Hannah Botterman

When the message came that her grandad had died on the day of the World Cup final, Hannah Botterman had to push it out of her mind. On the other side of the world, and sporting an injured knee that had ruled her out of the tournament, she could only watch on as England’s World Cup destiny slipped away. 

It was supposed to be the best two weeks of Hannah Botterman’s life. The script had been written; win the semi-final against Canada and reach the World Cup final, take the scalp of five-time winners New Zealand in their own back yard, and lift the 2021 Rugby World Cup. On a 35-game unbeaten run heading into the semis, the Red Roses seemed ordained for the trophy, but before the first line of that story could be inked into history, things quickly unravelled for Hannah. “During the Canada team run, I literally just put my foot out and a chunk of my femur came off with my cartilage and was in my knee. I couldn’t straighten it,” remembers the loosehead prop, now just shy of fifty caps for her country. “I thought I’d be fine, but I then had a scan and found out pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to play for the rest of the tournament. That was really tough.” 

But that wasn’t the worst news Hannah had to contend with that week. “A few days before,” she begins, “my dad had given me a call and told me that I was probably not going to see my grandad again, he had cancer and had become very ill in the four weeks I’d been away.

“My dad was crying down the phone, so I knew it was bad,” she continues. “I went and spoke to Mids [Simon Middleton, the England head coach] about it, and he said, ‘obviously if you need to go home, then you go home’. But this was before I got injured, so I decided I wasn’t going to go, more so because I knew my grandad wouldn’t want me to go. I had a last phone call with him, and then, on the day of the final, he passed away.

“I was on a family group chat, and obviously my dad wouldn’t have told me on the day, but my uncle was part of the group chat and he put, ‘Brian passed away’. I was in the gym on the day of the final, just getting a last session in, and I was just like, ‘fuck’. I knew it was coming, but it was sad I never got to see him again when all my family did.”

Such a sequence of misfortunes would be agonising for anyone, and yet in a style that we come to learn is typical of Hannah, she has found a way to contend with that difficult period and look back with a smile. “After I got injured in the team run, we were on the bus on the way back to the hotel. Obviously, I was on crutches, and Mids came to me and said,” as she adopts a fine impression of the Yorkshireman, “‘Botts, you mind gettin’ off bus without crutches or brace, because we don’t want Canada to see ya?’. I was like, ‘are you fucking joking me?’, but I just said ‘yeh, no worries’. I couldn’t straighten my leg, so I was hobbling out, it was very funny.”

Today, as we catch up on an unspoiled day at the lavish Pennyhill Park, England’s elite training base in Surrey, things couldn’t be better for Hannah. Coffee in hand, Birkenstocks on feet and wearing a hat she’s crocheted herself (one of her favourite pastimes, alongside golf), she has finally overcome that fateful knee injury and put together a run of games under new coach John Mitchell that showed her best form, as the Red Roses powered towards a sixth successive Six Nations title and third consecutive grand slam. Playing in a system that suits her aggressive, skills-rich, run-it-first style, Hannah is thriving, but those last few weeks in New Zealand are still a tender memory. 

“I do always think that everything probably happened for a reason,” she adds. “Imagine If I played in the World Cup final, win it, but my grandad never sees it? I spoke to his wife after, and she was like, ‘I think he was trying to hold out for it, and if you were playing, I think he probably would have stayed for a bit longer’. But he was ready to go.

“So yeah, that was a big two weeks to be fair. Busted my knee, finding out about my grandad and then losing the World Cup final.”

“I thought I’d be fine, but I had a scan and found out I wasn’t going to be able to play the rest of the tournament. That was really tough.”

Hannah is only 25 years old, but she has been part of the furniture of this England side for what feels like forever. First capped in 2017 against Canada when she was only eighteen, she was one of the original players offered a full-time RFU contract just over a year later, so she’s been an ever-present figure in the modern, fully professionalised Red Roses. Props are a particular breed, and Hannah is no different; with an effervescence you won’t forget, she has become one of the squad’s most open and recognisable characters. “I think it just comes from my family growing up,” she says of her candid nature. “My mum is seriously care-free; she doesn’t care, she’s so blasé about any social situation and so authentically herself all the time, even when she needs to not be herself. I’d describe my mum as one of my best mates rather than my mum, I probably mother her more than she mothers me now.” 

