stuck at it. 

“The turning point for me was when we went down to York RI earlier in the season. We turned up short-handed with thirteen players, and got 67 points put against us to nil in the first half an hour. Robbo [Richmondshire’s first-team captain Ryan Robinson] went to them and said, ‘we need to call this’. And they did, but they gave the game as a home walkover. So, on our home fixture, we had to go down there again.

“This time,” he continues, “we didn’t go short-numbered and we had a fairly decent squad with us. York RI were taking the mickey, they put 67-67 on the scoreboard [the actual score was 40-15].

“Anyway, the lads, they just played their hearts out. We didn’t win the game, but we dominated most scrums and scored a few tries. We came off that pitch that day as if we’d won it, and their lads came off as if they’d lost. 

“Honestly, I’m not kidding; since that day, I don’t know what it is, but I think this just seemed to put a little bit of belief in ourselves.”

Increased belief in the squad may well stem from a heavier training load, which Smurf believes has made his players fitter and stronger. When Richmondshire’s pitch becomes too muddy to use, “like training in chocolate custard,” he says grimly, the squad decamps to a nearby sports centre, where an ex-player-turned-PT-instructor puts them through their paces in the gym and on an artificial 3G five-a-side pitch. “Everybody’s bought into it,” Smurf says. “One of our older second row props, a lad called Mooch, has never been in the gym in his life, but even he’s started taking it on board.”

Despite the daunting task ahead of them in facing the side top of theleague, arejuvenated Mooch and the rest of Richmondshire look up for the challenge. Warm-ups commence in ill-matching shirts as lunges are undertaken with well-worn grimaces. “Oh my, Gareth’s joining the warm-up,” notes club captain Mark Parsons with surprise. Mark’s referring to Gareth Hastie, well into his fifties and still regularly turning out for Richmondshire having served three stints as first-team captain. He’s wearing a comfortable grey hoodie and spectacles, but looks serious as he glances over towards Rowntree’s warm-up. 

The occasion is set up beautifully, with Richmond bathed in glorious early-spring sunshine and the £300,000 clubhouse, opened in 2013 by then foreign secretary and former Richmond MP William Hague, humming with life. Working the bar is Jon Moulding, in many ways the archetypal club man, who moves swiftly to provide beverages and Scotch eggs alike. “I’m the development officer, but I also look after the clubhouse …” Jon begins before being interrupted by Mark: “And he runs the bar, and he organises all the food, and he helps run the walking rugby, and he has meetings with the RFU …” Mark corrects. 

Jon moved to the area in 1986, the founding year of Richmondshire RFC, and taught widely in schools across the North Yorkshire and Teesside region. In one of his first trips on a night out in the town, he was accosted by a group of lads in a pub who had just formed a rugby team. “The story of the club,” Jon begins with levity, “is that it was started by a guy called Alf Raine, who, in the north east, was a legendary rugby player, a real bear of a man, a huge guy with a huge beard.

“He did a number of jobs from bouncer, barman, enforcer, debt collector, you name it. His life story is like a Netflix show. He sadly passed away after moving to Goa in India after being a landlord of a dodgy pub in Epping Forest for eight years.”

You can’t get very far on a visit to Richmond without hearing about Alf Raine. As the evening descends and pints flow, wild stories circulate about the time Alf threw snowballs at a policeman when he wouldn’t let him drive home from the pub on a winter’s night, or when Alf roped his teammates into lifting machinery from a disused nightclub, only after they’d made some headway into the remaining barrels downstairs.  “He was a fantastic bloke … but,” Gareth interjects, adjusting his glasses, “how can I put this … you wouldn’t
trust him with money.”

Alf kept getting sent off for Acklam Rugby Club, “at least every other game,” Gareth confirms, and he needed somewhere else to play rugby. So, having bartended at Richmond Cricket Club down the road, Alf recruited several of the ‘barflies’ to put on their boots, bring their mates, and soon he had a team. 

“We started by playing rugby on the nearby Catterick Garrison [a major garrison and military town three miles south of Richmond], ‘borrowing’ their pitches,” Jon remembers with a laugh. “I’m still not sure whether they knew what we were up to. We got a bit of a reputation as being a fun club. Alf, as the main character of the club if you like, would start the singing, lead the drinking and all the rest of it. It was his personality really that set the club up.

“When we applied to the RFU to become a member, we applied to be known as Richmond, but there’s quite a notable club who operate under that name.

“We were then going to be called Original Richmond to spite them, or Richmond Castle. But in fact the small part of North Yorkshire we’re in was originally called Richmondshire, so that’s why we went with Richmondshire.”

From there, Richmondshire flitted between league and merit table rugby, oscillating between the desire to play social rugby or in an organised league. During the 2000s and 2010s, they dropped out of the leagues entirely, with the objective of building themselves back up. Whereas before, the club was reliant, over-reliant some might argue, on rugby talent stationed at nearby Catterick Garrison, Jon explains how that has changed over time.

“Probably the biggest thing that’s changed about the club is that while we still have Army guys who play for us, it’s fewer than it used to be, because times have changed. “Whereas back in the 80s and 90s, they were based on the camp, and they would stay there unless they got posted with wives and family, nowadays many of them come for the week and then go home at weekends to play their club rugby.

“We are pushing to try and get the league structure expanded so that second teams come into the leagues in Yorkshire,” Jon explains. “That would help us in a number of ways, in that we would probably go into a league like Yorkshire Five North, which looks like you’ve been relegated, but actually it means the teams we would play would be more of our standard. 

“There are a number of bigger clubs in Yorkshire One or Yorkshire Two, they might put their second team into our new league, and so we would get more competitive games. The last few years, we’ve had some heavy beatings, but only on one occasion in the last two years have we not fulfilled the fixture.”

For now, Richmondshire remain in Yorkshire Four North, and as they takethe field this afternoon the size difference between them and Rowntree’s is immediately striking. A club with 130 years of rugby heritage, Rowntree’s have dominated the league this season and have turned up with a squad of young, athletic players the likes of which are rarely seen at level ten rugby. 

It is Richmondshire who send the ball high into the cold air to begin proceedings, watched by a clutch of supporters on the touchline, many of whom were here in early February when the side secured their first home win in more than two years, against Leeds Modernians.

In the opening exchanges Richmondshire compete well enough physically, putting in a couple of solid early tackles and winning a few penalties. Soon after the start, a Rowntree’s player goes down and has to leave the field injured. Leading the applause is Robbo, the club’s first XV captain for the past three years.

Originally from Blackpool, Robbo has lived in North Yorkshire since he was seventeen, having joined the army a year earlier at sixteen. He now serves as a motor transport warrant officer, a senior non-commissioned role responsible for the control, management and coordination of military vehicles, from Land Rovers to fully armoured trucks.

Today he finds himself among the older heads in the side. Richmondshire’s team sheet includes several colts still young enough to feel slightly surprised at being there at all, and Robbo is keen to help guide them through afternoons like this. “I try to breed that confidence in the young lads joining the team,” explains Robbo. “I make sure to allow them to have their voice heard if they’ve got something to say. Just because they’re a young seventeen- or eighteen-year-old lad, they’ve got the same right to voice their opinion, like any senior player in that club.

“I first played for Richmond when I was about nineteen,” he continues. “During that time, I’ve dipped in and out, gone to play for a couple of more local teams, but I’ve always found myself back at Richmond.”

After a solid opening few minutes, a familiar story begins to unfold for Richmondshire. When Rowntree’s eventually bundle the ball over the line for the first try, the fatalism arrives almost immediately on the sidelines. Mooch, who today must wait patiently for his moment from the bench, offers a brief and unsparing assessment: “That was shit.”

From there the floodgates open. Two neatly executed moves from Rowntree’s bring a couple more tries, and the visiting supporters grow increasingly effusive in their praise for ‘Stubbsy’, Rowntree’s captain and tight-head prop. Once he gathers momentum, the younger Richmondshire players tasked with stopping him discover that this is easier imagined than achieved.

On the Richmondshire touchline, eyes begin to wander elsewhere as more tries go over. A kind of quiet acceptance settles in, broken only occasionally by the booming voice of Mark, who bellows reminders such as: “That’s what happens when you don’t tackle, ’Shire!”

For Robbo, the question of what exactly to say to a team that so often finds itself up against stronger opposition is one he feels keenly. “I couldn’t say this to the team,” Robbo says, pausing before continuing, “but I was struggling to see where we were going to pick a win up, because we’re going against teams that are very accustomed to playing at a higher level. They’re very fit and they’ve got a lot of league players too, and a league player at our level will rip through any union back line.”

But with the score at 38-0, Richmondshire manage a first for 2026. Rowntree’s knock on and, after a spell of neat passing, Richmondshire bundle the ball over the line – the first team to score against the league leaders since the turn of the year. It is not immediately clear who has claimed the try, though this hardly seems to matter.

Rowntree’s add another before half-time, but that barely registers either. What matters is that Richmondshire have kept going and given their supporters something to celebrate. Plastic cups are flung cheerfully into the air. Mooch breaks away from the back rub he has been receiving on the sidelines to high-five Smurf.

Despite the obvious difference in quality between the two sides, the game is played in the right spirit, which, in many ways, rather sums up Richmondshire.

The second half proves a tighter affair. Richmondshire manage another try to bring the score to 62-12. “We might have lost that by 100 a year ago,” Smurf notes afterwards.

“We’re becoming more competitive,” Robbo agrees between mouthfuls of post-match curry, “and I can see a future for the club in the younger lads coming through. I’m gonna have to pack it in soon, I’m 38. But I want to make sure there’s that plan in place for when some of us move on. At least a lot of them were involved in a win this season; they got that feeling, even though it was brief.”

As the post-match pints swiftly disappear and the aroma of Six Nations-themed Scotch eggs drifts through the clubhouse, memories of Richmondshire’s recent wins begin to resurface. The victories over Aireborough and Leeds Modernians are retold in loving detail, the final ten minutes of each recounted blow by blow as those gathered around listen with well-worn smiles, happy to hear the stories all over again.

Even when a club finds itself rooted to the bottom of the table, regularly on the wrong end of the scoreboard, moments like those matter. And who knows, Richmondshire might yet have a few more before the season is out.

Story by Scott Duke-Giles

Pictures by Samuel Simpson-Pattison

This extract was taken from issue 33 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

The Muppet Box has long been part of Hertford RFC’s heritage. The small, box-shaped, viewing balcony was added to the clubhouse in the 1960s, along with two squash courts. Sadly, the squash courts are no more, instead replaced by an impressive changing room block and physio centre, but the Muppet Box remains. And, on a suitably wintry English afternoon, Jamie George is popping corks and toasting an empty rain-sodden ground with a glass of bubbly on the famed Hertford RFC viewpoint.  His glass, of Nyetimber, since you ask, is tilted towards a small stand on the far side of the pitch that bears his name. “It all comes back when you come back down here to Hertford,” Jamie tells Rugby Journal. “You get flashbacks to mini rugby days, learning to play tag rugby … I love coming back.”

We’re the first people to speak to Jamie about his retirement, as when we meet, his decision to stop playing at the end of 2027 hasn’t yet been announced. Reflection is everywhere. “I guess it’s a bit of a full-circle moment,” he admits. “Driving up that driveway, it brings back so many happy memories. 

“I think I was a very different kid to what I am as an adult,” he continues. “I came from a massive rugby family, so rugby was always going to be a big part of my life and I think my dad was always pretty keen to get me down here, but I was a very shy kid, I didn’t speak to anyone. 

“There were a lot of concerns from teachers about how I didn’t really communicate with very many people,” he admits. “You probably wouldn’t guess that now. But, actually, this club and the sport of rugby itself, has changed my life and changed me as a person massively.”

Hertford is an impressive club. They’ve got pitches almost as far as the eye can see across an enviable sixty acres, some even floodlit; changing rooms everywhere, a big clubhouse and dining hall, with a balcony across the top – leading to the Muppet Box – and they run four senior men’s teams, a women’s side with age grades, and, going by a recent visit on a Sunday, about a million minis. They also know how to have a good time: “The bar must have taken about £25k last week,” we’re told by one club member.

Jamie George is their favourite son, hence getting his own mini grandstand. The 35-year-old Saracens and England hooker, has 110 caps for his country and counting (including twelve as captain), has been on three British & Irish Lions tours, and won myriad silverware with his beloved Saracens, including three Champions Cups and six Premiership titles. 

He stopped playing for Hertford when he was fourteen, and Saracens came calling. But, for him, the place is still full of memories and mates. There’s plenty of stories too, of “really special coaches”, of team-mates who went on to play for the first team and moments here with his family. 

First, his dad, Ian. “He was a massive influence for me,” says Jamie. “He played for Northampton, a bit for London Welsh and for the Barbarians. He was on the bench for England a few times, but never got on. Captaining the Baa-Baas was probably a highlight of his career. And my uncle was a big rugby idol for me, and idol generally, really. He also played rugby for Northampton.” 

Dad though, was not one to share endless tales of his glory days. “My dad was someone that, you know,” he says, pausing, “doesn’t say a huge amount. I actually only found out how good he was when I started playing [professionally]. 

“You’d bump into people at games who used to watch my dad play and they’d tell me how good he was and how unlucky he was not to play more for England.

“If you met him, he’s just the most humble, down-to-earth guy. He wants you to forge your own career and doesn’t really want to have too much of an influence on it. He always allowed me to do it my way and offered little words of wisdom here and there.”

Dad has been there throughout. A teacher by trade – Jamie grew up in the school grounds where he worked – there were two sides to him. “He was always one of the scary teachers, who likes things done properly, a bit of a disciplinarian. Your top button had to be done up and your tie had to be a certain length, people used to sort of be quite scared by him, but actually, he’s a big softie.”

Jamie and his dad are clearly close, perhaps even more so since the passing of mum Jane. “There’s been a few really nice moments, since my mum’s passing, when probably the emotional side of things has come in a little bit more,” he says. “Stuff like my first game as captain, or my 100th cap. You know, my mum wasn’t there for those situations, but my dad sort of stepped up. There’s always a lot of emotion when you lose a parent. “But you know, I think he was always then saying how thankful he was for what I was doing, and the ability of me to keep a smile on his face in difficult situations, and that’s a real privilege. That’s something that I’ve been really proud of, making him proud in those moments when things can be quite tough.”

Wellington, 2017, the second Test of the British & Irish Lions series. Jamie has started at hooker and the tourists have beaten the All Blacks 24-21 with an epic comeback that sets up a deciding final Test. “There’s a picture of my mum and dad after the game, and you can just see in their faces how proud they are, how buzzing they are, how happy they both are,” recalls Jamie. “It’s an amazing picture to have, especially now, it’s probably one of my favourite photos of all time, to be honest. There’s so much there in that picture; a picture shows one thing, but actually the back story is another. And, in 2017, I played a handful of games for England. I hadn’t started a game for England, I didn’t expect to go on the Lions, let alone start a Test match, and I managed to start all three, which was beyond my wildest dreams. 

“When I got selected, I immediately thought I would be part of the mid-week team, which I was more than happy with. And I think just that one picture, in the stands, hugging each other, arms in the air, happy, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what it’s always been about for me.”

While dad was the rugby player, mum was definitely the rugby ultra. “My mum was a pretty fierce person,” he says. “I guess I get my competitive instinct from her. We used to fall out here a lot, because, unlike my dad, she was very, very vocal on the sidelines, and if anyone messed with me, or if I wasn’t pulling my weight or whatever, she let them and me know about it. 

“We had a lot of those conversations,” he says, quickly adding, “she was a brilliant woman, her proudest moments were being a parent to me and my brothers.

“And she loved rugby,” he adds. “The thing that I always think back to was when I went to visit her on her deathbed, and she’d be asking me, even though she could barely speak, about the England rugby team, about how Marcus Smith was getting on... 

“That’s what she cared about,” says Jamie. “She cared about the lads. When I first joined Sarries as a full-time professional, I moved in with a couple of the boys, and every weekend, it was back to my parents’ house. My mum would put on this massive spread, try and feed everyone, and send them all back with Tupperware full of food. She just loved being around people, she loved hosting and loved making people happy. 

“She was a challenge for a lot of it,” he laughs. “She was just your typical Yorkshire girl who said exactly what was on her mind at all times. She’d be making it very clear when she was proud, she’d make it very clear if I disappointed her. We’d fall out all the time about different things like that.  

“But I think probably in hindsight,” he considers, “when you reflect on it, and I reflect on it a lot, it’s probably because we were very, very similar.

“I loved her to pieces,” he says. “She sacrificed a huge amount to allow me to do what I do.”

Jane passed just before Jamie was made England captain ahead of the 2024 Six Nations. “She’d been atevery game from under-fives to literally the game before I’d taken on the England captaincy,” he says. “I’ll always live with a little bit of regret that she was never able to see that, but equally, I know that she would have been watching those games and been very, very proud. 

“It does make you grateful,” he considers, “whenever you lose anyone, you do a huge amount of reflecting. I reflect on how much she did for me, I was always so grateful for everything that she did. She was genuinely my biggest supporter.”

Jamie is in a good place. More stories about his family, especially his mum, such as “her lucky hat”, a beanie that was always on, whatever the weather, or how she always had to walk in and out of the same entrance at Saracens, or how “wherever I was in the world, playing here or in front of 82,000 at Twickenham, I felt like I could always hear her voice”.

Rugby, says Jamie, has “been a tool for me to make people proud, and be able to give them stuff that they might not have had previously”. The arrival of his daughter Lydia happened soon after he lost Jane. “She was born ten days after my mum passed away, so it was all a bit of a whirlwind, a crazy time in my life,” he says. “It was slap bang in the middle of the Six Nations as well, so it was quite full-on. 

“But being a dad, the feeling it gives me,” he begins, “it’s really hard to put into words. I felt like it’s given me purpose. I certainly feel more motivated now to do well. 

“I want to be the best I possibly can be because, you know, Lydia’s two, and she comes to games, but she won’t remember them. I want her to be forever proud of what I’ve achieved. Not just as rugby player, but as a person as well.

“I’m not necessarily bothered about her being too fussed about rugby,” he says. “It’s more about who I am, how I’ve been with people, who I continue to be and how I show up for people: that’s probably what the most important thing is to me.”

Lydia made an appearance at Twickenham in her early days, something Jamie wasn’t sure about. “I was just worried that she wouldn’t enjoy it,” he says, “and that whole week in the lead-up, you get a lot of publicity, and a lot of people talking about you, and I don’t really like that sort of thing. I don’t like the spotlight and the focus being on me. I was weighing up whether it was a selfish thing to want the pictures of me carrying Lydia out rather than actually her enjoying it.”

A conversation with George Ford – dad of Alarnia – changed his mind. “He said, ‘you’ll have those pictures forever, and it will be so special, and Lydia will enjoy looking back on those in years to come’. I was so thankful that I did it. 

“Now seeing her after games, it puts things into perspective, win, lose, draw. She doesn’t care, like, she just wants a hug.”

Jamie is the kind of player you feel you already know. When we’re with him, he’s playing the role of ‘supertaster’ for Nyetimber, smelling the assorted aromas of their English fizz, and revealing his own tasting notes, including ‘strawberry laces’. He reads the script beforehand. “I’m not sure this is Maro’s thing,” he says, presuming the England captain must have been considered for the role too. “It was written for you,” he’s told. The dry, easy-going, cheeky humour reflects the person he not only seems to be from a distance, but very much is in real life. 

He’s at ease with the biggest names in the game, because he grew up with them. Influences haven’t just come from home, from Hertford, they’ve come from Saracens. “I mean, the first name that comes to mind is Mark McCall,” he says, name-checking his director of rugby. “We joined in the same year, and, you know, he’s someone who’s got had a huge amount of belief in me, he gave me an amazing amount of opportunities, but also made it very clear to me what it takes to be the best, and held me to that standing for a very long time now.

