Delon Armitage

Playing dustbin cricket in Trinidad, he couldn’t even dream of being Brian Lara because he wasn’t left-handed. Instead, he had to settle for playing rugby for England and becoming a European champion alongside some of the game’s greatest players, all while living in the south of France. So, tell us, Delon Armitage, where did it all go wrong?

The three brothers, together with their uncles and other assorted extended family members could often be found playing cricket in the streets of Trinidad. “We’d have someone’s bin in the middle of the road, and whenever a car came, it’d be ‘just one more bowl’ to the driver, and then we’d move it out of their way,” explains Delon Armitage, born, like his brothers Steffon and Bevon, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. “I don’t think I owned a t-shirt or anything longer than shorts – I never wore trainers – we were always on the beach, outdoors. 

“Growing up, cricket was the big sport, Brian Lara was a hero, even though I couldn’t bat left-handed,” he says, “or if I was playing football, I was Dwight Yorke, or Shaka Hislop if I was in goal. I say these names to my kids now and they’re like ‘who?’. Athletics was big too, especially around the Olympics and we’d all sit around the television cheering them on.”

That television would have been there in the extended family home. “We lived in a big house with all the family,” explains Delon. “I had uncles that were the same age as me in the same house and there must have been more than fifteen at times. 

“Me, Steff and Bevon would share a bed, although with Steff in the middle, it sunk down and we always ended up on top of him,” he laughs, never missing a chance to have a dig. “We were brought up by my grandparents, I called them ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, but we knew mum was still looking after us, sending money from the UK or whatever. We knew our dad was around somewhere on Trinidad, but he left us when we were really young and we didn’t see much of him.”

Even in these early years for all three brothers, they had the freedom to explore. “We didn’t watch TV,” he says, “we were outside playing sport, we were in the bush, hunters looking through forests, going looking for snakes. I look at it now, and I wouldn’t let my kids anywhere near the stuff I was doing.”

The idea of sport as a career was not even considered, or dreamt, and rugby was nowhere to be seen, although Delon’s competitive nature was. “I was very competitive,” he admits, “I hated losing; at times when my brother beat me, I’d throw stones at him, saying ‘cheat’. 

“I hated losing,” he repeats, “and I just enjoyed playing sport, I’d never thought I’d ever be doing it in a team for a living.”

Almost three decades later, he brought to an end a professional rugby playing career that lasted for a good chunk of two of them, when he officially retired in 2019, aged 35. “My last game was in 2018,” he says. “I’d busted a gut with Lyon in pre-season running hills and all that. I said to myself I’d have one good last season then come back to the family, but I ended up getting injured in the first 60 minutes of the first home game, so I was out for the rest of the season. It was my knee. I was coming to the end anyway. I think I was one of the last of the old school; rugby has changed now. 

“I don’t think this new generation with training and professionalism, that they’re going to reach mid-30s, like some of us did.”

He thinks his position helped his longevity. “I definitely think I was quite fortunate playing wing or fullback,” he says. “Less contact and all that, a few of my friends say you could count on one hand the times I’ve made a tackle.”

A three-time European champion with Toulon, seven of his fifteen professional years had been in France, three of them with Lyon. London Irish had given him his first professional contract, signed when he was a teenager from Richmond College but, he says, “I went the long way around,” when reflecting on his start. “If you’re not in a decent school or seen early, it’s tough. You can play county but it’s not the same as schools. 

“When you look at the players that have made it, they’ve often come from the same background, and even if they have been brought up in rough areas, they got a scholarship, and rugby was their path out. Then they go to the schools with the best coaches and understanding of how to make it.

“I ended up getting to London Irish with a bit of luck because I was at college,
I was the only guy in that year that hadn’t been to a private school.”  

Delon’s route to Irish began when he left the Caribbean after visiting his mum and her English partner John. “I remember the day we were meant to go back to Trinidad and grabbing his hand saying ‘I don’t want to go back’,” says Delon. “In the end he said, ‘fine okay’ and we ended up adopted and staying in England.”

