Matt Kvesic

The tape had run out, the medical supplies were low, and then the bailiffs wheeled away the Wattbikes; Matt Kvesic’s return to his boyhood club Worcester Warriors wasn’t quite what he expected. A long-term contract was cut short, and he was forced to leave his family behind and head to Italy.

When Worcester Warriors went into administration in late September 2022, Matt Kvesic was lost. He’d played over 260 professional club games, he’d been capped by England, but now he was facing redundancy at thirty years old. He didn’t have the safety net of youth. The likes of Ted Hill and Ollie Lawrence were rich with suitors when the Worcester party came to an end; still in their early twenties and with England potential, they were the tastiest morsels for the vulture clubs circling. But for those the wrong side of 30 such as Matt, the landscape wasn’t so fertile.  “I was probably a bit older than you want,” he  recalls as we speak in Worcester, still home today. “I’m not exactly at my prime, there’s a lot of good young back rows and I’m out of the England fold as well. So, in all honesty I was panicking.” 

His agent put out feelers, conversations were had and the first concrete opportunity for the rest of the season was with Zebre Parma in northern Italy. Exciting on the face of it, but it would also mean spending the next eight months living in a flat on his own, in a new country and away from his family. However, a mortgage doesn’t pay for itself. 

It’s clear that Matt is a family man. We’ve been speaking for almost two hours about the meanders of his rugby career, from winning the double with Exeter Chiefs to Worcester’s demise, from touring Argentina with England to Championship away days at Ampthill, but his favourite topic is clearly his [now] four-year-old son, Albie. “Going to Italy was really difficult because my missus [Felicity] and my son didn’t come,” he says. “We’d just moved back from Exeter, and we’d made Worcester our home – Felicity is from Worcester, and we’d had our lad. Italy was really fun for the first couple of weeks and then actually it was like, ‘I’m living in a pretty crap flat on my own’, and it put a bit of a downer on it. It was hard trying to talk [to my family] on FaceTime and Albie’s saying, ‘I don’t want to talk on FaceTime, I want to see him’.”

Matt made the move to Parma at the beginning of November, but with a busy playing schedule, chances to visit home were limited. “I really wanted to get home for Christmas,” he says. “My son was three years old at the time and he loved it. I had Treviso away on Christmas Eve, so I was thinking there was no way. But I found a flight from Venice [half an hour south of Treviso], it was at 5.15pm and it was a 1.30pm kick off, so I barely even showered after the game and one of the team managers drove me to the airport. Luckily, I made it in perfect time, and then the flight was two hours delayed. I had to get a cab from Heathrow on the other side, £300 to get back to Worcester, but I just wanted to get home. I flew back to Italy on Boxing Day, but I got to bring Albie for a week with my parents, which was great.”

Italy wasn’t just a jolt to the system of Matt’s personal life, but his rugby life too. Three seasons before, he’d been part of an all-conquering Exeter Chiefs side, and now he was playing for a team fighting at the bottom of the URC table, with just a single win to their name in two seasons. “Zebre was very different,” he admits. “Professionally and coaching wise, not being rude or anything, they were very passionate people, it was just things like wanting to do contact every session. It was tough, we didn’t win a game the whole time I was there.”

He managed twelve appearances, even scoring a try against Cardiff and while the environment may have been different, Matt did at least have the Italian lifestyle. “Parma itself, the food there is mental,” he says. “I didn’t have much of a kitchen set-up, so I was eating out a lot, it was so good. It’s a bit of a food capital, and I got to travel and explore the country, albeit on my own. I did enjoy it, but I couldn’t have done another year, especially without the family.”

As the surname suggests, Matt has Eastern European roots in his family tree, but he was actually born in Iserlohn, Germany – a result of his father being posted there with the British Army. “I was born there, we moved back within the year, and then went back over again about two years later,” he says. “A posting generally lasts about two years, so I would have been four, five when we left again, I can foggily remember a few bits. I did look into seeing if I could get a passport but unfortunately, I don’t qualify.

“The Kvesic name is Croatian,” he continues. “That’s from my dad’s grandad who I never met, he passed away when my dad was young. On my mum’s side, my other grandad who I did know, he was Polish.

