Northampton Saints

The reverend had just wanted to try and keep youngsters on the straight and narrow, but using a pitch near a monkey house, bandstand and a bear pit, in a town perfumed by beer, he instead started a rugby club that would go on to conquer Europe.

Many were pleased to see the improvements to the monkey house at Franklin’s Gardens. And, it has to be said, the addition of a bear pit was a nice touch. When combined with the brass band concerts, the high trapeze and ‘monster fire balloons’, it was with good reason that the gardens became the place for locals to visit on days off. Helped also by regular trams, it effectively became the ‘Champs-Élysées of Northampton’.

But it was the football pitch that even pre-dated [John] Franklin himself – who had bought and renamed Melbourne Gardens in 1886 before selling them to the ambitious bear-pit-loving Northampton Brewery Company two years later – that would end up bringing the locals in their tens of thousands, eclipsing even the popularity of the bear pit and monkey house.

Northampton Saints were formed as Northampton St James by a reverend eager to aid the local youths in their self-improvement, and soon became a focal point for the shoe-making, beer-brewing midlands town. 

Even today, just to ensure you don’t miss it, the club has a neighbouring 418-ft tower – used to test lifts – as a beacon to attract any lost rugby souls. 

That tower, despite its comparatively brief history – it was opened in 1982 – has witnessed all manner of changes at the Gardens, not least 1988’s Gang of Seven revolution. 

At a time when the club were at an all-time low on the field, a group of disaffected former players won a vote to kick out the committee and effectively began again with a clean slate. 

For the group to truly bring about change however, they needed finance and one of the ways to get that was the addition of hospitality boxes, pre-sold to sponsors. But while that initial income was important, of more significance was one buyer in particular.

Keith Barwell, a local businessman who’d made his money in the newspaper industry, was one of the first, if not the first, to put his money down. “Initially, he’d done loads with Luton Town Football Club, then he’d done charity work with Northamptonshire cricket, then, in my teenage years, we started coming down to the Gardens,” explains Ella Bevan, Keith’s daughter and a director at Northampton Saints. “When the Gang of Seven were looking for business people to help with this new vision, he wanted to get involved.”

Although not on the rugby side. “He was really honest,” says Ella of her father, still president of the club. “His biggest strength is identifying his own weakness, and his weakness at that time was that he didn’t really know anything about rugby.”

Nonetheless, as was par for the course at the time, Keith helped engineer moves for some of the players that would play a big role in helping the club re-establish themselves, such as legendary All Blacks’ captain Wayne ‘Buck’ Shelford. 

The Shelfords became family friends with the Barwells, and when they returned to New Zealand, Ella went to visit. “I went over to stay with Wayne and Jo [his wife], and all the talk over there was about the Packer deal [the global rugby concept that threatened to launch before the game officially went professional], but when I came back, I basically walked into the house and Mum said, ‘oh you’ll never guess what Dad has done? He’s bought a rugby club’.”

Aware that the amateur era was coming to an end, coach Ian McGeechan, secretary Roger Horwood and Murray Holmes had been tasked with drawing up a list of five business people that would inject cash into the club to allow them to switch to professionalism. “My dad had just sold his newspapers, so he phoned Roger Horwood in the morning and said, ‘right, I hear you’re looking for a million pounds. Well, I’m the guy’. And that was it.

“So, Roger went off to the lunch and said, ‘right, don’t worry about it, just crack open the Champagne, we’ve got the funder. And so it became a private limited company and he just sort of started spending a lot of our inheritance on the rugby club.”

Although his background had been newspapers – he’d been a pioneer in free-sheet newspapers, but with proper editorial – Keith also kept an eye out for other potential openings. “He would class himself as an entrepreneur,” says Ella. “Looking for a good opportunity and turning it into something winning, and I think that’s what he saw in the Saints – a good opportunity.”

The club were able to maximise existing relationships with the likes of Carlsberg – who had been brewing in the town, perfuming the air with their hops since the 1970s – and Church’s shoes, who have an official heritage as old the Saints, but an unofficial one going back to Cromwellian times. “They’re actually owned by Prada now,” says Ella, “showing us her Church’s shoes, and when they had their fitting for the men here, I had to go to their Prada office in London for the women’s.”

Combined with another local-business-done-well, Travis Perkins, and then the sale of 1.2m shares to supporters to develop the Barwell Stand, the club have been able to build one of the Premiership’s finest rugby-first stadiums, with a capacity of 15,200.

But the battles that Keith had weren’t just about winning over already enthused locals or selecting the right coaches – the appointment of John Steele was one he was particularly key in delivering – but it was also with the RFU, forever the sparring partner of Premiership rugby clubs in the professional era. “He did a lot for Premiership Rugby because he and Peter Wheeler at Leicester really drove the conversation with the RFU – Dad used to call them the Nigels and the Ruperts,” explains Ella. “The RFU had all the money and they were keeping it and, in order for club rugby to be as good as it could be, they would need central funds. 

“I think the first year they got £240,000 from central funds and that was after loads of hard work, loads of battling with Peter Wheeler, Dad and the RFU. I think if that hadn’t happened, then Premiership Rugby wouldn’t be anything like it is today.”