“I genuinely consider him a friend and a mate and someone that I would call if I was in trouble,” he says. “And I was really lucky to grow up with a group in the academy with players like Owen Farrell, George Kruis, Jackson Wray, Will Fraser, the Vunipolas – they are people that I idolise really, even though they’re the same age group.

“We generated this really cool environment and culture where we drove each other really, really hard, but we also backed each other. We’re each other’s biggest supporters. I think that I wouldn’t be the player I am without those guys.”

While there’s been plenty of good headlines for Saracens, they’ve also had their dark days, none more so than the financial scandal that saw them relegated to English rugby’s second tier. “The relegation and salary cap scandal was a huge challenge to everyone,” Jamie admits. “The uncertainty around our future was obviously a really difficult time, but I think the way that we then rallied around, got clarity, understood the situation that we were in, and then had this sort of ‘us versus The World’ mentality was one that we absolutely loved. 

“I think it’s a really big part of our story, that we were hugely successful, we had to take the relegation on the chin, then off the back of that, to come back and reach a Premiership final and win a Premiership final, it says more about the club than the relegation does in any way.”

It’s a good time to chat to Jamie. At Hertford, we spend hours in the rain with him, as he jumps on and off a vintage bus, tastes wine, gets soaked sitting in his own stand and is dressed up by a fashion mag in oversized jumpers and trousers. He takes it in his stride, as we continue to look back on his career. Lots of good stuff, but not without challenges, albeit few regrets. “I honestly don’t have many,” he says. “I hope that when you speak to anyone that’s worked with me, [they would say] I come into work and love being there every day. I had some struggles, like under the Eddie Jones era, as many people did, being away from home and in a tough environment. I struggled there a little bit. So I probably have a couple of regrets around how I handled things then, and my reactions to things. But other than that, I’ve loved the journey.”

It’s not quite over yet: he’s got another full season of club rugby to go, hopefully another season of international rugby, finishing ideally with a Rugby World Cup. “I’m not going to miss training in this,” he says, pointing to the rain-filled skies, “which is pretty much the months from November to March, training in the rain. 

“I’ll miss the people though,” he says. “That’s the big thing for me. There’s a big part of me that loves the tactical side of the game, building up to a big game, the feeling in the changing room, the feeling before a Test match. 

“You know, I’ll miss that interaction with the fans. I’ll miss that connection,” he says, finding the right word. “I’ll miss the feeling in the sheds after a game. If you asked me to close my eyes and think of my best moments in rugby, like, I won’t remember specific moments in games, I’ll remember being in the changing room, mostly with a trophy, having a beer, having a laugh, listening to music, and probably the two days that follow after those big wins.”

Silverware-wise, it’s not been too shabby. “It’s been decent,” he says, laughing. “Honestly, it’s surreal beyond anything that I could ever have dreamt of. I used to go down to watch Saracens at Vicarage Road, and from that moment, I fell in love with the sport. 

“I’ve been able to go on and play 300 times for that club, and it means a lot to me to be retiring as a one-club man, because I never saw myself playing for anyone else. The loyalty I’ve shown, and the loyalty they’ve shown me, is something that means everything.

“I reckon three or four years ago, I probably wasn’t enjoying rugby as much as I probably should have been,” he says. “And something that I realised then was how lucky I was to do what I do. If you told my ten-year-old self what I’d be doing at this moment in time, I’d have bitten your hand off.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Mark Parren Taylor & Adrian Dennis

This extract was taken from issue 33 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

Bathed in sunshine, nothing but cloud-free, bright blue skies in almost every direction, the only exception being the presence of that most famous of ‘non-rugby’ rugby landmarks, the 163ft Great Pagoda at Kew Gardens. Even without the rugby, there’s reason enough to want to be at the Old Deer Park, London Welsh’s historic ground on an unseasonably glorious day like this in April.

The sun’s not the only one to show up: turning up in their droves are the London Welsh faithful, who give true meaning to the latter, having followed their side in serious numbers as they climbed their way up the leagues, bringing the Exiles ever-closer to a league more befitting of their history within the game. 

Bracknell isn’t a game which usually pulls in the punters, and it’s not every club at level 5 of the English pyramid (or any pyramid for that matter) that can bring in four-figure crowds, but here we are, among what must be close to 1,500 rugby folk for the final home game of London Welsh’s Regional 1 South Central campaign. 

This season has seen them take the league at the third time of asking, securing a fifth promotion in eight seasons, an ascendency that took them from Herts/Middlesex 1 to National 2 South. “It’s 1,417,” says Danny Griffith’s, the club’s chair, correcting our crowd estimate. “We have it independently verified so we know for sure.”

Ironically, we’re speaking to Danny after the match, as he was absent due to illness that day. “I had a massive allergic reaction to something,” he explains, “nothing I’ve ever had before, I was head to toe in hives, my lips were double size, mouth swollen, I was just lucky it wasn’t anaphylactic.

“Not being funny,” he adds, “but if I’d gone to the game, I’d have just looked like a spotted gnome walking around the club…

“I was gutted, absolutely gutted not to be there…”

The day was as perfect as you could want from a day at the rugby. Even without an affiliation to the home side, the presence of the likes of British & Irish Lions legend John Taylor at a 400-strong pre-match lamb shank dinner; a live soundtrack provided by a young Welsh choir; and just the general feeling you get at a club which was once on the brink and is now enjoying the fruits of a hard-slog journey back, transcends the ground. Maybe not to Bracknell, who are soundly beaten 50-12, but even they enjoyed a cold pint in the sun afterwards, having pushed London Welsh for the whole game, the scoreline perhaps not completely doing justice to their efforts.

Not that London Welsh is a good place for any side to go. Before they fellto title rivals Jersey in February, London Welsh hadn’t lost in 23 matches, home or away. It’s the kind of form and dominance not seen at the ground for many years. They’ve known the best of times, it’s on almost every wall. One wall in particular, next door to their own museum, The John Dawes’ Room, tracks every great moment with a timeline, and it’s got plenty of ‘stops’. It tracks myriad moves across London – Stamford Hill to Tufnell Park, Kensal Rise and Cricklewood, Raynes Park, West Kensington, Hendon, Hampstead, Acton, Leyton, West Ham, Herne Hill – before home was found in the shadow of the pagoda on Kew Road.

It tracks the successes on the pitch: from being crowned the best club in England and Wales in the early-70s, to agonising cup final defeats at Twickenham, and the richest of Lions history. This was, after all, the club that paved the way for the ‘Welsh-style’ of play, and had seven players on the Lions tour of 1971 which culminated in a still-iconic Test series victory over the All Blacks (winning 2-1, with a fourth Test being drawn).  There are also promotions to the Premiership and more silverware in the British & Irish Cup, before it stops
in 2017, with liquidation, although perhaps in a show of defiance that the club was not done, it’s not actually a ‘full stop’, but an ellipsis that follows the words ‘The Journey Begins’. “We’re now going to get another bit made for this to cover all the promotions,” says Joe Jones, who finds us perusing the timeline while he looks for a place for the choir to practise. He’s the chair of the London Welsh Rugby Choir, a group set up by four friends (Joe being one of them) as a way of finding a good excuse to go on the British & Irish Lions tour of 2005. It went better than expected. “We had such a good tour, such a good welcome, from that welcome, we then got invited to the Olympics, onto the radio, we did Hong Kong Sevens,” he explains.

And for anyone who’s been a regular at Old Deer Park for the past seven season, they’ve provided the musical score for their rise back to the national leagues. Although Joe is more keen to talk about the London Welsh side of the 70s. “They had 14 internationals in 1971, I think the only non-international was Freddie Davis the prop,” he says. “But I didn’t start playing until 1973, because I was at university.

“When I came to London I needed to find friends,” continues Rhondda-born Joe. “ I had no idea you could just turn up at London Welsh, one of the biggest clubs in the world, with a pair of boots, and just ask to play. But you could back then.

“I always thought we’d do it, we had the right mindset,” says Joe, switching topics swiftly to the current generation’s fifth promotion. “And we’ve scored 900 points…”

The John Dawes’ Room is now open, Joe takes us through to a room adorned with walls full of shirts, assorted caps, rugby knick-knacks and of course a Grogg or two, and another London Welsh stalwart Morlais Evans joins the chat. “It’s our style, and we got  past the 1,000-mark today,” he says, picking up on Joe’s comment about 900 points. “We’re used to free-flowing games, and it was only when Jersey came to play at home a few weeks back that we lost, but that was their big hurrah. If Jersey had lost that game, their season was over, and they played out of their skin, especially second half. We led all the way through until the last minute.”

“The ref added ten minutes,” chips in Joe.

“Unbelievable,” agrees Morlais, “some of our boys didn’t know defeat until then: we’d won 23 or 24 games on the trot.”

Joe is keen to sing the praises of the London Welsh style some more. “I’ll give you an example,” he begins, “it’s always been about playing attractive rugby. The first game I ever played for London Welsh, away somewhere, I had the audacity to kick the ball for touch and after game I had to stand on a stool and drink a pint as punishment.

“Nobody at London Welsh kicked for touch, you always recycled the ball through hands.

“And it was John Dawes who changed everything,” he continues, “he introduced fitness regimes at a time when nobody even trained: it was turn up on Saturday, smoking a fag, and have a couple of pints after game.

“He also brought everyone into the idea that the ball moves faster than a man so if you pass the ball,  you’ll beat the man. He realised we had small forwards, but if he made them the fittest in rugby then we could move ball around, so rather than getting bogged down in a maul we’d get the ball going.

“Look at this photograph,” says Joe, changing topic again, “It’s the Prince of Wales, now the king, opening our clubhouse in 1969 – that wouldn’t happen to a normal club anywhere else in the world.”

It’s not just rugby brains that make Joe passionate about London Welsh, it’s the beauty too, as he points out of the window to the ground. “And I don’t think there’s a nicer ground in Britain actually… just look at it.”

After the match, while the celebrations look set to go on long after thesun has set on leafy south-west London, there are speeches from the terrace of the clubhouse, Champagne corks popping, fancy dress at every turn, and a fitting sea of red that would even make those other lions proud. The prize for winning ‘Regional 1 South Central of London & South East Division, English Clubs Championship’ is a humble wooden plaque adorned with those exact words, but the real reward has been the revival of a club that could easily have just left things as they were – with an amateur side already gracing level 9 of the pyramid – and not bothered the upper echelons of club rugby again. 

The record up to this point makes impressive reading. In 2017/18, level 9, the first post-pro-era season, they took the title with 21 wins, from 22; a year later, twenty wins, one loss, and one draw – 0-0 with rivals Old Streetonians. Year three, seventeen wins, one defeat. A fourth consecutive promotion was temporarily put on ice due to Covid’s intervention, before a fourth full season – twenty wins, four defeats – delivered promotion to where they stood this campaign, level 5. 

It took them three attempts to leave this notoriously difficult level, as they finished sixth, third and now, finally, first, with just the sole defeat a slight blotch on an otherwise perfect record: 21 wins, one defeat, points for 1,041, points against 393.  “It was a huge step up [to level 5], especially the quality of the top four or five,” explains Danny. “We also had Jersey coming into that league, so we knew it was a task, but Cai said ‘we’re going to win it’ – one of the players even got it tattooed on them last year, they were so determined to win this league, and believed they would. 

“But the way we did it,” says Danny, “if you’d said that at the start of the season, they’d have bitten your hand off, the results we’ve had, the way we’ve done it, we’re ready to go up. It’s a massive challenge in Nat 2, we’re up against fantastic teams, but if we can maintain position, acclimatise, work out what we need to do, then within the next three years our aim is to be a National 1 side, which is the max we can go with current model. We look at Richmond and what they’ve done to become a sustainable side at that level…”

Neighbours Richmond have been the inspiration behind a few things that London Welsh have got right, even before the professional arm of the club was liquidated in 2017. “When I was chair of the amateur side before,” begins Danny, who took over from Gwyn Williams for the 2018/19 season, “you always had the backing of the pro side with the facilities and finance, but when they went, we were completely on our own so we’ve had to find the money, and that’s been difficult.”

Luckily, even when the London Welsh name disappeared from the Championship, it was already living a second life in the lower reaches of the pyramid with an amateur side [launched in the 1990s]. “The reason we separated the clubs was because of Adrian Davies, who had come from Richmond, and was on our board at the time, and he’d learnt the lessons from Richmond, so we protected the London Welsh side,” says Danny. “It’s a fallacy that London Welsh got kicked to the bottom of the pile, because the [amateur] team already existed [in the league], it wasn’t like what happened with Richmond: they ceased to exist, and people don’t get the nuance with these different scenarios. 

“Although,” he admits, “it would’ve been good if [the pro side] had been able to carry on a bit higher up.”

It looked onerous on paper, but a return to National League levels was completely realistic. “We knew that four promotions would take us into the old National 3, so level 5, and that’s possible to do within a five-year plan,” says Danny. “We took that to the board and the penny dropped, ‘Christ we can do this within five years’, and get to a decent level of rugby.

“We put that to our supporters and they were absolutely fantastic, and then we were a team playing in Herts Middlesex 1 with crowds of 800 turning up because they bought into this vision. We weren’t knocked out, we were going to fight our way back, this was project reset.”

Sonny Parker, who’d been involved in the pro set-up, Cai Griffiths – another former player – and Will Taylor, formed the first new-era coaching team. And their charges were already in place, a group of London Welsh amateurs who’d just finished in the lower reaches of level 9. “It essentially was the same squad, the difference was how they were taking it seriously, training regularly, it was the attitude – they suddenly realised they were the first team, and people were going to come through the gate to watch them play. 

“Even as amateurs they had a much more professional attitude. It was a strange one: there was a group of players who gave up – regular training wasn’t for them, fair enough – but we had Cai as a player-coach, and having someone who knows rugby like that, an ex-pro playing alongside you, means you up your game. It was the little things, how he controls the game, it makes a massive difference.”

Naturally, success brought more players. “For people coming up from Wales, we were a good team to go to so it [recruitment] became quite organic, although Jon Shankland – a former player and director of the club – was also reaching out at every opportunity to find new players…”

The financial model was the same as Richmond. “We pay travel costs, give them food, and loads and loads of beer post-game,” says Danny. “We’re brutally honest up front about trying to do it sustainably. One thing I can’t dismiss is the sponsors, Chestertons, and the community, who shored up holes when we were struggling to make money for things like rent – ODP is not a cheap facility. At the moment, it’s the best part of £300-400k a year [to run the club], and that includes the whole community side, youth, minis, rent, feeding players, kit… 

“It wasn’t sustainable to pay people,” he continues. “It was about people wanting to be part of the club, and for them to go out on the field at Old Deer Park with 1,400 people supporting them – for a 24-year-old that’s pretty amazing. Those kinds of memories are ones that stick with you for life compared to playing on a park with two guys and a dog. So, we were lucky to retain players and people…”

They’ve also found other ways to bring in the crowds, and extra revenue. “We started charging on the gate because of two key drivers, one being, ‘why would someone buy a membership if it’s free to walk in through the door?’ The other thing was the British attitude of, ‘if it’s free, it’s rubbish’. And people who come here now are getting a decent quality of rugby. Now with members getting in for free, we’re taking about £1,500 with casual supporters coming through on top of that.”

Balancing the books is of paramount importance, it’s what stymies any talk of going all the way back to the top. “Realistically, the model we had as a pro side was unsustainable; we just had one guy, Kelvin [Bryon, who passed away last year], propping it all up, but what we’ve got now is working.

“It’s a multi-spoke wheel, I can’t point to one person, one sponsor that, if we lost them, it would be disastrous; we’re now in a good financial position, with the supporters, with a nice level of sponsorship. And much as we are grateful for sponsors, it’s not just one, we’ve spread our bets, rather than having the situation we had before.”

Danny believes that the lessons of professional rugby, learnt the hard way in the early days by London Scottish and Richmond, latterly London Welsh, and more recently London Irish, Worcester and Wasps, still haven’t been heeded. “Rugby union is like rugby league was in the 1980s,” he says. “Far too much money sloshing around, people getting paid ridiculous money for low spectators. Back then it was league and the likes of Jonathan Davies and John Gallagher getting paid huge salaries for playing in front of some 5-6,000 crowds – that’s similar now with union.

“I do wish there was a definite split between pro and amateur,” he concludes, “where for instance Premiership and Championship are paid, and everything below is amateur, as opposed to getting paid £300-400 – that just ruins it. Something has to give in the next three to four years, it can’t carry on, it’s just not sustainable.”

Not every ground in south-west London is equal. For every fan-packedOld Deer Park, historic Richmond Athletic Ground, or shiny Prem-standard Twickenham Stoop – not to mention that big lump of concrete down the road – there are also plenty of park pitches, full of lovely surprises. “The first session we took was next door to Pools in the Park: we couldn’t train at our place during the summer because of the cricket, so we were there picking glass off the fields,” recalls Cai, taking us back to the beginning.  “There must have been 35 players there: the majority of the players that year were the players who finished sixth the previous season.”

He echoes the thoughts of Danny, with the change in mindset and improvement in coaching having an obvious impact. Even when Sonny left after one season, and Cai had to step up, he was well-supported. “Sonny left and then Tom May came in as coach,” he explains. 

“Because we only have three subs, sometimes you have to look at it strategically. Who’s the best person to play? Who are you going to put on the bench as one back cover?  And because of that and a couple of injuries, Tom had to come in a few times. It was the same with Steven Shingler recently, he stepped up to play, and Tommy Bell too, both were in a coaching role with us, but have played when needed.”

The key thing for Cai, is that while the club have had a handful of ex-pros put on the jersey in their rise, it’s only been as a stopgap, the hard graft has been done by the squad. Perhaps the only exception is Cai, a tighthead prop by trade, who played Wales at age grade, before spending a decade with Ospreys, winning three Celtic League titles and an Anglo-Welsh Cup and having a stint at London Welsh in 2013, in the Championship, when they secured promotion to the Premiership. “I would have preferred if Sonny had stayed for another two years,” admits Cai, “Yeah, but things happen, I enjoy that leadership role but it’s hard to be director, forwards coach and player… 

“Within the first three seasons, I got 55 caps, so I was consistently playing, but the majority playing second row, because I think I had better props than myself playing.”

When rugby broke for Covid, Cai saw it as a chance to regenerate the body and go again for another two years, but instead his body ‘didn’t get better’, and he settled into a rugby life on the sidelines.

He’s carried out the role with aplomb, barely missing a beat in gaining year-on-year promotions. “Every year we’ve lost one game,” he says, “apart from when we came up to level 5, we lost six or seven our first year. 

“But every year we’ve had a game that shocked us, reminding us that, actually, we’re sometimes not as good as we think we are.”

For Cai, the journey has been a literal one, taking him to places he never got to visit as a player. “I love going to different rugby clubs and just seeing what that history looks like, so that was a really good because I’ve never experienced that. When I turned pro at seventeen, it was just straight into the top end and no sort of community game.”

He’s also clearly grateful for the path his life has followed since professionalism left him at something of a dead end. “I was lucky that retirement was my decision,” he explains. “It wasn’t a career-ending injury or anything like that. I did twelve to thirteen [professional] years, I think I had my fill, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t like I had only three years and I got injured and then I’m out. 

“I think coming out of the game is always a challenge but my fiancée has always been very supportive.

“My final contract finished in the May with the Ospreys, I’d just started dating her, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have anything, and she said, ‘Oh, come to London. We’ll make it happen’.”

Like a rugby Dick Whittington, Cai arrived just with three bags and his retirement package (which would last six months), but after six weeks of searching he still had no work. “Then Bury St Edmunds came to offer me a player-coach role and then a week later I got a job offer as a training provider.”