“My grandad was a young boy in the war, and he ended up fleeing a concentration camp and living in Kenya with the Maasai, he spoke Swahili and everything.”

“He was a big character, his story’s pretty mad actually,” continues Matt. “He was a young boy in the war and he somehow ended up fleeing a concentration camp and living in Kenya with the Maasai. He spoke Swahili and everything. Then, there was a family who went on holiday in Kenya who saw him and thought, ‘I don’t think he’s supposed to be here’, so they took him back over to Cornwall. 

“He ended up in Cornwall around the age of thirteen or fourteen, then worked in the tin mines and was the longest serving tin miner in Cornwall. When we’d visit him, he’d have me skinning his rabbits after going hunting, gutting his fish and digging for worms down on Falmouth Beach. At the time I probably didn’t appreciate it, but it was great fun.”

With a military father, Matt’s early years were full of upheaval, bouncing around the barracks of southern England, from Andover to Bovington to Tidworth. Eventually, looking for somewhere more permanent, Matt took up a place at Blundell’s School near Tiverton, and that’s where rugby properly began for him. 

His path to the professional game, however, came through a chance scouting at a summer camp. “My dad knew a mate who ran an army rugby course, a three-day residential,” he explains. “Gloucester and Worcester ran the rugby side, and I ended up impressing the Worcester coach, a guy called Matt Sherratt, who’s now in charge at Cardiff. It was actually tough because I was an avid Gloucester supporter growing up, but he asked me if I wanted to come and train.”

“The squad was stacked: George Ford, Owen Farrell, Elliott Daly, Mako Vunipola, Joe Lauchbury, Christian Wade and Dan Robson, to name a few. They were very successful, winning the 2011 U20s Six Nations grand slam.”

Matt spent the next two years training with the Worcester academy, and by sixteen he’d been selected for the England age group side. At seventeen, he made his professional debut for the Warriors, making him the youngest player to represent Worcester in the professional era. “It was Scarlets away in the LV Cup,” he recalls, “and we got absolutely humped as well. I had about 30 minutes off the bench, I made a good carry and a good tackle but then Regan King, [the All-Black centre], he must have stepped me about four times in one run, he was just on another planet.” 

The following season was Matt’s first in full-time professional rugby. Worcester had just been relegated from the Premiership, but that worked in his favour. “My first full year was in the Championship, which was perfect for me development wise. It was the first year I played England U20s as well. If you were in the Championship then, England got preference over the player, so I played a lot with what was a great England team. The squad was stacked: George Ford, Owen Farrell, Elliot Daly, Mako Vunipola, Joe Launchbury, Christian Wade and Dan Robson, to name a few. Unsurprisingly they were very successful, winning the U20s Six Nations grand slam before making it to the final of the 2011 Junior World Championships against New Zealand. With only a point in it after 60 minutes, the Kiwis eventually pulled away to win 22-33, the likes of Sam Cane, Brodie Retallick, Beauden Barrett, TJ Perenara and Charles Piutau in the side that lifted the trophy. 

“In hindsight it was probably the most enjoyable year of rugby in my career,” says Matt. “I played a lot more games than I expected to, albeit in the Championship, but I racked up fifteen or sixteen appearances and then played almost every Premiership game the season after. I don’t think that would have happened had we been in the Premiership [in his first season].”

Matt’s seamless trajectory continued the following season, with over twenty appearances for the Warriors and another U20s Six Nations title. But injury struck in the build-up to the 2012 Junior World Championships, and he needed an operation. “I was desperate to get on the plane, but Stuart Lancaster, who had just taken over at England at the time, called me and said, ‘Don’t go, get the operation and we’ll have a look at you next season’.” When you’ve got the England head coach on the phone at nineteen saying he’s got an eye on you, you listen.

Within a few months of his graduation from the U20s, Matt got his first chance to train with the senior England squad, and by the following January, he was in camp for Six Nations preparations. Fighting for the jersey with captain Chris Robshaw, Tom Wood, James Haskell and Tom Croft, a first cap was elusive, but after waiting out the Six Nations and the autumn Internationals he got his chance on the summer tour to Argentina, making his Test debut at openside in a 32-3 victory and retaining his place for the 51-26 win a week later. “Being named in the starting fifteen, I do remember being very, very nervous, but at the same time there was no pressure really, I was a young guy just giving it a crack,” remembers Matt. “That short period of time was awesome because everything was just new.”

