Step into the Cardinal Vaughan car park at Twickenham during the Six Nations and it is easy to see why not everyone feels at home. Men with exotically striped blazers mix with tweed, fur and quilt. Tables groan with champagne and glistening quails’ eggs. “We’re all Tories here, aren’t we?” murmurs one patron, gesturing airily around him prior to this year’s England v Scotland game.
To many, Twickenham encapsulates English rugby. As with Marylebone Cricket Club and the All England Club, those other elite bastions, it can be a curious mix of modern business and old school. The late Philip Toynbee – “A bomb under the west car park at Twickenham on an international day would end fascism in England for a generation” – would these days find more new money at the Rugby Football Union’s headquarters but still recognise a certain breed of customer. It is an image of a sport that has proved resilient in the public mind – posh schoolboys, affluent country types and City suits at play.
A certain breed of customer: the crowds gather at Twickenham before England’s 2015 Six Nations match against Italy
The 2015 Rugby World Cup, frequently billed as the third largest sporting event on the planet, will bring a whole new audience into contact with the game. It is also a once in a generation chance to update some preconceptions. The World Cup is the RFU’s opportunity to convert those not around when Jonny Wilkinson landed his life-changing drop goal in Sydney in 2003. Over 2.2 million tickets for the event have been sold but Bill Beaumont, the chairman of the RFU whose younger son Josh represented England against the Barbarians this year, knows there is one other key ingredient. “The big thing that will drive participation – and no pressure on Stuart Lancaster – is the team succeeding. Kids like to be associated with success. We’ve got to ensure that when little Jimmy comes down to enjoy his first taste of rugby he enjoys it and we keep him. If he doesn’t like it he won’t come back. By the end of the year the World Cup will have come and gone and it won’t come again for a very long time.”
English rugby, despite the acclaim that greeted Clive Woodward’s World Cup-winning side of 12 years ago, remains a sport of confused identities. The English psyche, so cluttered with class-based, geographical and historical baggage, does not always help. New Zealand, with its hakas, silver ferns and cradle-to-grave devotion, knows no such confusion. It is a similar story in Wales, while in 1995 South Africa’s rugby team were hailed as a unifying force for a nation. But the English? The only characteristic upon which their neighbours agree is their alleged arrogance.
It is a familiar accusation. England are the biggest (and wealthiest) union in the world and are traditionally the least loved.
The conjunction of these two facts is no coincidence. The former Scotland and Lions forward Nathan Hines says arrogance was always a core theme of his side’s team talks before Calcutta Cup games at Twickenham. “Even if it wasn’t actual arrogance, there was that perception. It comes from way back, from history not just rugby. When a small nation plays a big nation, the big nation always likes to to stand up and try and bully everyone.”
By the time visitors actually get inside Twickenham, with its hashtag-heavy messages, references to ”Your England Team” and blizzard of corporate branding, such prejudices are frequently reinforced.
“I’d like to see this place after a 10-year barren spell to see how many true supporters there are,” mutters a kilted Scotland fan in the car park, convinced Twickenham attracts a different breed of spectator to other Six Nations grounds.
Twickenham, categorically, is not the whole or even the sum of English rugby. But our journey through the English game, from its western heartlands to northern outposts, might as well begin there. The Morris family from Ealing – father clad in a Russian-style winter hat, chucking a ball around with his son, Geronimo, in the Cardinal Vaughan – say the car park experience is an integral part of their day out. “The car park’s a big portion of it; I’d say it is 30% the car park and 70% the match,” says Mr Morris.
Geronimo might also enjoy a trip to Rugby School’s excellent museum. The majority of rugby men and women have always possessed a contrary streak, although whether this dates from William Webb Ellis’s era is debatable. A game that involved throwing a large ball around was played in Roman times and Webb Ellis’s “fine disregard” for the prevailing laws in 1823 was not trumpeted as such at the time. Even Rugby school’s archivist, Rusty MacLean, says Webb Ellis would not, contrary to popular legend, have picked up the ball but instead caught it prior to running upfield.
What is indisputable is the influence of Rugby school on the sport that shares the town’s name. Walk across the immaculate first-team pitch in the famous Close and it is easy to understand how the game’s upmarket reputation took hold. The ethos of muscular Christianity promoted during Dr Thomas Arnold’s period as headmaster had found the perfect vehicle and the educated classes spearheaded the sport’s development. The first five presidents of the RFU were Old Rugbeians and England’s white jerseys also originated at the school. Ten Old Rugbeians also featured in the first England side to play an international game, against Scotland at Edinburgh’s Raeburn Place in 1871. When the northern clubs broke away in 1895, it was not to become professional but because the RFU would not sanction broken time payments – compensation for missed hours of work. The schism that created the sport of rugby league still shapes the way union is perceived 120 years later.
