Chris Robshaw

The ending wasn’t quite how he’d imagined it. Defeat in his final home game in front of an empty stadium; solace in a win for his 300th and final club appearance at Leicester; but then came the Barbarians... For Chris Robshaw, and everyone that knows him, it’s been emotional.

Our two meetings with Chris Robshaw are just under five months apart. Both are in south London, the first is late September, for the photoshoot in a studio near his Wandsworth home. He’s in good form, looking ahead to his imminent finale in English rugby: a final home game [against Wasps], a final away game [at Leicester, also his 300th appearance] and a run-out for the Barbarians at Twickenham against the country he once captained.

For the second, at his home the following February, he’s in a good place again, literally packing his bags for San Diego, with a flight to his new life in California and job with Legion in Major League Rugby just two days away. “There has been a fair amount to organise,” he says.

“The house pack up has been pretty manic, we’ve been in Wandsworth for more than seven years, so we’ve acquired a fair amount of stuff that either had to go into storage, the dump or clothes banks.”

There was also the small matter of covid to deal with. “My wife [singer Camilla Kerslake] had covid over Christmas,” he explains. “Only mild symptoms which is good, but it meant an isolation period, and for me that also meant making my first Christmas lunch.”

Any good? “Not bad actually, I was pleased with my beef Wellington, but must admit I still have a way to go before I’m taking on Gordon Ramsay.”

More importantly, there was also the news – revealed to the world by Hello! last month – that he’s about to be a dad. “It’s going to be an amazing experience becoming a father for the first time. I am a little bit nervous, but can’t wait. And it’s going to be born in Las Vegas, so hopefully that will be a fun fact when older.”

San Diego, on the Pacific Coast of California, is famed for many things. Golf, for one. It has 92 courses in the wider county area, including 2008 US Open host Torrey Pines – where Tiger Woods famously won with an injured leg in a sudden-death play-off against Rocco Mediate. The actual Torrey pine itself is another famous resident what with it being a rare pine species only seen in two places in the US.

Other things of note include its desert state park, mountains, an endless list of theme parks and laying claim to being the host city of the world’s largest comic convention, attracting 130,000 masked and cloaked individuals every July. But, what appeals to Chris, is something that he’s always longed to be near: the sea. San Diego has pretty good access, just the seventy miles of sandy-beached coastline.
“I always wanted to live abroad,” he says. “I love the sea, it’s always been a massive escape for me, especially having been brought up in and around London.

“Now I’m going to be getting six months there and six months here, so I get to take the next step in my life which also allows me to get away from the pressure here – at least the captaincy side of it.”

Not that’s he’s downplaying the MLR or his new side, San Diego Legion. They are, after all, among the favourites for this year’s campaign, having always reached the semi-finals, including the final in 2019, and were leading the division last year when it was cut short. “I imagine stuff there is intense,” he says, “but from what I hear there is a lot of fun off the field. They play hard but go to the beach for recovery. Instead of sitting in an ice bath they sit in the sea.”

At 34 and looking in fine shape, he could have chosen an adventure closer to home. “I just wanted to see a bit of the world,” continues Chris. “I’ve been to Bath, I’ve been to Sale, I’ve done that for the last fifteen years, so it was about going somewhere new and exciting, where there was a good standard of rugby.”

He emphasises the last point. “I still want to play a good standard, but not a standard where I’d have to go to France and play for eleven months of the year. It’s sixteen games maximum a season in America and, at the age I am, that suits my body and suits my mind.

“The thing that was a big selling point,” he continues, “was that everyone I spoke to, just said what a nice place it was. I spoke to Darren [Gardner] the owner and a couple of the players, and the set-up is professional, they’re the best team, and not one person said a bad thing.

“There’s still a bit of nerves about going,” he admits. “I’ve been at Harlequins since I was seventeen. I supported the club, I was born and raised in this part of London, but I can’t wait to get involved.”

He won’t be going alone either. “Yes, both Camilla [with bump] and my dog Rico are making the trip over to America and looking forward to it. Although I’ve found out it’s more expensive to fly your dog over than it is you.”