The initial glimpses of success came before professionalism. “I think the first moment was the 1991 Pilkington Cup final against Quins,” says Ella. “Coming after the late-80s when we were diminishing, we were not a great side, and then the revolution meant we suddenly found ourselves in the 91 Pilkey Cup final.

“There were about 22 supporters’ coaches and we were the underdogs by a country mile, we weren’t ever going to win that game. But we took it to extra time [13-13 in normal time] and it was just a great game, a great atmosphere. I think that was when we actually really started to believe that we could do something.”

The 25-13 defeat in front of 53,000 at Twickenham set a benchmark. “The first win that I can really, really remember,” says Ella, “was turning Bath over here [11-8], that was in the early 90s [1992/93 season], and they were ‘the team’ at the time, top of the tree, won everything.”

McGeechan had set the ball rolling with the Saints’ style of play, and John Steele built on the foundations, taking them to runner-up in the 1999 season, the year before they’d reach the Tetley Bitter Cup final [losing to Wasps 31-23] and then win the Heineken Cup against Munster [9-8].

That was the same year Ella’s older brother Leon joined the board, a decade before he succeeded his father to become chair. “I started working with Dad in 2009, but it was on the farming side of the business, and my brother was going to be working on the rugby side.

“He took over as chairman in September [2011], and then the following October he was diagnosed with cancer and he passed away [in June 2013]. 

“When he passed away, my dad had then also been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, so while we did have a sort of plan, it all got screwed up and thrown into the bin. And that’s when I started becoming more involved in the boardroom and what went on commercially.

“My brother had aspirations for the club, he would have been a brilliant chairman,” explains Ella. “He would have done ground-breaking things but he was also really heavily involved in the development of the stadium.”

That legacy, in bricks and mortar, isn’t the only one for Leon at Saints. “My brother had been poorly for eighteen months [before he passed], but actually he was not visibly poorly for a lot of that. 

“And the last match he went to was the Premiership final against Leicester when Dylan Hartley got red carded. By then, Leon was really poorly, visibly poorly. 

“But at the game, he went on to the pitch and spoke to Dylan,” continues Ella, “because of the red card, it meant he wasn’t going to the Lions, so there were all sorts of thoughts going through Dylan’s head, but Leon made the effort to go on the pitch and speak to him and the team. 

“Four weeks later, he died. 

“That’s sort of a measure of the man.”

On the back of Leon’s final appearance, the Saints community sent ‘reams and reams’ of letters and cards to the family. “They were all printed off and given to Leon’s children, and they’ve still got those to this day. That was such a massive support to them and obviously lovely things that people wrote about him and the family really...”

Owning a rugby club, even a successful one with a big fanbase, does come with some trimmings that aren’t always the most palatable. “My dad is well known for saying that, ‘it’s like skiing and you find yourself at the bottom of the crevasse and, you think, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’. That’s how he described owning a rugby club.

“We’ve always had lots of support,” she continues, “but we’ve had the odd horrible comment too, as you can imagine.”

Relegation was a comparative blip, especially as it ultimately led to a second European title.

“My dad went from ‘should be given the keys to the city’ – and he did get the freedom of the borough, as it’s not a city – to, ‘he should get up and go, and leave Saints alone’.

“Someone left a note on his windscreen [when we were struggling on the pitch] and he wrote in the programme the next week that if the guy that wrote it would like to meet him in the bar afterwards, he’d buy him a pint. Because that was the way to discuss these things, not by leaving rude offensive notes on the windscreen for his wife to pick up.”

Ella does understand it though, to a degree. “The supporters are not as bothered about, you know, ‘are you making a profit or are you not making a profit?’, but if you’re losing week after week after week, and we’ve been there, then it’s a hard place to be and you know, the supporters find it difficult, and they will vent that frustration in the way they see fit. Sometimes it’s not nice.”

The mixed results of recent times, can be countered with the fact the squad is pretty much where Keith had hoped it would be. “He had a vision, which is sort of pretty much where we are today, where he wanted this mix of sort of 80 per cent homegrown talent, three or four excellent internationals from overseas. And then grafters like Tom Wood: really, really good club men that would take you through to the winning formula. I think that that’s pretty much what any club looks for now.”

Would the family ever not be involved? “It’s never been a thought,” she says, “definitely not at the moment. My dad is still on the board and he’s president of the club.

“I mean, you can never say never,” she admits. “Rugby is changing and I think, off the top of my head, that Dad is probably the last owner left from the original founding [Premiership] clubs. 

“But the money needed to play rugby is definitely changing,” continues Ella. “So, I’m sure that there will be decisions to be made by my children and my brother’s children going forwards. 

“But as it stands, there’ll always be a Barwell/Bevan there. It’s a massive part of our family,” she concludes, “and for dad’s grandchildren, he’s always going to be synonymous with Northampton Saints. Cut us open and we’re black, green and gold.”

Ella talks of other plans being discussed, including an indoor performance centre and a Franklin’s Gardens hotel, but the over-riding ambition remains the same. “To be the best club on and off the pitch in Europe,” she says. “That’s what we have always aspired to be.”