John, a rugby player with Hatfield, took Delon first to Sudbury, and then Richmond. “At Sudbury there’d be one team, but at Richmond there was an A, B, C, and D team,” he says. “They put me in C or D.”

Not that he was happy to stay there. “There was one tournament, I trained with the Cs, but wanted to play for the As, and they put me in the B team. I was really angry, even at nine, I couldn’t understand it.”

Stepdad John ensured rugby kept the brothers’ interest with some early financial incentives. “We had a bet with my stepdad, that for every try we’d get £1,” he says, “and the winner [over a season] would get a Super Rugby shirt. It got really competitive, we used to come back from tournaments, saying ‘I got fourteen, how many did you get?’. It didn’t matter if we won or not, it was how many tries we got. I played on the wing and Steff played scrum-half, so he’d just get the ball, dummy and go over all the time, whether he had an overlap or not.”

So Steff won? “Yeah, Steff won.” 

France was next, when the brothers’ stepdad got a job in Nice. “The rugby club had this one pitch that everyone trained and played on and it had this cage all around it with flats built right up next to it,” explains Delon of his time at Nice rugby club. “It was like an abandoned building, it was scary to go in.

“Then you soon got into French culture at games, very aggressive, lots of shouting, coaches fighting with other coaches – Nice were in the top league then. You’d go to the matches, and it had all the bands and trumpets; it was a different culture. At Richmond, it was just ‘come on Richmond’ but here you had a party. 

“Before I left France, I said I’d love to come back and play in this environment again.”

He didn’t leave France until he’d at least trialled for the national under-16s, where he competed for places alongside the likes of Yannick Nyanga and Frederic Michalak. “It was down in Narbonne and the first bit of the fitness session was a 50-metre swim – what’s that got to do with rugby?” he asks, “I could swim, but I wasn’t a strong swimmer, and I remember some of the boys couldn’t swim at all. I soon realised that at one side, it was shallower and so they were basically just walking and moving their arms, so it looked to the coaches like they were swimming.”

Delon failed to make the grade. “I wasn’t big enough,” says Delon, now 6ft 3in. “I didn’t start growing until after that and they like big, strong players down in France. 

“Not getting through counts a lot if you want to get into an academy down there, so it ended my chances there too.”

London Irish eventually provided Delon with a way into professional rugby back in England, where he’d returned to play for Richmond and study at Richmond College. “Declan Danaher and Rob Hoadley scouted me,” he says. “I was playing for Richmond College, and they’d come to watch Rob’s brother.”

After getting his chance through that stroke of luck, he literally couldn’t wait to get into the first team. “I was playing A-league on Wednesday, under-21s, but I couldn’t make the London Irish first team. But I thought I was ready, I was pushing and pushing, asking [assistant coach] Paul Hull ‘why am I not playing?’ and he goes ‘I’m pushing for you’.”

How old were you? “I was eighteen.”

His drive to succeed, to always play, to always win, is what has made Delon a three-time European champion, but it’s a characteristic that hasn’t always manifested itself in a way that wins fans. “I don’t want to say it, but I was always the bad egg in the family,” he says, “the aggressive one, the one who threw a tantrum, I didn’t like losing, but if I channelled it, then it was about wanting to be the best all the time. 

“I remember my stepdad saying my teachers wanted me to see a psychiatrist to have a chat, but he said ‘no’,” continues Delon. “He thought if I lost that edge, I wouldn’t have made it. Saying that, he did say you also can’t be thinking the whole world’s against you all the time, you have to channel it in the right way, you have fight. For me that came out in training...”

How bad were you at school? “I was pretty bad at school,” he admits. “Even now I remember days at school when I’d want to play football in the playground and the kids wouldn’t let me so I’d kick the ball on the roof, I could be that kind of nasty kid. 

“I laugh now, but I look back and think that’s such a nasty thing to do, if I’m not playing, you’re not playing...”