With two good performances under his belt, Matt secured a place in England’s EPS (Elite Playing Squad) for the following season, and coupled with a summer move to Gloucester, he was destined to push on and challenge for a starting shirt. However, that never quite came about. While he was ever-present in training squads, Matt would have to wait another three years until he pulled on the England shirt again, getting 20 minutes off the bench in a friendly against Wales. And it would be another three years until he won his fourth and final cap, again as a sub in a 2019 World Cup warm up against Italy.

Matt’s reflection on his years with England is one of mixed emotions. “I really enjoyed my time,” he says earnestly, “but I just wish I’d had a chance to have a go in a bigger game and really genuinely challenge myself. I’m not taking away from the caps I got, but I never played in a Six Nations game or an autumn International. I would have loved an opportunity to play against the world’s best players, because at least then I’d know if I was good enough or not. But I’ll kind of never know. 

“I was in the set-up for so long, in that period there was only one season when I wasn’t in the squad. To do the Sunday, Monday, Tuesday [with England], drive back to the club, go back up to England again the next week only to drive back to the club – as time goes on, that’s quite mentally tough. I was probably in the best physical shape of my life prior to that 2015 World Cup, we got absolutely flogged in that build-up camp in Denver, but then I didn’t go.”

During Lancaster’s time, much of the talk surrounding England’s flankers was the lack of a genuine openside, with Matt often touted as the player that could fill that role; however, that would have meant ousting captain Chris Robshaw from the seven shirt. Eddie Jones, meanwhile, opted for more robust options in his back row, which Matt admits didn’t fit his playing style. His chances began to dry up under Jones, and even after the best season of his
career in 2018/19 at Exeter, it still wasn’t enough to be named in the wider fifty-man squad ahead of the 2019 World Cup.

“That was the first time I wasn’t disappointed about not being selected for England,” he reveals. “That season was probably the best season of my life: we lost to Sarries in the final, but I had an incredible season personally. I’d had some really good chats with John Mitchell [England’s forwards coach] at the time, and when I wasn’t picked, I just thought: lets crack on and enjoy.”

But, out of the blue, a call-up came. Despite not getting the nod in the initial squad, Matt was invited to join up with the camp for the remainder of the six-week run up. He got a cap against Italy, but it wasn’t enough for a place in the World Cup squad. “Basically, they all went on the plane, and I went home. I actually really, really enjoyed the training, I wasn’t expecting to make the World Cup, so I could just be there and enjoy it whatever happened. My mindset was very different at that point.”

After an England career full of almosts, Matt chooses to focus on what he achieved rather than what could have been. “I think it just happens with age, you mature a bit, your priorities change. It was definitely a rollercoaster of a ride with England, but I don’t really sit and dwell on it too much. It is what it is. It doesn’t [eat me up inside], but I guess I also don’t feel wholly fulfilled, I feel I had a lot more to give.”

“That was the first time I wasn’t disappointed about not being selected for England. That season was probably the best of my life, and when I wasn’t picked I just thought, ‘let’s crack on and enjoy’.”

At Exeter Chiefs, Matt enjoyed some of his best days on a rugby field. Rob Baxter had been trying to sign him since his Worcester days, and after a four-year stint in Gloucester, Matt headed southwest to join a golden generation of players that had just won their first Premiership title the season before. After a slow first season, what he calls his “indoctrination” into becoming an Exeter Chiefs player, his second season brought 27 appearances and eight tries, a place in the Premiership XV of the Year and on the shortlist for the individual award. In his owns words, Exeter had “taken the shackles off” a player who’d become too breakdown-focused during his four years in cherry and white. “We just couldn’t lose,” says Matt. “I think that year we’d secured top four before Christmas, which was absolutely unheard of. I loved that year. Sam Simmonds ended up getting injured, so I moved across to eight and played there for most of the year.”