Outside Wigan’s DW Stadium there is still little love lost between union and league. Two longstanding female fans are adamant league is far more exciting. “I find union boring,” complains one. “They get the ball and you think they’re going to run but then they kick it. They’re not as good-looking either.” There are few RFU debenture holders in a town where the 13-a-side game exerts an iron grip.
Most local schoolboys here would no more dream of playing union than they would lacrosse. No school within the town plays union seriously any more. At John Fisher Catholic high school – alma mater of umpteen international players, including Shaun Edwards and Chris Ashton – league is the undisputed king. “They might [watch England at the World Cup] if Sam Burgess is playing,” suggests Andy Unsworth, the school’s head of PE.
Which makes people such as Ian Hollis all the more extraordinary. It is a damp, cheerless night in January as we turn off the thundering M6 and inch towards the union oasis of Orrell. The club came within a whisker of winning the English title in 1992, losing just twice all season with a side studded with international players and expertly coached by Des Seabrook. Then professionalism arrived and the northern powerhouse fell apart. The former owner Dave Whelan pulled the financial plug in 2004, the club reverted to amateur rugby three years later and their old Edge Hall Road home is now the training ground for Super League’s Wigan Warriors’. Last season Orrell finished sixth in South Lancs/Cheshire Division 2 and are currently without their own pitch or clubhouse. Given their decline in circumstances and league’s dominance locally, it is easy for outsiders to wonder why they still bother.
Orrell are battling to survive in the face of local fans and players who prefer the game’s other code
En route to a post-training beer in the Delph Tavern, Hollis offers a clue. He has made just three visits to Twickenham in 40 years and one of those was to watch Orrell in a junior final. “This is rugby league land. They think that if you play rugby union you’re soft, even if you’re 6ft 2in and 18 stone. Around here they still think union’s a game of kick and clap. They’ve not seen it played at grassroots the way we play it. It’s like chess and draughts. League’s bang-bang-bang. In union you’ve got to think a little more. Once you get the bug you’re bitten for life.”
It is this kind of diehard persistence that has sustained Orrell in their darkest hours. It costs them £45 just to rent the artificial pitch at St John Rigby college for training on a midweek evening, plus another £45 on matchdays. Chuck in the cost of a referee and washing the kit and they have to find at least £150 each week, with no bar proceeds and a maximum attendance of 120 if the weather’s half decent.
Another long-time stalwart, Tony Pegg, confirms life has often been “incredibly tough” for the club’s custodians. “Sometimes I ask myself why I do it. But what would I do if I didn’t? It’s in the blood.” Even during the period when Whelan and the Wigan RL chairman, Maurice Lindsay, were involved, it was an awkward marriage. “The first time we hosted a home game they subcontracted out the running of the clubhouse and ran out of bitter and Guinness,” recalls Pegg. “Afterwards the bar manager said Maurice Lindsay had told him rugby union supporters only drink lager and gin and tonic. It summed up his complete lack of appreciation for the sport.”
‘This is rugby league land. They think that if you play rugby union you’re soft, even if you’re 6ft 2in and 18 stone’
More than a decade later plenty in the area will also tell you the RFU could do far more to assist rugby union in the north. “They would deny it but I don’t think there’s an appreciation of the health of rugby in the north-west … make that the north full stop,” says Pegg. “I don’t think there’s a club around here that doesn’t run fewer teams than it used to. It’s not dying but it’s been a real struggle for us. There are a lot more alternatives than there used to be.”
On a sodden afternoon on the Lancashire coast, at his beloved Fylde RFC, one of England’s most fondly remembered captains, Bill Beaumont, accepts not everything in the English garden is rosy. There is only one professional side – Sale Sharks – in the whole of the north-west and the landscape has changed utterly since Beaumont, now 63, captained the North to their famous victory over New Zealand at Otley in 1979. Gone is the era when sides such as Orrell, Waterloo, Broughton Park, Liverpool St Helens and Fylde all had first-class fixture lists. Beaumont is also aware how significantly football’s reach has extended over the same period.
“I do think we’ve got enormous challenges. When you go around the country how many rugby posts do you see in public parks? Our challenge is to get all those people playing soccer to come down to their nearest rugby club and see what rugby has to offer.”
