Lichfield Ladies’ pre-training meeting is well underway when the Rugby Journal arrives. The meeting is in the bar at the top of the stairs – the Storr Room – refurbished during the lockdown with a new-age pub feel to its décor: smooth lines, wooden finishes, hipster lighting. But instead of George Ezra or James Bay pumping softly through the speakers, head coach Maria Crowfoot is outlining the key changes to rugby’s lawbook ahead of the new season. As we slide into a chair at the side of the room, Maria is highlighting how the new ‘50:22’ kicking law might be exploited. The going theory is that it’s possible to take a quick throw-in from a 50:22 kick [where a team re-gains possession in their opponent’s 22 having kicked the ball from within their half, so long as the ball bounces before crossing the sideline]. If the team can quickly re-gather the ball after it has gone out, Maria reckons there’s nothing to stop a quick lineout being taken. The clever idea is met with some deep thought and a degree of chin rubbing. Not everyone looks convinced, but it’s certainly got rugby cogs turning again after the longest rugby hiatus anyone can remember. With a raft of new rules – and how to exploit them – in mind, the players head down the stairs and into their first training session of the new season.

It’s a glorious mid-August evening in the west midlands and Lichfield’s Cooke Fields grounds look rugby ready. The ground is a hidden expanse of land, just behind a pub off the A38 (with an unassuming entrance you need to miss once in order to know where it is – or at least the Rugby Journal did).

We’re out of town here, or rather out of the city. Owing to its resplendent cathedral, Lichfield is one of the UK’s 69 designated cities, but with a population of just 33,000 it’s one of the smallest. Its centrepiece building was constructed between 1196 and 1249 and is the only medieval English cathedral with three spires.

What really put Lichfield on the map, however, was the city’s boom years of the 18th century when it became a popular stopping off point for horse-drawn coaches travelling between the industrial centres of Birmingham to the south and Burton upon Trent, Derby and Sheffield to the north. In that era, the city thrived as a provider of accommodation, corn, hay and leather to the hauliers of the day.

It wasn’t too long after that period – in 1874 – that a Lichfield rugby and football club was founded. As tended to happen at that time, the association football team broke away after a few years to form its own club, and Lichfield RUFC went solo.

For too many years, the club dotted around the city without a home until acquiring its first permanent residence in the 1960s, switching to its present location of Cooke Fields in 1985. Lichfield Ladies was then founded in 1992.

Cooke Fields boasts four pitches across three terraced levels of ground. Tonight, the men are training on the bottom pitch – under the watchful eye of international referee Craig Maxwell-Keys who has come down to help his old club get used to the new laws. The women are on the top pitch. The walk up gives the players time to take in the summer colours around. It is very difficult to imagine a better setting to shake off the rugby cobwebs.

This top pitch has always been the training pitch for Lichfield Ladies. It was on this pitch that Emily Scarratt, Sarah Hunter, Natasha Hunt, Vicky Fleetwood, Harriet Millar-Mills and Amy Cokayne used to maraud when the club were experiencing their boom years between 2013 and 2017. Those days, however, feel longer than four years ago. Owing to the total exclusion of Lichfield Ladies from elite women’s rugby in 2017, the memory of where they were feels a lot further away.

“The Premier 15s feels like a million miles away because there’s no promotion but if they did [have promotion] then it would be closer than a lot of people make out,” Lichfield player, Carmel Elliott tells us on the sidelines of training.

Before an iron curtain was pulled down between Lichfield and the newly formed Premier 15s competition in 2017, Lichfield Ladies were one of the best teams in the country. The second best according to their league position in the Women’s Premiership – the precursor to the Premier 15s – in 2016/17. And it was no one-off. The three previous seasons had seen Lichfield rise from sixth, to fifth to third. They were becoming harder to beat with every season, and their players were becoming individually better with it. When England played France in the 2017 Women’s Six Nations, five of England’s matchday 23 played at Lichfield, while two more – Hunter and Fleetwood – had come through the club’s development pathway. Only Bristol were providing more England players at that time.

Lichfield’s second-placed finish that season should have translated into winning their first ever Women’s Premiership title. But Aylesford Bulls took that accolade instead, narrowly beating Lichfield in the play-offs before going on to lift the title. Lichfield took their frustrations out on Saracens, smashing the team which would go on to dominate women’s club rugby over the next three seasons, 41-12.