Neil Best stood on top of the benches in the changing room, naked as the day he was born, to welcome the newest member of the Northampton Saints backrow club. “I walked in the changing room,” explains Phil Dowson, the current forwards coach and soon to be director of rugby. “And Besty, who was something of a character, was stark naked, pointing under his arm, saying, ‘you’re going to be here now Dows, you’re under my wing.

“It was a really weird welcome,” admits Phil, “but it was a welcome that I really appreciated, especially because of what happened in the England and Ireland final in the Churchill Cup.”

That game had taken place the summer before, when it was known he was joining the club, and, to Phil’s own admission, England, “took an absolute hiding and Neil Best absolutely ruined me”.

That also came off the back of a league game for his Newcastle Falcons side at Franklin’s Gardens, making the flanker wary of what may be ahead. “They were unbeaten at home and, ironically, Newcastle won, we’d scored all our points in the first five minutes and then just held on. 

“Dylan, Courtney, [Chris] Ashton, all those boys were there and it was quite a fractious game,” recalls Phil. “And by that I mean, there’s a lot of really awful chat and handbags, that sort of stuff.

“Neil Best was the opposite flanker and he said, ‘when you come down here you won’t play’, so they all knew I was sort of coming down.”

Yet, despite the welcome on the pitch, it was what happened off it that made him think again. “What I remember from that game was the crowd was so gracious,” he says. “Walking through the dinner afterwards the supporters were saying ‘well played and you deserved to win’. 

“And there was also the fact the club gave Carl Hayman man of the match. Normally, because of sponsors, clubs always give that to a player from the home side, so I thought that spoke volumes about the principles of the club, these little things have really stuck with me.”

Under Saints coaches Jim Mallinder and Dorian West, “they were on a bit of an upward trajectory,” says Phil. “They’d come up from the Championship, finished eighth, then I joined and it all kicked off. We finished in the top four over the next six years in various different positions.”

And it was done with a squad full of characters to match the likes of Best. “He was clearly nuts and a bit of a legend, but we also had Chris Ashton who was fairly wired, Ben Foden was a character, [Soane] Tonga’uiha too, there were load of big characters knocking around, and they were all quite young as a group and that group kind of matured together over the next five, six years...

“Jim created a really good environment for it,” he continues. “It was pretty loose, but there was also a line that you wouldn’t cross with Jim, he understood what young lads wanted to do, but if you ever stepped over the line, you knew it. 

“Dylan is an incredible leader in fairness,” he adds. “The impression I had before I knew him was that Dylan was a thug, because that’s how he plays or how he did. You know, right on the edge, hard-nosed, in your face. It was skilful as well, but there was an edge to it. 

“What you understand when you meet him is how intelligent he is, how empathetic he is, and how much he can influence people just by the way he talks to them in different ways, like good leaders do.” 

His first European game stands out. “It was a night game against Munster and I ran out with Roger Wilson and Bestie, and the noise the crowd made – Munster had brought a lot of people over – and there were fireworks going off. So much noise, it was absolutely electric, and I remember thinking, ‘this is what I’ve come for’.”

Two years in, Europe took Phil and Northampton to Cardiff for the Heineken Cup final against Leinster which, despite leading 21-6 at half-time, they would end up losing 33-22. “I had nightmares about that game,” says Phil. “Literally, I woke up thinking about it. I’ve never watched it back.

“What you forget is the unbelievable run of form we had: winning away at Cardiff; away at Castres, who were unbelievable at the time; beating Ulster; beating Perpignan.

“We’d had a pretty brutal season,” he adds. “The week before we played against Leicester and I remember speaking to James Grindal, their scrum-half, and he said he walked into their physio room after the match, and it looked like a First World War hospital tent, people with bandages on, crutches, just absolute carnage, and ours was the same. 

“Leinster had had a week off before, and we just literally ran out of steam. Dyls went off at half time, I took a yellow in the second half, and it all just fell apart.” 

During his time with Northampton his own game evolved, helped by the addition of the right hungry, young players. “When Woody came in, that drove my personal standards through the roof. 

“I was away when he first arrived, but my friend Mark Sorenson, the second row, rang to tell me: ‘this lad from Worcester is pretty mustard, his fitness levels are pretty high’.

“When I turned up and got hammered on the weights, hammered on the running, I was like, ‘I need to get fitter to be better’.”

This was a Saints side ‘at its peak’. “The coaches were very good too,” he says. “Dorian technically, for the stuff he did, was brilliant, Paul Grayson, Alex King, Jim was brilliant in terms of setting scenes and stuff.”

When the Premiership title arrived in 2014, courtesy of a 24-20 Premiership final defeat of Saracens, and following the European Challenge Cup, won weeks earlier against Bath, the club put on an open-top bus to parade the silverware around the town. “I was a bit worried that it was going be lame, because as we were leaving the club, there were a few people, but it wasn’t busy – you’re were thinking ‘this isn’t quite Man Utd...’

“But by the time we got to the centre of town, it was rammo – we’re all having a beer and everyone’s there, the whole club, the whole town was out. It was extraordinary.”

A year later, Phil left to join Worcester Warriors. “That was a very tough thing to do,” he says. “One of the things I love about Jim is his honesty and he said, ‘I want you to stay but you won’t play as much and it’s only really one year’. 

