Nolli Waterman

When the tough Welsh valleys boys arrived at Butlin’s for the under-12s festival, they weren’t expecting to find themselves dump-tackled and danced around by a 12-year-old girl called Nolli. But that’s what happened. And, decades later, they can still feel every one of the bruises.

Long before Nolli Waterman became renowned for sitting full-backs – Welsh or otherwise – down on the international scene, she was getting some serious practice in at home in Somerset.

Sometime around the mid to late-90s, Caerphilly, like all the other visiting sides for the Gullivers Sports Travels mini festival, were staying at the nearby Butlin’s and feeling confident of putting their English hosts to the sword before heading back to the camp for some top quality English cabaret.

But facing them for host side Minehead Barbarians was a 12-year-old, strong-shouldered, prop-turned-back, called Nolli Waterman. “Back then I would regularly be the one smashing people,” explains Nolli. “I actually started as a prop because I was bigger and stronger than a lot of the boys. I basically did rugby, gymnastics and swimming, so I had these massive, powerful shoulders.”

Perhaps unluckily for the backlines she would go on to face, the addition of second rows at junior rugby level, meant she had to switch. “They didn’t want the boys putting their hands between my legs, so they said, ‘right, you can go fly-half’.

“Anyway, funny story,” continues Nolli, “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this, but my very last game with the boys was against Caerphilly at this massive Gullivers Sports Travel tournament as an under-12.

“In that game, I’d gone completely wild, had a massive game and scored a try and dump-tackled this boy.

“Later, I was at university in Cardiff – at UWIC, now Cardiff Met – and I was chatting to this boy on my course. I mentioned I was from Minehead, and he said: ‘Oh my god, you’re that girl. Thank god you went on and played for England’.

“It turns out he was the boy I’d dump-tackled and he’d got years of stick for it, and it was Phil Dollman [former Exeter Chiefs title-winning full-back].

“I also ended up dating another boy who played in that match, and at his 21st birthday party, one of his friends came up to me, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, I was so pissed off that you were really good, that when you scored that try, I kicked you in the head!’.”

Nolli made a mark – or had a mark made on her – wherever she went, and was spotted by England playing for the South West at a regional under-16s tournament. “There were loads of girls from that [England] generation all playing against each other at this tournament in Lichfield,” she explains. “There’s this great picture of Maggie [Alphonsi] when she was a prop, so massive, so chubby!”

Once in the England Academy, she then started to realise how close she was to the seniors, literally. “In the first ever England Academy run, Streety [Gary Street] got us in a huddle, and said, ‘look over there is England A, and there’s the seniors – you are two fields away from playing for England. Even though I was the youngest at fifteen – the next youngest was Rocky [Clark] at nineteen – it was the first time I thought, ‘I could actually play for England’.

“I remember walking behind Gill Burns and thinking ‘fucking hell she’s massive, oh my god, like, look at the size of her’. Luckily, I then met people like Jo Yapp and realised I didn’t have to be massive...”

The car journeys to England Academy training – often in the Midlands and a fair drive from her Somerset home – were also memorable, as she got to spend them with her father Jim, a Bath full-back with more than 400 first-class appearances to his name. Nolli’s parents had split up when she was young and, having spent four of her early years in New Zealand with her mum, when the family returned to Somerset, both were keen to make up for lost time.

“My dad would take me and so I spent a lot of time in the car with him,” she says. “I spent a lot of time early on in my career with just the two of us and I think that was a real important part of my development. Although he always used to say that I’d fall asleep fifteen minutes into the car journey, and he’d drive the whole way there with me fast asleep.”

Although he coached Nolli at Minehead, she knew little about his Bath days. “I thought the amazing team he played for was Minehead Barbarians,” she admits. “I don’t remember him playing, but I remember waiting for him in the bar.

“He was always the last one out from the showers, hair neatly brushed and still damp. Then he’d pick me up, and go and get an orange juice and lemonade and a Lion bar.”

It was only when she joined him at The Rec after he was invited to the club by former team-mate and Bath president Mike Beese, that she realised how good he was. “It was a past players’ day and everyone was just coming up to my dad saying ‘oh my god Jim, you’re the missing piece’. He hadn’t been back to the club since he left in 1984, the year before I was born.

“We were sat chatting to [former fly-half] Brendan Perry and Matt Perry walks in, goes straight to my dad, and says, ‘oh my god, Jim Waterman, it’s so good to finally meet you, I’ve been using your peg for my whole career’. At the time he was the most capped full-back for England!

“As we were chatting, there was all this stuff they were saying about my dad, that we’d genuinely never spoken about, how he was innovating in lineout moves, backline moves...

“I’m really proud of my dad,” she adds. “In the vast majority of interviews people used to talk about me being the daughter of Jim Waterman and he was always saying, ‘it’s so ridiculous that you are known as my daughter, I should be known as your dad, you’ve won a World Cup’.

“I think that association with the men’s game and what the male had done in your family is something that a lot of people still turn to, but at the same time I’m obviously massively proud.