While Sonny would bring him to London Welsh after a season, Cai now continues to balance his coaching with a role in sales for a training company (a different one). It’s a balance he’s been happy to manage, not least because of the success, but also because he’s keen for London Welsh to do the right thing, hence the word ‘sustainability’ being something of a catchphrase for anyone involved at the pointy end of the business for the club. “We’ve paid more expenses because costs are skyrocketing, and we don’t want players to be out of pocket,” he says. “But I’ve heard some horror stories out there where some players at this level get paid £250-£350 a game and that is absolutely disgusting. How is that sustainable? So for me, it’s, let’s look after the players. 

“But there’s no difference to what Shingler was getting paid compared to, say, one of our props – they are getting paid exactly the same. 

“I think for us it has to be sustainable, so if that means we’re here [National 2] for another three years just to find our feet to kick on again, then so be it. We’re targeting the top six going in there. 

“We are lucky that we’re probably coming out of the hardest league at level 5, so we are battle-hardened by having three years in that league. 

“And I think what I’m really excited about is to have five subs as well,” he adds.

With so much success – few coaches can boast records such as his – you’d think turning professional would be a consideration. “Shings, our attack coach, he’s with Ealing women and it’s definitely going to be his career, he’s going to go to the top, he’s so talented. But for me, it won’t be, I’ve got no aspirations at all.

“I’ve seen right at the top,” he adds, “I’ve seen the demand on those coaches, the time that they spend day in, day out, just reviewing games, coaching and everything else that comes with it. 

“And I’ve done that from a player’s perspective, and I haven’t got the energy to do it. I’ve seen it. They’re on their laptops 24/7, reviewing the games, sorting session plans, everything is just too demanding.”

Even his own future at the club seems to be ever-changing. “At one point, I thought this might have been my last season,” he admits. “It was just my work, it’s going really well and basically doubled in size, so it’s that balancing act. Sometimes it’s a challenge because I need to be in Manchester in the day, then need to come in on a Tuesday evening and still perform as a coach. 

“But,” he adds, “I’ll stick at it for another year.”

And if you win National 2? “Well, there’s always one more year isn’t there?”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Danté Kim

This extract was taken from issue 30 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

On the Tuesday after England became world champions at Twickenham in September, while many of the squad are still appearing on screens and in studios across the world, voices still hoarse from the celebrations, one player is quietly going about their domestic chores. It’s not that the player in question didn’t play a big role, quite the opposite: she scored two tries in the final, and even captained the side en route to winning the World Cup for the second time in four attempts. Nobody could question her right to be front and centre, but that’s not the way Alex Matthews likes it. “Yeah, been a little bit busy,” Alex tells Rugby Journal, “but it’s back to reality now, back to normal life, I’ve just been doing the food shop and catching up on an awful lot of washing, I’ve done about four loads now. I’ve just been unpacking, getting organised…

 “It just feels normal,” she says of the past few days, “celebrating, it’s been lovely, lots of drinking… I saw the family yesterday, it was nice to see mum, she was reliving it all, getting emotional, comparing 2014 to now. She was looking back at pictures and seeing nobody in the ground [in 2014], versus the unbelievable scenes we’ve just had.”

A home final in front 81,885 at Twickenham, and not just any old 81,885. This was a crowd unlike any the old stadium had ever seen, fervently passionate, celebratory from start to finish, even those whose side didn’t win. It was a carnival. “Getting off the bus at the Allianz was unbelievable,” continues Alex. “The sea of people, looking up at the stadium and seeing every stairway, every stand full of people overlooking from the balconies, Twickenham never had a reception like it… 

“That’s the thing, for people who weren’t there in person, it is difficult to capture that, you can’t really describe it,” she says, reflecting the views of so many who were there. “I walked down [from the bus], saw Mum, and gave her a cuddle and had a cry before I went in. She was right at the front in a bright red jacket. 

“As soon as we cuddled, I burst out crying. I think it was just what I needed,” she admits. “I was quite overwhelmed the day before and morning of, not overwhelmed just, ‘wow this is going to be special’ and I think I needed to let it all out. By the time I got to the changing room, I was, ‘right, let’s go do this’. I’ve asked for one photo of the south stand to be printed out, as that [the atmosphere] is what made the day. Winning was the cherry on the cake.”

Every final is a finale, but not all are quite as fitting as this one. It was less a rugby match, more a coming of age of the modern women’s game, making the loudest statement possible that it couldn’t be ignored anymore. The crowds didn’t just gather for England either. “In New Zealand [for the World Cup] it was just the home team getting crowds, but the fact that Samoa and South Africa experienced their biggest crowds ever too, that made the tournament for me,” she says. “Just the amount of love every nation has been given. The New Zealand captain did a much better job of summing it up than I could: she said they were expecting nobody at Twickenham [New Zealand played their bronze final there], so were taken by surprise, when people showed up for them, it was one big celebration…”

Process-driven is how Alex describes the England World Cup camp, and, well, normal, a word that she keeps using. “Honestly, it’s so bizarre,” she says. “It was like the Six Nations, so normal, it felt like an ordinary camp, which is exactly what Mitch [head coach John Mitchell] wanted. It’s a big enough occasion already, speaking among the leadership team, we wanted to make it normal.”

That word again, she says even up to the semi-final against France, while there were some nerves, it was no more than she’d expect from a Six Nations clash.

Early in the tournament there had been a slight change from the norm for Alex: captaincy against Australia, in the absence of Gloucester-Hartpury clubmate Zoe Aldcroft. “That was pretty cool,” she says. “Mitch told me a week before, I gave him a punch on shoulder and said, ‘what are you doing to me?’. I wanted to say no, but the opportunity to captain a team at a home World Cup, well, I never thought I’d be able to add that to my CV, and again, having those girls around me, they’re great.  Mitch just said ‘you lead from front already, don’t change anything at all’.”

She also had to say the “last words before we went into battle”. Memorable? Not for Alex. “I can’t even remember what I said,” she admits, “I’ve got it jotted down somewhere, but I don’t know what I said. I know at half time it was very simple, because Australia had showed up, and what we were doing wasn’t working, the girls wanting to go off script, but we were very much ‘stick to game plan, keep it simple, let’s enjoy it, don’t go and do anything special’.”

A slim 19-7 half-time lead, became a 47-7 thumping by full-time; captaincy was a doddle. “We weren’t panicked by it, but it definitely gave us focus areas…”

England revelled in having a week between games, meaning they could slip into their usual routine for training camps: low-key on Monday, building up as the week went on. The squad was under the spotlight, which is exactly as they wanted it, being able to spread the women’s rugby gospel with such huge audiences watching as important as any win they could deliver. Different personalities emerged from within the squad, more voices for the next generation to relate to. 

Not one to post on social media – she says she only looks when she’s tagged in something – Alex did break the habit with a post after the Australia win: 

‘Yesterday was for the quiet ones – the overthinkers, the reflectors, the planners. The ones who thrive in stillness, notice what others miss and only speak when their gut rumbles. A reminder that it’s ok to not be the loudest or boldest, that impact doesn’t need volume and you don’t always need the spotlight to shine.

‘There’s strength in quietness’.

It resonated, not just in likes. “The amount of messages I’ve received from parents and children saying what impact we’ve had on them. I was just saying I was doing it for quiet people, I didn’t want to do it [the captaincy], I stepped out of my comfort zone, to be a role model for a different audience of people.”

And what an audience. For the final alone, the BBC reported viewing figures of 5.8m, a number that swelled to 12m across the entire tournament. 

The moment with her mum as she got off the bus aside, Alex only felt a little nervous before the final. Training was good. “Boring as it sounds, it was no different and we actually had the best week of training,” she says. “The way we trained on our tough day, if we played like that, we were in a good position, everything seemed to be clicking. At the same time, if we’d had the worst team run, we’d probably have said, ‘well, we’re going to play well tomorrow’.”

The team had got all of the ‘emotional stuff’ out of the way earlier in the week, the presentations, the video from home, so that they could focus on the job in hand, which Alex didn’t underestimate. “The last time we faced Canada at the World Cup, in the semi-finals [in 2022], was one of the hardest games I’ve ever played,” she says. “I remember coming off that pitch more exhausted and emotionally drained than in the final. 

“We saw how physically dominant they were against New Zealand [this year], which is a challenging thing to do, and how quick they were, but I was excited, I was up for a challenge, that’s what you want…”

On match day, the backroom staff had family and friends in, including coach and former captain Sarah Hunter’s baby. “It was really family-orientated, calm, so it was a very nice touch.” And then the anthems. “Oh, I’ve never sung a national anthem like it,” she admits. “I’m normally mumbling, so that nobody else can hear, but this was the loudest I’ve ever sung. I was just feeling this huge pride of being up for the challenge, ready for whatever they threw at us, I knew it was going to be a good fight.”

Emotions were kept in check. “Sadia [Kabeya] walked out [at Twickenham], and immediately said, ‘I think I might cry’. I said, ‘you can’t cry now, too soon’. It was just a whole range of emotions, I was just excited to be there. When we walked out, Mo [Natasha Hunt] gave me a tap, a little smile, and it was full on from then.”

Canada came out firing, scoring first, but few watching ever felt England’s third world crown was in doubt, Alex included. “I can’t remember the score, but I think it was only ten minutes in, and thinking ‘we’ve got this’,” she admits. “I don’t know what it was, but I remember being confident that unless we do something really stupid, we’ll have them. They kept coming at us, but our defence won us the tournament. We spoke about it before; our physical defence really showed.”

After Canada had scored in under five minutes, Ellie Kildunne then did her magnificent thing by finding space in a phone box to put England in front, Amy Cokayne stretched the lead, and then Alex stepped up for a try that seemed to secure victory, even with just 25 minutes played. The England scrum had driven Canada back, Hunt picked up, Alex broke too, took the pass from her team-mate and made it 21-8. There was no way back for Canada.

“Me and Mo all week, were talking about just backing our instincts, backing each other,” says Alex. She scored again, powering over from close range, for the final try in the 33-13 win. Job done, ecstasy right? “Again, it was a bit like 2014, I didn’t really feel like anything,” says Alex. “Jonny Wilkinson refers to it as just another win, and it is. Obviously, seeing other girls get emotional, getting happy, one girl cried a bit, but it felt like another game. Everyone puts so much expectation on it, when it happens, it’s ‘ah okay’. But the bit that got me was looking around the stadium, seeing it still full, people still cheering, as we were getting medals, all that happened, and it was absolutely rammed. 

“We were on the pitch for hours, I think, I’m not too sure,” she continues. “Once we’d done laps and thanked everyone, I tried to find the family, they wrapped me up in cuddles – there was a nice little picture of it – and said they were so happy, lots of cuddles and kisses. Mum was emotional, she had tears in her eyes because she was so happy, she cried at everything, and she’s the stable one in the family. When I scored, she cried both times. I’m not sure if that was because of the pint she was enjoying or what, bless her…”

Afterwards, there was a reception at Twickenham – with a free bar, Alex is keen to point out – then the Cabbage Patch, with Alex finding her way home at 3.30am. “Some girls were still going at 6am,” she adds. 

The next day, they were all off to Battersea Power Station  for the balcony presentation and party. “We bumped into two men [at Battersea] who had been to every single men’s World Cup, and this was their first women’s World Cup, and they’d travelled around the country, and said it was their best World Cup ever. For two men’s supporters to say that, we must be doing something special.”

Now, it’s back to normal life. As she’d already seen Lady Gaga perform, she declined O2’s offer of tickets to her gig, and left the team hotel on the Monday after the final. “I do feel a little bit lost now I’m out of it,” she admits, “leaving the hotel, leaving everyone after we’ve been together for months and months. Now I’m not living to a schedule, I’m going to have to work out what to do with my day, how is this all going to work? Even going food shopping was a bit overwhelming.

“We’ve been in such a complete bubble with the same people all the time, I don’t even know how to eat breakfast. This morning, I was piling my breakfast with eggs to get the right amount of protein and I had to remind myself I don’t need to do that, so I put some back.”

There was no emotional goodbye, with all the players dispersing at different times, to different places. “I left on my own,” says Alex. “It’s a bit like a prisoner being released, although you get the blues after any tour.

“I think visiting my  parents was a bit surreal,” she continues. “Everyone down the road stopped in to congratulate me, which was nice. I pulled up to my house in Gloucester, and the neighbours were coming out to say well done, and they’ve not met me yet, I only moved in during the Six Nations, so I’ve not been there. 

“But today is the first normal day, I’ve not had time to think about much, just got the life admin to catch up on…”

TJ’s is the kind of café we all know. Serving up giant plates of all things good and fried, but given the menu also has plenty of evening meal options, you know it’s a place for the locals to always find someone to chat to. And on the eve of the World Cup, for one old lady with a shopping trolley, grabbing a cuppa after a busy morning shop, that was Alex Matthews. We’re at TJ’s partly for the fry-up, but also to get Alex’s back story, something which the Gloucester pensioner may have already gazumped us to. Curious onlookers have also stopped for a chat, we are just a couple of hundred yards from Kingsholm, and we’ve got Alex wearing an England shirt, so it’s not hard for them to put two-and-two together, albeit some are coming up with five. “They thought I was Mo, blonde girl!” laughs Alex. “They wanted me to sign a picture from last year, and they were like, ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ pointing to Mo. She’s half the size! Me and Zoe get mixed up all the time though.”

Gloucester-Hartpury are now the dominant force in English women’s club rugby, threepeat champions, so getting recognised, sometimes correctly, isn’t uncommon.

“More of the [Gloucester] men’s fans are getting behind the women’s game, because it’s a rugby city,” says Alex, “even our end of season was down at the Food Docks, they had a big screen, and I wasn’t expecting anyone to come, but it was full of fans, local people, getting behind us.”

Alex’s first title win came with Richmond, her first club, where she played alongside sister Fran, and it was while at the south-west London club, she got called up for England, making her debut in 2011, aged eighteen. “I have been doing it for a very long time, haven’t I?” she says. “But I also think, where’s the time gone? The season is so busy. I almost haven’t had time to stop and appreciate it all either This season, especially, I did think, ‘God, I have been doing this a long time’.”

Does she feel old? “No, I don’t,” she responds, quickly. “It’s crazy. And I think Mitch puts me in the ‘old’ group, because obviously it’s just the four of us – Scaz [Emily Scarratt ], Mo, Marlie [Packer] and me – from the previous World Cup [win in 2014], but I’m like, hang on, they’ve got like, four or five years on me, don’t put me in their bracket. So, I think I do get caught up with the ‘old, old’ group, but I’m not, I’m just ‘old’.”

Born in Camberley, Alex made the move to rugby to follow Fran, although being in the youngest possible minis group, she decided it wasn’t for her.  “I didn’t like it, I think because it was too kiddy-like,” she says. “Even at that age, I was super introverted and awkward. It was all ‘scream louder, I didn’t hear that!’, and I was very much, ‘oh, get on with it’. So, I stopped for a year, and then I went back, I think because I was watching Fran from the sidelines, beating up the boys, and I wanted to join in.

“Then my coach, Bob Jones, who was this big, bald, proper London-accented bloke, scar all down his face, was just shouting at us. And I was like, ‘I love it’. He just told you how it was, he didn’t shy away because we were little kids. Under-9s was my favourite year because it was tackling. I think the boys were quite scared of it, whereas I used to love the one-on-one tackle drills; they were like little battles.”

There was little visibility of where rugby could take Alex. “I think I had one photo of Paula George that my dad cut out of the newspaper, and that was the only memory I have [of England women], otherwise it was just whatever Fran did.”

Career-wise, the plan was just getting through school, although a PE teacher pointed her towards Hartpury, where she could ‘get to do rugby and do A levels on the side’, which sounded good. “I absolutely loved it. You get that freedom; you’re sixteen, yet you’ve got the schedule, and you can pretty much train like you’re a professional while doing the A levels. And then, obviously, you’re surrounded by friends all the time, and have the evenings to do whatever. It’s good fun.”

And then, easy breezy, she was playing for England. “It was almost like, and it sounds silly, but for me it was just the next step,” she says. “Everyone talks about barriers and all, but I’ve had it plain sailing really. I did county, I got selected for regional, one step into the next. I followed my sister into senior rugby and so on, time flies by and look where I am, a fourth World Cup.” 

Sevens has played a huge role in Alex’s rugby life, good and bad. Either side of the fifteens World Cup win in 2014, she was part of the sevens set-up, but the experience wasn’t always positive. So much so, she had to be persuaded to return to the programme after the 2017 fifteens Rugby World Cup. 

England’s fifteens boss Simon Middleton was keen for Alex to have her future sorted before the World Cup and, at the airport to New Zealand for a World Cup warm-up, coach Matt Ferguson took Alex to one side. “He said, ‘what are you going to do?’. I was like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t like sevens, it’s not for me. I hated it’.” 

It’s easy to forget that these were pioneering days in women’s rugby, professionalism was still new, and being a pioneer isn’t always a good thing. “The first two years I was in sevens, I don’t know if it was the environment, but I was miserable,” she admits. “It’s my biggest regret, because I was full-time with Fran and I remember driving to training at Surrey Sports Park, and thinking, ‘this is all I’ve ever wanted to do, to be a full-time rugby player, this is my dream, I should be happy, but I don’t want to go’.”

Such was her unhappiness, it manifested in a complete lack of confidence. “I think that fear of failure was drilled into us,” explains Alex. “I convinced myself I couldn’t catch or pass a ball. And I’d been playing rugby all my life, I was in the top fourteen players to be contracted, and I’d convinced myself I couldn’t play rugby. 

“I actually got really ill,” she continues. “I don’t know if it was this environment or my own stress, but I developed an autoimmune disease as well. I rapidly lost 10 kilos, everything was over working. You can have overactive thyroid or underactive but basically my thyroids were releasing too many of the hormones. 

“I just wasn’t getting fitter, all I was doing was extra running sessions, I couldn’t lift a barbell or do one pull-up. Nobody was paying any attention. And it was Fran that said, ‘Look, can we get bloods done or something?’. After that I said, ‘I’m done with sevens’. I wanted to go back to fifteens and find the love for rugby again.

“Individually I absolutely loved the girls there, but the standards they expected...” she pauses. “I don’t know what it was, it was quite an unhealthy environment, carbs were frowned upon. You’re in an elite programme, and yet you feel like you can’t eat carbs. It was professional, but so unprofessional. You look back on it, we didn’t get anything right in that sense. Obviously, it was early days, and you’re going to learn from it all.”

The programme back then was very different to what the Red Roses have today. “At Surrey Sports Park there’s a corner cupboard , the closet – that was our meeting room. We were basically in the janitors’ corner cupboard, that was where our lunch was, there was no daylight or anything. We were just in a cupboard. That wouldn’t have helped my mind state, either.

“My sister, equally, she didn’t really enjoy it,” adds Alex. “Even now, I’ll speak to Marlie [Packer] about it, no one particularly enjoyed it, but it was never anything we spoke about. I think because it was something you’ve wanted for so long, it was almost like you had to be grateful, you know, ‘oh my god, we’re finally professional’, it’s just what it is…”

The saving grace for Alex was twofold. “I went back to fifteens, and got on medication,” she says. “Actually, in the last few months, I’ve been ... what’s the word? Basically, I haven’t got it anymore. The meds have levelled my bloods out, I started putting on muscle again, and then just enjoyed rugby again.”

She did return to sevens, in 2018, although perhaps not with exactly the right attitude. “I basically told myself that by Christmas I was going to leave the programme, before I’d even signed anything,” she admits. “We only started in September, but then he [coach James Bailey] worked his magic and I enjoyed it.”

The two years after she rejoined the programme proved to be the most important, almost paving the way for what she would achieve later in her rugby career. “Just from the point of letting go and just playing, it almost completely changed my mindset,” she says. “James Bailey used to speak about loving the game. I think the first two years in sevens programme, we thought professional meant everything’s got to be perfect. 

“But I think this time [with sevens in 2018] was when I properly fell in love with the game again. I’d always been such a perfectionist and worried about failure growing up, but I just let go of that. And I was like, ‘all I have to do is enjoy rugby’, I’ve been doing this so long that the rest of it will take care of itself.”

