Alex Goode

Glued to the television, a twelve-year-old Alex Goode didn’t miss a point as he watched Britain capture their first-ever badminton medal at the Olympics. He’d found his sporting hero, who just happened to also be his Aunty Jo. 

In the echelon of sports, badminton is the sporting equivalent of Richard Hill, the former England flanker: quietly going about its business with considerable success despite being seemingly unheralded by those around. Although, when we say unheralded, also like Hill – who was lauded by pretty much every pundit – there’s quite a few people that are in the corner of badminton. 

To put into numbers, there are 220m people playing badminton. And, with the best part of two hundred countries officially affiliated, it’s the second biggest sport in the world behind football. Rugby, even by counting anyone to have once kicked a stray ball back to kids in a park, can barely muster ten million players and is, for comparison, ranked roughly alongside ultimate frisbee. 

And, what’s more, you know badminton is properly global when China is the big dog of the sport, which is pretty much how it should be in a numbers game. 

It stands to reason then, that winning any kind of accolade within the Olympic sport is nothing short of miraculous. 

Which is why Britain’s Sydney Olympics bronze medallist Jo Goode is put on something of a pedestal, not only for the British badminton community, but for one fan in particular, her nephew Alex. “Aunty Jo was my sporting idol, she really was,” says Alex, when we meet him in his west London home. “I was twelve years old when she went to Sydney. She was also a mum at this stage and trained back up [after pregnancy] and was ranked the best mixed doubles female in the world.

“They [Jo and mixed doubles partner Simon Archer] were in the semi-final, a set up, and had match point and her partner just capitulated. He was a decent player, but the pressure came on and they lost that in the third set. A day later they picked themselves up for the third-place play-off, against the Danish who were number one seeds I think [actually number four but they were European champions] and she just rallied so strong, kept him going [Archer had been struggling with a chest injury], in the zone, and they won in the third set. 

“I just remember that resilience being the big thing,” he continues, “when things weren’t going their way, having the resilience to fight back was incredible from Aunty Jo. It was amazing to see someone so close to me do that, especially at that age. 

“I was up at five or six in the morning, watching everything. I was watching this far [he puts his hand flat to his face] from the screen for every point, in awe of what she achieved. 

“I still never really forgave her partner,” he laughs.

Badminton was an ever-present in the Goode family. “My uncle went to the Olympics,” he adds, “they were all badminton players really. I’ve got a long way to go to be successful in my family. You’ve seven Commonwealth golds from my Aunty Jo and that bronze medal and before that my uncle went to the 1992 Olympics as a badminton player and my family have coached Gail Emms – part of the second British Olympic medallist duo that picked up silver in Athens 2004 with Nathan Robertson – so they’re pretty amazing.”

Even in his own house, a Victorian terrace in a quiet slice of West London – handily a stone’s throw from his former team-mates’ Wolfpack pub – he struggles for bragging rights. While the bathroom has a framed shirt with the great and the good of rugby saying how great he is, and there’s a shelf of mementos from his impressive club career – the most recent one akin to a chunk of blue-painted fence post for Premiership player of the month – they’re continually trumped by those belonging to his partner Lucy, who works in the music industry. A platinum disc for Billie Eilish, a gold one for Gary Barlow...  “If anyone comes to the house, they’re not bothered by anything I’ve got up,” he admits. “She’s got platinum and gold discs here and there, and the artists she’s dealing with are genuine A-list celebrities – which, no disrespect to Owen Farrell, he’s no Billie Eilish to be honest.”

That she’s cool about the celebrity link only makes it even more impressive. “She’s very calm, she doesn’t get too friendly,” he says of her musician contacts. “If things go wrong she says it’s better to be business orientated.”

He’s obviously impressed, just as we are. “It’s not even the stories, it’s just that she’s having dinner with this person, or trying to sign this person, or backstage here, or being mentioned at a speech at the Brits, that’s a pretty big deal, I’m very proud of what she’s doing.”

The third member of the family [fourth if you include Cookie, the dachshund] is also making an impact. “See that big frame in the garden,” says Alex pointing to a large metal frame. “That was once full of glass, until my ten-month-old son Remy brought it crashing down, almost on top of him!