Competing with his two brothers, who were later joined by two younger brothers [Guy and Joel] and a sister [Juanita], also ensured competition was never far away. “We’re quite close,” he says, “we did a lot of stuff together, and every sport was a competition. We were quite good at sport – tennis we played a lot in France – and because we were so close in age, everything turned into a fight. We’d play all day, but as soon as someone lost that was it, right I’m not playing anymore.”

Mum Verna was always supportive. “She hated rugby,” says Delon. “My stepdad played it and broke every bone in his body. He forced her to come to games, she didn’t want to be there. As soon as any injury happened she wanted to get on the field, so it was hard for her, but as we started to retire, you could hear in her voice how happy she was. She was really happy to hear I was hanging up the boots.”

Delon broke through alongside the likes of Topsy Ojo, David Paice, Nick Kennedy, a golden crop, as was always the requirement at London Irish. “We relied on boys coming through the academy, because we weren’t a money club,” he says.

Told by then-coach Toby Booth to always ‘be ready’, his first appearance came against Sale away on a Friday night. “I remember it was Jason Robinson, Mark Cueto and Steve Hanley, the league’s top try-scorers and an England player, so it was ‘here we go’. But I did alright, scored there, and came off the bench a week later at Saracens and scored again.”

The starting debut against Leicester saw him face his toughest opponents. “They had the Tuilagis, Freddie on the wing and Henry at number eight, Andy Goode, Austin Healey, all these names,” says Delon. “There’s some big boys at London Irish, but it was only when you stood in the tunnel next to the likes of Martin Johnson, Julian White and Ben Kay and you just thought, ‘wow these guys are a different build’. In my head I did think ‘would anyone notice if I didn’t walk out?’ 

“The first thing Andy Goode did was put up a bomb, and it felt like it was up there for ages. I remember having time to look, seeing Freddie coming, and as I was looking at him I knew I had to jump as it was taking so long to come down. When he hit me, I must have slid ten metres back, as I ended up ten metres back on my tryline. 

“That hurt, in fact I remember everything hurt for days after that.” 

Irish continued to blood and stick with youngsters coming through, before a spate of signings such as Mike Catt, Riki Flutey and Seilala Mapusua, took them up a level. “Now we had the big guys, the World Cup players, things were changing,” says Delon, “from then on London Irish started to click...”

Steffon, then at Saracens where he hadn’t been getting much game time, also joined the club. “He was just what the club needed at the time, a ball stealer; we had great flankers, thousands of them, but he just came in when rugby needed someone to lift the ball off the ground and take it, it was perfect timing.

“At Toulon, he won us so many games, or rather saved us so many times,” says Delon. “You’d be winning games, when you’re playing the likes of Munster and Leinster in semis and finals, and they’d travel up the field 80 metres and just when they’re about to pick and go, bang, he goes and steals it, then Jonny [Wilkinson] kicks it down the field and we’re back on the front foot. 

“He’s one of those type of players that when they announce the team and his name is in there – him and Jonny – it’s like, ‘how are we going to lose these games with these guys in the side?’. It’s not because he’s my brother, he’s just one of those players, like [David] Pocock that you can rely on when you’re struggling, that’s why we’ve got them...”

Brian Smith changed London Irish, putting a competitive edge to the club that Delon thrived on, setting him against his friends and rivals for top try scorer: Topsy Ojo and Sailosi Tagicakibau. “We had a style about us as well, whereas before it was ‘let’s get a penalty and Barry Everitt will kick for three’. And now with Topsy and Sailosi coming in, we were all about the same age in the back three, and Brian Smith would come in and say ‘so who’s going to score the most then?’. We all said, ‘nah, we’re all friends’, but it was also, ‘nah I’m winning this’. 

“It changed the atmosphere at the club and we had world-class players in every position,” continues Delon. “We went to Wasps and put 50 points on them, we were winning games we shouldn’t, we beat Harlequins easily in the [Premiership] semi-finals at their ground.”

In the final, in 2009, they lost by a single point 10-9 to Leicester, with Delon at least getting on the scoresheet with two penalties added to a Mike Catt drop-goal. 