The sevens might have been a mixed bag, but her career has, to date, been topped and tailed with World Cup wins in fifteens. “I think I was just happy to be there,” she says of the 2014 final. “I’d just finished my final year of uni, which was stressful, I had a hip operation in October because I wasn’t actually part of the training squad for a lot of the World Cup. I got back before our training games against the USA and had to do a fitness test.

“I just remember how much it meant to the old girls,” says Alex of the 21-9 Rugby World Cup final win, also against Canada. “They’d been to finals, lost them, it was a similar story, I just knew in the build-up how much it would mean to them to win, so I almost wanted to do it for them.”

It’s an experience she’s been able to apply this year. John Mitchell, she says, holds the key to the togetherness of the current crop of World Cup winners. “He’s good,” she says succinctly. “I mean I was a bit anxious when he arrived, obviously change and all of that, and you read the media, and they don’t seem to like him, but I think he’s been so good for our culture. It’s the tightest I’ve ever felt as an England squad; everyone gets on like, there’s less little cliquey groups. It’s so much more open and honest, fluid and less serious.”

One of Mitchell’s key things has been players finding their ‘why?’. “Mine changes,” she says. “At the beginning, I obviously wanted to be like my sister. Then it was to make my parents proud. Then, I had a brother that died of muscular dystrophy just before I was born, he was sixteen, and all he wanted to do was kick a football around, and he couldn’t, because he didn’t have the muscles to do it.Hearing the stories made me think, actually, I’ve got this body, let’s take advantage of it. My parents always said as well, as long as your body’s moving, keep doing it.”

Alex truly loves rugby, which is why it was so hard when her sevens life became difficult. The love of rugby, together with all of the above, is now the ‘why’: it always has been really. “You know when you’re little, you have a nightmare or whatever, and to get myself back to sleep, I used to picture myself playing rugby. Rugby, just thinking about it, is what relaxed me.”

Fourteen years of World Cups, Olympics, Commonwealth Games, title triumphs and continually striving to be the best is no easy thing. “Yeah, yeah, it’s hard to try to stay at the top all the time,” she considers. “I think I did lose a bit of purpose, just a little bit, for a couple of years, which is why I came to Gloucester.”

She joined Gloucester-Hartpury before the title-winning had begun – it’s no coincidence they started after she arrived – because of one person. “To train with Zoe [Aldcroft],” says Alex. “She’s literally the sole reason I came to Gloucester. She’s just got something about her, hasn’t she? We say she’s ‘tapped’! It’s just her mindset . I just find her inspiring, she’s so competitive, I wanted to train around her, be around her. If I was younger and I had to pick a role model, it would be Zoe.”

Alex’s dad, Dave, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2023. She found out in New Zealand, while on England duty in WXV. “We played Canada and then the morning after, I got a message off the doc saying to come see them when I was free,” she explains. “I was like, ‘oh God, my gum shield’s triggered something, I’m going to have to do an HIA, because I’ve got a history of concussion.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” she says of the news delivered, “I was absolutely blindsided. But Fran was with the refs out there as well, a couple of hotels away, so I got her to come to the hotel, and broke the news to her. I’m glad I could do that because otherwise she’d be in Australia  – where she now lives – by herself and she’s the softer one of us, I say she’s the nicer one. 

“I didn’t want to tell anyone for that whole week, because I didn’t want people asking me questions, to impact the team. I told Amber Reed, she was my roomie. And she said, ‘I’ll ask you one question a day, and that’s it’. She was very normal with me, but I just didn’t want to affect anyone or impact anyone. 

“I don’t think people realise how intense camps can be, because other than being in the shower or going to the toilet, I had no time to process anything or cry. Even when I went out for a walk one evening, I bumped into all the Welsh girls. It was Sisilia [Tuipulotu, a Gloucester-Hartpury team-mate], bless her, and she just caught me and gave me a big cuddle and didn’t ask anything.

“It was hard,” she continues. “It was one of the toughest weeks of my life. Even in the scrums in New Zealand, when it was silence, I remember just thinking of my dad and then being, ‘no, now’s not the time’. It just hit me in the most random moments.”

At the final whistle against New Zealand, when England won 33-12 , it did hit. “Sunts [Sarah Hunter] gave me a hug and I just cried, let it all out,” she recalls. “And I think that was the cliff of it. I just broke down there, everyone thought, ‘oh, it’s because, yeah, they’ve beaten New Zealand’. 

“I think England rugby even used it on a social thing, ‘Oh, they’ve beaten New Zealand. This is what it means’. Nope, nothing to do with that.”

England had offered to pay for the sisters to fly home, but they knew Dad wouldn’t want that. “‘Don’t change your life for us’, they always said,” says Alex.

However, she did consider it, including the possibility of moving to Harlequins to be closer to her family home in Surrey.  “He walks around, a bit unstable on his feet, just in a lot of pain all the time, and it ages you so much. Early on, when he started losing his hair, we used to call him a little chick, when the hair started growing again. 

“I remember at one of the Gloucester games, just catching him in the stand and, he just looks so old, that got me as well, with his little walking stick. He was just so, like, he’s always been so healthy, always active. He’s a little gardener, that’s his retirement job. So yeah, it’s hard.”

The challenge is also worrying about her mum. “I end up finding myself worrying more about my mum than I do about my dad. It’s horrible seeing your dad in pain and deteriorating, but your mum’s going to be the one left with everything to deal with. So, yeah, I worry about her a lot.

“I Googled it [prostate cancer] out in New Zealand, and the best-case scenario was five years; it’s crazy, but my dad is a stubborn man.”

The World Cup hasn’t just given both Mum and Dad Matthews even more reasons to be super proud of their epic daughter Alex, it has also led to more conversations, more awareness, about her dad’s condition. “We’ve had support from the rugby cancer charity [Rugby Against Cancer], which was quite nice that they reached out, and Prostate Cancer UK reached out too, offering support, inviting us to events, and other little things like that have been nice…”

Repeating the fact she’s not one of the ‘old, old’ England girls, she’s not yet too worried about what happens next in her career. “I worry a little bit about my career, I think because I’m one of the first to do solely professional rugby, I’m not sure what’s next, rugby is all I’ve known,” she says. “I don’t know what’s out there [for a post-retirement job ], I don’t know what I want to do, everything I keep doing just comes back to job satisfaction. 

“I’m not bothered necessarily about money or recognition or anything, if I’m enjoying it, and I help people, then that’s fine. But I still don’t know what that [job] is…”

There are other considerations about her future too, including a family. “Yeah I want to have a family,” she says, “but I’m 32 now, when do you do that in rugby? That’s the side of it the men don’t have to think about. They can still have a family, their wage will help support their family to move around with them, club to club. 

“And I think that is definitely where the women’s game’s going to struggle like that, because it’s hard, I know Abbie’s  [Ward] done it, but I don’t think it’s easy.”

All of that is for another time, though. Right now, Alex is happy in her rugby. She’s finding success, yet again, on the pitch. “Yeah, I am happy,” she repeats. “I’ve come around at a good time to be a part of all these incredible teams.”

Retirement isn’t something she’s considering, as she says, again, she’s not in the bracket of Scaz (35), Mo (36) and Marlie (36), so isn’t ruling out another World Cup. “I’ll be there in four years,” she says, “I’m in my own little bracket, because I was so young in 2014, but I haven’t thought that far ahead.

“I honestly can’t take anything for granted: anything could happen between now and then that rules you out, I don’t know. To be honest I’ll see where my body is, but I think I’ve got more to give on the pitch, and from that sense, I don’t think this is my last one, but we’ll see whatever else pops up… 

“When do I call it a day?” she asks herself. “I don’t want to be rubbish and just carry on playing, I don’t want to play beyond my time, and I want children, I’ve got to fit that in sometime. And I’ve also got to start looking at careers outside rugby, so when do you fit all that in?”

Who knows, but if anyone can make it all work, it’s Alex Matthews, double World Cup winner, double try-scorer, multiple club title-winner, Olympian, sometime captain, and most definitely in an England bracket all of her own.

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Richard Johnson

This extract was taken from issue 31 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

Irish hard-rockers Thin Lizzy were known to reserve their biggest hit, The Boys Are Back in Town, for the very end of their gigs; a signature sing-a-long to send punters home happy and fulfilled. Allegedly when Phil Lynott, Thin Lizzy’s frontman, penned the words to the smash hit, he was writing about a criminal organisation in Manchester who he encountered in his youth, the notorious Quality Street Gang.  

But as the song sounds out at Sixways, before Worcester’s first home game in three years, the Quality Street Gang are far from the returning Warriors fans’ minds. The song instead takes on a new quality – triumphant, defiant – as the moment these fans have been dreaming of for three years finally arrives. 

Under new ownership, with new players, but at the same stadium, playing in the same colours, with many of the same fans who watched them until the seemingly bitter end three years ago, Worcester Warriors returned in a pre-season friendly against the best team in the country, Bath. 

It has been 1,089 days, exactly one week short of three years, since Worcester Warriors were suspended from the Premiership and placed into administration by the RFU. This marked the end of a painful saga in which former owners Jason Whittingham and Colin Goldring failed to pay players and staff, amid mounting debts of £25 million and unpaid tax bills.

Likened to ‘the death of a dog’ by former director of rugby Steve Diamond, Worcester’s decline was slow and agonising. The club’s final hope appeared to lie with Atlas, a consortium made up of former Warriors executive director Jim O’Toole and business partner James Sandford. Atlas attempted to rescue the club from administration but consistently disappointed fans with poor communication.

Despite being named the new owners in May 2023 following a £2 million deal, Atlas failed to make the further £1 million payment needed to relaunch the club. Control eventually passed to Wasps’ owner Chris Holland in September 2023, after Atlas defaulted on a £1.5 million loan from his company, Loxwood Holdings, which had been made to help Atlas secure a lease for Wasps to play Championship rugby at Sixways.

For their comeback match, Worcester, who last year celebrated their 150th birthday while in administration, have commanded a sell-out 9,000 crowd and as the first few people wander through the gates, some two hours before kick-off, you get the sense that this evening could build into something special.

Among the early arrivals is Marcus Mulcahy, the chair of the Worcester Warriors Supporters Trust (WWST). His gaze is fixed firmly on the pitch, as if he can’t quite believe his club is back, and he can’t help but ruminate on the past, given how long it’s been since he last stood in this spot, waiting for a game. “Losing your rugby club is a sort of slow, waking nightmare really,” says Marcus a little absently, still looking on at the pitch. “The immediate aftermath was the most painful bit. The administrators came on the radio quite a lot and they were interviewed in the local press. 

“We thought we might be back that season or the next, but then when the players all started leaving to go to other clubs it was clear that it wasn’t going to be an easy sort out. From there you’re just hanging on every little bit of information you can and following social media, where there’s loads of rumours. It’s soul-destroying; people really do live and breathe the club.” 

As people drift through the fan zone, snacking on food, grabbing drinks from the bar, and soaking up live music from a local band, the WWST are hard to miss. Their gazebo is pitched right next to the face-painting tent, a prominent fixture in the bustling scene. “We were supposed to have a cabin,” Marcus says through gritted teeth, his tone edged with disdain. “But it was stolen from the supplier’s warehouse on Monday.”

This raises the obvious questions – who steals a cabin, and why? – but Marcus doesn’t have the answers. The WWST tent, however, is thriving. Nearly as busy as its colourful neighbour, it’s packed with people eager to talk to Marcus about the latest goings-on at the club. “When the club was just about to be sold for the first time to Atlas,” remembers Marcus, “we thought that nobody’s actually paying any attention to what the supporters of the club are thinking, there was nobody shouting in our corner.

“In November 2023, we started taking members, and we quickly gained a reputation as troublemakers. We tried to do things like nominating the stadium as an asset of community value, which was really well received. This was done to prevent anything happening to it architecturally which could make it less desirable as a rugby stadium, and possibly delay the return of Worcester. 

“We stepped away in the end, because it created problems for investment. When we knew the right people were in charge, we didn’t want to pursue that and make it more difficult, but we’ve got the legal basis as a supporters trust to potentially get more involved if the finances don’t work out in the long run, but we have no reason to believe that’s the case. I suppose we’re a supporters’ club on steroids.”

Their unprecedented legal prowess aside, the WWST have also thrown themselves into preparing Sixways for the return of matchday. With hundreds of volunteers turning up, the somewhat grandly titled ‘Sixways SOS Days’ have seen people scrubbing dusty, long-forgotten seats that haven’t been used in three years, washing the windows of the South Stand, and picking litter from the car park. It’s unglamorous but vital work, especially with the very real possibility that the stadium could be close to full this season. “Initially, the owner’s target was to sell 1,800 season tickets, and I think they went up to 2,100,” says Marcus with an incredulous shake of the head. “I was saying that we should get at least 3,000 but they’ve nearly sold 5,000,” he continues. “To get that number of people coming back when we’re not in the top tier is incredible; the appeal of the club is there and people are coming back in huge numbers.

“It’s the sense of belonging that’s important and it’s not like just going to watch your local club game, it’s different when there’s a stadium full of people with the same interest really.” 

With still ninety minutes to go until kick-off, the fan zone is already heaving; old friends reuniting, the buzz unmistakable. Things are going better than even Stephen Vaughan might have dared to imagine. Worcester’s new CEO is a proud son of the West Midlands. Once a footballer for Walsall FC, his playing days were short-lived (“due to an acute lack of talent,” as he puts it with disarming ease). From there, he pivoted into the travel industry, eventually finding his way into sport, where charisma, rather than footwork, would become his defining asset.  “I spent five years working on London 2012, as managing director for commercial and branding,” explains the quick-talking Stephen. “My first role in rugby was CEO at Gloucester, where I spent eight really happy years. Then I moved to Wasps and the Ricoh Arena, as it was at the time, to take on a much bigger challenge.

“We got to the Premiership final, and everything was going fantastically well, except for the unfortunate financial situation we inherited, which was obviously bleak. It was such a shame, because the actual business of Wasps was flourishing. We were making a lot of money from the venue, the team were performing extremely well, but the debt the club had snowballed over the years and it became very clear that the finances were built on straw.” 

Just weeks after Worcester Warriors entered administration, Wasps followed suit, burdened by a staggering £95 million in accumulated debt. The club’s parent company, Wasps Holdings, along with three firms linked to the Coventry Building Society Arena, cost taxpayers millions.

Dozens of local businesses were also left out of pocket. Wasps owed the government £16.1 million from their Sport Survival Package loan, the largest share of the £124 million distributed among all thirteen Premiership clubs, as well as
£2.1 million in unpaid taxes to HMRC.

Stephen and Chris Holland, former non-executive director and chief operating officer at Wasps, were left to pick through the mess Wasps Holdings created, with Chris being named as owner in December 2022.  “Having to deal with a club going under were the darkest days I’ve ever had in my career,” Stephen continues. “It was awful speaking to players and staff when I was a member of staff who was also being made redundant.

“I was approached by a number of different sporting clubs after that, because although perception is reality, the work that we did at Wasps would have been an incredible success story.” 

From Wasps, in November 2022 Stephen took the job in cricket everyone was shying away from, the CEO of Yorkshire in the aftermath of a racism scandal and a wrecked commercial model. Amid hefty points deductions, Stephen helped Yorkshire win promotion back to the first division of the County Championship and helped rebuild its entire commercial and financial structure. 

He had taken things about as far as he could with Yorkshire when Chris mentioned the prospect of taking Worcester Warriors out of administration. “Chris had three key areas that needed focus, support and management and leadership,” outlines Stephen. “First the actual site itself, redeveloping the many acres that surround Sixways. Next was to get the venue back up and running, making profit rather than being a loss-making organisation, and finally to get professional rugby back into Worcester. 

“So, I came in on the premise that I would help him out, as all of those three things are well within my experience.” 

As Worcester take the field for their warm-up, they’re greeted with a hero’s welcome. There’s a ripple of excitement in the stands as fans nudge friends and family, pointing out new names, new faces, some familiar, most not.

For many, it’s a first glimpse of a team still taking shape. It’s a fascinating scene: home supporters trying to map out their own side, half-guessing positions, scanning shirts, quietly sizing up what this new era might look like. Before a ball is kicked, the new-look Warriors complete an impromptu lap of the pitch, drawing a swell of applause. 

Each player returns the gesture with an open-handed wave, a mix of gratitude and showmanship, before heading down the tunnel to change. Talk of the squad dominates the day. There’s admiration, some curiosity, and no small amount of wonder at how it has all come together, somehow, just in time. “From a rugby perspective, we really should have done a Netflix documentary on how we put everything together,” laughs Stephen.

“We had to agree to pay all of the rugby creditors, and at that point, we could have made the decision, rather than to pay multiple millions of pounds, to say, actually, we’ll do what other clubs have done in the past, and just start at level ten, but then nobody gets a penny.

“Then I sat down with a pen and pad, and thought, ‘right, I’d better think about pulling a rugby club together’. We think that we spoke to over six hundred players, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

“I won’t give names, because some of these players have moved on elsewhere, but we’re talking very recent British Lions speaking to us about coming here.” 

Recent news reports have suggested that several rugby creditors, including former players and staff, have yet to be paid, potentially leaving Worcester vulnerable to regulatory sanctions from the RFU. In a now-deleted online post, the club stated that a significant number of creditors have already received payment and emphasised that all actions taken have been in line with the RFU’s outlined provisions.

Regarding the squad-building, given the calibre of players in contention, and new squad members like Josh Bassett who have stepped down a division, it would be easy to assume that Worcester’s new owners are spending heavily to assemble the squad. But Stephen is quick to dispel that notion, perhaps as a quiet way of drawing a line between this new era and the one that came before, without ever naming names. “I don’t want to talk about what happened here previously. It’s a little bit like Voldemort and Harry Potter, where if I mention the names of the previous owners in front of the staff, everyone sort of stops. 

“If you’re coming to Worcester, you’re coming to buy into the project, you’re not coming here for the money, because guess what? Our budgets are Championship budgets. We won’t be paying as much as some of the teams in the Championship this year, I’m sure of that.

“There’s a misperception, because some of the names that we have in here, that we’re spending highly. In reality, I think the attraction of coming to Worcester Warriors is that we have an amazing stadium, we have a Prem-level programme, Prem-level coaching, and players will be looked after as if they are in the Premiership, but on a Championship budget.

“There hasn’t been one person that’s joined us for a pay rise. Not one person from any club has come here on more money than where they were previously. There’s certainly been no poaching of players, everybody that has come has been out of contract.

“We owe it to Worcester Warriors players, supporters and staff, that we don’t let the business get to that point again. So, it actually becomes quite easy to make decisions, you can be quite non-emotional about it, because you know that you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

Worcester’s return to rugby’s second tier was confirmed in early April. On the surface, it felt inevitable, a club projected to inject nearly £30 million into the local economy through tourism and matchday footfall surely had a place waiting for it. 

But in speaking with Stephen, it becomes clear that nothing about the process was guaranteed. “Applying to the Championship was so hard,” says Stephen with a hint of a groan. “I will admit it, of the three things I came in to sort out, I thought that getting back into rugby was going to be an armchair ride. My view was, we have an amazing stadium, we’re in the middle of the country, incredible facilities, people knew Chris, and what a stand-up guy he was.

“We had people like myself who have got lots of pedigree within elite sport, a great head coach in Matt Everard and everybody that we’ve got for medical, strength and conditioning, they’re all from the Premiership. 

“So I thought it would be, get the cigars out, Worcester are back in a great league. It was the absolute opposite. We were forensically audited and checked against all of the key criteria on many occasions. To the credit of the RFU, I don’t have any issue with them not wanting a repeat performance of what happened previously at Worcester or anywhere else. 

