Nomads

It was a rugby team that brought together rival players, embraced those that felt they were ‘a little bit shit’, that advised sports ministers, that beat Test nations, that confronted punky Beth Ditto lookalikes in McDonalds and would pave the way for the women’s Barbarians. This was the Nomads: gone and only partially forgotten.

When the Nomads played their last match on Sunday 18th March, 2017, against the British Army in Aldershot, it brought an end to 24 years (or maybe 25, nobody is really sure) of a rugby culture we’re unlikely to see again at the elite end of the women’s game. 

It was the type of culture that brought together a team of international players on the morning of a match, encouraged them to take big risks on the pitch, and followed it up with the biggest of nights out afterwards. 

Yet for all the good times, on and off the field, this amateur culture powered an elite rugby outfit. In 2010, the Nomads were ranked 12th in the world by the IRB – high enough to qualify for that year’s World Cup had they been a nation. They regularly faced the likes of England A, Wales, and Scotland, winning as often as they lost. They also beat South Africa, the British Army and the USA. They’ve seen some of the best players to ever grace the women’s game wear their colours: the likes of New Zealand’s Anna Richards, Non Evans of Wales, England’s Susie Appleby and Australia’s Bronnie Mackintosh. 

As an invitational team with a ‘have boots, will travel’ mentality, they were often described as the ‘women’s Barbarians’, but aside from some similar traditions – as a Nomad you are asked to wear one sock from your club and one from your country – the comparison doesn’t hold up. 

With no money whatsoever, very little kit, and a heritage that exists only in the heads of the players who were there [and what they can remember], being a Nomad in the women’s game never carried the same cachet as being a Barbarian in the men’s game. Not that the players were any less proud. But Nomads were Nomads.

“It was an opportunity, but it was an opportunity dressed up as hard work,” explains long-time Nomad Vicki Jackson. “You get yourself there, you bring your own snacks, or you pay a fiver to buy the snacks that have been bought by Stockers [Fiona Stockley, the team manager]. 

“I remember driving up to Edinburgh one time to play Scotland just after New Year,” continues Vicki. “That’s an opportunity, but not everyone sees it as that, because it’s dressed up as a bit of an inconvenience, in the freezing cold. Unless you really want to go and hang out with a lot of people that you’ve never met before, and really get the craic with them, play a game of rugby and try and have a night out somewhere random, you won’t see it as that.”

Vicki, who won two England caps and played most of her club rugby for Lichfield and Wasps, and is now at Richmond, always saw Nomads as something far beyond a rugby team. “It was incredible,” she says. “For me it was a feeling of belonging, to be part of something. That’s what it was like at Lichfield, I belonged there, I felt part of it. 

“In my old crappy rugby club when I was younger, I felt like I belonged there. And Nomads was like that. But it was like that from the off. Everyone was just really pleased to be there. And it was a belonging from the very beginning, you know, from the moment the squad met up.”

For Susie Appleby – who won 65 England caps between 1994 and 2005 and is now the head coach of Exeter Chiefs Women – playing for the Nomads was an opportunity to play with the shackles well and truly off. “The Nomads breeds that joue, that really free spirit, loads of energy and excitement to play,” she says. “The dream is to play for your country, isn’t it? And that was the pinnacle, and amazing, and all that kind of stuff. But I always had this ‘will I get to be a Nomad?’ hope. 

“When you’re playing for your country it comes with more pressure. There’s pressure to perform, there’s pressure to get results, there’s pressure to please your coach. The Nomads is more, ‘listen let’s really enjoy being together on the field’ and I think that brings better rugby.”

The Nomads’ Wikipedia page says the team was created in 1993 but long-time team manager Fiona Stockley – known as Stockers to all – reckons it was 1994.

Stockers’ first encounter with the Nomads came when she played for England A against them in the 90s. But her true relationship began when she became the team’s manager in 2003 – continuing right up until the club’s final match in 2017. In that time, she was the driving force behind the Nomads’ emergence as a women’s rugby institution. So much so that when the Barbarians were looking for a team manager to set up a women’s side, Stockers was chosen. She was the outstanding candidate. 

When she took over the management of the Nomads, the handing over of the club’s assets to her tells its own story: it consisted of 23 shirts. No shorts, no socks, no balls, no bank account. The entirety of the club could be stored in a single cupboard in her house. 