And then? Oblivion. That victory over Saracens would prove to be their last as a top tier women’s rugby team.

Earlier in the season, the RFU had turned down Lichfield’s application to compete in the new Premier 15s competition, even though the club had met all the minimum standards requested. Lichfield appealed the decision only to have that appeal turned down as well, sealing their demise as an elite team in women’s domestic rugby. Instead Loughborough Lightning – newly formed as a club, although a well-established university team with excellent connections with Lichfield – were selected to fly the flag for the area in the brave new era of women’s domestic rugby.

The decision seemed to be a paradox. On the one hand the RFU was starting to provide greater financial and administrative support for the women’s club game, but at the same time they had knowingly wiped out one of the leading rugby teams in the land.

If it seemed odd from the outside, it was unfathomable for those at the epicentre.

Lichfield’s director of women’s and girls rugby at the time, Becky Williams, described it as ‘having Lichfield’s heart ripped out.’

Forty-four players had to leave the club that summer. Many had wanted to stay but Lichfield themselves encouraged the exodus to ensure players would still be eligible for international selection – the message from the RFU had been very clear that only Premier 15s players would be considered for England. Lichfield even helped players find the right new club. Due to the new Loughborough side being the local Premier 15s team, many players chose to swap Lichfield for Lightning.

Just a few months later, in the first game of the inaugural Premier 15s, twelve former Lichfield players lined up for Loughborough – while many others were waiting in the wings, or setting themselves up at other clubs. Natasha Hunt went to Gloucester-Hartpury, Harriet Millar-Mills went to Firwood Waterloo, Amy Cokayne to Wasps.

The band was thoroughly broken up – only those who didn’t have international ambitions could afford to stay. Front row stalwart and former England international Roz Jermine was one of the few in that category. Under her maiden name of Crowley, Roz won 24 England caps, represented England at the 2010 World Cup (where she started the semi-final against Australia) and played a key role in England beating New Zealand in 2012 at Twickenham.

Roz – who is now the club’s head of women’s and girls rugby – told the Rugby Journal: “I didn’t have international ambitions anymore so I was quite happy to play at tier two. But for a lot of the players it happened at a time when they were right on the up and they had no option, no option whatsoever but to move to a Premiership club because they needed to be playing that quality of rugby against quality opposition. Even if we’d kept all our players, if you’re not playing against quality opposition you’re going to go to an international and have a shocker. For me, having two young children at the time, staying was a no-brainer. But for those other players they did the right thing to keep playing Premiership rugby.”

Although Roz’s international career as a Red Rose prop (on both sides of the scrum) was behind her when Lichfield’s status as an elite club was taken away, she felt the disappointment as keenly as anyone. “At the time I was livid, because I just thought ‘how can you look at a team that has produced this number of England players and say that we’re not going to be able to compete at that level?’ So it didn’t seem fair.”

Roz’s emotions have, however, softened over time. “Yes, there was a chance that with all the old boys at the club, we could have put in the money that was needed and done well for a season or two,” she says, “but I do think it would only have been a matter of time before other teams overtook us.”

Roz’s circumspection about the RFU’s decision four years ago is mirrored by others we encounter at training tonight.

Andrew Williams – whose daughter Sam is in her sixth season at the club – has coached both the U15s and U18s in the past. “We went through a mourning period of ‘look at what we’ve lost’,” he says. “There was a bit of – I don’t want to say bitterness – but we’ve moved on. We’re still Lichfield, we still have a club, we’ve still got a team.”

That capacity to grieve quickly and move on has been a key feature of Lichfield Ladies post-2017.

Even as the emotions thundered through Roz’s predecessor at the time of the demotion: the indefatigable Becky Williams, there was a deliberate decision not to dwell.

Becky said at the time: “No we’re not happy, no we don’t think they’ve made the right decision. However, that’s happened, sadly I can’t change that now, the RFU has made their decision and the new WP15s is fantastic, it’s a huge step forward for the development of women’s rugby and long term it’s going to be huge benefit to the ever-growing participation in the sport.

“We’re focused on our unique selling point: helping players be the best they can be.