“We have been held to a higher account than any other club would be. So our performance going forward will be subject to a higher scrutiny. You could argue that everybody should have the same level of scrutiny, but we appreciate that we’ve come from a different place.”

With kick-off imminent under the lights and the Cecil Duckworth Stand– recently renamed to honour the former chairman and local hero who passed away in November 2020 – packed and gleaming, the stadium announcer at Sixways sets the tone. “It’s been three long, torturous years without the club,” he begins, before urging the crowd to raise their voices for the return of their Worcester Warriors.

As pyrotechnics fire and Warriors-coloured smoke billows into the night air, the team charges out from the tunnel to a roar. A moment later, head coach Matt Everard emerges, quieter in his entrance but no less focused. He moves with intent to the sideline, joining his coaches with a set jaw and watchful eyes.

A former openside flanker for Leicester, Wasps and Nottingham, where he retired as captain, Matt has steadily built a reputation as one of the game’s rising coaching talents. After five years at Wasps, he moved to Leicester Tigers, initially as senior academy coach and then as defence coach. Now, for the first time, the head coach job is his. “I’m probably a little bit fast-tracked because I retired quite young at 28, went straight into coaching and had to learn quickly at Wasps,” says Worcester’s head coach. 

“Then overnight Wasps went under, and I had the good fortune to go and join Leicester Tigers, which was a brilliant experience. 

“I’ve probably been fast-tracked because I was a bloody average player, and I’ve found a real love for coaching earlier than a lot of players that were better than me, that had longer, more successful careers, and therefore came into coaching later.

“For me, the metrics of success are winning silverware, which we didn’t do while I was at Leicester. So, did I feel like it was a successful coaching campaign when I was there? I had a great time and learnt a lot, but we didn’t win, so, I don’t know.” 

Despite his own doubts, many would consider Matt’s time at Leicester a success. The Tigers reached a Premiership semi-final in 2022/23, followed by a Premiership Cup final the next season, and last year boasted the second-best defence in the league, behind only Bath. 

He was still with Leicester when the opportunity at Worcester first surfaced, though, by his own admission, he was kept somewhat in the dark during those early stages. “It was November last year that I first had a phone call from Chris and Stephen,” recalls Matt. “We’d all been affiliated and worked together at Wasps, so we all knew each other pretty well.

“At that point, it was all quite hush-hush around Chris owning Worcester and Sixways. They invited me for a coffee at Sixways, so then I drove down on a day off, got there and asked what the hell was going on. 

“Chris explained the situation and then Stephen talked about the project and how he wanted to build something at Worcester. They said they were really interested in me being head coach and assembling a team and a management group from scratch. 

“I remember driving home, my mind was absolutely going like the clappers. I sat down with my wife and gave her verbal diarrhoea for about two and a half hours about what an amazingly unique opportunity that is in sport and in rugby. 

“I think she could probably see the excitement in my eyes. At the end of that evening, she said, ‘you got to do this, this sounds unbelievable, and look how excited you are’. I probably knew that night that it was something I really wanted to be part of.”

Matt was ‘stood down’ from his role as defence coach at Leicester in February and announced as Worcester’s head coach in May. But he was far from idle in the intervening months, working behind the scenes with Stephen and others to pull the personnel of a rugby club together, basically from scratch. “Steve and Chris were incredible in giving me autonomy in putting the squad and staff together,” says Matt. “We definitely looked at the top four clubs from last season in the Prem, the URC and the Top 14, and what the demographic looked like in those clubs.

“That was a really useful project to do, and we understood the importance of getting players with senior experience, who have played in some huge games for huge clubs and what winning looks like. We also needed the energy and enthusiasm of talented younger players that are just so desperate to slingshot their career in the right direction.”

One by one, the new Warriors were revealed, often in playful, creative fashion. The club’s Instagram account leaned into the mystery with its recurring ‘Guess the Warrior’ posts: cryptic player facts teased in the captions, fans piling into the comments with their guesses, before a Top Trumps-style graphic finally gave the game away.

Away from social media, the team went hiking and camped in the Malvern Hills, where a few of the less outdoorsy members of the side failed to bring tents and had to sleep in their cars, and had bonding sessions where beers were passed around freely. Since then, it’s been all about the rugby, and how to challenge in a new-look league for all participants, not just Worcester. Matt is ready for the challenge. “I think the Championship is getting far better, it’s improving again and again,” considers Matt. “Ealing have deservedly been the flag bearers for a while, when you put people like Craig Newby into Cambridge, you put people like Dave Ward into Ampthill, they’re going to improve those clubs massively and the league as a whole. The clubs are all really well run, and there’s some brilliant coaches like Craig Hammond at Nottingham, who has done very well.

“What we’re doing here is far from a phoenix rising from the ashes, in my view. This is a new club with new ownership and new people. It’s a new team, but to have that extra little bit of emotional affiliation for the city and the fans is huge for us.

“It would be irresponsible of us to start throwing around the P word or anything like that, but let me tell you, I’m really excited about this side.” 

As the announcer runs through today’s line-up, which features experienced Premiership players like Tom Seabrook and promising young stars like Tim Hoyt, one name draws a louder response than the rest: “Starting at number seven… you might have heard of him, it’s Matt Kvesic.”

Among a handful of familiar faces, Tiff Eden, who broke through in his early days and Will Lane, a product of the academy, Matt stands out. At 33, with more than three hundred games behind him, he’s still flinging himself into breakdowns, chasing punts, and snarling into contact like a man with something left to prove.

“I get called old a lot, actually, it’s not fair mate! With the squad we’ve got, I think I’m like the seventh oldest,” laughs the veteran flanker and, let’s not forget, former England international. “I genuinely believe I can still add value as a player, but also around training, I want to help out with breakdown drills and all that stuff.”

After making his debut for Worcester in 2009, Matt went from being the youngest player to ever represent the club in the professional era, to playing for Worcester on 99 occasions over two spells, the second being cut short in 2022 when the club entered administration. 

Despite having spent the intervening years with Zebre Parma in Italy and then two seasons at Coventry, once the opportunity came back around, there was only going to be one answer, and Matt became the first signing of the Warriors’ new era. 

“Coming back was definitely a no-brainer for me,” decrees Matt. “I didn’t think I’d have the opportunity to play for Worcester again after what happened; to have the chance to come back was amazing.

“I had a great two years at Coventry, but when the prospect of coming back became a bit more real, I was always going to come back to Worcester. It’s a proper full circle moment. I started in the academy there in 2008, seventeen years ago… maybe I am quite old. I don’t know, it’s quite emotional.

“Chris spoke to me around April time, outlining the vision for the club and how great it would be if I came back. He didn’t have to sell it to me, to be honest. My first day was really weird – coming into pre-season has big first-day-of-school vibes at the best of times; everyone’s a little bit nervous, and this was all heightened because of the situation we were in.

“But for me, it instantly felt like all the bad stuff that happened to Worcester never happened. I turn up and the whole squad is different, there are a few members of staff who had familiar faces, but more than anything else it just felt totally surreal walking around the place.

“With the rugby side of things, you’re able to get into the process of training and back to a normal mindset. We’ve had some open training sessions which were amazing to have the opportunity to connect with the fans, it was moving to see a lot of genuinely emotional people. For a lot of the new lads, I think it’s important to understand how Worcester going affected people’s lives.”

From the very first kick, with blue and yellow smoke still hanging like fog above the turf, it’s clear the Warriors have the bit between their teeth. Bath have named a strong side, featuring stars from their treble-winning season such as Ben Spencer, Guy Pepper and former Warrior Ollie Lawrence, all of whom have been handed starting berths.

Barely three minutes in, Siva Naulago, the Fijian wing signed from Bristol Bears, streaks down the right wing and offloads to Louis Brown, the former Newcastle Falcons full-back, who barrels over the line for the Warriors’ opening try. The roar that follows is more than just excitement: it’s a cathartic blend of anticipation and release, three years of waiting, uncorked in a single, surging moment. It’s been a long time since the Sixways crowd watched their team pass down the line and a full-back go flying through to score. 

Every penalty, every scuffle, every loose ball sparks a cheer. The Warriors go into half-time with a 14-12 lead in a match played at a tempo that has no business belonging to pre-season. At half-time, the vibes are strong and the music blares once more, though not loud enough to drown out a few weary predictions that Warriors could tire in the second half, having put so much into the first.

This is a knowledgeable crowd at Sixways, and sure enough Bath begin the second half in ominously clinical fashion, scoring two quick tries and exploiting some of the weaknesses Warriors have as a new side who are yet to fully gel. 

There are wholesale changes in the second half, including Matt departing in the aftermath of another Bath try, which disrupt the flow of the game, but it does give the crowd ample opportunity to get a look at a lot of their new players.

With Bath leading 33-14 in the closing stages, there’s a sense that the match, after a breathless first half, might quietly fizzle out. But the Warriors dig in. There’s a final burst of energy, a few crisp offloads, and then Will Trewin slices through to dot down in the dying seconds, one last spark to stir the Sixways crowd before the whistle blows.

It’s been a solid outing against the best team in the land, and the slow, meandering lap of appreciation feels entirely earned. Among the last to begin the lap is Matt Kvesic, trailing slightly behind his team-mates.  

With his young son in tow, he strolls the perimeter, stopping often to greet familiar faces, pose for selfies, exchanging words that don’t need microphones. “We definitely feel the emotion circling around everything,” Matt tells us. “I’ve been saying to the team that we have to embrace it. I never left Worcester, when I played for Coventry, I just did the commute from where I’ve always lived.

“I’d be doing my weekly shop, and you bump into fans who ask what’s going on, telling me that they miss the club. That was on my mind at those open training sessions, the importance of Warriors coming back for the wider community.

“I think it does add a little bit of pressure, but it’s good pressure, because it’s up to us now to perform. To keep bums on seats and supporters wanting to come and watch us play, we need to play a good brand of rugby. 

“I think that’s exciting, you don’t get many opportunities to build relationships with fans like you do at Worcester.”

Around them, the usual post-match bustle begins to take over, but then, cutting through the chatter and the chill of early autumn, comes a noise rising from the Sixways speakers. The unmistakable opening notes of The Boys Are Back In Town sound out once more. 

“This is a rugby city,” asserts Matt as fans begin to gently file away, “it’s huge for Worcester to have their rugby club back. They say you never know what you have until it’s gone: well these fans have been through that, we’ve got to be hugely grateful to play with their support.” 

Story by Scott Duke-Giles

Pictures by Samuel Simpson-Pattison

This extract was taken from issue 31 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

It’s almost disconcerting when you get asked a question by Dan Carter. Such is the gravitas of the former All Black, you just don’t expect it, especially when he seems genuinely interested in your response and there’s even a follow-up question too. This is the man who delivered the perfect rugby performance against the British & Irish Lions, who was a key part of the most dominant All Blacks side of the modern era, who has been named best male player on the planet three times, and who still has the kind of chiselled good looks normally reserved for superheroes, and Brad Pitt. But, here we are, taking a taxi across town with Dan Carter, answering his questions, which mostly centre around the Rugby Journal, which he favourably compares to a French sports fashion magazine. He surmises, the journal was ‘kind of like a book that you sit on a coffee table, and it can stay there for a couple of years’, which we definitely take as a compliment. 

He’s in town for the women’s Rugby World Cup final, which he correctly predicts is going to go England’s way. “No team has beaten the All Blacks at a World Cup and then won their next game [since 1991],” he says, using the men’s example to explain why he reckons Canada may struggle to repeat the heights they achieved in their win over the Black Ferns. “England and the Black Ferns have
a great rivalry there, so I did think they [New Zealand] could upset them but, anyway, good for England because they’ve been so dominant for so long, and it’s been too long since they won a World Cup.”

We’ve got an hour with Dan, and for the shoot we’re taking him to Mountain, a Soho restaurant owned by a Welsh rugby fan [Tomos Parry]. No sooner have we arrived, than Dan is sharing rugby stories of Wales with Tomos, who’s perhaps also taken aback by the authenticity of this rugby icon. In return, Tomas quickly serves him up bellota (the really good jamon, from acorn-fed piggies), langoustines, and beef short rib, just enough to hopefully keep Dan chatting for a bit longer. Not that he needs much encouragement, but we’ve got quite the rugby life to cover, one that began around the late-80s in the minis of Southbridge (thirty miles south-west of Canterbury) and ended over thirty years later at the same club, where he completed his final rugby season with a Coleman Shield final
 win over rivals Waihora [40-32]. 

Before we get to that though, we start in the now. “I’m just looking after my four children,” he says of his current main role. “They’re four, six, ten and twelve, and actually I’m just loving having the weekends back again. 

“You kind of forget what it’s like,” he continues, “because when you play, your weekends are just dictated by rugby, even on a Sunday you’re tired, beaten up from a game, so it’s actually nice to have your weekend to just chill with the family and play the role of Uber driver for their sports.

“Now you’re on the sidelines of junior rugby,” continues Dan. “I do a little bit of coaching, I’m not the head coach, I just kind of fill in wherever I can. 

“I refereed a few games, you know, like under-8s; some of the sideline parenting is horrible at times. But yeah, if I had whistle in hand, I felt like I knew a little bit more about rugby, so they tended to shut up when I was reffing.”

Naturally, being one of the most famous rugby players of all time, his kids must hang on his every rugby word? “It’s funny because, for my kids, I’m just their father, so I might tell them something, and then their coach will say the exact same thing, and then they’ll listen to the coach more than they’ll listen to me.

“A year or so ago,” he continues, “my now twelve-year-old son asked if I could find him a kicking coach, maybe Richie Mo’unga or Beauden Barrett to help with his kicking. My wife just burst out laughing.

"That’s the beauty of being a parent," he says. "After about thirty seconds, he did say, ‘actually, you know something about kicking, don’t you?’. I can try to help, but they don’t really want to listen and I kind of enjoy that.”

It was his kids that made him realise it was time to bring to an end a career that saw him whitewash the Lions, win two Rugby World Cups, earn 112 caps, score 1,598 points at international level, and win three Super Rugby titles with Crusaders, while also taking Pro14 titles with Perpignan and Racing 92, and even a Top League championship with Kobelco Steelers in Japan. “I went back to New Zealand after they cancelled the Japanese season [due to covid], that was going to be my last contract,” says Dan. “and I started thinking about chasing other contracts and wondering if I should keep going. It wasn’t until my son actually asked if I was going back to Japan or not. I said, ‘no’, and he said, ‘that’s the best news I’ve ever heard’ and I realised, ‘oh my God, I’m playing for the wrong reasons’. I’m providing for my family, but to be honest, the kids couldn’t give a shit if I was playing rugby, they just want me to be home more. That just put everything into perspective, it was the right time.”

Southbridge might not be familiar to everyone, but it’s a long-time stomping ground for the Carter family. “It’s a small town, probably no more than a thousand people,” explains Dan. “Dad’s lived on the same street his whole life. He actually built a house about five blocks down from the same street from where he grew up. And it’s probably about five hundred metres from the rugby club, and that’s where I played ever since I first started playing, for Southbridge rugby club as a six year old.”

Rugby and cricket were Dan Carter’s first loves, one in the winter, one in the summer, with one just nudging the other into second place. “It was my dream to be an All Black, although I never actually thought it would happen,” he says. “I was always doing it just for fun, but when that dream became a reality, I never wanted that feeling to leave. I didn’t want to be just an All Black, I wanted to be an All Black great, that’s what was driving me each and every day.”

There were a few bumps in the road before then. Opting to go to Christchurch High School, instead of accepting the scholarships on offer at private schools, Dan put himself on a pathway that had been trodden by an awful lot of All Blacks before him. “Going to this big historical rugby school, I just felt this weight of pressure,” he says. “You walk down the hallway, and you’ve got photos of all these past students that have gone on to represent the All Blacks, there’s all these trophies, and then, all of a sudden, you’re playing in front of thousands of people. 

“And in that first year, I had one of the worst years of my life,” he admits.

“I was seventeen and I thought, ‘right, this is my pathway to be a professional rugby player’, but we had a really unsuccessful year, I didn’t play that well, and I lost the love for the game.”

As a result, he opted not to play senior rugby. “I went to social rugby with my mates [with the colts], it was a really nice reminder of why I played the game. 

“I was playing for the wrong reasons,” he admits. “When I was playing it was all about me, it was all about ‘this is my path to being a professional, right?’. I was far too serious, I wasn’t enjoying the game, enjoying the moments, and that’s why you should do what you do, because you love it. 

“I had an amazing year playing with my friends and someone must have noticed I was playing some good rugby…”

On the side, he was earning money the more traditional way. “I was doing a bit of building; my father’s a builder, so I worked for him for half a year, and I did a few other various jobs, just trying to get by. I was a horrible builder though.

“So that didn’t last long," he adds, “but through playing social rugby, I ended up realising I loved sport, I loved health, so I signed up for the local polytech to train to be a personal trainer.”

Dan did play for his school’s ‘old boys’ team, but he then found himself replaced by some serious quality. “We got to the final [with Christchurch High School Old Boys] and I got put on the bench because a whole lot of All Blacks came back. 

“This was back in the days when the internationals would play club rugby, so our backline had the two Mauger brothers, Aaron and Nathan, and Daryl Gibson, Reuben Thorne came back too.”

Before his career as a PT came to fruition, his rugby one took off. Canterbury’s selectors noticed him in 2001, and he made it into a New Zealand colts team featuring the likes of Luke McAlister and Jerome Kaino. “I came back from the [junior] World Cup and got selected in the Canterbury team,” says Dan, picking up the story. “All of a sudden, I was in the same changing room as my childhood heroes, Andrew Mehrtens and Justin Marshall. I was just thinking, ‘what the hell am I doing here? I was only playing social rugby last year, and now I’m playing with all these professional All Blacks.’ 

“I got my first contract as a Crusader later that year then," he continues, “fast forward ten months, and I’m playing at my first Rugby World Cup [2003], it all happened so fast it’s ridiculous…”

Dan learnt quickly: even at academy level, he was a complete novice. “I’d never been to a gym at this stage,” says Dan. “I’m nineteen years old, and never touched a weight, but with the academy I trained through the summer for the first time ever. Normally, I just played cricket, I wouldn’t be doing any gym work or running, but I loved it. That’s what set me up and put me on the steps to professional sport, even though I wasn’t really getting paid. I think my contract in the academy was about NZ$2,000 [£860].

“Even then from the academy when I started playing for the NPC team Canterbury, I signed a three-year contract, and it was NZ$10,000
[£4,300] a year.

“Then in 2004,” he continues. “I’d been in the All Blacks for two years, been to the Rugby World Cup, but my provincial contract was still only NZ$10,000.

“It was a bit of a jump from that contract to my next one.”

Once he’d navigated the age-grade system, Dan’s trajectory was rapid. “I just felt like every time that there was a step up, whether it was from club rugby to provincial rugby, to Super Rugby, to the All Blacks, it sounds weird, but it became easier.  The quality of people that you’re playing with is so much better, which means you just have to focus on your job. 

"And there’s the professionalism, in terms of specialist coaching you’re getting, the resources are better. It just felt the transition was really easy for me, in every level that I took a step up. I sort of really enjoyed pressure, I just wanted to prove to the people that had given me a chance, that I wasn’t going to let them down. 

"The fact that Robbie Deans [then Crusaders coach] had showed faith in me for my first professional contract, meant I was going to train harder than anyone else to prove to him that I belonged there.”

Andrew Mehrtens was the incumbent in the number ten jersey, one of Dan’s heroes, and while he expected to wait for his turn, it didn’t take long. “So in my very first professional game of rugby for the Crusaders, I got named in the number ten jersey ahead of Mehrts,” recalls Dan.  “As soon as the team was named, and he was on the bench, Merhts was the first one to come up to me and say, ‘Congratulations, if there’s anything you need this week, I’m here to help’. I mean, this guy would be hurting, and I think the fact he did that was a real reflection on him as a person, but also the environment of the Crusaders.”