“I was doing some work in the city for a bank with a view to post-rugby stuff and he said I could do more stuff in the bank, go part-time...”

Worcester came in with a two-year deal, and Phil left. Besides, laughs Phil, Jim had probably had enough of him. “They used to get annoyed because towards the end, I wasn’t getting picked and I’d go in every week and say, ‘why am I not playing?’ and they’d go, ‘look it’s the same as last week, go away and leave us alone’. But I was always, ‘no, no, I’m gonna ask every week’, just to annoy everybody really.”

He’d hoped, at Worcester, to help move the club along, but found that the ways of Northampton, and even Newcastle, weren’t always transferrable. But even that proved to be a lesson in itself.

Mallinder brought Phil back to Saints to work with the academy, and initially things went well, but it was short-lived. “We went on a shocking run, after winning the first four games, I think we lost twelve out of thirteen games,” he says. “That was a bit of a baptism of fire into coaching from my point of view, one minute you’re helping young lads out, cutting your teeth, the next minute Jim leaves and the interim coach Alan Gaffney puts me in charge of the defence. 

“And in that second half of that season it was pretty ugly, I learned a lot and appreciated the experience, but wouldn’t necessarily want to do it again.

“It’s just amazing how quickly things spiral when they go badly.”

Chris Boyd’s arrival also led to uncertainty, at least at first. “When he came, he didn’t know the coaches, he hadn’t met us,” says Phil. “So, we had a long conversation about rugby and stuff and then he said, ‘I don’t think you can do defence, it might be breakdown, it might be forwards – I don’t quite see where you fit yet. But we’ll come back to you. 

“He came back a few days later and said, ‘right, I’ve had a look around and done some chatting, we’ll put you in as forwards coach. But what I’m going to do is put some structure around you, for your personal development, because you haven’t got a lot of it.’ And so he said he was going to send me to some mates of his in South Africa. And I said ‘yes’. My missus was pregnant at the time, so she was delighted.”

Working with the Sharks and the Bulls, what Phil saw gave him the confidence in his own beliefs. “It reassured me that a lot of my principles, the way I wanted the forwards to play, were very, very entrenched in those two sides.”

As well as Jim – who, he admits, he needs to catch up with soon for a ‘beer or cup of tea’ – Phil also looks to other former mentors for advice, including ex-England coach Stuart Lancaster. “He’s brilliant,” says Phil. “He said to all the players at Leinster, ‘if you could play for any club, who would you play for?’, and 90 per cent of them said Leinster. That’s a powerful cultural model.

“That’s what we want here, local guys playing for their local club, it’s a powerful motivating factor and also a cultural stick in the sand. People who come into the environment can see that and feel that, and I think that’s important to make them feel part of it.

“When you have that [the local base], you can then cherry pick the guys you bring in around them.”

Now, with the pressure about to hone in on Phil, he says he’s both ready for it, and nervous, but feels he has the core ingredients. “I was talking to Donncha O’Callaghan the other day, an absolute legend of a man, and he was reminiscing about the good ol’ days, and he was saying that the Munster team – with O’Gara, Stringer, O’Connoll and all that – never knew how good they were. He was saying they should have won more. And they would have if they’d realised that.

“I kind of feel this group doesn’t quite know how good it can be,” he continues. “Sometimes I think we need to get out of our own way, and go for a little bit more. 

“But again,” he admits, “that comes with maturity and that takes time and development and all that kind of stuff, which professional sport doesn’t always have the patience for.”

Tom Wood may have set standards when he arrived at Northampton, but from his point of view – arriving from his first club Worcester – he was just trying to keep up. “I was blown away to start with,” he admits.  “Where I’d come from, we had some great players, some big-money high-profile individuals but the overall intensity wasn’t there. 

“But at Northampton it was different,” he continues. “Even the front row trained to the highest standards: Alex Waller, Soane Tonga’uiha, Brian Mujati, Dylan Hartley – they all took the game seriously, trained hard, they had the right attitude, and I felt really part of that.”

He also noticed the difference in local interest. “In the first couple of weeks, I went to a post office and someone recognised me straight away,” he recalls. “I hadn’t played a game yet but some old lady comes up to you, pinning their hopes on you as the new signing. That’s actually quite a lot of pressure.”

He also found himself breaking up a tight unit. “They were a pretty close knit, the back row were really close mates,” he says. “I didn’t know this at the time, but I’d been more or less bought in to replace Neil Best – who went to Worcester – as I think in the coaches’ minds they wanted a bit of a younger model, and I’m a similar player to Neil.

“Phil was close to Neil and, it’s not that anyone made it uncomfortable, but I could tell they’d lost a mate. But once I got playing, putting my body on the line, it changed things.

“I had a flying start,” he continues. “We played Leicester on the opening day at Franklin’s Gardens, I got man of the match and then, having played a bit in the England Saxons, I got into the Six Nations squad.

“It was a bit of osmosis,” he says of his form, “I think being around better players, that intense environment rubs off on you, that skill level gets raised, and the intensity, fitness and conditioning is that bit higher. 

“It was also unearthing, or unwrapping, the energy and potential I had. I felt on my own, that I was banging my head on a brick wall in my Worcester days, but at Northampton I got carried along with everyone else whose energy matched you.”