“If you want to play rugby, if you want a great club to teach the skills of the trade, come to Lichfield. If you’re a footballer, a hockey player, a netballer, a rower, then come to Lichfield and we promise we’ll make you the best player you can possibly be.

“It’s going to be a bumpy road but we’ll do what we’ve always done, we’ll just crack on and get the job done. We don’t know any different.”

And so began Lichfield Ladies’ new era: to continue being the best developer of young players, without being an elite team themselves.

Roz thinks this attitude was absolutely essential in keeping the club afloat that summer. “It could have all come tumbling down if we’d lost 44 players and not recruited enough, the wheels could have fallen off,” she says. “We tried to keep the bits that had been good about Lichfield and keeping the coaches Richard Bennett, Ian Cokayne and Bali Salisbury for the following season made such a difference as people knew they were going to get that quality of coaching when you came to training. There was a whole culture of players really looking after each other and everyone just putting effort into the pot and seeing what comes out.”

Lichfield’s culture is with a small ‘c’ – there are no slogans around the clubhouse, no refrains trotted out in training. Instead, Roz talks about wanting to see ‘happy faces’, while current full-back Melissa Adkins says, “I enjoy how welcoming the club is, and although I enjoyed the welcome at other clubs too, I just settled here so quickly.”

Richard Bennett was Lichfield Ladies’ head coach from 2008 to 2019 and helped establish the atmosphere which drove the club’s success as an elite team – and which defines it still.

“I always thought that character was more important than reputation,” he says. “And we flogged that to death.”

Former player Vicki Jackson puts it even more directly: “Lichfield at the time had such a good culture, there were no dickheads, no egos. We had two teams who used to train together and there was no splitting of the teams, we all just loved each other. If you were a dickhead you’d have the shit ripped out of you until you were nice.”

Keeping the club united wherever possible has long been a pillar of Lichfield Ladies’ identity and sees the club refer to its two teams as ‘the red team’ and ‘the green team’. The red team play in the higher division (currently Championship North) and the green team in the lower division (currently Midlands 2). Although there is an obvious hierarchy with the red team playing at a higher level than the green team, players have always switched between the sides, with selection often based on non-rugby reasons, such as working commitments on Monday.

Going to extraordinary lengths to help players as individuals has also been a hallmark of Lichfield’s approach through the years. For Roz, that has seen the club help with her childcare during matches, and looking after her ‘Batphone’ during training. If the Batphone went off, coaches were under instruction to hoick Roz off so she could go and feed her new-born baby.

“RB [Richard Bennett] was always really focused on looking after the person,” explains Roz. “He knew that for a lot of the players what was really important to them was developing as individuals as well as within the team. So he’d be offering individual skill work if there was something that the England coaches had said they needed to see from someone. And for me, he knew that what mattered was getting on the pitch and being secure that my kids were OK, and that I wasn’t being a terrible mother by turning up and playing rugby every week. So he’d make sure that that bit was sorted.”

Amy Cokayne’s mum, Sharon, would often be the one to look after Roz’s children during matches, although Roz was known to combine playing with childcare herself, sometimes coming off to feed her eight-week-old, before re-joining the action.

Richard Bennett’s individual approach to supporting his players extended to psychological support. Explaining the help that the club gave to one of their England players who was low on confidence at the time. “It was about reframing the chatter in her brain,” he explains, “so that when she hit the ground in a match, there was a lot more positive stuff than negative.”

And what about coaching the best player in the world at the time in Emily Scarratt? “The phrase that comes to my mind is that listening is a skill,” he explains. “The thing with Scaz is that I’d known her since she was fourteen or fifteen and she was outstanding then. She’s got no airs and graces and if you suggest things to her and listen to her, I think that’s the best way of dealing with an outstanding player because they’ve got more to offer than us telling them.”

Like everyone at Lichfield, when the announcement was made that the club wouldn’t be joining the Premier 15s party he was “absolutely gutted”. However as someone who was considering retiring from his day job as a teacher at the time, he did consider applying for the salaried coaching role at Loughborough – with his track record and knowledge of the many transferring Lichfield players, one imagines his application would have been near the top of the in-tray.