“It’s the hardest thing in the world,” he says of fatherhood, Remy is his first child. “There’s a surge of sort of excitement and then a fear probably as well and worry of everything about being a dad.

“I certainly wouldn’t say that he was a beauty straightaway,” he admits, “they look like a little alien at the start, but they sort of blossom and you fall in love with them so quickly and you just want to look after them. You certainly see why parents say they would do anything for their kids. If you needed to run in front of a bus, you would, you’d do anything for them to be healthy, happy, and protected.”

Even before Remy’s arrival, he had mixed reports of parenting from his team-mates, with Owen Farrell telling him to be ready to have the paintwork of his house ruined and Vincent Koch highlighting every childhood ailment. “He would be saying, ‘ooh that’s a nightmare, this is a nightmare, teething, that’s a disaster too, then there’s this and this... I was like, ‘is there any good?’ And he said, ‘you just forget about it all when he smiles at you and gives you a hug’. 

“And that’s true,” continues Alex, “you do you forget all the bad stuff and just remember the good times and his development and him smiling and, you know, him learning to walk or crawl or whatever it is. It is phenomenal.”

It’s also helped him gain a better balance in life. “You realise there are more things to life than rugby,” admits Alex. “I think when it’s just you and your partner, rugby is everything. You come home after a loss and you take it home with you, and think about it, and I think for a few months after [the birth] it was my best rugby because when I got home, I was thinking, ‘how do I keep this child alive?’. It was a low bar that was my barometer, but it meant you’re not thinking about rugby...”

And it also meant there’s more incentive to return home in one piece from facing the giants of European rugby – Alex is 5ft 9in and 90kg and regularly running in the direction of behemoths seemingly twice his size. “I get that for every game from Lucy, ‘just come home safe’ she says, but it’s easier said than done, I probably should’ve chosen a different occupation if that was the sort of remit. I can’t control if Jos Tuisova wants to run over the top of me.”

Last October, Alex became the most capped Saracen of all time with his 339th appearance, adding to a plethora of achievements in a seventeen-year career with the London club. He’s won three European Cups, five Premiership titles, a Championship title, and been named European Player of the Year. 

Like many backline creative types, he was on the books of a football club from an early age (Ipswich), but rugby was still an ever-present, with his first club being Cambridge. “I just loved the rugby club, all my mates were there,” he says, “and I never missed a rugby game, I’d miss a football game but never a rugby one. If there was a clash, rugby never missed out.”

He joined Saracens in 2006 as an eighteen year old, and made his debut within two years as a twenty year old in what was also the final game for Richard Hill, as Saracens beat Bristol 25-20 at Milton Keynes (Vicarage Road was being used for football). 

The game has evolved in his time, and even during the course of our interview, it’s evolving again, such is the uncertainty created by the RFU’s tackle law announcement. As such, smaller players – as Alex has to be bracketed – could be even more prevalent in the future. “There are now smaller players coming in,” he says, “because it’s extremely hard to tackle small players without getting caught taking their head off and carded. 

“I always believe that good rugby players, with good rugby brains will always come through,” he adds, warming to a conversation he’s clearly had more than once.

“People like Brian O’Driscoll, Dan Carter, Richie McCaw, none were incredible athletes, or freakishly good at running over the top of people. Richie McCaw was one of the weakest flankers around, but his fitness, his rugby intelligence, his body angles were on a different level. 

“Dan Carter was a good athlete, but it was his rugby brain again [that was the difference], same with O’Driscoll. Pound for pound he was strong, but it was his timing, agility, his brain, knowing when to pass, when to offload, when to kick, and when he got older it all got better and better.

“Obviously there’s a lot of athleticism through the academy. It’s easier to coach big strong players, and people gravitate towards them, but I think there’s more of a push for intelligent rugby players and then athletically developing them.”

Once a fly-half by trade, a role he occasionally reprises, Alex’s Saracens professional life has been largely at full-back, with England captain Owen Farrell owning the number ten shirt. It’s a partnership that’s borne fruit at every level, including against the very best backlines in Europe – featuring some of the best players on the planet. But for England, aside from an autumn series and Six Nations campaign under Stuart Lancaster in 2012/13, Alex has not had the opportunities his talents deserved. At 34, he’s likely to end with 21 England caps. 