“When I played my last ever game for the Barbarians, I wish I’d realised I could choose a different number, because dad had played with 16 on his back, because they didn’t wear the unlucky 13 in those days. It would have been nice to wear his number 16 at Twickenham.”

From the England Academy, Nolli then made a senior debut at sevens, as part of an under-19 side – England and France were considered too strong – that had been invited to a European sevens event in France. It was far from ideal, but gave Nolli an idea of how some views hadn’t quite caught up with modern thinking. “Streety came back from his meeting with the organisers and said, “I think they’re going to change the pitch because they don’t think you can play on a full-size field’.

“They had been saying that women can’t pass the ball that far. We were all laughing and thinking, ‘that’s going to be like mini rugby’. But they actually did make it narrower and shorter, and because they thought we couldn’t kick either, every conversion was in front of the posts.”

Although the posts were something of a moving target. “In the final we played Italy and Rachael [Burford] was actually kicking and the posts were like those giant inflatable things with wavy arms you get in garages,” recalls Nolli. “And it was so windy, that two Frenchmen had to run on and hold them in place when Rachael kicked, because they were flying everywhere. It was so ridiculous.”

Senior caps soon followed, in far more civilised circumstances, as Nolli won the first of her 82 caps in 2003, aged eighteen, making her the youngest woman to represent her country.

She played in four World Cups, but injury played too big a role, even from her very first tournament in 2006, the year she’d been voted most promising player.

A torn quad meant she missed the first pool game in Edmonton, having to complete return-to-play protocols. “They didn’t want me to do anything with players, so I ended up tackling our team doctor, and I injured his knee too, so it was awful,” she says. “Afterwards, it was such a massive relief, I was really emotional and I remember crying in the shower, just so relieved that I passed.”

A bang on the door interrupted the cry, summoning her to the team, she joined the matchday 22 and faced South Africa, eventually helping England reach the final, where they lost 25-17 to New Zealand.

In 2010, it was her ACL that interrupted her World Cup build-up. She made it, but the end result was the same, losing once again to New Zealand, 10-13 at The Stoop. “If you’d asked me after that game, ‘what was the score?’ I wouldn’t have been able to tell you,” she says. “And it wasn’t until we got to the 2014 World Cup that they sat us all down and made us watch the game. It was awful, utterly awful.

“We were in an amazing place physically in 2014,” she adds “I remember being in a training camp, and we would do Toughen Up Tuesdays and Streety smashed us. It was, like, awful, but we had this different edge to us.

“In the gym, the props Rocky and Sophie Hemming were doing pull-ups while wearing weights, whereas in 2006, I remember just seeing the props hanging on the bar.”

This time, it was Canada in the final, and victory at last: a 21-9 win. World champions.

Nolli was set on retiring after the Olympics in Rio. It was her hardest year, and things that had been bubbling under, started to resurface. She had a fifth reconstruction surgery on her knee, seventeen months out, but the issue went beyond the physical. “I was diagnosed with depression,” she explains. “I think I’d never really dealt with any of the challenges that I’d faced over the years. A lot of it came down to my fear of not being good enough. Every time I’d come back from an injury, I’d got to a point where physically I was in a good place, but I always wanted to be better coming back. I didn’t want to be the player that was not the same because of the injury.”

She’d been undergoing rehab, and it was the physio who had worked with her on the ACL five years before, that noticed something was amiss. “I ended up having a one-to-one with a doctor and I was talking about something that was pretty serious but I was basically laughing and smiling, but crying as well, there was this mishmash of everything.

“Everything had disconnected,” explains Nolli. “And it was all in a bit of a pickle in my brain after that meeting. The doctor had printed off this article around, ‘what is depression?’ and ‘what is anxiety?’ and handed it to me.

“I could relate to quite a lot of it, but I’d never really thought about it because I’d always been in a really positive position. I had amazing support, I was playing really good rugby, I had my amazing family, I was successful.

“I never really felt like I could feel sad, or feel sorry for myself, which was how I saw it, I never wanted to be that person.

“I walked in the next day, and the lady that looked after the whole programme came in and she said, ‘you know, Nolli, this is the place that you can really be you’. And the floodgates opened and I don’t think I stopped crying for a couple of weeks.”

She started a programme with a psychiatrist and psychologist, combined with her physical rehab. “Within three or four sessions over that course of time, I went from not being able to walk properly to then getting into a running programme,” she says. “Instantly, it was this massive shift that because I accepted where I was mentally, I just saw these massive changes physically too.

“I didn’t tell any of my team-mates,” she continues. “I only told Rachael Burford, who I was living with at a time. I didn’t tell my mum, which still upsets her now, but I told my dad and even he was like, ‘but you’re the one that’s always happy?’.

“But I kept that inner circle of knowing really, really small, because it allowed me to deal with it in my own way.”

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Nolli struggled to believe she was good enough. “I always had a feeling that I was being picked by the coaches, but the players wouldn’t pick me because the players didn’t think that I was there,” she says. “I suppose what I should have done was pay more attention to my mental health once I’d got back playing.”