As with any successful side, changes in culture, says Delon, had a negative impact. “We used to have a train-hard, play-hard, bit-of-a-party culture,” he says, “but someone decided that wasn’t the way forward. Then players were coming to the end of contracts, retiring, people left...

“We lost a lot of brains,” he says, “people like Bob Casey, he found it hard to walk let alone jog, but you wanted to fight for him, and there were guys like Kieron Dawson coming to their end of careers, it was tough.” 

Steffon made the move to Toulon a season before Delon, who held on to appear in what was to be his only Rugby World Cup in 2011.

When England called for Delon, he admits he wasn’t in the best of form. “I was miles off when I got my [first] cap,” he says. “The year before I’d had a good season, and they [England] went to South Africa on tour and there had been talk that I might go with Rob Andrew,” he says. “When Johnno got the job I was nowhere near it.” 

Even so, a last-minute injury saw him called up in the autumn of 2008. “When I did get called up by Johnno, he said ‘can you be down here in fifteen minutes?” recalls Delon. “So I jumped in my Fiat Uno wearing London Irish kit and boots, the training ground was ten minutes from me and I just snuck in with the backs when I arrived.

“In that first week of training, Johnno said to me, ‘we’re going to give you a go’ and he basically said he didn’t know I existed before, so now it was my opportunity to show I was good enough. He was going to start me next game.”

His debut was against the Pacific Islanders, when Danny Cipriani marshalled a side including Paul Sackey, Ugo Monye, Nick Kennedy and Riki Flutey to a 39-13 win with Delon getting man of the match in a debut Johnson described as one of the best. “For him to say it was one of best debuts he’d seen, and to get man of the match was amazing, but in my head, it was ‘can he still drop me for the next game? Am I still going to be involved?’ Because, yes it was an international game, but it was the Pacific Islanders and you really wanted to play Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.”

He needn’t have worried, as Johnson started him for all three, part of a run of eleven consecutive starts for England. Were there nerves? “Always,” he says. “You always know that once the ball has been kicked off, you’ll be right in it, so all my career I’ve always been ‘come on, kick the ball, let’s go’ just waiting for kick off. That was all nerves, but people thought I was cocky or arrogant – I was just hiding the nerves.

“We’ve always worked with coaches on body language – they told you that even if you’re tired or nervous, don’t show it to the opposition, and that’s what I’ve always had in my head. I’ve always smiled when I played, if I make an error, I just get back on it, you’re supposed to try and not let people know you’re frustrated. 

“I’ve played a lot of mind games over the years,” he concludes, “and you’ve got time to do it at fullback, standing there at the back.”

Did he ever feel comfortable with England? “That England experience, I always felt like an outsider, I never cemented that position, even though I played those games in a row,” he says. “It would’ve been easy then to think ‘this is mine now’, but I always felt when I got there that I was fighting for that shirt every week.

“I think it came from what Johnno said that first day about me renting the shirt,” says Delon, “I always thought he could turn to me at any stage and tell me ‘no, that’s you, you’re gone’.”

Even when there was a ban, Johnson didn’t budge from his loyalty to Delon. “He always stuck by me,” he says, “he never said ‘that’s you, done’, it was always, ‘we need you to get back playing’. Even when I did my shoulder, he was making sure I came in and got the best physios, best work, I was really looked after.

“A lot of players never come back [when they leave the squad]; when I came into the squad, I took someone’s place, and it could happen to me.”

But Johnson remained steadfast in his support, something Delon puts down to his personality. “There was always a couple of training bust-ups, and you could see Johnno watching it, watching boys getting in there, and he loved it, he wanted to know that you wanted to fight for that shirt.

“Without Martin Johnson being there, I don’t think I’d have had as long, with all the other stuff that happened, the bans and that, I don’t think I’d have got capped by anyone else.”

Controversies are always noted in the media when it comes to Delon. In January 2011, he was banned for eight weeks for an altercation with a doping official, the same year as a tackle on Tom Biggs landed him five weeks, and the following year there was a nightclub incident in Torquay. “I beat myself up at some of the things I’ve done, complete stupidity,” he admits. “I was always a player that played on the edge, I always wanted to win, to do my best, and obviously that wasn’t. 

