Chinnor RFC
The daily life of Matt Williams used to involve deals with Hollywood execs, launching girlbands across the planet, making movies with the Harry Potter team, and helping the Hannah Montana soundtrack go platinum. Today, it’s much harder. Finding rugby refs for friendly fixtures and helping to get Chinnor RFC promoted from National One.
The referee hasn’t shown up, or rather he’s cancelled at the last minute, and Chinnor’s director of rugby Matt Williams isn’t happy. There are two games today, one for the first team against Welsh side Camarthen Quins, and also a run out for the twos, or the Falcons, as they’re known. Although we’re unsure of which of the two games is currently missing a ref, either way it’s a problem for Matt and he’s on the phone, doing the kind of frantic ring-round that’s undoubtedly also taking place at every other grassroots club across the country this same morning. No referee, late players, missing keys to the container, there’s always something.
It gives us a chance to peruse the club. On one wall, there’s a pub sign from an establishment called The Bird in Hand in Chinnor. It’s long since closed down, but it’s lived on in the crest of Chinnor RFC, the club that was formed within its walls back in 1963. One of them had been a master at nearby Risborough School, and had collared some players from there to help them get a team up and running on the village playing fields.
Chinnor, a village whose most noted feature appears to be the concrete works, is no longer home. They’re now eight miles up the road in the comparatively metropolitan Thame with its sprawling population of 11,500. Whether it’s Chinnor or Thame, we’re still roughly in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Oxfordshire’s finest countryside.
The pitch we look out upon is part of the 100-acre Thame county showground, once home to Britain’s biggest one-day agricultural show, but now its days of witnessing the crowning of the best pumpkins and prized piggies are long gone. It’s still home to some form of agriculture, as the hulking agricultural machinery sitting dormant on its pastures seems to testify, but the only vegetables earning praise are those that are grown in the allotments, next door to the clubhouse.
Instead, in a town where Larry Grayson was once a local pub landlord, the main attraction is the rugby. The club are now not only the biggest in Oxfordshire, having passed by arch rivals Henley in recent years, but among the contenders in National One after a summer recruitment that saw them bring in 22 new faces. Among them were the likes of 28-year-old Worcester flanker Carl Kirwan, former Samoan captain Ofisa Treviranus and ex-London Welsh and Yorkshire Carnegie full-back Chris Elder.
The man who has been largely responsible for the recruitment, has been the same man sorting the ref issue, Matt Williams. “I’ve had a mixed bag of life experiences,” explains Matt, having solved the problem by persuading a linesman for the second game to also officiate the first. “I was at Harlequins up until 2000, when I had a heart attack, which ended my career instantly. I had three operations as a result – I was only 21.”
Matt had a rare heart defect. “It was same as Marc Vivien Foé, the old Man City and West Ham footballer who was less lucky than I was,” he says. Cameroon midfielder Foé had collapsed in the centre circle during an international against Colombia and died shortly after.
“I didn’t realise I had this heart defect until professional sport triggered it.
“Back in the Quins days, we always did a 3k run as our fitness test. I was alright on the 3k and out of the three years I was there, I never had an issue for two and a bit of them.
Matt Williams
“But then we had a new S&C guy, Paul Pook, an amazing guy and part of the early age of professional rugby – he was one of the scientists of strength and conditioning. He changed the fitness test to maximum exertion, where you do a row, a cycle, a run, all back-to-back and record the distance. It was only six-minute intervals, but I got to a minute and a half and blacked out on the run. They retested me two weeks later, and I blacked out again, at this point there was something blatantly wrong.
“I went out to Caerphilly and played six months there. There was no fitness test, and everything had been absolutely fine. But one night I was at my girlfriend’s house and I felt something was wrong, we called an ambulance and they said something had gone wrong with my heart, it was a silent heart attack.
“I was immediately transferred to a national heart hospital, and they said I had a very rare condition, it was an electrical problem with the heart that was a one-in-five-million syndrome. They said people in everyday life have it but didn’t know they had it, because you only found out when your heart was pushed to exertion.