The last few months have been emotional. The final Premiership games went as expected, albeit with the omission of one major factor in his playing days: the fans. As he ran out for the final time at The Stoop against eventual Premiership finalists Wasps, he went out to a tunnel of applause, but it was only those players and staff allowed in the stadium, and while the flame throwers lit the night sky on his arrival, there were no spectators to feel the heat, just empty stands. “It was a strange day,” he says. “Even as I entered the stadium for the last time, I was looking around at everything, trying to take it all in. I had a lot of pre-match interviews to do, and I was just trying not to get too emotional.

“I wanted to win and play well, and the club had allowed my wife, family and a few friends to come and watch, which was nice.”

Tears? “I welled up a little as the flame throwers went off and the rest of the squad made their presence known,” he admits. “But it was just very sad that I didn’t get to celebrate with the people who have supported me since I was a teenager, following the side around the country and beyond, with a packed-out stadium. From a selfish point of view, I will always be gutted to have not shared that final moment with them.”

A week later, his final club game, at Leicester, Harlequins made up for the 23-32 loss to Wasps, with a 32-26 win at Welford Road in his 300th game. “The plaudits and reaction were overwhelming, whether on social media or to private messages,” recalls Chris. “Early on in the season I was on the high 200s, so I had the number 300 in mind and wanted to try and achieve it, it was touch and go but we got there.”

Any regrets as the moment drew nearer? “I was happy with my decision to move on, you know in your mind and in your body and without crowds it did make it easier,” he says. “It was nice to play Leicester as my last game, as I have a number of friends in the team and roomed with Dan Cole my whole England career.”

So far, so good, a fitting ending to a brilliant English rugby career, and just the small matter of the Barbarians against England to go. Which is where the plans went slightly astray.

As we all know now, in what already seems like a different time, Chris was one of thirteen players reprimanded by the RFU, handed a fine and four-week ban for leaving the team hotel, resulting in the cancellation of the match. It’s a difficult situation for Chris to discuss, even now, months on, when the rugby world has moved on. “Firstly, I want to apologise to the Barbarians, RFU and the rugby community,” he says, aware that this is his first print interview since the incident. “Myself and twelve others made some poor choices and broke the code of conduct. We have been given our punishments which we all accept and try and move forward.”

Part of the punishment was 50 hours of unpaid rugby community service. “I think I’ve always done a healthy amount of grassroots coaching and interactions,” he says, “but I’ve really been enjoying the structured community service I’m involved with now and actually my schedule now allows me to explore this side of things even more.”

As modern players get ever more immersed in professional life, many leaving their grassroots clubs at a young age, they are becoming more detached from the realities of the community game. “I feel this is something players in the professional game are moving further away from,” he says, “not through their own thought, but just through busy playing schedules and various rugby commitments. It has been a great reminder of what makes this game so special in this country, the rugby clubs and people involved in them are very much that.”

Chris has only ever been at Harlequins. Born and raised in Surrey, he played for Warlingham RFC, then went to Millfield School in Somerset, and signed for the Twickenham club as soon as he was old enough.  “I’ve had a couple of offers [to leave] at different stages but I always wanted to win with Harlequins,” he says of why he spent his career with the one club. “When you want to play for England you have to stay in the country, that was a massive driver to be successful. I wanted to play for my country more than maybe earning a little bit more money.

“I was paid handsomely,” he quickly adds, “you get paid well when you play for England and you get endorsements, but for me it wasn’t about that, I wanted to try and win for a club I supported as a kid.”

Chris played sixteen years as a professional, longer if you go back to when he trained with England as a schoolboy. “When I was at school we’d come in and stay in the army barracks, get changed in the corridors,” he recalls. “In the [Harlequins] academy we’d be playing the likes of Leicester, Leeds, Bath, so it felt professional, but after training you’d have to clean the first team training balls and do all of that, which almost felt like a rite of passage.