Seven years on from her debut, while it may not feel like it for her, Hannah is now a senior international player. “What’s scary is that there are girls that are a lot younger than me in the set-up, so now I feel a bit old,” she says. “We always say in the rugby world that if you’re thirty, you’re old, and I’m 25 which is nerve-racking. I got capped quite young, so that’s why it feels like I’ve been here for a while, but I got capped and then wasn’t involved for a year. I do feel like a bit of an old girl now.” Does she feel like a fifty-capper? “No,” she replies with a laugh, “absolutely not, it’s properly flown by. I don’t really know where it’s gone.”

A quick glance at Hannah’s family tree shows her rise to rugby prominence was virtually inevitable. On her dad’s side there’s her uncle Gregg Botterman, the hooker who played almost 200 times for Saracens, and on her mum’s there’s auntie Jane Everett, a former England front rower who was part of the 1994 Rugby World Cup-winning squad. Her mum and dad also both played the game for local clubs, so for Hannah, rugby was both nature and nurture. “It was rugby, rugby, rugby, you didn’t have much of a choice. I ended up being in rugby clubs all weekend; on Saturdays I’d watch my dad, Sunday I’d watch my mum. Being in that environment I gravitated towards it, and as soon as I could, I started playing.” Literally, as soon as she could – at her first club, Datchworth RFC, she had her hands on a ball as early as four years old. “My minis rugby, that was really close-knit. All the mums and dads were mates, we used to go on skiing holidays and stuff, it was a proper family.” At twelve, she moved into girls rugby at Welwyn RFC, playing alongside a number of her future Red Roses team-mates such as Ella Wyrvas, Zoe Harrison and Helena Rowland.

It’s easy to forget that even for this generation, all of whom are now part of a Red Roses side that have broken every attendance and TV viewing record going, the visibility of top-level women’s rugby was meagre during their time as young, hopeful stars of the future. The rise of the women’s game had been widely lauded, but quite how dramatically it’s occurred in England in such a short time, rising from a record attendance of 15,863 in 2022 to 58,498 in 2023, is nothing short of remarkable. “When I was younger, I didn’t even know any women’s rugby players, I just didn’t even know it was a thing,” says Hannah. “I knew women played rugby, but I didn’t know any of the England girls. I knew Maggie [Alphonsi], but only because she was my mum’s mate, not because she was an England rugby player.” Even the significance of her aunt’s achievements passed her by. “I didn’t really take too much notice of it; I didn’t realise what that meant. Thinking about it, having another family member capped for England and winning a World Cup is pretty cool.”

Rugby at the time was a passion rather than a pursuit for Hannah, and so when she moved to Hartpury College at sixteen, away from home for the first time and experiencing her first ‘elite’ rugby environment, she didn’t have the same discipline she does now. “I just got in trouble a lot; you’re sixteen years old, you’ve gone away from home, I was like, ‘let’s be having it,” she says, rubbing her hands together. “The head of safeguarding, he didn’t like rugby girls, probably because we always got in trouble, and he actually phoned up my step mum. I had short peroxide blonde hair at the time, but it was really shit, orange essentially, and he was like, ‘she’s never going to be selected for her country because of the way she looks’. At the time I was like, ‘that’s chill’, but looking back, it was a fucking horrible thing to say, and fuck you, because I’m here now. 

“He thought I was a train-crash waiting to happen, and he said, ‘unless she’s going to completely change her ways, don’t bring her back’. So, I didn’t go back, I knew I was going to get in trouble and get expelled, so I transferred to a college down in London to finish off my BTEC.

“I was a bit of a terror as a small child to be honest,” she asides. “I was all over the shop, tearing about the place. It’s a bit morbid, but at my grandma’s funeral, she’d written a letter about all of us grandkids, and she was just like, ‘Hannah was a whirlwind’. We joke about it now, but I’ve got raging ADHD. When I got a bit older and went to Hartpury that probably didn’t change too much, I was still a bit of a terror.”

“I was enjoying going out and getting pissed and doing everything I shouldn’t have been doing. The 6am wake-ups just weren’t it. If you’re a dedicated person at sixteen years old, Hartpury is the best place for you to go. There’s no doubt about it, the setup is ridiculous. You’re in the gym three times a week, running sessions, rugby sessions. It was a bit silly that I didn’t take the opportunity well enough because I probably would have been well ahead of where I was when I was younger, physically and in a playing capacity.”