Reaching such heights – European finals and league titles – at the start of his career, meant it couldn’t last. “In 2016, when I was captain, all the excitement and positivity had plateaued,” he admits. “We’d got a little bit stagnant, and were banging heads against each other. 

“There’s no grudge or hard feelings, but just a huge amount of frustration, we weren’t aligned, the frustration was building and my year as captain was probably my least enjoyable of my rugby career – we weren’t living up to potential, that we were underperforming was the over-riding emotion, we were capable of so much more.

“Players were getting frustrated,” he concedes, “and it was getting venomous between coaches and players.”

Exeter had become the benchmark and Saints were losing ground. “I think it was because we did the same, we’d lost that little bit of cutting edge, and we seemed to adopt the attitude that ‘what worked in 2014 will always work, so more of the same’, but you do that and you get more of the same result, that’s not how professional sport works.

“Eighty-ninety per cent of what the coaches did I loved,” he says. “Take Dorian, he’s a brilliant forwards coach, his lineout and scrum work is exceptional, but he also had a lot to say in how the rest of the game was run, and refused to evolve and adapt. But 90 per cent of what he did was good. 

“We were always around the top four,” he adds, “but I never thought we’d win it again with an old school coach and without that extra ten per cent.”

Not winning also put a dent in his own England hopes. “When you’re playing in a winning team, things are going well, your face gets in the England selection bracket. 

“Look at Ted Hill, he’s one of the best players in the league, but because he’s at Worcester he never gets spoken of for England. If he was pulling up trees for Leicester, he’d be the first name on the team sheet.

“The fact we were not winning meant my name slipped out of the fold. I maintain I was always playing well: my tackle counts, the rucks hit, the low error count. I was pretty consistent. 

“But you lose favour when you lose the fashionable bits, getting on the end of offloads, carrying on the front foot, you lose all the showbiz stuff when you’re losing by 50 points. Instead, you’re out of sight, doing the grafting.”

There came a transition with Alan Gaffney but, says, Tom, “we were still in a dark place, the spirit wasn’t great around the camp. And then Chris Boyd came in, with Phil Dowson, Sam Vesty and it brought a freshness to the place. 

“There was youth, new ideas, they picked a load of young players, and these guys started to move past the old guard with some of the big names moving on.

“We also played an exciting brand of rugby, we had that attacking mindset of Boyd from Super Rugby, with Sam having an attacking framework that was ambitious.”

Phil had gone from former backrow colleague to coach. “It’s still the same relationship,” he says. “I respect him as a coach, I subordinate myself and listen. 

“He’s got the driving intensity of training and messaging, and I’d never undermine or belittle him, even though we’re close enough mates, so I probably could get away with it, but that’s not what I’m about.”

As Phil had alluded to, Tom’s training regime was once everything, and even he admits, it could have perhaps been too much. “I think I was so intense in my early days, I forgot to enjoy it.

“I sometimes look back at my old self and think, ‘that was a bit much or a bit intense’, you would laugh at yourself for doing that now, it’s a bit overboard. 

“But then it was what got me to where I am today.”

That said, despite his age, 35, Tom is still looking at his numbers in the gym. “I’m always conscious there’s another young guy coming on the scene looking for your spot,” he says, “and I’m still always hitting top numbers in the gym, on the pitch, tackle count. 

“I’m a competitor,” he explains, “it’s what drives me. Luckily, I’ve managed to stay ahead, even with them nipping at the heels.”

He lists the young players that have broken through at Saints in the past two or three years, “that’s basically a full team of youngsters, academy graduates coming on the scene simultaneously and getting a shot,” he says, “and now most of them are on England’s radar in some way. They’ve got caps too, and with those credentials, you can’t hide them under the pretence of youth anymore.”

The result of this, is that it’s time for Northampton to take the next steps. “I think we’re in a good place,” he concludes.

As for his own place, he knows ‘having the number 35’ next to his name wouldn’t have helped his cause with a completely new DoR, but in Phil there’s familiarity. “I don’t want any handouts, I’ve got to be performing,” he says, “but Phil knows what I’ve done, that I can play 80 minute every week, despite being 35.

“And that the day that’s not true, the day I can’t hold down a place, I don’t want to be there, I’m not interested in hanging around in the second team, or going down the leagues, and being some bit-part player. Hopefully when that happens, I will know when to step down, without needing to be told.”

After a ‘little bit of a wobble over Christmas’, when he found himself on the bench, Tom is back in the fold. “I really don’t enjoy being on bench, I’m an 80-minute player, a workhorse, not an impact player. I don’t like to warm up seven times for a game, just once.

“Two weeks on the bench and you feel injured, like you don’t belong anymore and need to retire, but then I started two games on plastic pitches too, and I felt invincible, like I could play for another five years.”

Will he go for another five years? “I really don’t know,” he says. “I very nearly retired last year, I didn’t want to go anywhere else, and I had no contract, so I’d resigned myself to retirement.

“But then a bit later in the season, a contract became available, an offer was made, and despite the fact I’d made peace with retiring, with my body in one piece and playing well, I figured I could do another year, and I’ll probably have a similar conversation in the next few months.