The debut, in 2003 for the reigning Super Rugby champions against Hurricanes saw Dan thrust into the spotlight for the first time. “All week, the fans were, ‘who’s this guy starting ahead of Mehrts?’. And I was so nervous.”

In front of 30,000 at Jade Stadium, the pressure was on. “So, the game starts, I miss a kick from in front of the posts, and I’m already looking to the bench. I get another penalty from a similar position, miss that as well. I could just hear the whole crowd go, ‘okay, get this guy off’. 

“Unfortunately for Aaron Mauger, he got injured, so I moved to twelve, Mehrts came on, and says, ‘keep kicking’, and I’m, ‘nah, mate, I’m done’. So, he kicked but then I end up scoring a couple of tries, and had a great debut [37-21] after that.” 

The rest of the campaign saw Dan retain the number twelve jersey, a role he also took on for the All Blacks, playing next to both Merhtens and Carlos Spencer. “I’m just learning from these two different styles,” says Dan. “I just wanted to learn. On one side, it was backing your instincts and the flamboyant play of Carlos, then there was the real strategy vision of Mehrts, and I’m feeding off both of them.”

Learning first-hand, literally alongside, two great All Black fly-halves helped him ultimately to leapfrog both after the 2003 World Cup, during which he managed to nail nine conversions against Canada [in a 68-6 win], in his only start, with Spencer the first-choice. 

For the autumn series the following year, the All Blacks left both Mehrtens and Spencer at home, with Dan stepping in as the starting ten. Wins over Italy (10-59, a 19-point haul), Wales (25-26, 10 points), and France (6-45, 29 points) representing a decent start for Dan, and he was up and running. His emergence was timed to perfection. “Throughout that autumn series, after every game, I was doing media and all everyone was talking about, was the Lion series.

“You can’t really compare it to anything else,” he says. “The Rugby World Cup is the pinnacle, that’s what you want to win more than anything, but to have a Lions series during your time in the black jersey is so unique.

“You could have a ten-year All Black career and be one of the greats, like Jonah Lomu for example, and never get to play against the Lions. To get that early in my career, I just wanted to be a part of this.”

Dan Carter destroyed the Lions, never more so than in the second Test when his 33-point-haul – two tries, four conversions and five penalties – in a 48-18 win not only secured the series win, but marked him out as one of the greats, producing one of the all-time performances. He was still only 23. “People may have known of me, fans in New Zealand, it was my third year playing for the
All Blacks, but I guess it kind of stamped me on the world stage,” he admits. “It showed what I could do on the biggest stage, I was just constantly trying to strive for the perfect game, and that’s probably the closest I got to it. 

“It just grew the expectations of what I wanted to do every time I played,” he says. “And I didn’t want it to just be a one-off game, I wanted to have such high standards every time I played.

“But, obviously, it was a special game,” he admits.

Rugby World Cups were next on his list. He’d been part of the 2003 squadthat was expected to end New Zealand’s World Cup wait, since the inaugural 1987 win, but that ended in defeat to Australia in the semi-final. “I could see it hurt more experienced players a lot more than it was hurting me,” he says. “These guys that might never go to another World Cup, this was their one chance or their last chance. 

“That was was ingrained in me from then on, I want to be a part of the next World Cup, I needed to be there in 2007 to right the wrongs of 2003. I played some of my best rugby from 2003 to 2007 and I was in my prime in 2007…”

But again, the All Blacks failed, this time it was even worse. “We lost a quarter final [18-20 to France in Cardiff]. We were one of the best teams in the world, but we just couldn’t perform at Rugby World Cups. 

“It was hard in 2007, we were red-hot favourites, and there was even a sense within the environment that we were going to win, but we didn’t, we were the most underperforming All Blacks side in the history of the Rugby World Cup. 

“There was a lot of criticism, there was a lot of scrutiny, rightfully so; we didn’t perform when it when it mattered most and the country goes into a little minor state of depression, so it was hard, but you just have to bounce back.”

The All Blacks, says Dan, were in a cycle. Every four years new coaches would rebuild, right the wrongs, then when it didn’t work out, they were replaced and so it continued. “It’s only a failed campaign if you don’t learn from it,” says Dan. “At the time, it was really hard to deal with but that was the foundation to set us up for being a dominant team for the next ten years or so. That was the reason that we were able to win back-to-back World Cups, by taking the lessons of 2007 and growing.”

And also keeping the same coaches.  “Credit to New Zealand Rugby, they broke the cycle, they reappointed the coaching group that lost the 2007 World Cup: Graham Henry, Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith.

“Between the coaching group and the leadership team we realised that we didn’t deal with pressure that well. Yeah, we love beating teams by forty or fifty points. But we had to work on our mental strength to be able to win in really big moments when everything’s going against us. 

“We just spent the next four years really working on our mental strength. In 2007 we were the fittest team, we were the strongest we’d ever been, the fastest we’d ever been. We were doing PBs in the gym, amazing athletes, but we weren’t spending any time on our mental strength.”

Having a team that had tasted defeat helped too. “They had the hurt of losing a World Cup and that can drive as a great motivation. That’s something that the All Blacks didn’t have in 2019, there were no players in that team that had lost a World Cup.”

In 2011, they won. Albeit showing every ounce of resilience by edging thescrappiest of finals to beat France 8-7, the winning kick ultimately coming from the boot of Stephen Donald, the famously fourth-choice fly-half, who came in after injuries not only to Dan, but also Colin Slade and Aaron Cruden. Watching from the sidelines was far from easy.

“It sucked,” he says. “The nerves, it’s almost easier playing. You’re in control, you can dictate play, keep things cool and influence the game, but when you’re on the sideline, you’re a nervous wreck.”

Was it hard not being on the pitch when they broke the World Cup hoodoo. “Mixed emotions,” he admits. “You’re proud that finally it’s happened, as you’re thinking ‘when will it come?’ after 24 years. But you want, selfishly, to be in that moment. You want to be on that field, but at the same time, things happen for a reason, and that grew motivation inside of me to want to be there in four years’ time.”

Four years on, they were facing Australia in the final at Twickenham. This time, there was no doubt. A 34-17 scoreline a reflection of New Zealand dominance, Dan completing the triumvirate of kicks (two conversions, four penalties and a drop-goal) to notch 23 points. “I felt like everything in my career was building up for that moment,” he says. “The quarter-final losses, the injuries, I just felt we were in complete control in that tournament. It was a strange feeling, it was like everything had been working towards it.

“And the way it just all panned out, we were able to be the first team to win back-to-back World Cups, to win a World Cup outside of New Zealand, to have a great performance, and to finish playing in the black jersey with a victory alongside some of my best mates that were also finishing. 

“Seven of us players that had all played around one hundred Test matches were playing their last game in the black jersey that day,” says Dan. “So yeah, such a special period to share that moment with them.”

Relief had been the main theme of the 2011 win, but in 2015, it was celebration. “We could actually enjoy it a bit more. When you’ve been working so hard for something and to achieve a goal you set up to achieve, it was such a special feeling.

“It was the greatest moment,” he says. “I mean, my first and last games in rugby, are my most special moments.”

Then 33, Dan returned to France for his rugby, where he’d previously enjoyed success with Perpignan, helping the unfancied club to the Top14 title in 2009. This time, it was Paris and Racing 92, another title followed, and he’d leave to join Japanese club Kobelco, in what was his last international stop. “I never wanted to retire, but I knew I had to at some stage; you had to finish playing at some stage, but I dragged it out as long as I could.”

Even after his kids stepped in to force the issue, he couldn’t resist one final season where it all began. “I went to play club rugby in Southbridge, a season for them to end my career,” he says. “It was back to being just amateur players playing for the right reasons, to play with their friends, for a beer afterwards.”

Naturally, having one of rugby’s true global stars rock up on your local pitch was too good an opportunity for some players to miss. “I can’t remember if it was a semi-final or final, but as I was kicking the ball, I got absolutely smashed. And on the anniversary of that hit, the guy that hit me puts something on social media every year: three years since I smashed Dan, four years since I smashed Dan…

“You’d pass the ball, and then you’re trying to sidestep the next two guys that are trying to hit you, it was a lot of fun and we went on to win the Coleman Shield.”

He was playing alongside a cousin, with old mates, he even had mates on the opposition and even the performance was perfect. “We were down by twenty points at half-time, and then we came back to win [40-32], it was incredible.”

Dan has now polished off the langoustines, the bellota, and had his fill of the short rib, he’s given us more time than he had to spare, and yet is still effusive in his apologies that he has to go, albeit still willing to answer a few more questions. 

Some things you just can’t not ask, such as ‘who is the best he’s seen?’ “Richie McCaw, such an amazing leader,” he says. “There’s nothing that he would ask of his team-mates that he wouldn’t do, and he’d often still do more. Just to see how he put his body on the line, week in, week out...

“I would also have loved to have played with Jonah Lumu,” he adds. “His career finished the same year I started, but it would have been pretty special to have him playing outside me.”

Best team? “I played with really special teams, but 2015 was a special one, it was quite a dominant era. Yeah, so many players playing that, in their positions, were probably the best players in the world. 

“And we just worked so hard,” he continues, “and we had this underlying confidence around us to create history.” 

Aside from tending to the Carter flock, and trying to give his kids advice, Dan is wearing multiple hats these days. Like many, he struggled after rugby, eventually going through what he calls a ‘repurposing’ of his life. “I dragged out my career so long just because I wanted to block it [the future] out and thought it was a distraction to my focus on being the best player in the world,” he says. “And who knows, it might have been. It might not have been. 

“I was investing, and financially I was sound, but it was more ‘what’s going to drive me every morning to get out of bed?’, and that was the hardest thingthat I had to deal with.”

He wrote a book, The Art of Winning, he sought the counsel of other professionals who had been through the same thing, including Jonny Wilkinson, and he met with a former ad agency boss whose specialised in helping people find their purpose. “I was a little bit lost and it actually made me look inward for the first time. The whole ‘who am I now that I’m not a rugby player’.”

And what he discovered was a passion for ‘social impact’. And while the phrase is without doubt massively over-used by Linkedin warriors who have no intention to create any change beyond their follower count, in the hands of Dan Carter it means something. He’s not just talking the talk, he’s set up the DC10 fund, which works with UNICEF to help, among others, impoverished communities in the Pacific Islands; and he’s got a high school foundation with Richie McCaw that gives grants to teenagers to pay for everything from their boots and equipment to training fees; and he was instrumental in setting up the Global Rugby Players Foundation, alongside the likes of McCaw and Wilkinson. “We all achieved a lot in the game, and we had our challenges,” he says. “But imagine the players that get the dreaded tap on the shoulder from the coach and they are no longer wanted or had a career-ending injury and they have nowhere to go.

“There’s a lot of people like that, so that was the start of forming a support network for professional rugby players, men, women, sevens, fifteens, to help professional players navigate change as they transition out of the game.”

Before he heads off, the conversation turns to grassroots rugby, the one place where the far-too-often maligned concept of ‘rugby values’ is still alive and well. Now as a rugby dad, he appreciates those values more than anything. “I went to a rugby tournament for under-10s to under-13s, and my two kids were playing.

“And there were over one hundred teams, tents everywhere, barbecues, communities.  Once you get out of Auckland and you look at the rural parts of New Zealand, rugby is thriving, that’s the heartbeat of rugby. It’s like where I grew up, my little country town, that gave me so much energy.

“People are still going to the club rooms on the Saturday, forgetting the stresses of life on the farm or shit that went wrong during the week, and just coming together; everything is still centred towards the rugby club and the Saturday watching rugby, kids playing, adults playing, a beer afterwards, hot chips for the kids. 

“That’s the values of rugby,” he enthuses. “We don’t focus enough on those values. It’s all around safety and parents second-guessing whether their kid should play rugby or not, maybe they’re better if they play soccer or basketball…

“Those values of rugby, they’re still there in the amateur game, and that’s what we need to double down on, because what this incredible sport does is teach you life lessons, it’s not just about the rugby.” 

And, yet when the rugby is as good as when Dan Carter plays it, it’s easy to see why so many of us often think otherwise.  

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Richard Johnson

This extract was taken from issue 31 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

It was acidic water that first made Scarborough what it is today. It was coming down cliff and running into the sea, and such was its chemical make-up, the healing properties were seized upon, put into print, ‘Scarborough Spa’ became a thing and Britain’s first seaside town was born, in the 1600s.

Anna, the lesser-known of the Bronte sisters, was tempted here to spend her final days, where she stills resides; it’s also home to The Vaults, aka the ‘Covent Garden of the North’. And, preceding all of this, is the 12th-Century Scarborough Castle guarding the bay, and its fine curve of golden sand, from any outsiders. 

For those that know, Scarborough is special, and Zoe Stratford, co-captain of Gloucester-Hartpury, the ‘three-peat’ champions of England, and captain of 2025 World Cup champions elect, the Red Roses, knows. Born and bred in the north-east Yorkshire town, until recently her parents had two different cafes right in the heart of the place. “My dad’s sold his now, but my mum’s still got hers,” she says, “but I think she’s looking to sell hers in the next couple of years, to enjoy a bit of retirement.”

Such is Zoe’s connection with Scarborough, she’s making sure that she keeps a little slice of it in the old town, with a cottage bought together with her husband Luke Stratford. “I still wanted to have some sort of strings attached to Scarborough,” she says. “Obviously we go up whenever we can but I just wanted to have something that’s mine, but also a little bit of a business as well. So we got a little Airbnb, a fisherman’s cottage, in the old town, it’s only about seven minutes from the beach.”

Aside from everything else that’s been happening to Zoe in recent times, winning domestic titles (on repeat), Grand Slams (also on repeat) and even World Players of the Year, she’s also managed to squeeze in a few off-field achievements. “I got married,” she says, before giving us a rundown of Luke’s current rugby activity. “He was with Leicester Tigers, he was their forwards coach the last two seasons, and now he’s at Sale to be the scrum coach for the women, so there’s a lot of travel at the moment. But we still do have our house down in Gloucester, which is our main base, and he’s sort of just finding his feet up in Sale, before we see if he actually wants to get somewhere there, if he’s going to be there long term.

“He’s actually up in Scarborough with my parents at the moment, it’s a bit nearer to Sale than Gloucester, so he’s with them for a couple of weeks, just while I’m in camp.”

The two met while students at Hartpury. “He didn’t coach me,” she says. “But we both went to Hartpury University, he did do a little bit of coaching with the hookers at Gloucester-Hartpury, and then coached around the local area and played for Hartpury RFC.”

There’s a lot of water still to pass under the bridge before the two settle on their forever house, not least respective careers on an upward trajectory. “It’s tough,” she says of the two having to always be in separate places. “If he wants to be the best coach he can be, he has to travel and move to those areas. But I’ve said to him that I’m going to be selfish for the next seven, eight years, however long I’ve got playing, and then he can do whatever he wants, and I’ll follow him around. But, it is difficult. It is difficult, but we manage, we’re all good.

“Although I’ve always said that eventually I would like to end up near Yorkshire,” she adds, “because I really want my parents to kind of be involved if we have children.”

But all that’s for future Zoe [and Luke]. Zoe is now in the midst of the mostimportant, career-defining period of her rugby life. Captain of club and country, recognised as one of the best in the world as a player, Six Nations’ Grand Slams in the bag, and a third title with the now-dominant force in club rugby Gloucester-Hartpury, who sealed their latest crown with a 34-19 win over Saracens back in March. How they came to be the force to be reckoned with, after years as also-rans, Zoe puts down to organisation off the field, as well as on it. “I genuinely think the biggest reason the success is James Forrester, who’s our CEO at Gloucester,” she says. “At that time when we were finishing fifth or sixth in the table, we were not even competing with the likes Saracens and Harlequins.

“Then James came, and he’s got a business mindset,” she explains. “He had businesses out in Singapore and then he came back to Cheltenham and wanted to get involved in Hartpury, because he played for them. He was our forwards coach for a bit, and I remember us clashing quite a bit, because he’d have these ideas, I didn’t agree, but it came from a place of just caring so much about the women’s game. 

“And then after that season, Sean Lynn came on board, and they created a plan where ‘Jango’ [Forrester], would become our CEO and he’d do the business side of things, he’d get the sponsorship.

“He obviously got a lot of investment for us, and got the investment from Gloucester, so we brought in the likes of Maud Muir, Sarah Beckett, Sam Monaghan, Alex Matthews, and then we had the right pool of players. His first thought was, ‘get the good players in’, and then we could work on the rest.”

Head coach Sean Lynn was then key to how they came together. “Lynny’s main ethos is about playing for each other, having license to inspire, bringing family feel,” explains Zoe. “And I think it’s something that we have always had at Gloucester, we have a very good culture, it always used to be about going out together after games.  But then if we actually wanted to take this seriously, it was about how we could bring that closeness on the pitch and work for each other every single week.”

The turning point came in November 2022, when Gloucester-Hartpury travelled to title rivals Exeter Park and came away with a 17-25 win. “I think we almost said at that point, ‘I think we might actually get to the final as I think we could actually win the Prem’,” she says. “It was all a little bit crazy. We’d beaten Saracens, Quins, Bristol but then Exeter at Sandy Park, just before Christmas, I think from that moment, we know we could do it. It was only halfway, but we were just creating so much momentum, and it kind of felt that we were like a force to be reckoned with.

“We got to that final [in 2023, against Exeter],” continues Zoe. “And when we won it [34-19], at Kingsholm – which gave it that extra bit of oomph – it was just the best day ever… winning that first final, I just remember it being so special. That we could do it in front of so many fans at Kingsholm, and obviously doing it with Mo [Natasha Hunt, her co-captain], lifting the trophy together, it was just unbelievable.

“I know there was a few girls in that group that had quite a rough year, obviously, Mo and Sarah Beckett  didn’t get selected to go to the World Cup, so it was something that we could do for those guys as well. It was my favourite, favourite final, definitely.

“I think the fact that it was a home team in the final, I think created so much more momentum, it was a real sunny, hot day, and I think people just came out in their droves. Before, maybe the finals haven’t been so successful in terms of the crowds so it was really special day, not just for rugby and Gloucester, but also, I think for the PWR, because I think it was kind of a point of change. It was when it wasn’t just the London clubs winning, it was about the likes of Exeter, Bristol and Gloucester-Hartpury also competing in those top four places.”

Even though success has continued in terms of results, the finals that have followed haven’t quite matched up in terms of crowds. “It’s still something to work on,” she says.  “I think for Gloucester this year, it’s been inconsistent in numbers, we want to be getting the big crowds,and obviously we see them come out for the semi-finals and finals. But we want to be able to have them consistently through the season. 

“I think we had a Friday night game against Quins which did well actually, so maybe we need to look at maybe changing up the days and times a bit too.”

Women’s rugby in England has certainly been eventful and such is the tinderbox nature of social media these days, it doesn’t take much to create a storm among the people of X, even if the incident is on TikTok. When England beat Wales 12-67 in front of a record 21,000 crowd at the Principality, a result that surprised few given the strength of the Red Roses, the other headline should’ve been around the attendance (the best for a women’s game in Wales), but instead it was about an impromptu TikTok danced performed by Sarah Bern and her Welsh rival, Bristol Bears team-mate, Jasmine Joyce-Butchers. “I was quite surprised by the amount of hate they got,” says Zoe. “You see the likes of Ilona Maher, and how many people she has brought into rugby from her social media, and it’s things like this that create that connection [with fans]. 

“I think all the hate comments are unacceptable, and I think for women’s rugby, we play because we enjoy it, and people expressing their personality is an important thing to do.

“Wales did lose [the game], but it doesn’t mean that she [Joyce-Butchers] can’t enjoy the celebration of the event – I think it was the first time that they got 21,000 fans at a women’s event.”