“I had three operations and was told my rugby days were numbered. It was tough because in my age group it was only myself who’d played 16, 18, 19 and 21 England, I’d been capped at every age group. And I was in a really successful group of Steve Borthwick, Andrew Sheridan, Adam Balding, David Flatman, Alex Sanderson – a really good group of England boys.
“I ended up lost, thinking, ‘wow I wasn’t expecting this, what do I do next?’”
Matt’s dad was a former football agent. “He was a well-respected agent,” he says. “And this was in a time just after rugby had gone professional, so we ended up working together in an agency now focusing on rugby.”
They built an impressive client base, including Olivier Magne, Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu, Census Johnston and Juan Manuel Leguizamon, and Matt also made his first steps in coaching, taking on roles with Barking and setting up a Harlequins satellite academy that produced the likes of former Quins’ captain George Robson.
Three years into his new career though, his past caught up with him. “Even though this was a great job, I wasn’t playing,” he says. “It was like a three-year delay in mourning not being able to play.
“I turned around to my father and said, ‘do you know what? I’m out, I’m getting on a plane to America and I’m going into the world of entertainment’. He started to laugh and said ‘what are you talking about?’ I said I needed a ‘complete change of scenery and I fancy entertainment’.”
Doing what? “I didn’t know,” admits Matt. “I genuinely didn’t know, but the word ‘entertainment’ was sexy and cool. I’m now 25 or 26, and my dad says, ‘look ‘I’ll give you some money to set up an entertainment agency, but once you’ve spent that, you’re coming back into the rugby agency’.
“He made me sign a contract with him saying this is a loan and if you can’t repay me you’ll work it back.”
And so, the former age-grade hooker with three years of experience as a rugby agent, left for America. But not before he’d made the next logical step for someone on this kind of career path – he set up a girlband. “I literally put an ad in a newspaper, hired a room at Pineapple dance studios, and they all turned up,” he says, as we quickly check we’re still in the clubhouse of Chinnor RFC. “The funny thing is, I got a guy who was a football agent to help me – he happened to have some experience in the music world. And the pair of us sat there as all the girls came in singing and dancing – it was my five minutes of feeling like Simon Cowell.
“This was overnight and out of nowhere,” he admits of the idea. “They came from all around England, and I auditioned 200 girls to put the band together. I was so naïve, I literally thought, ‘I’m going to put a girlband together because that sounds cool and sexy and I’ll put seven girls together because the Pussycat girls had five’. It was that naïve.
“I cast these girls, I got the music for them, I choreographed them – I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing, but it worked.”
How? “Cold calling,” he says. “I knew nobody, so I picked up the phone, got on a plane and battered the door down until somebody listened to me.
“I was in New York with a CD and pictures of the girls and I got myself a meeting with an A&R administrator which to me sounded huge. It turned out to be nothing more than a secretary in a cloakroom, so I’m sitting in this room that’s literally 2m x 2m, playing this music, pretending to be really cool, and not realising that the person I’m meeting can do zero for me.
“But then by complete fluke this woman was administrating the I Am… Sasha Fierce album for Beyonce Knowles, and her dad, Mathew Knowles, comes storming in shouting ‘have you done this, have you done that’, and this lovely lady says to him, ‘this man has the UK’s Pussycat Dolls, you need to listen to it’.
“He pulled me up to the top floor of this building in New York, I walk into this floor that’s like a scene from a Hollywood movie – a huge open-plan room – he sits down, puts the music down, and says, ‘this is brilliant, I’m in’. And that was it. I only had six songs – written by a guy I’d found in the middle of Tottenham.
“He signs the girls, and moves them to Houston.”
Although, admits Matt, the band ultimately ‘crashed and burned’, it still broke him Stateside. “In the entertainment industry, it’s about contacts, and success is a by-product of that,” he says. “I knew no-one, but the fact I sold this band to Sony and Mathew Knowles gave me a black book overnight.
“They had millions spent on them in development but it didn’t work. We had a TV show Breaking From Above [the band were called From Above] which was aired in 162 countries on MTV it was a big, big deal.”