“I didn’t know any of the England girls. I knew Maggie Alphonsi, but only because she was my mum’s mate.”

At the time, she admits the motivation just wasn’t there. “Having a contract wasn’t a thing like it is now, I imagine the talent coming through now is a lot more motivated. If I’d have known when I was sixteen going into college that it’s possible to do this full time, I probably would have taken it a bit more seriously.”

With rugby out of the picture, instead of weights rooms and scrum sessions the next year and a half consisted of pasties, cups of tea and a paintbrush. “I was a waitress at a Harvester for a while, that was exciting,” she jokes. “Then I became a painter and decorator. I was living a proper van life, so I wasn’t in good nick at all. When I got back into rugby, I was just playing for fun.” It was the summer of 2017 when Hannah made her way back to the rugby field, joining up to play some social sevens after a plea to pull her boots back on again from her old divisional coach Rob Cain, who went on to coach the USA. From there, things moved quickly. 

“Rob asked me to continue coming to Saracens, and I was enjoying the craic, they were good girls, I thought it’d be good fun. And then I was on the bench for the first game of the season, I was like, ‘what the fuck is going on?’

“We went up to Waterloo, we were losing, I was thinking, what is going on? I came on and we ended up winning, and I had a pretty impactful game. Out of luck, Fergie [Matt Ferguson, then Red Rose’s forwards coach] was there at the time, so he had his eye on me from then.”

Just months into her return to rugby, an eighteen-year-old Hannah had made her Premiership debut and was immediately on the international radar. England were due to play Canada in a three-Test series that November, and with the experienced Sarah Bern out injured, Hannah got the call. 

“There was a serious crisis in props, and when they had none left, Matt gave me a call. I’d only just started playing again in the Prem, and I was huge,” she says. “But, by luck, there was a lot of injuries, and somehow, I just ended up playing for England. It was pure luck. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing in terms of scrummaging and all that.”

Hannah ended up winning two caps that autumn, debuting in a series that also saw the likes of Jess Breach, Abby Dow, Ellie Kildunne and Zoe Harrison make their England bows, a group that soon rose to become the spine of today’s Red Roses. Hannah even managed a try, dotting down at the back of a lineout maul in a 49-12 win. For most players, this would be the ‘I made it’ moment, but for Hannah, this was just the beginning of her journey. “After that I was like, oh fuck, I’ve got to stick my head down if I want to do that again – there was murmurs about getting more full-time contracts, they’d just had them for the 2017 World Cup, and that’s when the switch happened. And I did stick my head down to be fair. I was meal-prepping and all that, eating salads in the van instead of pasties, and was going to the gym when I wasn’t being made to. I ended up losing twelve kilos and got into some decent nick.”

Has body image ever been something she’s struggled with? A confident shake of the head. “Not really. I think that’s down to just not giving a fuck. I’m not too fussed about what other people think of me. I get a decent amount of shit, even now on social media for looking like a boy, but I don’t really care.”

Her hard work soon paid off, playing eighty minutes in the final as Saracens won the inaugural 2017/18 Premier 15s title. After missing out on the 2018 Six Nations, by the autumn she was back involved with England, and by January 2019 she had become one of 28 players offered a full-time contract. By any standard it’s a spectacular ascendency, and it showed Hannah the value of putting in the work. “I am probably naturally talented, but it is that classic of ‘hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard’. I was that talent that didn’t work hard for a decent period.

“I’d played since I was four years old, so I had all the basic skills. Back when rugby wasn’t as big as it is now, if you could pass off your left and right hand, that was good, and I was also a lot bigger than everyone else, so that was helpful – that wouldn’t happen now. But since getting contracted, I’ve had to keep pushing.”

Particularly in the specialist position that she’s in. Debuting on the wing at eighteen is one thing, but playing prop at such a young age is a whole other story. “It is tough, there’s really technical bits to it. Dan Cole’s really good at it because he’s being doing it for what, fifty years, and I’ve been doing it for five. It’s only during this Six Nations that we had a proper scrum coach come in [Nathan Catt, the England pathways scrum coach], which has been good but difficult. Everyone had their own way, and now he has to come in and tweak certain things, so everyone is trying to tweak at the same time. But ultimately, we’ll be in a really good place.” Known for her array of skills in the loose, has she come to love her role as a scrummager? “I definitely didn’t, but I had the realisation a while ago that it’s all well and good to do the ball-in-play stuff, but ultimately, I’m currently paid to win scrums. That’s my sole job, there’s three of us whose number one priority is to get the ball back. The around the park stuff comes more naturally, but that’s the easy stuff, the scrummaging is where I need to get better.”