Beaumont’s lifelong affair with club rugby dates back to the day he was invited to play for Fylde’s third team away at Percy Park as a 17-year-old, little knowing what post-match revelry lay in store. He finally rang home at 2am from a transport cafe at Scotch Corner to reassure his parents that, contrary to their worst fears, he was still alive. “My mum turned to my dad and said: ‘That’s it, he’s never playing again.’”
His subsequent journey – captaining England to the 1980 grand slam, leading the Lions and representing his country on the old International Board (now World Rugby) – has taught him plenty more. He is adamant rugby is a game for all classes. “If you look at the schools where the England players come from it would have changed dramatically from 10 to 15 years ago. When I played it was perceived you either went to a grammar school or a private school.”
Even then the reality was subtly different. “In the dressing room you’d meet people from all walks of life. We had roofers, coppers, teachers and travel reps, yet when we put on the jersey we were as one. In my experience most people on a rugby field will take a hospital pass themselves, rather than drop their mate in it. For me that sums up what rugby’s about.”
They will snort with derision in Dewsbury but Jason Leonard, once a carpenter from Barking, has just become the RFU’s president. Even rugby’s sternest critic would find it hard to argue the sport is not more inclusive these days. The number of women and girls registered to play rugby in England last season, for example, rose by 20% to 18,000 on the back of their 2014 World Cup success and the RFU hopes to boost that figure to 25,000 by 2017.
There are more registered adult male players in England than in New Zealand, Australia, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Italy and all the Pacific Islands combined, yet England have won just one Six Nations title – and no grand slam – since winning the World Cup in 2003. “In a way our size is our weakness from a playing point of view,” says Beaumont. “There are a lot more choices to make as a coach and selector than in, say, Scotland.”
Perhaps. Others argue that the RFU, for all its good intentions and ample resources, is still suffering for not contracting the top players centrally at the outset of professionalism 20 years ago. Should the host nation fall short in this World Cup the club v country debate will rapidly reignite.
To understand why Twickenham is not particularly representative of English rugby union it helps to look at a map. By and large this is not a city game – even if City boys love it – but a sport of provincial towns, suburbs and rural heartlands. Talk sport to anyone in Cornwall, for example, and they are far more likely to mention Jack Nowell than Jack Wilshere. There are hotspots in the Midlands – Leicester, Coventry – as well as Kent, Surrey and Sussex.
Wharfedale, located just outside Grassington in the Yorkshire Dales, is a good case study. Burnley and Leeds are not a million miles away but beyond the mill towns and post-industrial sprawl there has always been a defiant sprinkling of union. To stand at the river end on a sunny spring day, with dry stone walls just beyond the dead ball line and sheep munching away contentedly beyond, is to experience something close to spectator heaven.
The local side – aka The Green Machine – are also a throwback, having just completed their 19th season in the third tier of the English league structure.
Michael “Clarty” Harrison, who farms locally and has served for decades as captain, coach and chairman, says sustaining the club at their present level costs £120,000 per year, with first-team players receiving the princely sum of £80 per game. The RFU used to chip in £70,000 per annum but now only helps with travel expenses. Survival is a perennial struggle.
The Wharfedale model, however, is thriving: four sides, 150-200 mini players, enthusiastic crowds of 700 odd, a coaching role in local schools. “We want to give the people of the Dale the chance to watch some decent sport,” says Harrison, who played for England Schools 50 years ago but whose solitary visit to Twickenham for an international was to watch the club president, John Spencer, represent England.
Spencer, who lives a drop-kick away from the club and was born in Grassington, has a foot in both camps; like Beaumont he holds a senior RFU board position and will be the manager of the British and Irish Lions in New Zealand in 2017. Even he shakes his head at some of the ideas emerging from Twickenham as the RFU seeks to streamline the English club system.
Spencer feels particularly strongly about a proposed reduction in league sizes, which would mean fewer home games for clubs such as Wharfedale. Given the club’s bar takings each week are roughly equivalent to their gate receipts, two fewer games would be a sizeable blow. “To us it’s a nonsense,” says Spencer, a Lion in New Zealand in 1971. “The guys telling us what to do don’t know how to run a club. Why do we want to play two fewer games per year? We’re told it’s about player welfare. Well, rolling subs have taken care of that. Our players can’t get enough rugby. We’re not anywhere near player welfare limits.”
Nor does he feel union is as endangered a game as some are telling him. “I’m told extreme frisbee is going to challenge us. The mind boggles.”
Listening to the crowd cheering the resident pre-match announcer – “Welcome to the chrysanthemum growers and artichoke producers of Fylde. If you ever want to come to the Dales to avoid fracking we can arrange it” – and growling “River! River!” whenever their forwards get a shove on, you suspect Wharfedale will remain on rugby’s map of life-enhancing destinations for a while yet.