“When I do retire though, I won’t be sat around the house wondering what to do, I’ll be up a tree the next day.”

Eh? “I’m also a tree surgeon,” he explains, “and I’m making furniture out of wood too, so I’ve got a lot to do in my spare time.”

A lot of people at Northampton Saints have more than one string to their bow. Hooker Sam Matavesi, for instance, has a whole alternative career in the Royal Navy. “I’m quite lucky I’ve got an elite sports draft,” says the 30-year-old, who signed from Cornish Pirates. “It was only given to Olympians, but it means I’m still in the Navy, I just don’t get paid.”

Sam’s journey to Saints was far from straight-forward. One of three professional rugby-playing Cornish-Fijian brothers – older brother Josh is currently in Japan “sitting down props and all sorts” while younger brother Joel is making his way at Newcastle – he made his entrance to the Premiership later than expected, having first signed for Exeter Chiefs as a teenager, only to be released without making it to the senior academy.  “I was at the age where I was going out too much with my friends,” he admits. “At the time I was also going to the Chiefs with the academy and I remember thinking it was pretty set, I was going to play rugby for the Chiefs. I expected it to happen, but it didn’t happen.”

Having been in the same era and college [Truro] as Cornish internationals Jack Nowell and Luke Cowan-Dickie, when he was released by Chiefs, Sam was instead picked up by Plymouth Albion, coached by ex-England and Bath hooker Graham Dawe. “It was incredible, all the stories you hear about Dawesy are true, the man is a legend,” he recalls. “I remember one Christmas Eve, and I’m probably on about £4,000 and I said to him, ‘Dawesy, it’s Christmas time, I need some extra money. What can I do?’. And he said, ‘alright, me and you Christmas Eve...’

“So, the middle of the Brickfields [Albion’s home ground] pitch was horrible, it was all damp, and so me and him were at the bottom of the pitch, behind the goalposts, digging up the grass and replacing the bit in middle.

“We’d get sponsors’ boards, about twenty of them, and put them over the replaced grass around the halfway line, and he had in this old John Deere just going up and down for hours just trying to lay this turf...”

A change in coaching team at Plymouth, led to his departure, but when his partner Lilly fell pregnant, he felt the need for something more stable, and, playing first for Camborne and then Redruth, he joined the Navy. “I did my ten week training at [HMS] Raleigh and it’s full-on,” he says. “They have you constantly doing something from six in the morning until eleven at night, whether it’s training, ironing your boxers or cleaning your shoes.

“When I passed out [qualified], it was the 100th anniversary of the rugby club, so I basically met the First Sea Lord in the first week because he was chairman of the rugby team, and then played rugby against the Army in front of 80,000 people at Twickenham, meeting Prince Harry.

“Until I joined the Navy, I don’t think I’d worked that hard really,” he admits. “Even from the age of seventeen to about 23, with my rugby, I knew I could catch and pass, and I wasn’t that bad at actually playing rugby, but I never really knew what hard work was.”

For those unfamiliar with the Matavesi story, Sam’s dad Sireli had toured the county of Cornwall in the 80s, which resulted in him being offered a job in the mines, marrying a Cornish girl and settling down. “I saw him play a vets game once and he was unreal,” says Sam. “I think people forget when he came over as well, his English probably wasn’t great and, you know, all of it was a far cry from farming in Fiji to going down the mines in Cornwall.”

Sam does, however, take after his dad who was also, coincidentally, part of the same Cornish squad as Graham Dawe, when they lost the 1989 County Championship to Durham.

“He went from being quite a quick, elusive number no.8 to playing front row, prop. Although I’ve not got to prop yet, I have gone from seven to two.”

Joining the Navy also led to a step up the rugby ranks, as he was signed by Cornish Pirates who were having a “bit of a crisis at hooker”. 

“It didn’t start well,” he admits. “I played against Jersey and I missed about fifteen lineouts, we lost, and I thought he [Alan Paver, who signed him] was going to sack me. But instead, he said, ‘no, we keep going, keep grinding’.”

The grinding worked, and he was called up by Fiji, for the first time in five years. “I had played for Fiji in 2013, and I wasn’t good enough at the time but it wasn’t like Fiji is now,” says Sam. “I wouldn’t class it as an international sort of programme. It was pretty dreadful, in terms of how it was run, the management, the resources, everything. 

“I ended up going to the 2013 Pacific Nations Cup, I played one game, and then didn’t play again for another five years.

“When I came back though, we lost to Scotland, beat Uruguay and then beat France at the Stade de France, it was unbelievable and I didn’t have a bad game.”

As luck would have it, his opposing hooker against France, Julien Marchand, would get injured, as would, in the same autumn period, the Italian hooker Leonardo Ghiraldini. Both played for Toulouse, leaving a space in the squad to be filled by a certain Cornish-Fijian. “They both did their ACLs and so they signed me as a medical joker,” explains Sam. “They must have seen me play against France, and so I played against the RAF for the Navy on a Friday night, then on the Saturday afternoon I started a three-month contract with Toulouse.