Albie had just been born and Matt was loving life in a cosy part of Devon, but the following season his playing opportunities juddered to a halt. “When I came back in, I could just tell it was really cold. I didn’t really have much love from the coaches. I had a few games off the bench and the chat was about the competition, but I didn’t feel I’d had much of an opportunity to play. I could just feel the plan was to let me down gently, but it didn’t feel like that at the time. Not long after Christmas I eventually got an answer that they weren’t going to keep me on.”

Matt had gone from the best season of his career to being out of a job. “It was mentally tough. If I’d been crap for two years then it’s my fault, but they just said with budgets, players, etcetera. But that’s the life of a professional sportsman: you sign a three-year contract, begin to get settled and things change. But they’re not your decisions.”

The timing couldn’t have been worse. “It was early 2020, I spoke to my agent, and we had a look,” explains Matt. “But then, about a week later, Covid hit. 

“Everyone shut down, but I needed a job. I couldn’t really find anything at the time, nobody was signing players. When rugby started to pick up again, I hadn’t found anything and Rob [Baxter] called me up and offered to have me back. There was a stubbornness in me, I didn’t want to go back for three months, so I said no.”

Instead, he returned to Worcester Warriors, watching from afar as Chiefs completed the double later that year. Does he have any regrets? “Sometimes I do, yeah. I’ve got the medals, because technically I played in the competitions [which had started the year before], but they’re tucked away in some drawer. I’m sure when I’m fifty in the pub I’ll be wearing them saying ‘yeah, I scored the winning try!’.”

It’s been well-documented, including in a previous issue of Rugby Journal, what happened after Matt’s return to Worcester. Sitting across from him now, over a year on from the club’s liquidation, which took all of twenty seconds to complete in a court hearing, it’s astonishing the story still has no definitive ending or a clear next chapter.  “You don’t expect to outlast a club,” he says matter-of-factly. “It was a pretty brutal end, seeing how many people it affected, from players to staff. Des, the kitman, he’d been there longer than I had from when I first started fifteen years before, and his wife worked there too. For me, I signed a four-year contract, you plan life around that. I would still be contracted now.”

Jason Whittingham and Colin Goldring formally took control of the club in June 2019, and while they didn’t have the personal touch of Cecil Duckworth, the club was moving in a positive direction. It’s easy to forget the quality of the squad that Worcester were building at the time, from the youngsters in Ted Hill, Fin Smith and Ollie Lawrence to the Lions-grade internationals of Duhan van de Merwe and Rory Sutherland.  “Steve Diamond had come in, things had really started to perk up,” says Matt. “We were definitely on an upward trajectory. If you’re signing players [of that calibre] you think the club must be doing okay.

“I’ll be honest, coming to Championship there was a bit of an ego thing for me. But the way Coventry are, it’s no different from the way we trained at Worcester. I don’t feel like I’m in a Championship club.”

“But then you could see the cracks starting to appear. We didn’t have any tape, or we were low on medical supplies because they hadn’t paid the medical bill. We didn’t have any supplements because they hadn’t paid the supplement company. There was always an excuse. There was a day we turned up for training and the non-playing squad were about to go and do an off-feet session on the Wattbikes, but the Wattbikes were being wheeled away by bailiffs. With things like that happening, the writing was on the wall.”

Before they knew it, the club was in freefall. The whole squad was in the eye of the storm, but Matt felt it even more than most with his wife, Felicity, covering the story for her job as a BBC reporter. “I’m at the club basically waiting to lose my job, you’ve got the rumour mill going where boys are hearing this and that, and then I’ll get home and she’ll say, ‘I’ve heard this today’, and you can’t deal with any more, your head just gets frazzled. But she was really good for me because she understood the administration process – we didn’t know all that, it’s complicated, but she could help break that down.

“I think that press release [where the owners caused outrage by placing the blame for the financial woes of the club on the fans and players] couldn’t sum them up better, you probably got a good gist of what they were like.”

What happens next with Worcester Warriors remains uncertain. Atlas completed the purchase of the club in May 2023, but little more than murmurs have emerged since. “Because the facilities there are so good, people are seeing Sixways as a land-grab rather than a rugby opportunity,” suggests Matt. “I suppose rugby at the moment isn’t really a business you’ll get money back from investing in, it’s a black hole at the minute. Hopefully somebody does at some point. If I had enough money I’d do it, but I’d have to win the EuroMillions a couple of times.”