“Being banned for six weeks plus, was always the worst time ever for me, I’d rather be injured because you’re letting the team down. Even getting a yellow card, people say it was letting yourself down, but it wasn’t that, it was the fact I was letting the team down which is worse. It’s not about me, if I was playing tennis, it would be different, but this is team sport.

“When I look back, if I could erase some things of course I would.” 

Some incidents, for Delon, were more clean-cut than others. “The one that I replay the most is when I got banned against Bath [on Biggs], I lunged and he stepped... I keep playing it back.

“Everything I did back then just got worse and worse,” says Delon, “it was always ‘oh does he not learn?’. I wish I’d played in the olden days when there was no social media. Social media changed the game. I will always put my hands up and say I deserved it. But sometimes I saw bans that I got and other people got away with it and I did have to ask ‘was I the scapegoat?’. I felt like that a lot, that I always got the worst, and that was probably me feeling sorry for myself. 

“I’d get a ban, see someone do the same thing and think ‘oh yeah he’s going to be in trouble’, then nothing happens.

“The worst one for me, was when I waved [to Clermont Auvergne fly-half Brock James], and then had a little thing with Brian Moore [who said he’d have ‘chinned’ anyone that did that to him, Delon responded with a damning review of his book]. In my head I just wanted to go at him, to do something, to say something. A few weeks or so later, the Lions go on tour, [George] North does the same thing, and I’m waiting for comments, and nothing... 

“Fucking hell, I’m still getting booed by crowds for that, I was right all along. 

“Last week I read something on Mayweather and Notorious [Conor McGregor] with Mayweather saying how he gets abuse non-stop. It’s because he talks, even though he backs it up, but Notorious can say or do whatever and they all love him, what is that? Is that racism? I do think am I missing something...?

“I don’t care,” he says, “it’s the past now, but you do start thinking ‘could I have done something or said something?’.”

Delon’s form with England was such that selection for the 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand seemed inevitable. “People said I was a shoo-in,” he says, “but going back a bit further, I’d been one of the stand-out backs in the Six Nations so people said I was a shoo-in for the Lions, and nothing happened. So, when the World Cup came, I didn’t believe it would, I just kept my head down.”

That Lions omission hit Delon hard. “I was really disappointed,” he says, “I spoke to Johnno about it, he was shocked. They took Leigh [Halfpenny] who was injured and [Lee] Byrne who was injured and didn’t play much at all. And then when they called someone up it was [James] Hook they got to come in – that was really hard for me to take. So I made sure I didn’t believe the hype after that.”

Even when he was playing for England in the warm-ups, he joined other players in being cautious. “You wanted to stay injury free, so nobody was keen to play in those friendly games,” he says. “It was Wales, Wales, then Ireland, and I wasn’t keen. I remember playing Wales at home, and we had the incident with full-back [Morgan] Stoddart and I remember hearing a crack, that was really sad. He would have been training for months, and just before going that happens.

“I started against Wales, then came off the bench against them and then in the Ireland game Cuets [Mark Cueto] got injured after two minutes. I saw them look for me on the bench, and I was ‘no, no, no’. Until I got to New Zealand, it wasn’t real, the Rugby World Cup wasn’t happening until then.”

When they got there, infamously, the England squad found themselves the subject of unwanted press coverage for their off-field antics. “For me personally, it was about winning a World Cup, whether we were good enough or not I don’t know, but you focus on that. At the time it didn’t feel like we were one of the strongest teams but that doesn’t matter, it’s the team that performs on the day.”

But with no access to the local papers, the squad found out about the headlines through phone calls home. “We had a meeting about that, about going out,” he says. “If that works for you at home during the Six Nations, going out for a beer on a Tuesday before, then I couldn’t care less, each to their own. But I guess if it’s affecting the team, then that’s different, and it was [affecting the team] because we were talking about it. We should be talking about who we’re playing next, how we’re going to win, not about this.”