Was it tough to take, being overlooked time and again by former England coach Eddie Jones? “It’s a good question,” he ponders. “I think mentally it was tough. Because the media were always talking about it, there’s nothing you can do to control that opinion, but it’s ultimately his [Eddie’s] right to do what he wants. 

“I kind of used it to focus on Saracens and some of my best games were when internationals were away or when I didn’t get picked [for the matchday squad] and was coming back [to Saracens] with no preparation and throwing myself into it.

“The club was so good at just going, ‘Goodey, do what you need to do, we love you, you’re brilliant, just go out there and be yourself’. I always had that love for the club to never let them down 

“It was a bit, ‘put your best foot forward, fuck England, I’m going to show how good I am and just keep doing that’. And so yeah, I actually think it galvanised me, and I think my form was good, but [at times] it did affect me mentally. It was a hard period.”

Winning the silverware at European level was also made more special because he hadn’t reached the heights with England. Did he ever get feedback as to why he wasn’t picked? “Not really,” he shrugs. “There were times when he [Eddie] might have said, ‘work on this or that’.  But, on the Australia tour in 2016 he said, ‘oh you’re not on good form’, and I thought that was harsh. But then over the next two weeks he said I wasn’t picked because it was, ‘just a gut feeling, going with my gut’. And there’s two ways to look at that,” he continues. “Sometimes you want something to work on, so you can practice, but sometimes they’re just bullshit answers, they’re just telling you something: ‘oh, go and work on high balls’. And some coaches will always look to find things. But when you’ve got Eddie saying it’s just his ‘gut feeling’ that’s as honest as you can be. It’s shit for me, because I’m training well, playing well, but there’s nothing I can do about it or work on, because he’s being honest. 

“Sometimes people want to give something to a player, so they make something up and then the player just goes looking for it down a wormhole.

“I just think with Eddie,” he surmises, “I just wasn’t the type of player he wanted. There’s not too much rhyme nor reason about it – and it wasn’t helped by them having two playmakers in George [Ford] and Owen – but I’m not losing sleep over it. 

“Maybe when I retire it’ll hit me,” he concedes, “but now I’m having a great career, I’m very lucky. Of course, I’d love to play more, there’s nothing like hearing the national anthem, and do I think I should’ve had more [caps]? One hundred per cent. But I’m not going to sit here saying ‘Eddie’s shit’. He’s a very good coach, he did great things for England, and I wasn’t what he wanted. There’s been plenty of players over the course of England history not picked when others say they should be. It’s one man’s opinion. It wasn’t to be.”

Eddie’s replacement though is a good one, reckons Alex. “He was the stand-out choice,” says Alex of former team-mate Steve Borthwick. “People were crying out for Scott Robertson, but Borth worked with the England set up, he worked with Eddie for a long time, seeing the good parts and the not so good, and he’ll use that to his advantage.”

As for the demise of Eddie’s England, Alex puts it down to clarity. “It’s a shame because when Eddie came in, those first four years there was so much clarity, I was part of team meetings and everyone knew what was expected of them, everyone knew if we were going this way, around the corner, up and in, up and aggressively, or kick chase here.

“And if you have clarity you can go one hundred per cent,” he continues. “I remember reading a research article about all the top speeds recorded in ice hockey for the Buffalo Sabres for the whole season. Every single game the highest speed recorded was when they were going off the ice to be subbed, because it was the simplest thing, they knew what they were doing, once the card was up, they went. And I think with Eddie, that clarity was why he was so good for four years, and it hasn’t looked like that in recent times. Steve will give the players that, they know what’s expected of them and how they do that.”

For all the trophies, tries and chunks of timber he’s won over his career, one image forever conjured up when his name is spoken is of a gently swaying Alex Goode, still dressed in match day kit, in the days following the 2019 European Cup final victory over Leinster. “I think there’s two things with that,” he begins. “One, I’d only been with Lucy a couple of months, and I think she was questioning if I was a bit boring, especially coming from the music industry, rock and roll whatever you want to say. 