“Rugby does evolve,” he says, comparing then to now, “you look at different training methods, recovery methods, length of sessions, but a lot of it does go in circles – I’ve enjoyed the ride, it’s been fun.”

Mark Evans was coach when he arrived, and Chris was on the books when they got relegated, but it was the incoming Dean Richards that made his mark when he broke through in the Championship. “Deano sat me down and said, ‘what are your aspirations this year?’ and I was, ‘I want to play in the second team’, and he said, ‘if they’re your aspirations, we don’t have a place in the team for you’.

“He’s a man of few words but he’ll always back your corner. I remember my first couple of years and I was quite injury prone,” he admits. “I broke my foot twice, I broke my leg, I did my knee ligaments, I broke my hand – that does make you kind of think, ‘is this game for me?’ I’d heard that if you’re out for more than six months, the club get rid of you, but he sat me down and was like ‘we want to invest in you and give long-term support’.”

His start to life with Harlequins and in the Championship was ominous. “I broke my foot in the first game of the season,” explains Chris. “I played a little bit in training, then I broke my leg again – I got caught in a ruck. The knee ligaments just went when I sidestepped – I don’t think I’ve sidestepped since.”

Such was the frequency of the injuries, he had serious doubts, but mum Patricia – who had brought Chris and his two brothers up alone after his father died when he was just five – had some advice. “I spoke to my mum at the time and I was like, ‘I don’t know...’ and she gave me typical motherly advice, ‘have you tried drinking more milk? You’ve just got to stick with it’.

“A lot of people only see the good times,” he continues, reflecting on those early days. ‘They see playing in big stadiums, against the best players in the world, but there aren’t many players who have a quick trip there.

“The Maros, the Farrells, they have worked hard to get there, but they’ve got there at quite a young age. Whereas a lot of guys go up a bit, come back down, go up a bit – you need to show resilience, you’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to put the time in.”

The path has certainly been cobbled for Chris. He earned a first cap, aged 23, against Argentina in 2009, starting in a 24-22 defeat in Salta, in an England side shorn of British & Irish Lions, but still including the likes of Julian White, Steve Borthwick, Steffon and Delon Armitage and his Harlequins team-mates Danny Care and Nick Easter.

He didn’t return to the England side for almost three years, but when he did it was as captain, leading Stuart Lancaster’s rookie side in the opening game of the 2012 Six Nations against Scotland. “It took me over two years to get back in there [with England],” he says. “It was tough earning my stripes, but then that’s another rite of passage. To win my second cap and be named captain... I wanted to grab that with both hands. I was nervous, but I was excited, we had a young group.”

Were there nerves specifically around the captaincy? “I had captained Harlequins for the period before,” he says. “Captaincy is not an individual thing, you need good people around you, and we had Dylan Hartley who was fantastic at the time and even Owen Farrell, even though he was in the camp for the first time, the way he was speaking, the authority that he had was incredible, and there was Brad Barritt too.

“It wasn’t the most exciting game, but we won [6-13], and it was good to get that from the start. Everyone wanted to achieve for England and Stuart.”

Under Lancaster in the early days, England were the young guns of the Six Nations, taking scalps, and playing, at times, thrilling rugby, but never quite making it over the final hurdle, as he racked up three runner-up spots on the bounce. “We were playing brilliantly to go into that final [2015] Super Saturday,” says Chris, referencing the weekend when England and France played out a rollicking 55-35 try-fest. “I hadn’t won a Six Nations, so to finish second on points... I think if it had been the points’ system we have now, we would have won it and that’s the frustrating thing.

“We played some good rugby but we blinked at the wrong time and that’s going to scar me for life,” he admits. “We had some fantastic fun with Stuart, we went to South Africa and battled over there [2012, losing 22-17 and 36-27], we went to New Zealand [in 2014] and lost it in the last couple of minutes [20-15 in the first Test].

“We challenged the best in the world, but unfortunately we couldn’t quite get there, and I need to take responsibility for that as well, possibly not preparing the team in the right way – it’s easy to look back in hindsight and say we could have done this, could have done that.