Despite the side’s most literal, nomadic existence, it was an official institution that gave life to the Nomads. The Nomads had originally been set up by Carol Isherwood at the RFUW (at the time a separate entity to the RFU) to provide strong opposition for England A in preparation for the A team equivalent of the Five Nations. 

In those early days, the Nomads were interchangeably known as the ‘Premiership All Stars’ and they effectively were – a best of the rest who hadn’t made the England cut mixed with some older players plus high-profile internationals who played in England at the time.

By 2003, Stockers had finished her own playing career and was gaining a reputation as a brilliant organiser of rugby teams, having managed the England U19s and the academy. At the same time, the RFUW found themselves without anyone able to manage the Nomads, so they asked Stockers.

She said yes, and along with Anna Marie Jones at Saracens and Laura Smith at Richmond, gave the Nomads a new lease of life. “We just sort of picked it up as we went along,” Stockers recalls. “We arranged games with England [A], then other matches started happening with a bit more regularity, we played Wales that year as well.”

Players selected were those on the fringes, either because they’d just missed the England cut, or were heading for the exit. “We were always looking for players that hadn’t quite made the squad [England A] but that had great potential,” explains Stockers. “And players that had just finished and may have a bit of an axe to grind – but were still in a good place fitness wise.” 

In Stockers’ early years between 2003-2007, the Nomads played exclusively against England A and Wales, beating England A twice in eight matches, with one draw, and beating Wales on three out of four occasions.

But in 2008, Stockers got a call which would take the Nomads to another level entirely, and to another continent. “So I’m sitting at work and I get a phone call from Susie Appleby, and she says, ‘I’ve just spoken to Jo Hull.’ Jo Hull at this point was the Scotland coach. She continued, ‘they’ve been asked by South Africa if they want to come and play but they’ve now made other plans so Jo has suggested Nomads go instead. And South Africa will pay for everything.’

“I was like, ‘oh my god, this is ridiculous.’ So I had a conversation with South Africa myself and they said, ‘we’ll pay for flights for 30 people, we’ll put you up in accommodation, and what we want you to do is come and play our women’s team as a curtain raiser for two men’s fixtures against Argentina in Johannesburg and New Zealand in Cape Town’.

“They had been given some cash for these two games because it was women’s month in South Africa and because it was Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday.”

It was a dream ticket for Stockers and the Nomads, the only catch was that the matches were in five weeks’ time. 

“When someone offers you a trip to South Africa, it’s an opportunity you don’t want to say no to. I sent this email out to everyone who had ever played a Nomads game, maybe 120 people, and I said, ‘prepare yourself, are you interested, can you commit to this and come to South Africa for a rugby tour?’ I got about 40 replies instantly. It was ridiculous. People were coming out of the woodwork.

“We had so many things to organise, we needed a kit for a start. Luckily a company called Business Continuity said they would sponsor us, which was amazing – but they made the shorts in centimetres and not inches. So when the shorts arrived, they were for an eight-year-old. Even the biggest set of shorts were never going to fit our smallest player!

“The rest of the kit arrived the day before we flew and the t-shirts and the polo shirts came to the airport, that’s how rushed it was.”

One of the players selected who wasn’t in Stockers’ black book was Vicki Jackson. “I got a call from Stockers – who I had never heard of before – while I was in my friend’s car heading to a hen do in Edinburgh,” recalls Vicki. “Stockers was like, ‘oh, [England coach] Gary Street has put your name forward for the South Africa trip with the Nomads’. She explained what the Nomads was, and of course I was absolutely buzzing.”

Susie Appleby also got the call, along with a host of other famous names in the women’s game: Anna Richards, Non Evans, Bronnie Mackintosh, Georgia Stevens, and Leslie Cripps just to name a few. 

Not that Vicki knew who anyone was. “I was so clueless, I didn’t know anyone,” she explains “I think I’d heard of Georgia Stevens and obviously I knew Anna Richards but had no idea who any of the others were at all. I sat on the plane next to Helen Harding from Wasps. I think she said she had 40 ‘A’s caps and no senior appearances and she was like, ‘alright junior, alright junior’ and we just got steaming on the plane and it was great fun. 

“In the first Test match I was non-playing reserve with Jackie Shields, who, like me, had just the one cap at the time, so we used to joke that we were bringing two caps to this 950+ cap squad.