If as much energy could be put into celebrating the positives of the game, as it does the negatives, women’s rugby would be in a very different place. “I completely agree, there’s so many haters online that just want to be a keyboard warrior,” says Zoe. “I think people should celebrate the fact that people [players] want to give themselves to you, or the fact that we want to open our sport to so many different people.

“Women’s rugby is such an accepting sport, in terms of diversity, as well, any background will fit into women’s rugby, no matter where you’re from, or who you are. I think people need to understand that more, celebrating that it’s a positive place to be, there’s just a lot of hate that goes on and doesn’t need to be there at all.”

On the rugby side, one challenge for the Red Roses has been the comparative lack of competition in the Six Nations. While some sides, such as Italy and Ireland, had periods of holding off or even putting England on the back foot, to the supporters, the Grand Slam felt like a cakewalk. Five wins from five, 256 points for, 71 against. France’s late charge – having been 31-21 down at half-time – to lose by a single point 43-42, was the only time they were truly challenged. “Sometimes we don’t quite get the competition,” admits Zoe, “but say for the Red Roses, we make sure we’re doing the best that we can to put in those performances. We look at ourselves and how we can get better, because we see ourselves as the benchmark and we don’t know where the ceiling is so we try and just push and push our own standards. 

“That’s also why the likes of like the WXV has been so important,” she continues. “Because we’ve had the chance to play the top four teams in the world, we’ve had the chance to play the Black Ferns two or three times in the last few years, whereas before we’d play them maybe once in a World Cup cycle.”

Since England failed to win the 2022 Rugby World Cup, losing 31-34 to the Black Ferns in Auckland, Zoe has enjoyed nothing but success, for club and country. “It has been pretty wild,” she admits. “In my head now, I just want to win a World Cup, so bad. I think especially this year’s, it’s just about how can I now put myself in the best place for the team, so then we can now go and hopefully put ourselves in the best place possible…”

Has the ghost of 2022 (and indeed 2017, from an England perspective) been put to rest? “I think the biggest time we spoke about it was the following year we went back out to New Zealand, and it was a little bit of a touchy subject. We thought, ‘has anyone actually watched the final?’. Or are we going back out there to kind of relive this without any of us of acknowledging it? 

“A few of us were made to sit and watch that game. It was a tough game, and there was a lot of unfairness in that game, and I think it wasn’t about our ability, or if we could or couldn’t beat them, I think we all believe that we could have gone out there and beat them, but just on the day, it wasn’t our day and a lot things got in the way.

“These last four years has been about how can we still be at the top of our game, even with that unfairness, and how can we be brutal even if we face those challenges that we faced in that final.”

Unfairness? “Injuries, the cards, the lineout at the end, all those little key moments…”

What’s fair and unfair is obviously a matter of opinion, but what England have worked on is how to deal with the situations, that may seem unfair, and still progress, and ultimately win a World Cup.

It would be reasonable to expect Zoe, as captain, to feel more than a bit of pressure. “No, I wouldn’t say pressure,” she says. “I would say that I feel responsible for things, if that makes sense. In the game, I wouldn’t think about it, but then post-game, I might think, ‘Oh, damn, is that my decision that’s caused that?’.

“Before I got given the captaincy, the biggest thing I wanted to make sure was that I stay as myself as a rugby player, so that means going into games, I always try and keep it calm, think of my processes, because obviously it is a pressured job.”

How did she feel taking on the captaincy? “I was actually really nervous when I got the role,” she admits. “I think my first thought was obviously to Marlie [Packer] and how she would react because she’s been an amazing captain for us over the last the last couple of years.

“I was really nervous, because obviously I knew it was going to be difficult for her, and then I didn’t know how she would react, but she has been absolutely unbelievable.”

Her style of captaincy, she says, is lead by example. “I will do anything for the team, I’ll put my body on the line, and if I can do that, then hopefully people will be able to follow,” she says. “And hopefully that creates an environment where people are able to thrive, but also we can hear everyone’s voices in the group as well, and they’re having input into our game.”

The Red Roses bring a squad to their home World Cup, with plenty of experience from the bitter defeat of 2022, but buoyed by even more young talent, with Zoe highlighting the recent additions of Maddie Feaunati and Mia Venner, as proof of the abundance of quality within the English ranks. Is the squad better than last time? “It would be hard to say that it was better,” she says. “But I think we have a lot stronger culture now. I think that we have had very honest conversations. We have roles in the group that people are given, and they can help put the best team in the best places. 

“Now it’s like we are open with each other, about our emotions as well and how we’re feeling and I think that makes us a stronger side.

“I think it’d be so difficult to say if we were better in terms of on-pitch, because that core group is very similar to what it was last time.

“Competition in camp now is next level though,” she adds, “there’s competition in just about every single position which is incredible.”

Zoe is used to such competition, not least due to the fact her World Player of the Year win in 2021, instantly made her a target. “Just thinking back, I do remember it being completely pressurised,” she says of the individual win. “And I remember that first game back, everything was reflected in being world player of the year. In your head, it’s, ‘Oh, my God, I need to prove that I am world player of the year’, and I remember being extra nervous going into games. If did anything wrong, I’d be thinking, ‘Oh, my God, that’s not world player of the year stuff’. I kind of got to the point where I just hate people saying it.”

Hopefully, by the end of this year, they’ll be adding World Cup winner to any sentence with her name in. “I think it’s massive for women’s rugby, it could be like the biggest thing that has happened,” she says. “For it to be in England, I think we’ve created a massive fan base currently, and that’s without a World Cup.”

Zoe has seen how crowds were immense in New Zealand for the World Cup in 2022, but have since fallen away, but hopes the already existing presence of a Red Roses fanbase should avoid them suffering the same fate. “We have a fan base, we filling our stadium up more and more, so if we get it right, it could be an amazing sporting event.

“You could look at it as pressure, but we also had pressure going into the last World Cup, it felt like everyone hated us in that moment, we were also the favourites.

“Now we’ve experienced it,” continues Zoe, “and a lot of the girls were there too, and if we can put ourselves in the best possible place, I think that pressure will be relieved a little bit, but obviously pressure is pressure…”

And if you don’t win? “I would feel there was something missing,” she admits, before repeating the Red Rose thinking of being in the ‘best possible place’.

Being undercooked is something several critics have pointed to given how the Six Nations played out. “We know we’re going to get that extra bit of scrutiny whatever we do, even if we’re a little bit off it for a game,” says Zoe. “Like with the Italy game, we got a bit of scrutiny for that second half performance that we put out there. It’s just something that we have to deal with along the way.”

So not losing since the World Cup final, isn’t a problem? “We faced the biggest challenge in terms of diversity by losing a World Cup final,” asserts Zoe, “that is probably the biggest thing that we have learned off over these four years.” 

As accustomed as the Red Roses have become to growing crowds and scorelines, Zoe feels they’re on to something special, and knows, from almost a decade as a Red Rose – she made her debut in 2016, aged nineteen – what it was like when she began. “A goosebump moment was playing France at Twickenham two years ago in the Six Nations,” she says. “Obviously it was 58,000 people there, and we were not expecting it at all. 

“Just driving through the streets of Twickenham, we got off the bus, and it was just swarmed with people. I think just that moment was like, ‘Oh, my God, we have come a long, long way’.”

But, there’s still plenty more to go. “I don’t think there’s a ceiling to it,” she says of the potential of the women’s game. “We’re the girls that can drive it, we can keep pushing it and pushing it and I don’t think there is a ceiling to it. If we get it right with our fanbase, and we keep it so accessible, I think it could be an incredible sport, and then just keep on going and going.”  

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Sam Bénard

This extract was taken from issue 30 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

Every rugby player that ever earned the honour of facing Jonah Lomu has tried to track down a photo or two of them playing against the great man. Given that the number of players who squared up favourably to Jonah can be counted on one hand, a typical photo in this genre will see a player being venomously handed off, or dragged along the ground while holding on to one of Jonah’s feet, or variations thereof. It’s become its own artistic category.

And within it, Mike Catt owns the ultimate work of art. Jonah trampling right over the top of him in the 1995 Word Cup. If social media had existed in 1995, meme-land would still be pushing out fresh content about it.

For Catt, it’s something he’s gotten used to talking about. It’s consistently been a decent icebreaker in the workplace, and in some ways, it’s kept him young.

“Every time I come to a new job, there’s a picture of me getting run over by Jonah, even kids who weren’t born at the time say to me, ‘I’ve been on YouTube and I’ve seen Jonah, and all this stuff’.” Mike smiles as he talks to Rugby Journal from the Waratahs training base in Sydney, where he is five weeks into his new life as assistant coach at the club.

There’s a chance it’s a forced smile. After all, it’s 7am in the morning in Sydney and this is our first question to an England legend and World Cup winner, but Mike is nonetheless equanimous. “It is part of my journey. I don’t have a problem with it. It’s good banter, and I wasn’t the only one,” he says.

If the wider rugby world know Mike Catt for this moment in time, England fans know him for many more positive ones. His career was one that matched the fortunes of the teams he played in, whether they were Bath, England, the British & Irish Lions, or London Irish. There were crushing lows, false dawns but massive highs too.

There’s his World Cup 2003 final cameo and his thundering carry in the phase that led to Jonny Wilkinson’s drop goal, there’s his calmness off the bench in the quarter-final against Wales which turned the match in England’s favour, or his leadership of an unfancied England team at the 2007 World Cup, dragging them all the way to another World Cup final in Paris, or his time as player-coach at London Irish where he spear-headed them to a Premiership final aged 37. 

And that’s before you consider his twelve-year stint at Bath, where he won the Heineken Cup and multiple league titles during the glory days of The Rec in the mid-nineties.

But what of the bad times and the hard times, what sticks in the mind the most? “Well, you know, goal kicks. I missed five out of five at Old Trafford [in 1998].” says Mike. “The first time England had ever played at Old Trafford and we lost 25-8 against New Zealand. I should never have missed five out of five, they were so easy as well. So I got hammered in the press there. 

“It got to the point, before Jonny Wilkinson turned up, that if I missed a kick in the 20th minute, the press were blaming me for England losing the game by one point because I missed a kick. It was quite hard for me to stomach. You might have a good game, you might miss one or two kicks, and you get hammered for it … yeah, it’s funny, it’s a funny one, the press and me. 

“I understand the job they’ve got to do but without the press genuinely understanding what it feels like to stand up there, you know, to be in that situation,” he says. “It can affect kids, it can affect people. Not every article they write is a fucking good article, do you know what I mean?”

While media sentiment flickered in the wind around Mike in the early part of his career, it never affected his passion for the game – which became a powerful tonic for Mike on troubling mornings reading the newspapers in the late nineties after an England international. “You know, if I didn’t love the game as much as I did, there’s a good chance I probably would have packed it in,” says Mike. “I could very easily have packed it in. But it was just through the love of it. I’ve loved every single minute of it I can genuinely say. I’ve had my moments where I’ve been hammered in the press and all that sort of stuff, and sometimes justified, but I just love doing it. It was my escape from everything. I could just get on a rugby pitch and go and play the game. It was brilliant.”

Mike’s enthusiasm for the game not only kept him in the game but led to a fanaticism for improving his game and for reaching his own peak physical condition, one that saw him regularly head out for pavement-pounding runs the morning after a full-blooded eighty minutes for club or country. While his team-mates were negotiating how to roll out of bed and take on the stairs, Mike was lacing up his running shoes. “Sunday morning after a game, I’d go and run. It would clear my head, it was the only way I could clear my head. The only way I knew how to do anything. There wasn’t any hot and cold tubs then, you just manned up, had a drink on a Saturday night and then got up in the morning.

“My strength was my fitness,’ he reflects. “I always thought, you have to be a good decision maker as a 10 or 12, and if you’re the fittest person on the pitch, that means you can make better decisions later on in a game, when people start fatiguing. So I always drove that. It wasn’t until Jonny Wilkinson came along … otherwise, I never lost a fitness test the whole way through. I just loved it. I thrived on it. 

“It’s the way you become mentally tough as well, is running. You could sit on a rower, you could sit on a bike as much as you want, but when you run you’ve got to take yourself to a really dark place. But with that comes resilience so you can plough through eighty minutes pretty, pretty easily.”

There’s little doubt that Mike’s base level of fitness is what persuaded Clive Woodward he was worth a place on the plane to Australia for the 2003 World Cup, despite Mike not having played for England in nearly two years due to injury. 

“Clive called me up three days before they left for Australia,” recalls Mike. “I’d been texting him saying ‘just give me a game [in the pre-World Cup warm-up matches]’. And he wouldn’t give me a game. He said, ‘no shortcuts, no easy ways to go’. Okay, I thought, but I just kept training. I was in Spain flogging myself every day running. I don’t know why I was doing it because he wasn’t giving me anything. But then he phoned me up after England had lost to France in Marseille and said, ‘can you come up and do a fitness test?’. I did a fitness Test with Andy Gomarsall and Austin Healey, and I just blitzed that. I was buzzing. And then, he gave me a call on the Sunday, and off we went to Australia.

“I just loved it, you know, I was like a 16-year-old kid playing with my mates in the park because it was a bonus that I was there. We slowly got through the competition, and I played a little bit more, and then got selected for the semi-final against France. That’s why I think Clive took me – two seasons prior Serge Betsen had destroyed Jonny and the way we wanted to play. Since then Clive had always said he wanted another kicking option. Tins [Mike Tindall] and Will Greenwood weren’t kickers really, so that’s why Jonny and I got on really well. We could dovetail in terms of ‘you take five minutes, I’ll take a minute’; ‘I’ll take a kick, you take a kick’, that type thing. We had a brilliant, brilliant relationship in terms of that.”

After the win over the French – with Mike playing his part expertly in wet conditions, successfully nullifying the impact of Betsen on England’s gameplan – Mike famously told Clive Woodward to drop him for the final in favour of Tindall.

“Clive said ‘I haven’t made my mind up here’ and I said ‘put me on the bench’. The French match was the first time I’d played 70 minutes for two years and I was battered, so I was quite happy, and I did a really good job off the bench anyway.”

Had he ever asked to be dropped before? “No, you wouldn’t, it doesn’t come into it as a competitor. It just worked really well for us then. I hadn’t played for ages. You forget how emotionally and physically draining it is if you haven’t done something for a while. We were pretty open and honest with each other, and I just said to Clive, ‘look, just put me on the bench. I don’t mind it’. So that’s what happened.” 

Mike’s contribution in the final, although much shorter, was no less telling. Entering the field in the 79th minute when England were winning 14-11, his total assuredness in extra-time gave England the confidence to finish off the Wallabies in the 100th minute. And of course, after the mayhem of the Wilkinson drop-goal, it was Mike who delivered the touch-finding kick that ended the game. 

Mike arrived in England from South Africa in 1992 as a backpacker. His parents had given him a plane ticket to England as a 21st birthday present so he could meet his grandparents for the first time. 

“I went backpacking, got bored after a couple of months, moved to my uncle’s place in Gloucester, and then just phoned Bath up,” explains Mike. “I had never heard of Bath before. Gareth Chilcott answered the phone, I think. My uncle spoke to him, and he said just come down.”

In South Africa, Mike had played for Eastern Province at schools and under-21 level as well as six times for the senior side, so he knew he had the cut for first grade rugby anywhere in the world. However, Bath was not an easy gateway to the English game, housing as it did half the England team at the time, with players such as Jeremy Guscott, Ben Clarke, Richard Hill, Victor Ubogu and Jonathan Webb.

Mike’s ambition initially was just to play a few games in a new climate, so he started out in the Bath third team. Later in the season though, Guscott got injured and Mike, by now promoted to the second team, began to be fielded at outside-centre for the Bath first team. “It was an incredible life experience,” Mike recalls. “I stuck at it. I could easily have just packed my bags and gone back home, but I loved the way Bath played with Stuart Barnes and Phil de Glanville. They were winning and as a youngster that accelerates your experiences and your skills.”

Bath’s business benefactor Malcolm Pearce gave Mike a job in his newspaper business, providing him with an £8,000 income, allowing him to dedicate the rest of his time to rugby. 

“I used to work stacking newspapers starting at two o’clock in the morning,” Mike says. “Then I moved into one of Malcolm’s newsagents: Johnson’s News. I went and worked there behind the till and stacking shelves. A few of the boys worked in the dairy, as Malcolm had a dairy too. Some guys were in accountancy and stuff like that. He looked after us.”

While Mike was being looked after on the field, there was no arm-over-the-shoulder approach by his Bath team-mates on the field. Not before he had proved himself anyway. “It didn’t matter whether you were a nice guy or a horrible guy. It didn’t really matter. The John Halls, the Andy Robinsons, these are tough men who wouldn’t really acknowledge you until you had proved that you were a good rugby player. 

“Probably a little bit like South Africa at the time, it was pretty hard-nosed. If you wanted to change position for example, you had to go and play in the second team before you changed position in the first team, stuff like that.

“But, those guys are all friends for life now. It was an amazing time.”

At the end of Mike’s first season at Bath he was selected for England U21s’ tour of Australia in the summer of 1993, where he first met the likes of Will Greenwood, Simon Shaw, Mark Regan and Lawrence Dallaglio, all future World Cup winners heading to Australia for the first time.

Dallaglio and Greenwood have both since recalled Mike’s fashion choices in those days. Denim being the common theme to their recollections. So, what was he wearing on that first England tour?

Mike laughs, and pauses before making his defence. “Yah, I mean, fashion in South Africa wasn’t really fashion in the UK when I turned up. I had a white, knitted jumper from my grandma actually, a nice woolly one and all the boys were like ‘what are you wearing?’. The fashion police were definitely out.”

Once Mike started playing, his England U21 team-mates forgot all about what he had arrived in. England had a very successful tour to Australia, winning the age-grade Test against their Australian counterparts, with Mike scoring a try along with two from Kyran Bracken. 

After making a name for himself in England’s colours, Mike’s progress up the ranks was swift, making his England debut in the Five Nations against Wales in 1994 and being selected for the World Cup in his native South Africa in 1995. 

Meeting Jonah in that semi-final didn’t hold Mike’s England’s career back at all. While Paul Grayson moved into the fly-half role for England during 1996, Mike nailed down the full-back jersey, and England were a flowing running rugby outfit, winning the Five Nations despite losing to France.

The following season Mike largely had to make do with bench duty as Tim Stimpson emerged as England’s first choice full-back. But he impressed on England’s summer tour to Argentina and was a late call-up to the Lions squad in South Africa, in place of the injured Grayson, winning a full Lions cap in the third Test, starting at fly-half, as the Lions lost to a retaliatory Springboks 35-16. 

“It was the first time I had experienced anything with the Irish guys, with your Scots, with the Welsh boys, and it was just the most incredible camaraderie and bond,” he recalls. “It was professional at the time, but it was still amateur, and we had an amazing time on the back of playing good rugby. And it was just brilliant rubbing shoulders with the best of the best. And to win a series in South Africa was huge for me.

“I grew up wanting to play for the green and gold. That’s what every South African boy growing up in South Africa wants to do. But I’ve never looked too deeply into anything. I’ve always wanted to be a professional sportsman, whether it was triathlon, whether it was rugby, I don’t know, but I always wanted to be a professional sportsman. I just loved what I did. My opportunities came somewhere where I never expected them to come, but the opportunities were given to me and I took them.” 

Mike then takes the interview on himself. “Everybody asks me, who’s the biggest role model that you had coming through your career? And I’d go, well, it’s myself, because as a player you’re the only person that drives your mentality, your attitude, your ability to stay strong when you’re injured all the time, getting dropped, getting hammered in the press. Ultimately, you’re the person that makes you who you are. You look back at that person and you go, ‘yeah, it was me that was putting in those hard yakka’. I love listening to people and watching other people but it’s yourself that you look to, you know.”

He stops before adding, “getting carried away there, sorry mate”. 

It’s a rare delight to hear this kind insight, affording us another glimpse at the fire that has driven Mike all these years as a player and now a coach. 