Delon’s England career ended after helping them through to the quarter-finals in a 16-12 win over Scotland. “[Chris] Paterson ran into my shoulder, I got a week’s ban, and then they lost to France in the quarters.”

After the Rugby World Cup, “lots of thoughts” went through Delon’s head, as he was in the midst of negotiations with London Irish and he knew an offer from Toulon was always potentially on the table. “[Stuart] Lancaster said to me he wasn’t going to put me in the 30-man squad, even though myself and [Manu] Tuilagi had good tournaments and had had good feedback; that pissed me off. 

“He came and told me that just before he announced the squad, that I was going with the Saxons and he was going with Mike Brown and Ben Foden, which I understood. I remember from the Saxons days him telling those guys ‘my aim is to get you in the first team’ and if he didn’t follow through when he’s got the chance...”

That move to the Saxons also resulted in another moment. “The Saxons were at Exeter so I thought I would go back to stay at my mum’s [who lives down the coast in Brixham] for the weekend and then all that happened.”

The incident was with a bouncer at a Torquay nightclub. “I was out with Steff and, I’ve seen the video, it still goes through my head now, and I saw a bouncer there swinging at him, and I’ve just gone ‘hey’, he’s swung out and I’ve swung at him, just one...”

And after that, his England days were over. “Lancaster felt that he wanted a load of choir boys in his team and that’s what he got,” he says, “and that’s why the World Cup didn’t go so well for him, you can’t win a World Cup with choir boys – that’s how I felt about that team at the time.”

His reputation also took another hit. “Watching the media and they are very much, ‘does he not understand? Does he not learn?’. I just felt ‘here we go again about me’, in my head I was gone.” 

He wasn’t the first or last rugby player to have a nightclub incident. “They do always happen,” he says, “some are lucky, some get away with it, some don’t. If you’re a human being, it’s just one of those, but if you’re X you get more scrutinised for it. It happens – I’m not proud of it, I didn’t go out for it, and all because I defended my brother...”

Toulon was now inevitable, it wasn’t just an opportunity, but an escape. “I almost thought ‘if I went to France the media wouldn’t follow me’,” he says, adding, “but then there was that wave and, boom, it’s all back and ‘look, he’s doing it in France now’. 

“It was a WAVE!” he exclaims. “People get less [grief] for kneeing someone in the face, for elbowing someone, do you know what I mean? Someone stamps on someone’s face and he gets a couple of weeks and it’s fine, but I wave at someone...

“I apologised to him,” he admits, “but I don’t need to apologise to people on Instagram. 

“After the game, I went into the changing room and said to him ‘look, sorry mate’ but it’s just turned into this big, nasty thing. I didn’t elbow anyone or do anyone any harm...

“I went through a stage when I started blaming the press and the media,” he admits. “I’ve seen the guys use them for the good and the bad, and I was definitely hiding from the press. “I wouldn’t do after-match, I wouldn’t do press or magazines, I wanted to be away from it all because I always felt they put you on this pedestal only to kick it away. I always felt that about them, so for a large part of my career I hated the media. 

“I knew it was their job, but now I’ve got kids, so when you see someone writing or calling me a bad boy on the front page, how do you think that’s going to go down? I don’t think people should call someone something without knowing them. 

“I’ve never hid away from the things I’ve done, I’ve put my hand up every time, but the other stuff was eating away at me, I hated it. If I didn’t love rugby so much, I would’ve walked away a long time ago.”

Did the media attention impact on his family? “Yeah big time,” he says, “my mum, my wife, friends, family, even my kids as they got older going to school, hearing things. 

“Maybe I ran away a little bit in France, then they came and found me. Once you’re in there, it’s hard, once you’ve been branded, it’s hard to get away from it sometimes. 

“I spoke to one of my friends about it, I said ‘how do I get out of this?’, he said, ‘you’re free, use it’. If you come out tomorrow and you’re acting like Jonny Wilkinson, you’re lying to yourself and people know. They’ll know that’s not you, so put your hand up and try and get better. You can’t try and be something you’re not because you’ll end up hating yourself even more.” 