“She goes into the office on the Monday and, for the first time ever, she said everyone was like, ‘oh my god, your boyfriend, is still going out, caning it, what a legend’. She’d never heard anyone talk about rugby before in the office, it was all football or music, and so I think I went up in their estimations from that.

“But on a more serious note,” he adds, “you get asked about that much more than anything you’ve ever achieved in rugby. And my mum is disappointed by that. She’s always like, ‘he’s a very good rugby player too, you know!’.

“I guess as long as it doesn’t detract from the fact that obviously I played a lot of games, I played a high standard, I am professional, and I’m not out every night drinking – even though I know that everyone would like to believe that it’s like the 1980s and 1990s stories you hear of being out on the piss every night and turning up for training stinking of whisky and cigarettes and still playing well. 

“Because, ultimately, I’ve looked after myself and had a very good career from being pretty diligent about everything as well.”

Defence rested, we turn to the next stage. He’s 34 now, breaking records with every game he plays for Saracens and the trophy cabinet – the club one that is, not the home one with all the gold discs – still has space for a few more cups. Even as we write three months before the end of the season, Saracens are looking good for another Premiership title at least. 

Retirement isn’t yet on the cards for him, not least because he doesn’t quite know what he’s going to do in the afternoons. “You’re going down a wormhole here,” he says of our post-rugby career question. “I think there should be an unwritten rule that you should never ask about player, ‘what are you gonna do after rugby?’ It’s so hard and it’s such a stressful thing. 

“I joke, but I’ve always known I’m going to have to work again and I’d love to play rugby until I am 80, but it doesn’t work like that. 

“I’ve been doing something for twenty years, and I’m institutionalised in that and then, suddenly, bang, I’m going to be starting again and reinventing myself, competing against graduates. Of course, you have a skillset that’s more worldly and you have leadership, team ethic, hard work and all that, but finding a new career is hard and so foreign to everything you’ve done your whole life. 

“And on top of that, you then have the fact you were ‘someone’, a little bit,” he admits. “Even if it’s just the butcher or someone in the pub who knows you. Or you go to the games and there’s the fans and then, suddenly, you’re absolutely no one. So there’s an ego side to it too. There’s the income on top of that too, as a player, you’re on relatively good money, but then...”

So, there’s no plan? “I’ve kind of given myself the next eighteen months to really zero in a bit more and not be too sporadic,” he says. “I’ve done quite a lot of work experience at different places and then probably ticked them off as not things I want to do, which does help a bit. Stuff with GlaxoSmithKline, Allianz, a few different things, but not for me... I probably won’t go into the coaching route either: too much uncertainty and moving the family around.” 

Alex’s dad had an engineering company doing emergency lights, which meant he could be called out at all hours, but on the flipside it also ensured he had the flexibility to never miss one of Alex’s games. “It had a big effect on me,” he admits. “And I think being there as much as I can for Remy is important to me.”

He’s not completely unprepared however, as he talks about setting up a business with his dad. “I’m keeping it quiet though,” he says. “I’ve got a bit of fear of failing as well. It’s a bit of a constant worry and not wanting to look like a failure, for someone who’s been slightly successful.

“I like the structure of rugby,” says Alex, taking the conversation full circle. “I’ve had eighteen years of knowing what I’m going to do, where I’m going to be, and that doesn’t bother me, so suddenly not having that would be quite scary.”

‘Surviving’ and not getting injured are his two main goals outside of the trophies, and he intends on going out on a high. “It’s a club I love,” he begins, “so I don’t want to fall off the edge of a cliff [performance wise] and be that player who ‘used to be really good’.  I don’t want people to say, ‘he’s not good anymore’, I want to be performing at a really high level.”

And once he’s done with rugby, he’s definitely done. “I don’t even want to play a charity game when I finish,” he says. “I see people like Paul Gustard running out trying to whack people and I think, ‘this is not for me’. Beach rugby, or rugby where you dive into the water to score, that stuff maybe.

“If I get through rugby, and I’m okay at the end of it, then why push it? I’ll do dinners and auction things, but I won’t be going back to Cambridge to try and be a local hero or something like that as a 36-year-old on one leg.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Darryl Vides

This extract was taken from issue 21 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.