More success followed including – and surely the only member of the front row union to do so – going platinum. “I worked on the Hannah Montana soundtrack,” he says. “I found a guy for Disney to work on that, and ended up getting a platinum disc for that movie.”
He also launched music producers, including one that worked with Usher, and then started working in film. “My most recent one was Killer’s Anonymous with Gary Oldman, which was out in America last month,” explains Matt, who clearly still keeps a hand in.
“And I did a deal with Warners because my speciality was music,” he continues. “I’d managed to get my hands on a Lennon/McCartney copyright so I did a deal to produce the Mamma Mia of Lennon/McCartney music. The film is still in development with the Harry Potter team, but it was ten years ago that the deal was actually done.”
It was doing the latter deal that demonstrates the greatest disparity between life then and now. “I was invited to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank to meet the CEO that was then Greg Silverman,” explains Matt. “I didn’t understand how much of a big deal this was and how difficult it was to get a meeting with him. I’d just sent a random cold call email and he had responded, it was about the Lennon/McCartney rights.
“The next thing I’m sitting in his room, looking at a Heath Ledger Joker costume on one side of the room and then, out of his window, you’ve got all the DC comic costumes and sets on display.
“I remember walking to his office through the lot and it was just a who’s who of world film just walking around. At that point it was ‘wow, this is insane’.” Quite.
After four years, he said goodbye to Hollywood and hello to Gravesend RFC. “I was travelling every month between London where my family were, and Los Angeles, it was an awful lot of airmiles,” he says. “It got to a point where my wife – at this point we had two children, we’ve got three now – decided we had to make a call about moving to America. She was really against our children growing up in America, so the decision was made to come home permanently and back to reality.”
His agency had been in America, so he contemplated launching a UK one, before an opportunity arose in his first love. “I was at home and my dad called up about an offer from Gravesend RFC who were 30 minutes from my home,” says Matt. “He said, ‘look I know you haven’t coached for a few years, but they’ve just been relegated [to level five] and they’re looking for someone to shake it up and get them promoted again, it could be a good clear-out of the mind’.”
He took the job and proved an instant hit. “We got to Christmas and were top by a considerable mile,” says Matt. “We’d scored 1,000 points and smashed everyone. But me and the chairman disagreed on the future of the club, he got nervous it was getting too serious.”
Six months at Gravesend had given Matt a huge amount of confidence in his coaching ability, and, as a parting of the ways with the Kent club looked inevitable, he took another call. “It was Chinnor who were second from bottom in National Two and they were saying, ‘do you fancy coming here, there’s ten games to go, if you keep us up, we’ll give you a contract’.
“In truth had they not been in that position I’d have said no, but coming out of what I’d done at Gravesend, I had an ego the size of a house at the time, so I took it.”
He kept Chinnor up by a single point, as they finished fourth from bottom in a division in which three went down. “Then the chairman, Simon Vickers, said ‘you’ve achieved the target, now let’s go on a journey and turn the club from amateur to semi-professional and see where we can go’.
“Year one, I was given a very small budget and we agreed a target of top six – we finished top six. Next year we got more budget, and finished sixth, but with more points.”
Then the target shifted, to promotion. “We then finished joint second, missed out on a promotion play-off to Old Elthamians by games won. And then, two years ago, we won the play-off and got promoted.”
In their first season in National One, according to Matt, they overachieved, finding themselves in the top three for half of the campaign, before their squad size of 25 took its toll and injuries forced them down to a still credible tenth. It’s a problem Matt has looked to remedy with his recruitment for the current campaign.
Despite the mutterings of rivals, Matt explains the arrival of another matchday squad’s worth of players hasn’t been down to a blank chequebook policy. “Those that come here have come for life experience, not rugby experience,” he says. “Of the squad this year of 34-36 players, we’ve sourced work for 19 of them.
“If we have a lad out of professional rugby with no real world experience he would ordinarily have to start applying for base level jobs, but we can help them skip the base level if we think they’ve got the right life skills to advance them in their career path.