“In the third Six Nations [2014] we went to France and a bounce of the ball went their way, they had a two-on-one and scored and that was our Grand Slam done.

“It’s little things like that, it all comes down to little things,” he repeats, “even going to Wales and that Grand Slam game [2013], it didn’t go well [30-3], and we’d played the week before against Italy at home and didn’t get enough points on the board [winning by just 18-13] and we lost the title – lots of little moments add up.”

Lancaster played a big role in his career, showing faith in him as captain despite his, and his squad’s, relative inexperience at Test level. “Stuart’s a fantastic coach,” he says, “people are starting to see it again with Leinster, but it’s a results business and when things go badly you take the brunt of it. He was a fantastic coach for England. Cracking coach.

“With Stuart my handling improved massively,” he continues, “I had to step up with the leadership and try to get fitter too – he was all about playing an expansive game. With Eddie it’s very much a physical game, more set-piece orientated, and Eddie is a fantastic man-manager too.”

Chris doesn’t need reminding of what happened next; the 2015 Rugby World Cup. “Doing that press conference post Australia was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” explains Chris. “Two hundred cameras, media, lights flashing, you’re holding back tears and you say your piece and you’re now dead behind the eyes.

“I was dead behind the eyes for quite a long time,” he admits, “my wife and I went to Pennyhill [Park, England’s base], we got into a room and just hugged each other and started crying.

“It was tough, and a lot of the other players were exactly the same. There were a number of things that helped me, but it’s something I’ll never fully get over, it’s always something which will hurt me to talk about, a scar I’ll always wear.

“Of course, that scar will fade in time. I remember, after the World Cup, my wife organised to hire a house in the New Forest for me and my friends and we drunk until we couldn’t remember – probably not the most sensible thing to do – but it allowed me to forget, even if it was just for a weekend.

“I was going to the post office and people were telling me how bad I was,
I didn’t want to leave the house, I felt a massive burden, a massive shame.

“Sean Fitzpatrick emailed me quite soon after and said, ‘look there’s nothing anyone can say or do at the moment that will make you feel any better but the sun will come up again, it might not be tomorrow, might not be next week, might not even be next month, but it will come up again and it will be okay’.

“There was a third thing that helped. Myself, Stuart and a couple of the other captains went to Buckingham Palace,” continues Chris. “We’d just been knocked out, we were feeling pretty down, we could sense the pity of other players and, as I was going, Heyneke Meyer stopped me and grabbed me by both shoulders and said, ‘look you’re too strong to let this affect you’.

“And, for me, it was people like that who reached out, that’s real leadership, because they didn’t have to. Stuart was great with me, Conor [O’Shea, then Harlequins DoR] was great at the time.

“It took me a long time to move forward,” says Chris. “We played Wales at Twickenham first game back. There was huge talk in the press about how we wanted to get these boys back and we won [25-21], luckily, and, doing the lap of honour I just broke down in tears.

“I had to get back into the changing room, just the whole emotion came flooding out and I remember guys coming up to me and saying that they didn’t realise how much it affected me, how much it had taken its toll and, me being me, I probably bottled it up and didn’t share as much as I should have done.

“Then, going to Australia that summer, we won the first game. We’d never won a series down there, they were the team that knocked us out [of the World Cup] eventually, I won my 50th cap down there, I got man of the match, we won the series.

“When Jason Leonard presented me with the [50th] cap the whole changing room applauded me and cheered me and it was just such a...,” he pauses, “well there’ll never be closure on that [World Cup] chapter but that was a massive step in the right direction.”

Eddie Jones also played a part. Chris was playing some of the best rugby of his career in a physical backrow with James Haskell and Billy Vunipola, and it seems little coincidence that he was doing so without the captaincy. “He was very good for me,” says Robshaw of Eddie. “He’d slated me a bit in his first press conference, but to be honest I never thought I’d play for England again [after the World Cup], so I thought it was a slow death.