She made it to the fourth World Cup, but only after being persuaded to not quit after Rio. “I’d lost the enjoyment of rugby, I didn’t feel that that I was good enough and I think I always thought if I came back from an injury and I wasn’t good enough like, I didn’t want to drag my career out.

“I think everything that I’d found hard before Rio, I didn’t know whether I could continue facing it.

“I actually saw Rocky in the gym at Surrey Sports Park, because I was part of the contracted players from Rio through to 2017 [World Cup]. I tried to ask to not be contracted. I saw Rocky and said, ‘I think I’m done mate’.

“Obviously we weren’t doing it for the money, my body was pretty battered, and I didn’t know whether I could just physically keep going and mentally it was exhausting.

“She said, ‘Ah, mate, take it competition by competition, the big girls will be back in for the autumns, just stick around to see if you have fun’.

“She said that, as we weren’t far away from the next tournament, it was better to look at that, rather than at the World Cup.’”

Rocky’s approach worked, and Nolli found herself in the semi-final against France. Nolli had to leave the field early for a head injury assessment, after what she describes as ‘the hardest 25 minutes of rugby’ she’d ever played. She was cleared but couldn’t return to the field. “I spoke to Rachael after the game, and she said, ‘where did you go?’. I told her I had an HIA, but hadn’t realised that it ruled me out, which Rachael told me. Concussion protocols meant you couldn’t play for a minimum of six days and the final was five days away.

“I went to the toilet and cried.

“That was really, really tough, really hard,” she continues. “I don’t think I was looked after very well. Afterwards, I was asked to leave the hotel and had to hand back my accreditation. “At one point, I had to ask to be part of the shirt presentation, which I think was tough.

“I removed myself the day after it happened, and went and spent a day with my family. I was really lucky that both my parents were there.

“A friend rang me up and said, ‘oh my god, I just can’t believe this’. But this was a friend whose husband had just lost his dad to cancer.

“She was dealing with all sorts of stuff – she was also going through IVF – and it was so ironic. I’ve got someone that’s going through all of this and they’re telling me that what’s happened to me is awful. That was one of the worst things, and it put it into perspective for me, this was just a game of rugby.”

Nolli played international rugby for one more season. “I stayed around and I actually ended up playing my best rugby in my last season.

“So, in a way, not playing in a World Cup final, the HIA, going through all of that, meant that I had some of my best times, played some of my best rugby, and finished with the biggest smile on my face at the Ricoh Arena, seeing my family all there and scored a cool try.”

The try – Google it – was her 47th, helping England defeat Ireland 33-11 in front of 7,500. She knew it was her last game, even if she hadn’t said it out loud. “I welled up walking through the tunnel, at the end of the game,” she says. “I was waiting to be interviewed by Sky and looked up into the box and it was really rare for me to have both sets of parents, my brothers, Simone my partner, my step-sister and her daughters, like everyone, all together.

“They were just all bouncing around having the best time and I was like, ‘you know what, I’ve literally just had a game that was like playing mini rugby with and against some of my mates,’ and there was an 18-year-old superstar in Ellie Kildunne playing at fifteen... I genuinely thought, ‘is this my retirement? Should I announce it in my interview? Maybe not, just in case you regret it’.”

The Ireland game was Nolli’s international finale, and when she was offered a television pundit role for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, she brought her club career to an end too, not wanting injury to somehow ruin the opportunity.

That journey started off a bit bumpily, especially when she covered her first ITV game, Ireland and Italy in the 2020 Six Nations. “It was awful,” she says. “I clicked on my Twitter after the game, and there were hundreds of notifications.

“I suppose what I found it hard was the people that were actually physically tagging me, to send me a lot of abuse such as, ‘why were you there?’ ‘you were awful’, or just generally ‘you’re not very good’, and calling out ITV saying I should never do a game again.

“I think what hurt most was that it was literally my first ever game,” she says, “it was like a first ever day at work. Everyone that’s gone to work for the first time is nervous, and yet my bosses, the head of ITV, are being tagged saying ‘don’t ever employ her again’.”

But the likes of Ugo Monye, Gabby Logan, Craig Doyle rallied around. “All of these people then reached out to me, and Craig Doyle, in particular, rang me and just said, ‘Look, Nolli we all get it, and don’t worry’, and that was amazing.

“The amount of support that I had from within the inner circle within the media made me realise that I was actually part of that team and that I wasn’t just me as a newbie, I wasn’t on my own and it wasn’t just me because I was inexperienced. They all get it now, even though they’re all unbelievable at their job. People still throw mud at them.”

Now, Nolli is flying. The mentorship of Miles Harrison has been huge and, when we talk, she’s just returned from covering sevens, and is also working with Channel Four and ITV too. “People ask me what I do and I have to say, ‘well, have you got about five minutes?’.

“I was always really embarrassed to say that [I work in television] because I thought I sounded a bit of an idiot, so I would never say it. Also, in my head, I think I always thought it was like a player appearance, not my actual job.

“But if someone asks me now, what I do, I will say ‘I’m a commentator’. That’s what I will lead with. I think it’s only probably the last year or six months really, I have felt comfortable and confident to say that.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Karen Yeomans

This extract was taken from issue 17 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.