If English rugby still has something of a split personality, there is one region where it can truly claim to be the people’s game. Umpteen towns in the south-west have their oval ball chapels of pain; the Mennaye Field in Penzance and Redruth’s Hellfire Corner are just two evocative shrines. It is Gloucester, however, where such quasi-religious fervour runs deepest. The days when the Cherry and Whites could field a team almost exclusively harvested from local clubs are gone but it remains English rugby union’s unofficial capital city. To watch a game in the Shed, the choir stalls of Gloucester’s alternative cathedral, is to enter a world as distant from Twickenham as Lidl is from Fortnum & Mason.
The night Gloucester beat Saracens in early January, courtesy of a last-gasp kick from James Hook, the roar was probably audible in Cheltenham. Many of the inmates are lifers. Graham – “sometimes they call me Salty” – has not missed a home game for 25 years. Nigel, now in his mid-50s, used to be a football referee but got “fed up” with the lack of respect from the players. Two hours before every game he takes up his preferred front-row spot, keen to give the match officials a helping hand. “There’s 4,500 of us in the Shed and we can all referee better than the actual referee,” he insists. “Rugby’s so deep-rooted in Gloucester. It’s more than a rugby club, it’s what the city is.”
Then there is Ken, who travels to games from near Oxford wearing a straggly wig and bucket hat in tribute to the club’s Australian forwards coach, Laurie Fisher. “Twickenham is for the occasional supporter, this is where you come to watch real rugby,” he pronounces, pausing only to sip his pint and shout “Glaws-terr” at deafening volume.
“There’s no other sport in Gloucester,” says Mike Teague, the former England international and Gloucester veteran. “There’s no soccer, it’s totally one-eyed towards the Cherry and Whites. All you want to do as a youngster is put on a Gloucester shirt. I remember listening to my old team-mate Richard Mogg. He used to say that when he ran out at Kingsholm he loved watching the faces of the opposition. He said you could see the fear and anticipation in their eyes.”
Tucked within Gloucester’s ring-road is Longlevens RFC, one of the dozens of small rugby clubs within half an hour’s drive of Kingsholm. You would struggle to find any with a tighter community bond or more generous to passing strangers. The day we visited they were serving Christmas lunch in mid-January and celebrating a successful season under Rich Rudge, their admirably positive coach. The club’s ethos is refreshingly simple: develop your own youngsters, play decent rugby, make the rest of the family feel welcome and player retention takes care of itself. Rudge is so committed to the cause he even moved his family to a house adjoining the club and knocked through the brick wall bordering their pitches to make getting to training easier.
“In rugby there’s no airs and graces about anyone,” Rudge says. “You could be a solicitor, carpenter, anything. There are some bloody battles at times but afterwards we shake hands and have a beer. I class this as my second family.”
Clockwise from above: Longlevens celebrate their 77-12 victory over Old Colstonians, spectators watch a scrum and a Longlevens player is injured. The club’s ethos is simple: develop your own youngsters, play decent rugby and make the family feel welcome
There are even fewer frills in Stuart Lancaster’s home village of Culgaith in Cumbria. Standing on an exposed ridge above the River Eden, the family’s dairy farm is tucked away off the deserted main street. The Black Swan pub is similarly quiet. If any tourists venture beyond the Lake District to these parts they tend to head for Center Parcs – or the Llama Karma Kafe – down the road.
Yet in conjunction with the west Cumbrian coastal town of St Bees where Lancaster went to school, this is the birthplace of the cultural revolution that has swept through England’s national squad under their head coach. Along with everyone else, Lancaster was dismayed by the last World Cup campaign in New Zealand in 2011 and has been working hard to instil more pride in the shirt. He believes Wharfedale, Longlevens and Orrell should feel just as much a part of English rugby as Bath, Leicester and Gloucester and wants English rugby to be more connected from top to bottom. It is in junior clubs up and down the country, after all, that the next generation of players and supporters will be reared.
‘We’re reserved but, ultimately, when our backs are against the wall, the English always come out fighting’
The starting point was to make his players more aware of their predecessors and what the red rose represents. “Every team has an identity, whether you’re playing for your club or your school team. We’ve talked a lot about the identity of English rugby, to educate the players about those who played before them. When you’re an Englishman wearing the red rose that identity is the strongest pull of all. You’re representing not just yourself but your country and the family and friends who have helped you. It’s the ultimate strength.”