When selection came around for the 2001 Lions Tour to Australia, Mike was playing some of the finest rugby of his career. Ensconced in England’s midfield with Greenwood outside him, England tore through the Six Nations only for an outbreak of hand-foot-and-mouth disease to stop them travelling to Ireland and wrapping up a likely Grand Slam. 

Catt was selected as a member of the original Lions touring party and widely tipped to make the Test team alongside Brian O’Driscoll and/or Will Greenwood. But he sustained a back injury before the tour, which almost prevented him boarding the plane to Australia. Once in Australia, his calf started playing up as well. 

“I probably shouldn’t have gone on the tour to be honest,” admits Mike. “But Graham Henry said, ‘I really want you to come’ and I did everything I could, I didn’t want to miss out again.”

Despite waking up at 5am every day on the tour to coax his body into action, Mike was losing his fitness race. As a last chance saloon, he was selected to start against Australia ‘A’ in the fourth game of the tour, but he pulled up lame. His Lions tour hitting the buffers before it had ever got going.

Mike was not the only England player with a tour-ending injury. Phil Greening, Dan Luger and Dallaglio had all been ruled out, so the four of them went on a roadtrip as a consolation prize. “We hired a car and we followed the tour up the coast, stopping at Byron Bay and places like that, it was amazing experience, a great, great time for us all. And we were always among the Welsh, the Scottish and the Irish, it was just a hive of activity.

“And one of the best experiences I’ve ever had was the first Test in Brisbane. Obviously, I wasn’t playing but walking out the tunnel there was this sea of red. The whole stadium was pretty much red. And it was like, ‘oh my God this is phenomenal’. Everywhere you went out, whether it was Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, it was just red. The support we had was so, so special.”

During the 2025 Lions Tour to Australia Mike will, at least professionally, be on the other side of the sea of red, in his new role as the Waratahs’ assistant coach.

So how did the move to Australia come about? “I got a call from Dan McKellar [Waratahs’ head coach] saying ‘look, I’ve got an opportunity out in the Waratahs, would you be interested in coming? It’s a shorter season and would be a new experience for the family. So I spoke to my wife Ali, and it was sort of a no-brainer as it would be a great experience for the kids who are thirteen and fifteen now. It’s the way I sort of grew up and I wanted to give my kids the experience of growing up like that, but also I’ve never coached in Super Rugby before. I admired it from afar like every northern hemisphere player does, so to get an opportunity like this is pretty special.”

Five weeks into his new job, Mike is staying with a friend before he moves into a small flat on the beach in Bronte [in Sydney’s eastern suburbs]. In January, his son will join him and in the summer Ali and their daughter will too.

Next summer will be a busy time for Mike with the British and Irish Lions turning up on Australian shores towards the end of June, playing Mike’s Waratahs on 5th July. It’s a match which will pit Mike against not only his compatriots but his recent colleague at Ireland: the Lions head coach Andy Farrell. Mike left the Irish set-up earlier this year after four successful years with Farrell and the renewal of acquaintances in seven months’ time will add an extra layer of intrigue. 

Mike’s focus for now though is on developing his Waratahs squad as players. The team finished twelfth out of twelve in last season’s Super Rugby table and Mike is relishing the chance to work with the raw talent at his disposal, and to pass on his love for the game to a new group of players. “If you can coach a young kid into understanding what loving the game of rugby is, and how he gets there, to put a plan in place for the kid to get there, that’s where I get so excited,” says Mike. “The way I sort of coach is the guys’ buzz, you know. They go back to when they were sixteen years of age and they are playing with their mates on the pitch, that just frees everything up and just creates a great environment. 

“That’s the crucial thing,’ he says, “especially with the new generation coming through, just being able to free themselves up. 

“And if you are part of a successful environment, that’s life changing. And if I can give that to a young player because of my experience, that is why I love coaching so much, to take them to their potential.”

The interview has only just begun to scratch the surface of Mike’s coaching career, but Mike has to start his work day for the Waratahs, so time is up. Tomorrow they will jet off to Japan for a friendly match with the Kubota Spears in Tokyo. Once in Japan, Mike manages to call us back and tick off a few of our extra questions; so many more could still be asked, but they will have to wait. 

His career may only have started when he got bored of backpacking around England, but really that backpack is still slung over his shoulder as he keeps travelling towards his next adventure on the rugby horizon. 

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Hugo Carr/NSW

This extract was taken from issue 28 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

“I really want to make this point,” says Kent Bray at the start of our conversation. “I know I’ve had some really bad stuff happen but the one thing I want to express robustly is just how grateful I am. Grateful to be alive, and grateful to have had the life I’ve lived.”

Kent had that life, not just for a moment in time, or a purple patch when everything goes right for a year or two, but year-after-year through his 20s, 30s and 40s. Well, most of his 40s.

A hugely talented Australian fly-half, he was one of the youngest players in a New South Wales team packed with internationals – including World Cup winners David Campese, Marty Roebuck and Nick Farr-Jones – that faced the British and Irish Lions in 1989, narrowly losing the match 21-23. 

Then, he came to England, got a degree at Oxford University and spent six years as a player, then coach, at Harlequins, when their team featured Will Carling, Jason Leonard, Brian Moore, Mick Skinner and Peter Winterbottom. At the same time, he combined playing rugby with making a fortune with (and for) Citibank’s foreign exchange desk, eventually rising to the position of director.

Some may know him as Gary Stevenson’s boss in the best-selling book The Trading Game, and for being the man who openly questioned Gary’s claim of being, at one point, Citibank’s biggest trader.

Be it academia, rugby or finance, Kent has always excelled, either through talent or sheer hard work. Or both.

There was one other area in which he excelled, or perhaps excessed would be a more apt description. Ten years ago, Kent was sitting in a hotel room having accepted his fate, that he was going to die through cocaine addiction. It was just simply a matter of when. 

Kent was introduced to cocaine by a very successful businessman who supported Harlequins and who offered it to him at a match sometime in the early 2000s. By his own admission, Kent was somebody who would act on instinct. Yet while that first line of cocaine clearly had the desired effect, it took around ten years to go from something he did once a month, to weekends, to seven days a week, by which point he would start his working day by meeting his dealer. “I was in a toxic relationship with the mother of my two kids, I wanted to leave the UK, and I’d lost about three to four stone, having previously been around fifteen stone, because I was in the grip of cocaine addiction,” he recalls.

“And when I say cocaine addiction, I was doing twenty to thirty grams of coke a week. Some days I was doing six grams of cocaine a day, and I was spending £80,000 a year on the drug. Now, for those that don’t know anything about cocaine, twenty to thirty grams a week is like doing forty bottles of wine, and I wasn’t doing it because I was enjoying it. I was doing it because I was addicted.”

Kent’s account of that time is laced with moments of black humour. He would only use the drug on his own, which helped him to mask his addiction from his team at work. One colleague assumed Kent’s weight loss and behaviour was because he had a strict fitness regime and was training for triathlons. 

In 2014, he left Citibank knowing he was financially secure, but everything else about his life was unstable.

It was rugby, or more specifically a group of rugby players and coaches, that helped Kent to turn his life around to the point where this month he is celebrating nine years of being clean. Now he’s using that series of extraordinary life experiences to help others as a counsellor and mentor.

Rugby Journal meets Kent at his house in Billericay, Essex. This is where city boys go to live when they become men; when they have earned a seven-figure bonus. They come to Billericay to settle down, get married, have kids, buy a house, pay a mortgage and own a luxury car or four.

Kent’s spacious and immaculate abode is also now home to his office where he conducts online counselling sessions. He became a qualified counsellor in 2022. Because of Covid most of us had to work from home and using tools like Zoom and Teams became part of everyday life to the point where you don’t have to seek professional advice in person anymore. You can do it online instead.

There was also the impact of the pandemic on mental health across society, along with a growing willingness among men, especially older men, to talk about mental health. 

A survey published in 2024 by mental health charity MIND revealed that 54 per cent of men said they were comfortable speaking about their mental health, compared to 46 per cent of women, and those figures are higher among older males.

Because of the life he had, men of a certain age are more likely to open up to a guy who played rugby at the top level but also understands what it means to hit rock bottom when you seemingly have everything you need in life. 

There have been ten Rugby World Cups since the first tournament in 1987 and Kent has attended nine of them, including eight finals. “I’ve always gone with the same group of friends – Frank Austin, Dirk Hansen and Troy Coker,” he says. “I was in the stadium when Troy lifted the trophy [with Australia] in 1991, which was pretty fucking surreal!”

Kent knew it was going to be difficult for all concerned when they met up in London for the 2015 tournament. The moment they saw him they couldn’t help but see that he looked so strikingly different, but the confidence and bravado that you often need to succeed not only in sport but also as a trader, made him believe that he could simply tough it out. “Yeah, I was in a world of pain, really. They looked at me and I could see in their faces they knew something was wrong.”

They went out that night and Kent, by his own admission, did a rotten job of trying to cover up his addiction, making frequent trips to the toilet.

Being typically blunt Aussies, they said he ‘looked like shit’. “I said, ‘I’ve been under a lot of stress, a lot of pressure.’ They said, ‘mate, but you’ve left the city’.

“Then three or four days before the final, Troy said, ‘I’ve spoken to the boys. We’re going to have an intervention. You’re an addict. You’re addicted. You’re gonna die, you know that, right?’

“And I said to myself, I’m not having an intervention. I can get this under control. But that’s what addicts do. They deflect.”

Troy eventually got through to him. “The moment that would be a catalyst for change for me was walking through South Kensington,” begins Kent, “about two or three o’clock in the morning, and I was like, four or five bags of cocaine in, plus lots of drink. Troy just put his arm around me, which is unlike Troy. He’s quite an aggressive character! He said, ‘We’re leaving in two days. Please, please you’ve got to get professional help.’

“Dirk said to me a few years later, they were sitting on the plane going back to Australia, and one of the guys said, ‘you know, we might not see KB ever again’, because that’s where I was at. 

“I did everything I could in the next five months to stop,” he continues. “It’s that macho mate thing to prove you’re right. And I did reduce the amount I was taking but I couldn’t stop.” 

Troy’s words did at least convince Kent to go into rehab. “Eight days after coming out of rehab, I relapsed, and I ended up in a hotel room in Essex for three weeks by myself,” recalls Kent. “I thought, ‘If I keep doing this, eventually I will die because doing coke can put an enormous amount of stress on your heart, especially when you’re doing the quantities I was doing. It was the lowest point. I was filled with self-loathing, self-pity, guilt, shame, remorse and embarrassment about what I was doing and where I’d ended up, and I had anger, resentment and paranoia.

“I was on my own. I’ve got two kids who I love dearly. But I dropped out of all social groups. I hadn’t contacted any of the Harlequins guys in ages. Then I had what they call a ‘spiritual awakening’.

“I went to the toilet, and it said 3:22am on the clock on the TV, and my life just flashed before my eyes. And I had this moment of clarity, which was, ‘Mate you have got two choices – die from cocaine use or get recovery.’

“I threw myself into recovery and went to Narcotics Anonymous. The 18th June 2016, was my first clean and sober day.”

As part of his recovery, Kent moved to Southend, rented a flat and began to reacquaint himself with the man he used to be. “I walked into Westcliff Rugby Club one day just to watch a game. And this guy called Pete Jones, who I’d never met before, came over to me and he said, ‘Are you Kent Bray?’ I was amazed that he would have remembered me, for two reasons. It wasn’t as if I was a household name, and I had hair when I played for Harlequins.”

Westcliff had just taken on a young coach in Jacob Ford [son of Mike, brother of George] and Pete felt that Jacob could benefit from being around somebody with Kent’s experience. “When I got back on the training field and put the ball in my hands, man, it was beautiful,” he says. “It was fucking beautiful!”

And so, for the next three years, Kent would be Westcliff’s director of rugby. “It reminded me what I was about and what I had lost. To get back into that rugby community, I felt alive again. I’d lost a ton of confidence and self-esteem in my addiction. It’s like this cyclone that rips through your life, destroying everything and everyone in sight.”

That period also allowed Kent to reflect on his life and the events that had shaped him. He was sixteen when his brother, Scott, who was two years older, died having gone into hospital for what everyone thought would be a routine operation. The following day, Kent was playing rugby for Rockhampton, refusing to be consumed by grief.

One of the Rockhampton students watching on the sidelines that day was Sandy Horneman-Wren. Like Kent, Sandy studied law and he would go on to become a judge. ‘The most determined individual game of rugby I ever saw played was by Kent on the day following the death of his brother, Scott,’ Sandy later wrote. ‘I did not know Kent then, but had marvelled at his brilliance in past games. The deception of that day was that to most who were there, they were unaware of the grief of the boy wearing jersey fifteen; and he was going to play the house down. And he did.’

From that point, Kent always looked forward, not back. 

He played for Australia under-21s and spent several seasons at Queensland. Had he chosen any other team in Australia he probably would have been a regular fixture at fly-half. At Queensland, he played second fiddle to Michael Lynagh.

Although he practised law, Kent had no passion for it. He decided to move to England, to get a degree in social studies at Oxford University and play in the Varsity Match against Cambridge back in the day when the contest could attract a crowd of 50,000 at Twickenham, was screened live on BBC2 and was a showcase for future internationals.

He briefly returned to Australia but had to accept he wouldn’t become a fully capped Wallaby. So, he came back to England and signed for Harlequins.

Playing for Quins was known as a good route into the city. It put him in contact with guys working in finance who would welcome a well-educated rugby player with a big personality into their ranks and he got a job with brokerage firm RP Martin.

Kent’s aim was landing a role with one of the big financial institutions in Canary Wharf and after a seemingly endless stream of interviews, he joined Citibank in 1993. Soon after, he was earning £100,000 (£50,000 basic, £50,000 bonus), playing for a team that contained half the England XV and was dating ‘an absolute glamour’ who worked for the socialite magazine Harpers and Queen.

Also in 1993, Kent received a call asking if he would play for Scotland. There was a gap in the Five Nations schedule and the Scots had a game for a representative team lined up against Ulster at Ravenhill, except they were short at fly-half and Kent was eligible to play because of his Scottish grandmother.

Kent thought to himself, ‘ah, why not?’ and had a game of his life. “Mate, it was one of the days where literally everything I did came off,” he recalls. “It was freakish.” After the match, Scott Hastings asked if he would make himself available for Scotland. “It was the autumn series in 1993 and the All Blacks were coming over,” explains Kent. “The reason I remember it very distinctly was because Jeff Wilson made his debut and got a hat-trick of tries playing on the wing for the All Blacks. But leading up to that game, they picked me in a Scottish Development XV to play against New Zealand and I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to play against the All Blacks.”

Kent kicked four penalties, registering all of Scotland’s points in a 30-12 defeat. He couldn’t have done much more to make the international XV but ultimately Gregor Townsend got the nod. Years later, Kent was on a charity bike ride with ex-Scottish internationals Roger Baird and Iwan Tukalo. “Iwan said, ‘Your name rings a bell’. I explained that I played for Scotland and then I said, ‘Can I tell you right now I’m glad I didn’t get a full cap. I don’t mean that to be offensive but I’m an Aussie. I’m a proud Queenslander’.

In his final season at the Stoop, Kent was named player of the year, having set a new points record, although he still believes he got the award more as a ‘thank you’ for the six years he had spent there, rather than that one season. Looking back on that time at Harlequins, was there a sense that they underachieved? “It was a team full of characters,” says Kent. “Brian Moore: very intelligent, very intense. Will Carling: privately schooled army boy, movie star good looks, England captain at 23. Peter Winterbottom: absolutely hard as nails. Mickey Skinner: crazy as a cut snake. Jason Leonard: could sit with the King of England or a homeless person, and both those people would feel comfortable. Yeah, amazing characters, but, yeah, we underachieved for the ability that we had in that team.”

What happened next, is a story about life after rugby and what it means to reach a certain level of fame. “You play for a club like Harlequins or Gloucester or Northampton and you have an identity,” explains Kent. “Whenever you go into that club everyone knows your name. You go to the ground. You put on the jersey. You run out and the place erupts. You get interviewed after the game. You turn out for local charity events. You are validated. You are somebody. You feel that adulation. You feel the love and it seeps into every pore, nook and cranny of your soul, right?

“Then somebody else starts wearing that jersey,” he continues, “somebody else is getting that adulation, you go from this peak when you have this really fulfilling career and then you stop playing. Whenever you go back to the club, increasingly fewer people recognise you unless you’re a Martin Johnson or Lawrence Dallaglio. You start to lose that identity and that’s when guys struggle.

“I worked in the city, got a million-dollar bonus and I know this sounds crazy but it doesn’t compare to that five minutes before kick-off when you’re in this heightened physical and mental state. You’ve got that brotherhood: ‘I will be there for you. Will you be there for me?’ And you look each other in the eye and those moments cannot be replicated in the real world.

“Did you watch that documentary on 2003 World Cup winners?” he asks. “Ah, man, it was painful to watch at times. You would think winning a World Cup, you would be happy for life. But everyone has their own struggles. Life just turns up.”

As part of his programme of recovery, he went to see Peter Winterbottom to explain why he hadn’t been in touch and to open up about his addiction. He did the same with Gary Stevenson, who recently came to the fore again, going viral for his views on entrepreneurs. “Three or four years into being clean I thought, ‘I wonder what Gary is up to?’ because I was harsh on him at the end of my time with Citibank and the reason why was because I was high on coke.”

They met for lunch and Kent opened up. Gary was in the process of working on The Trading Game. Although Gary used pseudonyms for all the characters it was obvious to anyone who worked at Citibank that JB in the book was KB in real life. “When I read the book I was conflicted,” says Kent, “because if you didn’t know Gary, you didn’t know trading … look, it’s a really good book and what he says about the inequality of wealth is absolutely correct. But when I read it, well, yeah, there’s two things. One was having the opportunity to earn that sort of money, and he wrote some ridiculous, inflated stuff about how great a trader he was.

“For me, it comes back to gratitude. He ran everyone down in the book. And I thought that was distasteful, but that’s my ethical and moral code, right? 

“Grant Birkett played for Harlequins, and he got one cap for Scotland. It was Birko who got me my job at RP Martin and I’m eternally grateful to him. Harlequins, when they brought me over, sorted out my accommodation, got me a car, just let me settle. Again. I’ll always be grateful.”

Kent was offered jobs to go back into the city but was encouraged to become a counsellor by another member of his recovery group. He gained his qualifications and then began to promote his new life as a qualified therapeutic counsellor, initially through Instagram but predominantly through LinkedIn. “I didn’t want to go back to the city,” he says. “It’s a bit like your rugby career. When it’s over, it’s over.  And I thought ‘I’m gonna have to do something else’, and I just had a revelation that I’ve had a ton of experiences in my life. I tell you, it’s up there with the most bizarre things that have ever happened in my life – I presented myself [on LinkedIn] and I started getting guys contacting me and asking, ‘can you mentor me?’ I hadn’t really thought about mentoring or knew that much about it.

“We’re talking successful, professional men, decent level of education, a bit of sport in their background. On the outside it looks fine, married, kids, house etc … but they are struggling in different ways. And so I’ve become a counsellor and a mentor.”

The Trading Game is reportedly being adapted for TV. If and when that happens then Kent will be thrust into the spotlight as the ‘coke addicted trader’ which is how he is referred to in the book. He is more likely to see it as an opportunity to connect with more people who are addicted, and maybe even save a life. He also volunteers with MIND which can often mean dealing with cases of extreme abuse and multiple addictions. “It is by far and away the most fulfilling vocation I’ve ever had in my life,” he says. “I’m sixty. I’m in the last quarter of my life, my kids, who are fifteen and twelve, are now very much a part of that life.

“I want to use my experiences to help other people.” 

If you are looking for someone to talk with about an issue that is causing you concern, then contact Kent at his website kentbraycounselling.co.uk

Or listen to his podcasts on YouTube and Spotify.

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 30 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.