“George Oliver is a great example,” explains Matt, “he arrived with us a year ago from Rotherham and he started as a labourer, but today he’s a site manager. He hadn’t had a day’s experience in construction before, but he had the right tools to advance that we could mould, he’s now made steps that, in the real world, would have taken three years, that’s what we’re good at. People aren’t coming to Chinnor for huge pay days, it’s a myth.
“The clubs in the league and surrounding area believe the only way we can get the level of player we have is through financial recompense but that’s not the truth. The truth is we can fast track life, and that’s what were very good at. We have a phenomenal chairman in Simon Vickers who is very connected in the business world and don’t get me wrong, if guys don’t do what they need to on the rugby pitch, then it’s like everyone else in the real world, they have the chance to lose their job. But we’re very good at developing pastoral care, and developing people – we also have a couple of business people who are acting as business mentors to the players.”
A quick look at the sides that have passed through National One in recent years and those in contention now, show that it’s not short of a few quid. “You only know your own finance, but you hear rumours of clubs with lots of money and no money,” says Matt. “I would say there are boys in National One on match fees, varying from £150 upwards, and there are certain players in this league that would not be in this league if they weren’t getting paid a good amount of money.
“I wouldn’t like to comment as it’s all rumours, but what I would say, is if you look at the league competitively now, there are players in National One that most Championship teams would want in their teams. National One has now become as competitive as the bottom half of the Championship.”
Unsurprisingly, they don’t intend to hang around long in National One. “That’s 100 per cent our target,” says Matt. “Despite all the conversations that go on about how poorly funded the Championship is, they’re not as poorly funded as National One.
“National One is the top semi-professional league in the UK and now we’ve had our travel monies cut from the RFU, so the reality is we have zero support, and it’s an expensive business running a National One club.”
Matt heads to help prepare the seconds, or at the very least to ensure they have a referee, and a succession of clubmen join us for a chat. Mark Nichols, a former club captain, colts’ coach and first team manager who’s been with the club since 1976, takes us back to his playing days on the village fields. “It was clean-your-feet-when-you-come-back-from-the-showers – that type of thing,” he says of their former ‘clubhouse’. “It was really ramshackle grassroots rugby.”
He’s seen all the changes, and been integral in helping the supply of youth players to the seniors, instilling in them a pride in playing for the club that extended to leaving changing rooms spotlessly clean – something he then put in place when with the first team. “Bevon Armitage really pushed that forward too, enforced that wherever we went, making sure we left it as we found it,” he says – the older brother of Steffon and Delon had been one of the big early signings of Matt’s reign. “We’d often get nice messages from other clubs about how clean the changing rooms were.”
Junior Fatialofa, who joined from Cornish Pirates was, according to Mark, another player who made his mark, likewise Alfie Tooala. Loan players have also arrived from Exeter Chiefs. “We had three last year and they were typical Exeter,” he says. “Hardworking and humble.”
Former chairman Doug Humphreys also joined the club in 1976. He arrives today with his grandaughter in tow – who is brandishing a squash of some sort. “There used to be a chap called Benji who sold vegetables out of a little barn over there,” he says, point to an adjoining patch of land. “But he died last year, and they cleared the land, and turned it into allotments,” he says. “I took one of them up, so now I can tell the wife I’m at the allotment and pop in here for a beer.”
Not that it’s always just about the beer. “Have you been told about the Friday club? Well, we used to have an ex-player who was charging us ten grand for maintenance, and so we decided do it ourselves – there were eight of us, now there are twenty.
“Kubota give us a demo tractor every year and we’ve got two ex-farmers here, so we put a grass cutter on the back and do the pitch – that’s £70,000 worth of tractor we’ve got out there.”
Doug can pinpoint the moment Chinnor first made its mark in rugby. “The first season we won the county cup, when we beat Henley [in 1977], was the making of us,” he says. “In those days a lot of clubs wouldn’t give us fixtures. And when they introduced leagues they had to play us and throughout the 90s we were beating the sides around us, slowly climbing up to where we are now.