But he never applied. “It sounds a bit corny but it was heart over head,” he explains. “I spoke to various people I trusted including Judith my wife and I just couldn’t look myself in the mirror [if he had left]. I just thought I need to see out the next couple of years and leave them in a better place. Roz and Carys Hall – who was our captain – were magnificent during those years and the whole coaching team stayed in place, Ian Cokayne and Bali Salisbury.

With the same coaching team at the helm, the ship righted quicky and
Roz even thinks the negative news surrounding the club had a twisted
positive to recruitment.

“I suppose there’s no such thing as bad press because some players who had perhaps been intimidated by us before, or thought they wouldn’t get game time, now came across from local clubs.

“We actually got a lot more newcomers into the game and it was a lot easier to progress them. When we’d had total newcomers before, it was a case of ‘brilliant – but you’ve been playing contact for two weeks and if we play a live game then you might get completely decked by Sarah Hunter, which, you know, is not the most inviting prospect! Equally, she’ll probably put an arm around your shoulder and ask you what you’re going to do next time with your tackle technique and develop you that way – but it did narrow the range of abilities having our first team playing in tier two, and that made the club a better gateway for complete newbies. The challenge then became making the experience for new players something they wanted to come back for. And we did that by having quality coaching, and the atmosphere of lots of happy people.”

At the end of the first training session of the season, there are certainly lots of happy people bouncing back towards the changing rooms. About twenty turned up tonight which is “not bad for the first session back” according to Carmel Elliott, who joined Lichfield during the club’s 2017 recruitment drive. And everyone is confident more will be coming down as the season approaches. Lichfield have never failed to put out two teams on a weekend – an achievement that should not be underestimated given that the Premier 15s has had to scrap its development league as some of the clubs couldn’t consistently field – or afford to field – competitive second teams on a regular basis.

A few weeks after the Rugby Journal’s trip to the Midlands, a press release drops from Leicester Tigers. The grand old club of Midlands rugby is starting a women’s team, in partnership with Lichfield Ladies.

It’s an eye-catching partnership which will offer Lichfield players – although not Lichfield as a club – a pathway to compete on the stage they were barred from in 2017: the Premier 15s. “Leicester came to us and said, ‘we realise we missed the boat with a women’s team but we want to create one and the best way to do that is to make a link with a Championship club’,” explains Roz. “We said ‘that’s nice but we’re alright thanks. You need us more than we need you. Off you go’.

“But from there it became a really open conversation about how we could build a proper link where we keep our aim of being the best amateur club and developing players, but also have that link with Tigers.”

The deal means a temporary name change for Lichfield Ladies to Lichfield Leicester Tigers until the Premier 15s once again reviews its roster of teams, which is scheduled for 2023. If Leicester’s application is successful, any team competing in the Premier 15s would be called Leicester Tigers, while Lichfield will return to being Lichfield Ladies, as a feeder team to the Tigers.

Roz says Leicester and Lichfield are determined for the relationship to not only see Leicester take the cream of Lichfield’s players – although that will be part of it - but to have a collaboration that runs all the way down to the junior section where both Lichfield girls and boys will benefit through coaching and coaching development. “Tigers have been excellent in all the meetings where we discussed how this agreement might work,” says Roz. “They understand that they haven’t got the money to make players appear from nowhere, they need to develop players so the stronger Lichfield is, the better players they are going to have.”

But how will the Lichfield way – so intrinsic to its success of the mid-2010s and the club’s revival since 2017 – fare when it meets the Leicester way?

It sounds like that won’t be a problem, as Lichfield have already stamped their colours in the boardroom. Leicester’s head of women’s rugby, Vicky Macqueen, is a former Lichfield player and has coached at the club as well. “She really understands how we work” says Roz. “Niggly things like me saying the 1s and the 2s need to train together and that we can’t split where training is – she really understands how that works and how it develops players.”

From having the club’s ‘heart ripped out’ in 2017, Lichfield players may – six years later in 2023 – taste Premier 15s action under the stripes of the Tigers.

They may no longer be an elite club within the women’s game, but as Leicester have recognised, they are a first-class creator of elite players. Just ask the best player in the world Emily Scarratt, or England’s captain Sarah Hunter, they’re likely to tell you the same thing. That nobody does it better.

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 15 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.

Lichfield Ladies

Maria Pedro

Portugal

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