“I do think the bigness of that trip passed over me a bit though,” she admits. “I was just a silly, giggling idiot, carrying bags around for people, running on water and things. But I was always made to feel like I belonged there, Helen Harding was great, Angel [Leslie Cripps], and of course Stockers.”

For Susie Appleby – at the opposite end of her playing career to Vicki – the tour’s unique position in women’s rugby was more obvious: “To get to play in those fabulous stadiums in Cape Town and Johannesburg and to get to play with all those players that you always play against from Australia and New Zealand, it was something quite unique in its time. A lot of my rugby memories do merge into one but that Nomads tour to South Africa was one of the highlights of my career.”

The Nomads would win both Test matches against South Africa, winning 40-34 in Ellis Park and 29-0 at Newlands. It was a hugely successful first overseas tour for the Nomads, crowned by Stockers and tour captain Leslie Cripps being taken to dinner by the sports minister of South Africa in Nelson Mandela Square. “It was quite empowering,” she recalls, “because it was his 90th birthday coming up and it was women’s month and all of that. We didn’t know the sports minister would be there, but he wanted to ask us how they could develop women’s sport in South Africa. There was no prep, no warning, but they thought we were the people that could give them the answers. I have worked in sport, so that was useful but…

“They’re desperate to improve and they really want to do right so they are seeking the opinions of people they think are doing a good job and the UK is one of those places.”

Stockers must have made a good fist of advising the South African government because the Nomads were invited back to South Africa for another two-match Test series in 2012.

The tour party boasted a strong line-up once again with the likes of Scotland captain Susie Brown, Ireland captain Fiona Coghlan, Welsh fly-half Naomi Thomas, as well as young English players such as Sarah Mckenna, Gemma Sharples and Pippa Crews, with Giselle Mather as coach.

Vicki was on the plane too as she was fast becoming – in the words of Stockers – ‘the ultimate Nomad’.

But Vicki’s Nomads experiences contrast radically with her England experiences, as the intervening four years had seen her Red Rose career hit the buffers. “I’d come from nowhere [to be selected for England] and I think the girls knew that I wasn’t any good when I first started playing,” admits Vicki. “I just got that sense from them that they thought I was shit. And I actually thought I was shit. I didn’t feel like I deserved to be there. I used to dread going on camp, absolutely dread it. 

“I just never felt like I was good enough; I guess it was imposter syndrome,” she says. “And I would have been an imposter had you selected me on my ability at the time. I think I was selected on potential, and that’s hard, that is hard. And I just didn’t like being shit. 

“With the Nomads in 2008, I was a nobody, and that was welcomed. Whereas in an England squad, in a real performance environment, being a little bit shit is probably not welcomed. And I didn’t know how to behave in that environment. I was probably a bit daft, not taking things seriously, just trying to have a good time like I’d always had a good time on the rugby pitch. I didn’t know anything tactically about the game so I probably made the wrong decisions and it’s a team sport isn’t it? You’ve got to do something, they’ve got to do something. And I was always doing the wrong thing! But that part of me was – I wouldn’t say ‘embraced’ – but not looked down on, at Nomads. It was welcomed, I guess. It was a case of, ‘you’ve never played very much before … but crack on. Let’s all just go out there together and have fun on the pitch’. And that made it feel nice.”

Going into the 2012 Nomads tour of South Africa, Vicki was a senior
player, and was about to embark on one of the best rugby experiences of her career.  “In 2012, I was more established, more confident in my ability, and I also knew everybody. I had expectations from the previous tour that it was going to be really good fun, with no egos, and nobody was going to be sidelined. 

“And we had so much fun. And a big part of that I think was that we had
a bus. In 2008 we took taxis everywhere but in 2012 we had a bus so we could sing songs, everyone got slated, there were tour games and everything like that. I think mine was an Oasis song because you can get away with sounding northern with Oasis.”

The nights out were bigger too, and Vicki’s tales from them are endless. From the Olympics-themed night which saw Vicki get kicked out of an Irish bar dressed as a synchronised swimmer, to Giselle Mather confronting a Beth Ditto lookalike in McDonalds, and eating Rand instead of chips. “There was one night,” adds Vicki, “where everyone seemed to have a barney, a really pissed barney, more bickering, and then we all sung Can You Feel the Love Tonight on the coach home. Even when we weren’t drinking we had a nice time. One day we went in the sea at Camps Bay, and when we all got out we saw the ‘beware great white sharks’ sign. Wherever we went people would be ready to go, with bells and whistles on, and be pleased to be there. There was such a good vibe.”