“Henley had a superb side ten years ago, and were the best side in the county, but they couldn’t sustain it. The past ten years it was always Henley and Chinnor, but the last three or four, it’s been Chinnor more than Henley.”
The crowds have come along too, pulling punters in from Oxford, Aylesbury and other assorted villages across the county. “When we had Reading Rams and Henley in our league, we pulled in over a 1,000,” says Doug. “We’re not there now, more like 700 or 800, but we can get back up there.”
Carl Kirwan is one of the big name signings that should bring a few more through the gates, although at 28, he wasn’t expecting to be starting his post-rugby career just yet. He was told he wasn’t having his contract renewed at Worcester at the end of last season. “It ended for me in quite a frustrating manner, I’d gone through a few injuries, but I got back at a point where I thought I was doing well, and Alan Solomons saw that and said it too,” he says. “But unfortunately they said there was not enough budget and, at that point of the season when they told me, most of the clubs had done their business.”
Faced with the prospect of no income, it left Carl looking for work in whatever form it took. “I was looking for jobs, anything I could do really, there was a couple of jobs at a local gym, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do.
“I wanted to be involved in rugby, but you’ve got to pay the bills, professional rugby is not like football where you fall out of it and you have bags of money.”
Effectively in the prime of his rugby career, Carl spoke to a few clubs about rugby playing options and it was Matt’s offer that appealed, as it offered a player-coach role, combined with a job at Simon Vickers’ company Rectory Homes. “What was on the table here was better for overall life,” he says. “I can’t speak highly enough of Simon and Matt, they put it all together and made it so simple. You can hang around the Premiership for three or four more years but then end up with nothing, no life experience and nothing to offer outside of rugby.
“Now my week consists of work Monday to Friday, 7.30am to 4.30pm, then I train here Tuesday and Thursday for two hours and try and get into the gym beforehand.
“The transition is tough,” he admits. “You go from a professional environment where everything is done for you, from meals you can have to physiotherapy, and now you’re in a work environment where you have to knuckle down and then hit the Red Bull to get you through the training session! I’m still in Worcester, so it’s a two-hour fifteen-minute commute to work, which can be tough too – the coffee machine is definitely on full – but I’m really enjoying it.”
A former player, and the principal sponsor, Simon Vickers took on a more hands-on role at the club as president eleven years ago, taking over the first team reigns seven years ago. “Nothing has been overnight,” he says. “When we got to National One our target was to stay up, but we didn’t have the quality of players or size of squad.”
That they’ve recruited so well, says Simon, is also down to the players. “The more successful you are at not just playing rugby, but bringing in guys with a lot of talent, the easier it is to bring in more because they’ve got a mate they can bring along. They tell their mates, ‘you should come to Chinnor’ ‘Who?’ And then they sell the Chinnor story for us – our best ambassadors are the players.”
The target at Chinnor is without doubt Championship rugby, but some, including those ‘ambassadors’ who’ve seen the club at the closest of quarters believe they can go even further. Captain Ben Manning is now in his sixth season at the club. “The best thing is, we’re universally hated by everyone, and I love that, it’s walking around with that swank trying to prove that we are the best,” he says. “We’re always backs against the wall, because people don’t like us – it could be to do with the players we’re getting in.
“But we are what we are – a great club, with great fans, there’s proper stalwarts here who come week-in, week-out, and you have to respect them, they’re a massive part of this squad as well.
“Simon Vickers has put in a lot of time to get the club where we are, and he’s an old Chinnor boy so he knows that being the best club in Oxfordshire is part of it, but his and Matt’s aspirations are to be the best we can and get to the Championship.
“But I’ll be honest, if we stay the way it is, and we keep investing in players and have that drive to succeed and go higher and higher, then there’s no end.
“I don’t want to say we’ll be in the Premiership within two years because that would be unrealistic, but I don’t see why we can’t get to the Championship and then it depends where they want to take the club from a committee point of view. The Premiership within the next five or ten years? With these people involved, it could be done.”
Words by: Alex Mead
Pictures by: Philip Haynes
This extract was taken from issue 8 of Rugby.
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