“But he said, ‘if you can do these things there’ll be a position for you in my side, so go away and work on your game, there’s a place for you’. I want you to play six, I’m going to make Dylan [Hartley] captain, I want to go in a new direction, and I was like ‘thank God’.

“Honestly, it was like a slow death [of my captaincy] was being played out for a long, long time – on the back of papers, front of papers, on blogs, podcasts, social media. At the time I couldn’t really escape it, but not being captain allowed me to focus on myself, get back into it.”

He played for three years under Eddie, taking his caps tally to 66, with his final appearance coming in England’s third Test victory over South Africa in Cape Town on their 2018 summer tour [England lost the series 2-1]. “Even today I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable [being an international],” he admits, “I’ve always wanted to be better than I am, wanted to improve, to go out and do 20 passes because I’ve dropped one ball.

“Even now I want to do more, want to achieve more. I think as soon as you do get to that comfort stage, it’s probably time to move on.

“The psychologist with England used to say, ‘it’s easy to get in the room
but it’s harder to stay there’. That was something that used to drive me, Sean Fitzpatrick used to say, ‘always train as if you’re number two trying to become number one’.

“I remember Kevin Sinfield coming to speak to us with Andrew Strauss when Stuart first moved in and I was captain. He said, ‘what are you doing when no one’s watching? When you’re in England camp it’s easy, but in the middle of January when it’s raining and you’re a bit beaten up, you’ve lost three games on the bounce, are you still doing your extras when everyone’s gone home in the dark?’. You see some guys doing the extras and, more often than not, they’re the guys who are going and playing for England.”

There are other moments to review when looking back on his career. Such as ‘bloodgate’. He doesn’t want to go into much of the nitty-gritty, but he remembers what happened next.

“The amount of meetings you have when stuff goes wrong is huge,” he says, “and back then it was huge. It took its toll. I don’t think we won an away game the following season. There were casualties, we were a tight-knit group and, as a kid, you want to prove people wrong.

“I remember going to Leicester and there’d be people dressed up as vampires in the crowd with blood coming down their faces and all that kind of stuff. You take it as a bit of tongue in cheek, but I wasn’t one of the ones that lost my job, and I’m sure they’d see it very differently.”

Social media also emerged during his playing career, not necessarily a good thing when you’re captain of club and country. “If things go wrong, you feel it more, you’re more accessible to every man and his dog and they can make you know what they think at the click of a button.

“I would go off social for some campaigns,” he says, “you learn to take it, your shoulders get broader, your skin gets thicker and you learn to take it with a pinch of salt, and learn whose opinions matter: the coaches, your team-mates, your family, and that everything else doesn’t matter. You learn to rise above it.”

The topic brings us back to the World Cup. “The media backlash after the World Cup, the online backlash was coming thick and fast and my friends and family would say ‘you’re going to be okay’, but they had no idea what it was like. My wife was fantastic in looking after me and shielding me from it, but, as I said, it was those other international captains who reached out to me who’d been through it that made a big difference.

“I loved captaining my country,” he concludes, “I’ve never been more proud than to lead the guys at a home World Cup, but it was also the toughest. I’m not proud of how it finished, the way it finished, but I loved it.

“Eddie very much gave me a second life and I’m very much in debt to him for that. I’m gutted that I didn’t have the opportunity to go to a World Cup again, I would have loved to have had another shot.”

A knee injury in the autumn series before the Rugby World Cup failed to heal in time for the next Six Nations and by the time he returned, England had moved on. “I left no stone unturned and then it’s someone’s opinion, you’ve got to fit into their jigsaw,” he says. “I’m at peace with that.”

Not that he’s worrying about that anymore, as his thoughts return to the present and, specifically, California. “If I can’t live in London, then southern California isn’t the worst place to go.

“Sometimes,” he continues, “it’s hard to park rugby but, as I’ve got into my 30s, you take things a bit more in your stride, finding the simple things to make you happy. So now, my next big thing is to get a motorbike licence for San Diego – that and a surfboard. And, of course, to win the MLR with San Diego Legion.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Oli Hillyer-Riley

This extract was taken from issue 13 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.