You can see how the negativity has got to Delon, with every action magnified as a result of mistakes in the past. For what he’s been through, you’d expect a rap sheet far greater than his, especially when the ‘wave’ is the one that seems to have caused the most anguish. 

He’s won three Champions Cups, he’s won a Top 14 title, he was rejected in France, yet he returned to conquer it. In Toulon, he found his rugby home. “Even after that [the wave], they were brilliant,” he says, “they didn’t care, they loved it, I don’t think I paid for another dinner in Toulon in restaurants after that.”

It’s easy to forget that Delon was in the process of scoring a match-winning try in the Heineken Cup final during the wave which, when you think about it, so few have experienced the emotion of such an act, who are we to judge? 

Moving on, Delon was always kept on his toes in the south of France, not least by the possibility of new arrivals. “Bernard [Laporte, then his coach] played me for years saying he was going to get Leigh Halfpenny – years before he actually bought him.  

“He’d say, ‘Leigh Halfpenny can catch and kick the ball, boom, none of this counter-attacking stuff, we don’t win stuff like that anymore, just catch, boom, goal. Why aren’t you a goalkicker?’ I’d always say ‘you’ve got Jonny, you’ve got Giteau, why do you need another goalkicker?’” 

The anecdotes from Toulon are endless. “Our game plan was this,” he begins. “You’d come into a meeting, it’d be the All Blacks playing on television – that would be the team meeting, watching the All Blacks for half hour. 

“Ali Williams came in and said he could teach us how it’s done, ‘nah it’s okay we can see it, it’s there on the television’.” 

He saw seasoned internationals such as Frédéric Michalak relegated to training and playing with the academy, he saw the family of the owner influence big-money signings. “When I got there, it was always ‘who’s the next player, who’s the next superstar?’,” he says. “He [Mourad Boudjellal] talked about [Bryan] Habana for years – he wanted Habana, his daughter wanted Habana. ‘She wants Habana, we get Habana’, it was a ridiculous amount of money to get him to come.

“Then players like Drew [Mitchell] would come because Matt [Giteau] was there, Bakkies Botha bought along Danie Rossouw, it was all like an extended family. 

“Steff said to me to come along and in my head, it was like I’d been invited to play for Barbarians for a year, but on good money, in the south of France.”

His neighbours were Botha and Craig Burden. “They used to have barbecues and I’d see the smoke, run down the shop, get some beers and some meat, then sit in the garden waiting for an invite, but he never called me over,” laughs Delon. “The only time he called me over it was ‘hey, Delon need to go training, pick me up’.”

Delon was also a useful translator. “He’d ring me up from the meat shop to tell the guy what he wanted, I’d be like ‘can’t you just point?’ and he’s ‘come on, I’ve already rung you now, I want ten sausages...’

Sometimes, though, the pig came to Botha. “The South Africans loved hunting and we had wild boar where we lived, so they had the time of their lives. I used to get pigs come into my garden and Bakkies would say ‘if you hear the pigs, you ring me’. I’d tell him it was two or three in the morning, he’d go ‘ah okay’. Then in the middle of the night you’d hear a bang and you’d go out and see him and Danie sat in chairs in my garden with a gun, just shooting at the pigs.”

But for all the pig-based action, training with the likes of the South African lock, brought Delon up close with the very best. “I loved the way Bakkies went about things, he did his job to the best of his ability,” he says. “He was there to knock mauls down and smash rucks and he did all of that and more; you’d go through videos and he’s sprinting down the pitch chasing down wingers – he caught me when I played against South Africa. 

“He was doing stuff to another level, that’s why those guys have won things and become the players they are, that doesn’t just happen. How many second rows do you see trying to chase a winger? They’ll think they can’t catch them, but he’s there chasing them down.”