“Playing for a giant like Toulouse was unlike anything, it was so different,” says Sam. “If you wanted an extra bit of kit at Pirates you had to chip in and pay for it, but at Toulouse, from the first day, it was all Nike and Eden Park.

“I ended up winning the Top 14. We beat Clermont in the final and I flew back two days after for a week with the missus and kids in Cornwall, then me and my older brother Josh flew to Fiji for the World Cup prep. 

“It’s incredible,” he says of getting called up with Josh. “Me and him are a year apart in age and, growing up, there was always a lot of fighting and bickering, so I was a bit worried that I was going to fall out constantly. 

“I haven’t lived with him for years since we both flew the nest, but it was awesome, the highlight of my career so far.”

After the World Cup, he returned to the Pirates, only to discover there was interest from Saints. Aged 27, he was finally getting back on the journey to the Premiership that had ended at Exeter a decade before. 

At Pirates, he had a set-up willing to give him time to get things right. “Alan was like, ‘if you need to do something, you need to do it three times, we will do it four times, whatever you need’. 

“But then when you get to Northampton, it’s halfway through a season, they’re not waiting for you. 

“I played the first few games and it just didn’t click and then, straight away, you find yourself fourth choice again. 

“So I spent four months, literally, just training, and then it just clicked. I thought that I could always play rugby, I just needed that shot, and someone to have a bit of confidence in me.”

He found it at Saints, and also a new appreciation for work. “Once you’ve worked a normal life,” says Sam, who also did ground-working during his Redruth days, “when you’ve worked all day, woke up when it’s dark, got home when it’s dark and then gone to training, I think it makes you appreciate it. 

“I try and take that in most days to the Saints. I think if you ask most people, I’ve been quite a bubbly character and you know, someone that’s usually on a high rather than a low.

“I always look back and think about how I watched Josh play in three or four games at the 2015 World Cup and how I was playing for Camborne in South West One at the time,” begins Sam, “and then, four years on, me and him are at the next World Cup together.

“I’d love to play the next World Cup,” he continues. “I think long term, to play in two World Cups would obviously be a dream. I’ve got eighteen caps now, and I’d love to beat my brother’s total.”

Dan Biggar’s story is far more straight-forward. Heading into his fifth year with Saints, with eighteen months of his contract left to run, his time at the club, he says, “has flown by, and that’s a good sign. Things tend to go quicker when you’re enjoying things.

“I had ten brilliant years with Ospreys in fairness, my home club and my home region,” he continues. “That’s what you always dreamed to do at the start of your career.”

Moving to Saints though, was a new challenge, one that received criticism in certain quarters of the Welsh press. “The offer was good from Northampton, first and foremost,” he acknowledges. “So that, naturally, is going to prick your ears up a little bit and make you listen a little bit more. 

“But I think I was ready for a change anyway, and Northampton needed a ten. My wife and I were expecting our little boy, so it still meant that we weren’t having to jump on a plane from France or Japan to see family.”

He signed for Jim, but has spent his time playing for Chris. “He just gets people, that’s half the battle in this job,” says Dan. “There’s probably very, very little between top coaches on a technical point of view, you know. The game’s fairly simple and if you’ve got good players, generally, you’re probably going to come out a better coach, and vice versa.

“But Chris just understands people,” he explains. “And I think while it’s impossible to keep everyone happy in a squad of 45-50 players, you can only select 15-23 guys each week, the biggest compliment I can give to Chris is that nobody has ever got the daggers out for him. 

“Put a shift in for him, and he’ll give you plenty back. If I’m not happy with something, if I need a week off or to strengthen something, I feel like I’m in a position where I can just say that to him. 

“In other environments and cultures I’ve been in, that’s not always been the case.”

And he’s also enjoyed the intensity of the Premiership. “I always get asked about this [the difference between United Rugby Championship and Premiership], and the quality never seems to be much different – the likes of Leinster, Ulster and Munster are a pretty special teams – but it’s the week-in, week-out of the Premiership. Every weekend matters. 

“Every week is a big training week, every weekend is a big game, literally whoever you’re playing, there’s no easy games.

“It’s an occasion every weekend, too,” he says. “This is a proper rugby ground and it’s got 13,000 season ticket holders, another reason I joined.

“When we played in the Liberty Stadium with the Ospreys, it was a big football stadium for 20-odd thousand and, even if you’ve got 7,000 or 8,000 in there, it just felt quite sparse, quite empty, not the best atmosphere.

“Go into Franklin’s Gardens on a weekend, it’s just absolutely rockin’. There’s people in the terraces an hour or so before kick-off.

“Even when things are tough,” he adds, “when you lose a couple, when you don’t play well...when your alarm goes off in the morning, it’s not a place where you think, ‘I’m dreading going in’ or just counting down the hours until I can get in the car at the end of the day and go home, that’s the biggest compliment. 

“Every club has got challenges though,” continues Dan. “We’re not saying that Northampton is absolutely perfect, because there’s things that we could work on.”

Has he improved at Saints? “One hundred per cent,” he says. “That’s not a dig on Ospreys at all, because I pretty much owe them everything, but I feel like a considerably better player since I’ve joined Northampton.

“And if I was 19 to 20-years-old coming through here now, and I had Sam Vesty as my coach, I think I’d be a heck of a lot better than I am now.