“He’s very different, he’s funny. Yesterday he put on a dress and pretended to be the Ireland ten. He’s just ridiculous, I find him intriguing, he’s always got a story.”

And it’s only going to improve with her new set-up at club level, leaving Saracens to join Bristol Bears. Hannah and Holly Aitchison, the incumbent England ten, both chose to make the move at the start of this season, a rather good package deal that coach Dave Ward couldn’t turn down.

“I’d been there [at Saracens] for five years, and Holly wanted to start playing ten and couldn’t really do that at Saracens with Zoe Harrison being there. So we had to make a collective decision – Lark [Atkin-Davies] and Berner [Sarah Bern] were also at Bristol, and talking about scrummaging it would be pretty handy to scrum with the people that I might be scrummaging with at England. It was just time for a change.

“To be honest, I got a sweet deal out of it. I don’t think they really needed me, but I’ll thank Hol for bumping up my price.”

With a World Cup coming to home shores in less than eighteen months’ time, another Six Nations Grand Slam under England’s belt is the beginning of the path to what seems like their destiny, to finally regain the trophy in front of a home crowd after two consecutive World Cup heartbreaks. The new regime under John Mitchell has ushered in new ways for this Red Roses side to think about and play the game, and he’s quickly grown into a popular character. “He’s very … different,” says Hannah, choosing her words carefully. “Not necessarily the way he coaches, he’s just funny. Yesterday, he put on a dress and pretended to be the Ireland ten. He is just ridiculous, I find him really intriguing, really interesting, he’s always got a story to tell.” As if on cue, John Mitchell strolls behind us with his glasses on upside down. “He’s such a weirdo,” laughs Hannah. “The player-coach relationships are really good in camp. It is a very happy environment at the moment, we’re still learning what Mitch wants from us.

“I get the ball in my hand a bit more, as opposed to just chasing after kicks, which is nice.  We’re playing with the ball more and have the freedom to do that. Mitch has instilled in everyone that the point of training is to make mistakes and be creative.”

Things have changed for the Red Roses, but they are still faced with the perennial issue of a lack of competitive opposition – the week after we speak, a ferocious England win 85-3 against Ireland and back it up with a 42-21 win against France, their closest challenger, in Bordeaux. “It’s important that we don’t get bored,” says Hannah, “and that’s certainly not the feeling that I’ve ever got being here. We want to beat everyone, but I still get up for every game. Maybe away in France it’s a bit easier, you’re getting booed by the crowd and I fucking love that, and it’s got a bit more bite to it because you’re not sure if you are going to win. But it’s also pretty easy to get up for a Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, especially playing at home (Ireland, according to Hannah, needed “knocking down a peg or two”). Georgia Evans is my best mate, I’m going on holiday with her after the Six Nations, and I had a scrap with her against Wales.”

With WXV virtually guaranteeing them a game against New Zealand every year, England now have a greater chance to prepare for the test that their arch rivals could give them in next year’s World Cup final. Last year, they went back to Aotearoa and won 33-12 to clinch the inaugural WXV 1 title – and revenge? “We knew there was going to be a lot of talk about revenge,” she says, “but ultimately it didn’t matter if we beat them. It wasn’t a World Cup final. If we’d had fifteen on the pitch [in the final] we would have beaten them, we were battering them [they had been 14-0 ahead after 14 minutes, before Lydia Thompson was sent off]. We still had the opportunity to win it, we just didn’t.” 

There’s no doubt the result still hurts deeply, but there isn’t a chance Hannah is going to show it. As is her style, she doesn’t dwell on things, but when we ask if she needs to win a World Cup for her career to be a success, she pauses and considers. “It’s difficult in rugby, I could have the best game of my life in a World Cup final, but someone could knock a ball on at the wrong time. There’s 23 that play that game, you can’t win it on your own. Will it define my career? All I’ll say is, if we did it in front of a home crowd at Twickenham, that would be fucking sick.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Sam Bénard

This extract was taken from issue 26 of Rugby.
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