On the pitch though, South Africa claimed revenge for 2008 by winning the Test series 2-0. 

After such heady days, however, the Nomads would only ever play three more matches. The next was against Scotland on the back pitches of Murrayfield in early January 2015 – a brutal clash by all accounts where at one point five players were being treated for blood injuries at the same time. Nomads won 43-10 with Vicki unknowingly tearing her ACL in the warm-up only to play the whole match, score a try, and lead the charge on the night out as well. Her ‘ultimate Nomad’ status well and truly assured by this stage.

By the time of the Nomads’ next match in 2016 against the British Army, Stockers and some of her closest Nomads were aware that a new era was dawning, as the Barbarians had approached her about becoming the team manager of their women’s team.

When it was finally made public that the Barbarians would field a women’s team to play against Munster at Thomond Park in 2017, the news was hailed as a sure sign of progress in the women’s game. Yet the news also sealed the fate of the Nomads who had been blazing the trail for women’s invitational rugby for almost a quarter of a century.

If any grieving was done, it was done discreetly, and was outweighed by the excitement that 127 years after the Barbarians were founded, women would wear those famous black and white hoops for the first time.

When the time came for Stockers to start forming her coaching team and squad, she was giddy with glee.

Giselle Mather was the first person she signed up. “She got so excited about it,” said Stockers. “We started to think about what things were going to help build the Barbarians culture and as soon as you unleash Giselle the ideas flow. 

“Giselle was like, ‘I want everyone to have a sheep’. I said, ‘Giselle, we’re going to Ireland in six days and now you want me to find 30 sheep. I was buying sheep left, right and centre off the internet: inflatable sheep, Shaun the Sheep, any sheep I could get my hands on’.

When it came to selecting the players, Stockers took the advice of Barbarians committee members Gordon Brown and Mike Burton. “They said to me that if there are players who may not be a Barbarian in the future, but should be, you should invite them to play in this game.”

Stockers didn’t need a second invitation. “For me that meant selecting people like Vicki, like Fi Coghlan, for all the times that they paid for their own travel, their own accommodation, for putting their hand in their pockets to wash their kit when the big tours weren’t there. So it was a real giveback to those people.”

In all, ten Nomads were selected to be part of the inaugural 23-player Barbarians squad to face Munster, with Vicki starting at outside centre.
On a wet night even for Limerick, the Barbarians ran out 19-0 winners, with their final try right in the sweet spot of the club’s tradition of exciting, ambitious rugby played through the hands, and scored appropriately by former Nomad Georgina Roberts.

The women’s Barbarians have since won three of their following four matches, against the British Army, the USA and Wales, with the only loss coming against England. With Stockers at the helm, they will surely go from strength to strength. But in representing a club that is loved and respected the world over, comes an additional pressure to perform. Throw in the need to now plan out a full week of training, team meetings, socials, and media appearances before every match, and it begs the question whether she misses the simpler days of the Nomads? 

“I do remember fondly how tight it was before games,” Stockers answers. “We would meet at 9am and we’d be playing at 2pm. We’d have a cup of tea and a chat and a bit of a walk-through. Then a couple of sandwiches, and then off we go and play. And the sandwiches, the players would obviously bring them themselves! We probably got to the highest level we could with that level of preparation, and then once it becomes a little bit more professional and the expectation is higher and you are streamed or on social media, and you’re representing a club like the Barbarians, you have to prepare.”

Vicki also recognises that the culture which the Nomads stood for is old money in the modern game. “I do think that it would be very difficult to get that [Nomads] going again,” she says. “You can’t exist on just a lot of people getting together for the craic and paying for their own snacks now. There has to be something attached to it. What people can get, rather than what people will give. 

“I loved the Nomads. Really, really, really loved it and felt like it was a really big part of me as a player. But it was a movement of its time, I think.”  

Story by  Jack Zorab

Pictures by Lissy Tomlinson for Rugby Matters, Gallo Images and Getty Images

This extract was taken from issue 14 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.