“It’s his enthusiasm, his appetite for work, his knowledge, his understanding and just wanting players to get better, for teams to get better,” says Dan of Vesty. “And I think that’s quite infectious with the squad we’ve got at the minute: a young squad who just want to enhance their reputations, to get better, to learn, and you’ve got to drive that energy. 

“It keeps me feeing quite young,” he admits. “I’m 32, 33 this year, but I certainly don’t feel it when I go in to train, it’s definitely keeping me quite fresh.”

Dan is part of a mini team at Saints called the Negatrons who compete against other groups of players – the Rippers, Run Amok and Manor – as part of an in-house competition including anything from juggling to darts to penalty shootouts, with assorted prizes, such as tokens that give you passes to miss fitness sessions. “I’m in the same team as Courtney Lawes, George Furbank and some of the younger guys,” says Dan. “Courts came up with the name, because we’re like the sappers of the team, basically, always nagging and complaining about everything. 

“But we actually won the first year.”

It’s not the only win for Dan in recent times, as he was also given the ultimate accolade for his country, the captaincy. “I’m realistic enough to know that there probably would have been a few people ahead of me had everyone been fit,” he says. “And you know, I’m totally fine with that. 

“But it’s a really proud moment, for my family really perhaps more than me, because from my point of view, I’ll just be getting on with my job and I’d be a leader and vocal with the team anyway, so not much changes at my end.”

His attitude to captaincy is similar to when he is asked about his natural ability as a fly-half, he often highlights that he’s not the most naturally talented. “I’m not trying to be self-deprecating,” he says. “I’m trying to be as honest as I can. I hate people who do interviews and just give stock answers and whatever. If I’m going to do an interview, I’d rather be straight up and honest with you, otherwise, I just refuse to do it sort of thing. 

“I fully believe that I’m not [the most naturally gifted] but I actually quite like that,” he continues. “If you asked me how I would want to be described, I’d say to be known as hard-working, mentally tough, plenty of fight and a never-give-in attitude. 

“You could probably describe 20-30 fly-halves who are more talented than me, but perhaps haven’t got as much of that.”

Currently pivotal to a young Saints squad, Dan knows the time is approaching to start thinking ahead. “I think over the summer we’ll probably sit down and have some conversations and think what we want to do as family,” he says, “it’s not like I’m a young guy who’s got no commitments anymore, now it’s the other way around, your family decide for you.

“I’ve got another year left, and I absolutely love it in Northampton and owe them a huge, huge amount, because they’ve invested a lot in me on the field and I feel like I’ve grown as a person and as a player here. 

“I honestly don’t know what I’m what I’m going do,” he adds. “But I’m also really relaxed about it.

“I want to just see where we’re at in a year’s time and go from there.”

Which, hopefully, is in contention. “We need to stop talking about lots of potential in the squad and growth and we need to start delivering.”

Mark Darbon is ultimately the man charged with delivering. The CEO joined the club in 2017, with a background with Diageo and the London Olympics. Although a rugby fan, not coming from the sport professionally, ensured he came with a remarkably clean slate and even fresh ideas. “I think even before I came here, I was a little bit nervous about rugby,” admits Mark. “My fear was that rugby was a bit too traditional. Will you ever be able to get anything done? Will you be able to drive change?”

Change has happened in his time. Not only a new coaching set-up – among the jobs in his first year was replacing the much-respected Jim Mallinder – but he’s also started a new partnership with Bedford. It’s one that’s not only seen a plethora of young talent gain Championship experience, but also coaches. “A couple of our really talented emerging coaches, Jake Sharp and James Craig, are coaching consistently with Bedford,” he says. “That’s given them great exposure and experience and helps us build that pipeline on the coaching front alongside the playing piece.”

Profitability is also on the agenda. “We were getting pretty close [to profit] the year covid struck,” he says. “But for context, this club had a long run – I think it was sixteen years or so – of being profitable. We were the only club to do so and it wasn’t until 2015-16 that changed.”

Why did the run come to an end? “I think Saints began to suffer from the same challenge that had been plaguing almost every other club in the league,” he says, “the cost of investment in the playing side. 

“We’ve had to try and wrestle our way back [into profitability] and covid took the wind out of our sails a bit – we think it’s put us back about three years – but we feel good because our strategy had been working.”

How they get back on track is down to a number of things. “We’ve got 15,200 seats in this stadium and we’re blessed with the scale of our supporter base, but we need to sell this place out more regularly. We sell it out a couple of times a season and our average crowd is somewhere between 13,500 and 14,000. We need to be consistently sold out as a start. 

“And then we need to be really inventive and innovative with how we use this fantastic stadium away from just the fifteen or sixteen rugby days we have.

“So we started hosting major concerts here, Lionel Richie was the first, 16,000 people here, in 2018.”

For all the uncertainty of recent times, Mark believes, on and off the field, Saints are in a good place. “We’ve developed the youngest squad in the league and the highest proportion of homegrown players,” he says, “and while I hate saying it – because I understand why our supporters dislike it – we’re on a journey. I know we have to deliver in the here and now as well, but I think we have set good groundwork, and our job now is to kick on.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Michael Leckie

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