And that’s without excessive training. “The backs had Pierre Mignoni, and he was work, work, work,” explains Delon, “but the forwards’ conversation would go something like this, ‘right we’ll do twenty scrums, and half an hour of lineouts, then you boys are done’. Then a senior forward would say ‘how about we do five scrums, two lineouts and we’re done’, and that’s what they’d do. 

“We’d see the forwards’ cars leave the training ground and we’re still out there. We’d start looking at Pierre and he’d be, ‘no, no, no, we’re working’.”

Needless to say, what they did worked, as the European Cups and Top 14 titles prove. “Imagine going into a weekend knowing who you’ve got, the best players in the world on your team,” says Delon, “I was a better player for going to Toulon, playing with better, world-class payers, these guys have won World Cups. They don’t sit around, they’re analysing, working on their game...”

Especially his famous countryman. “With Jonny he was always working, analysing, kicking before or after training,” he says. “He was always asking ‘what can I do better’, and I think everyone was there buying into same thing. I was learning more from them, he was happy to help me because that was better for the team.

“I wasn’t happy just being there, I wanted to be the number one fullback in this globetrotting team.” Even when the threat of Leigh Halfpenny became reality. 

“I still wanted to be a part of it,” he says. “I would just tell myself it was because Jonny wasn’t playing, and James O’Connor wasn’t as good at kicking as Leigh, that’s why he had to play and I had to move to the wing!

“It was never what people thought,” he says of perceptions of Toulon, “that it was this party group. Yes, we knew how to party, and people were calling us mercenaries, but we were actually winning as well. So if we were mercenaries, then we were really good ones.” 

England did get in touch again, but Delon felt his time had passed. “I thought Mike Brown stepped up,” he says, “when he came in, he played really well, he was solid under the high ball, always beating the first man, his kicking was good. Foden did well too.

“Obviously I wanted to be involved, and I remember Stuart coming to see us before the 2015 World Cup to sit down with me, Jonny and Steff and he said, ‘look if you want to play for England, you’ve got to come back’. 

“We’d just won the double that year and then he said there’s no guarantees you’ll be in the squad. But looking at the squad, we were old then, me and Jonny, and we’d have gone there with quite a young squad. I knew, and I can’t speak for Jonny, but I knew my time was done, the boys were doing a good enough job. 

“England had changed and were doing well, and I knew myself that I was in this team, winning silverware that I could show my kids when they grow up.

“People say ‘do you regret going to Toulon?’,” he says. “What, winning silverware and playing with the best players in the world? No.”

For his brother, younger in years but also considered the best in Europe, it was different. “There were a couple of clubs that came in for Steff, and I said to him ‘I can’t choose for you’, but, for me, personally I would’ve probably gone. A World Cup in England, short career, you can always find another club, but I think the fact there was no guarantee of a place in the 30-man squad shook him. We’d just won the double, and Toulon as a place was buzzing.”

Delon is now finding his feet in coaching with his own eponymous academy where he’s trying to put into use his lessons learnt and mentoring kids (and adults) of all ages to achieve whatever their rugby goals would be. He’s also done a spell coaching at Chinnor RFC with former London Irish team-mate Richard Thorpe.

But, best of all, he’s enjoying being back with his family in Sudbury, wife Gemma and kids Cameron, 13, and Chloe, 11. “Most of the time I was in France, they were here,” he says. “Having kids has definitely calmed me down a bit. If you come home angry from rugby, it all changes when you see the kids, they don’t care if you’ve won or lost, they just want to see you.

“Gemma has put up with a lot over the years, she’s put up with my mood swings, ups and downs, but having kids has really changed me, they’ve made me see a different way. Yes it matters, but it doesn’t matter that much, it’s still a game, you’re healthy, so you should leave it there. Now, I cross the doorway, throw the bag down and it’s gone, let’s play.”

Today, Delon’s in a good place. “Sometimes, I do look back and think ‘if I didn’t do those things...’,” he begins, “but then I look back at what I’ve won, the players I’ve played with, and I think how many players have been in great teams but haven’t won trophies and think, ‘nah, you’ve not done too bad...”   

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Rory Langdon-Down

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