Matt’s career has already had more chapters than most, and his latest at Coventry – the club he joined in May 2023 – has brought him full circle, back to the league where it all began for him at eighteen years old. But at his new West Midlands rugby home, a club with rich history and now with hopes of a Championship title-run, the league is a totally different prospect this time around.

“I’ve had two very different experiences of [the Championship],” he says. “At Worcester, I think we won every game that year, we were a Premiership-level team. But coming back into the league there are a lot more competitive teams. Ealing obviously are very well funded but London Scottish beat them, Doncaster and Nottingham are playing well, Ampthill beat us:  the league is very good. 

“I’ll be honest, coming to the Championship there was a little bit of an ego thing for me. But the way Coventry are, maybe apart from some of the facilities, it’s no different from the way we trained at Worcester or Gloucester. Being here, I don’t feel like I’m in a Championship club.”

The level of the league on the pitch has risen across the board and it’s reflected in the numbers coming to watch. Already, average attendance is up by around 300 on last season, with over 5,000 descending on Butts Park Arena in a record attendance for Coventry’s Boxing Day fixture against Nottingham, on the same day the football side Coventry City hosted a sold-out fixture against Sheffield Wednesday. To put that number into context, Newcastle Falcons had drawn 6,000 for their clash with Bristol just before Christmas. “Football is huge in the city, and we still managed to get our record attendance,” says Matt. “It shows there’s appetite for support in the Championship. We’re not going to get numbers like Welford Road or Kingsholm, but relative to funding, the Championship clubs punch above their weight in terms of what they produce on the pitch and the matchday experience.”

To get a feel for the atmosphere, Rugby Journal is at Butts Park Arena as Coventry host third-place Cornish Pirates, who are sitting just two points behind the second-placed home side in the Championship table. Even with the festive period over, the game has drawn a substantial crowd of more than 4,300 fans, including a good handful of Pirates supporters making their voices heard. The stand is full, the sideline is ten rows deep, and there’s Guinness on tap – it’s not technically a Premiership stadium, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a rugby fan who wouldn’t want to come here for a game.

In a close contest that saw the score locked at 7-7 at the break, an intercept from the visitors’ Ruaridh Dawson undercut Coventry’s momentum, the Pirates holding on for a 21-19 victory on the road to leapfrog Coventry into second. 

It was a game that played out in the shadow of ever-growing uncertainty and speculation over the future of the Championship. The concept of a two-tier Premiership franchise model has been the latest point of contention, the Championship clubs releasing a joint statement unanimously rejecting the proposal for a selection-based Tier 2, saying the RFU has threatened them with effective regelation if they do not comply. This had come in response to a blunt statement from RFU chief Bill Sweeney, who said: “We’ve shown that if you pour money into the existing structure of the Championship, it just doesn’t deliver. That’s not being disrespectful, it just doesn’t.”

“I’ll be honest, I thought Bill Sweeney’s statement was absolutely mental,” retorts Matt. “There were no statistical figures backing it, it was just a sweeping statement of what he thought about the Championship. Where are you getting this from?

“What Coventry have done is, they’re sustainable; they’ve made themselves a club where they aren’t reliant on funding to keep going. They have a model that works, they don’t have a big sugar daddy that can drop loads of money. But you can’t ignore there are clubs that do struggle financially.”

Bringing the likes of Wasps and Worcester back into the fold has also formed part of the conversation around a re-vamp of the second tier, and while he concedes there are difficulties, Matt sits on the ‘for’ side of the fence. “In terms of bringing teams back, of course I’d love to see Worcester Warriors back in some capacity and it’d be great if that’s in the Championship. On Worcester, the city needs it; you bump into people in town and people miss it and still ask about it. It’s about finding that balance, but we can’t think about it until we know what the structure of the league looks like and what it’s going to be. If I had the answers, I wouldn’t still be playing rugby. 

“All I know,” begins Matt, “is that I’ve come to Coventry and I’m really enjoying my time; it’s been better than expected. The club itself, it’s a proper club. It’s a pretty great place to be.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by Michael Leckie

This extract was taken from issue 25 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.