Among other things, Lancaster has also trawled English military history for inspiration. The team’s weekly defensive award is named after Arthur Harrison, the only England rugby international to be awarded the Victoria Cross, and specific English character traits have been highlighted. “We’ve developed key anchors about what it means to be English; things like resilience, being at your best when everything is on the line, never taking a backward step. We’ve got examples throughout history of England sides showing those characteristics. Once you’ve got those anchors you’ve got something to build your identity around.”
“Sometimes I think we need to be a bit more front foot about being proud to be English. We often get accused of being arrogant as English people but I think that’s completely wrong. There’s a difference between arrogance and self-confidence. At our best we’re self-confident and front foot and never take a backward step. There’s no arrogance in this England team.”
Replay with soundStuart Lancaster: ‘When you are wearing the red rose, you’re not just representing the rugby fraternity but every person that lives in the country’
Talk to England’s players and the emergence of a new, improved kind of Englishness is clearly something they have also spent a lot of time considering. The Northampton flanker Tom Wood spent a formative period in New Zealand and is keenly aware of the emotional power that something such as the haka can bring. Wood was also involved in Cardiff in 2013 when England, on the verge of a potential grand slam, were swept aside 30-3 on a crimson tide of Welsh passion.
Stuart Lancaster on the World CupThe England coach believes the competition will have a huge impact on rugby union in the country0:38
That day proved a pivotal moment in the team’s development. “We felt we were overcome by the power of the emotion in the stadium,” says Wood. “We went in confident and we’d prepared well but ultimately the passion of the Welsh fans and the cauldron that was the Millennium Stadium caught us off-guard. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that but it must have been the case.
“Subsequently we thought: ‘Let’s get back to a bit of English identity.’ As a nation we’ve always struggled with that. We’re reserved but, ultimately, when our backs are against the wall, the English always come out fighting. We’ve got a great military and sporting history but we don’t shout from the rooftops the way others do. We’re so afraid of the arrogant tag that gets thrown at us that we’re scared to come out and say: ‘We’re confident, we’re passionate and we’re proud to be English.’”
Record levels of partisan fervour will be guaranteed at Twickenham in the coming weeks. It could be 30 years, if not longer, before England stages another home World Cup, although that advantage cuts two ways. For years England have underestimated the galvanising effect of the red rose on the opposition; what could be more satisfying for a New Zealand rugby player than winning a World Cup at Twickenham? This time, though, England will not have to worry about unfamiliar hotels, training pitches, climates, food or southern hemisphere media taunts.
“Playing for England is a dream you have as a kid but I take more satisfaction from making my parents proud and seeing the excitement on people’s faces as you walk through the west car park,” says Wood. “Looking up at the tiers of the stadium during the anthems you really do get a sense you’re representing the whole country. We like to think we’re the mirror the fans hold up to themselves. We want to embody what they want an English rugby team to be.”
Lancaster, as he approaches the biggest challenge of his life, hopes the entire country will get behind his squad, regardless of whether they can distinguish a ruck from a maul. “I think back to the 2005 Ashes and Euro 96 and the patriotism we saw then … I would love to rekindle that in this World Cup. We think we can and should be as patriotic as anyone else. Sometimes we just need to get it out there.”
Maybe he is right. Constantly being told to apologise for centuries of empire building and military activity would get on anyone’s nerves after a while. Then again, how much of an impact should British imperialism be having on England’s ability to win games of rugby in 2015? As Manu Tuilagi’s assault conviction earlier this year has underlined, not all Lancaster’s players were listening when the coach was delivering his “make your country proud” speech.
From Wharfedale, Longlevens and Orrell to Bath, Leicester, Gloucester and England: can English rugby be more connected from top to bottom?Replay with sound
Yet as Lancaster outlines his ethos – calm, measured, determined – you cannot help mentally returning to Culgaith and St Bees and the Cumbrian landscape that shaped him. English rugby may still be constrained by too much conservative thinking but it seldom lacks for yeoman spirit, regardless of what schools its foot soldiers went to.
If nothing else, English rugby also has a common, unifying goal. When the tournament is over there will still be significant divisions: a solitary pool game against Uruguay in Manchester, for instance, simply cannot be the last time England play a senior men’s international north of Shepherd’s Bush for 20 years.
But from Ian Hollis at Orrell to “Clarty” Harrison at Wharfedale, Rich Rudge at Longlevens and little Geronimo in the Twickenham car park, there will still be a remarkably diverse cross section of the population backing the national team this autumn. Nonbelievers will find themselves invited to follow suit. “We’ve got to get out of the pool stages first but if we do that and our momentum builds it’ll be a powerful force,” says Lancaster. Visitors and locals alike may feel differently about English rugby once the 2015 tournament is over.
