Simon Middleton

Six hundred years of liquorice history aren’t likely to be forgotten in a hurry. And rightly so. But in Pontefract they could soon have another history-maker in their midst, a World Cup-winning head coach.

There hasn’t been a harvest in Pontefract for fifty years, but the Yorkshire town still remains the spiritual home of liquorice. Its history goes back to the 1400s, when  the root was first cultivated, possibly by Spanish monks, and it was here they first had the genius idea of mixing it with sugar to create confectionary. Needless to say, today the town is peppered with reminders of the liquorice laces that are woven through its past and even present, with sweet makers Haribo and Tangerine having factories here.

No doubt during the liquorice boom, and even today, many members of Pontefract RUFC would have earnt their crust, in the industry. 

Simon Middleton wasn’t one of them. But, when we meet him at the club where he once coached, there’s at least a nod to his ‘sweet success’ with England, that helps give this narrative a handy link. 

It really has been pretty much ‘sweet’ all the way too, since he took over as head coach in 2015. Five Six Nations titles, four Grand Slams, and one Rugby World Cup final is a pretty decent haul, and it’s a collection that’s sure to get bigger.

But, wherever success happens, at Twickenham, in Ireland, France, America, or New Zealand, he always returns to the town  of Pontefract. “It’s not a small place,” says Simon, hailing originally from the 13,000-strong Knottingley, two miles away. “It’s quite a big place, lots of different suburbs to it and I reckon the population is about 30,000.

“I’ve stayed here because of family. When I got the job with England in 2014 my daughter [Cara now twenty] was thirteen and my son [Joel now sixteen] was nine and both very happy in school and had a circle of friends around here. Same as my wife, Janet; all our family are around here.”

Family is at the heart of Simon’s world and it was family that took him into a life of rugby, despite having been, by his own admission, not that good at either rugby union or league at school.

Instead, his rugby weekends involved going to watch his brother Kevin play union every week for Knottingley. The game changed, one weekend in 1983, when a seventeen-year-old Simon was on the sidelines and encouraged to give union one more go, with the colts side. “I went and played a game away at Bridlington,” he recalls. “And it was just something about it, I absolutely loved it. It was totally different from playing at school.

“I was treated like an adult, lads were being lads, we were seventeen,” continues Simon, “and I was like ‘this is the life for me’. That was it, my whole approach to rugby changed at that point and my ability. 

“Physically I wasn’t a great specimen,” he admits, “I didn’t have any physical attributes. I was a very skinny kid at school. I couldn’t really run fast but then I developed this speed. I don’t know where it came from but it became a real attribute of my playing because it was a bit of an x-factor element  of my game. 

“I really bought into the rugby bit and really started working hard on all my game.”

His passion for grassroots rugby had begun. “A love that grew from the game, from playing at Knottingley and the people there, [was] everything,” he explains. “It’s so much of what grassroots rugby union is about. 

“It grabs hold of you and engages you into friendships and bonds within the club. My best days were at Knottingley, certainly, in terms of love of the game.”

Simon spent six to seven years at his hometown club while working at a glass manufacturer as a project manager. On the rugby front, he made it to county level and it was playing for the white rose at the Wheldon Road Stadium (home of the Castleford Tigers), that he was spotted by Tigers’ coach Darryl van de Velde, who was there to check out the livewire scrum-half Dave Scully.

He didn’t sign Scully, who would go on to play at the Rugby World Cup for England in sevens. Instead, he signed the eleven-stone, pacey winger from Knottingley. “I just got a phone call from the Castleford coach saying ‘do you want to come and have some trials?’,” he says. “I’d never played rugby league before, well not since school, and it was quite terrifying the prospect of it at any level let alone at that level.

“But I went down and I just fell into it really,” explains Simon, who was 24 at the time. “One minute I’m watching these guys on the television on Grandstand and a week later I was sat in a changing room with them.  I was thinking ‘what’s going on here?’ It was that surreal, unbelievable. Everything after that, everything is what you make of it.”

Simon played on the wing 170 times for Castleford, scoring 82 tries, and was part of the team that won the Regal Trophy in 1994, the league cup of rugby league. “That was incredible,” says Simon. “At the time we were playing in an era where Wigan were just phenomenal. They had internationals from 1-17 and we made the Regal Trophy final. I remember walking out in the final thinking ‘you have to really enjoy this, don’t worry about the outcome’.

“I think it’s because everyone thought there was going to be one outcome anyway! But we were in a really good place as a team. I played against Jason Robinson, he was on the other wing.

“It was just one of those days when everything we did came off. We got on top of them and we stayed on top of them and I think we beat them 33-2. 

“Those days were very few and far between because Wigan were just winning everything,” he says. “We had hammered the best club side in the world at that point. 

“The euphoria was incredible,” he continues. “The lap of honour at the end of the game was amazing because you just knew everybody. Castleford was such a local team and it’s like the support is so hardcore, like all rugby league. Wigan had a 20-30,000 crowd every week, Castleford was 6-8,000.” 

Aged 32, he was released, but instead of retirement, Simon switched back to union and signed for Leeds Tykes, then under Phil Davies. “Everybody in Yorkshire hates Leeds but everyone wants to play for Leeds, they all kid themselves. I fell into that bracket,” he laughs. “I got a chance to play for Leeds and I was like ‘I’m having some of that’. I had a great eighteen months playing and then a pretty poor six months playing when I realised I’d played a season too long.” 

He retired in 2000, and Davies offered him a role on the coaching team as skills coach, part-time, a role that would eventually become defence coach and then assistant. He stayed with the club until 2011. “In that first year we got promoted to the Premiership and then it was a tough season for us, we finished bottom,” he says. “But Rotherham who won the Championship didn’t fulfil the criteria to be promoted so we got a stay of execution. 

“We stayed up and Phil was like ‘what do we need?’ and I said ‘we need a defence coach and I think you should get Mike Ford in’,” explains Simon, who was skills coach at the time. “Mike is a really good friend of mine, I played with him at Castleford and he had just started getting involved, he’d done a few sessions for us. Great player turned into a great coach.

“Phil came back and said, ‘I thought about it, how do you fancy doing it?’ I was like, ‘wow, defence coach in the Premiership I’m not sure I qualify for that’, but he was like, ‘yeah we’ll be alright, between us we will find a way’.”

They didn’t just find a way, they took a path to fifth in the Premiership and Heineken Cup rugby for the first time in the club’s history. “Incredible,” he says. “Little old Leeds, who were National Three when I first went there, were in the Heineken Cup!

“We were playing Toulouse, Perpignan and Cardiff. We had a few seasons in the Heineken Cup and it was just incredible to suddenly be on one of the biggest club stages, getting to travel and see some of these grounds [I had seen] on the TV. It was a great experience.”

Although Davies departed after relegation in 2006, the incoming Stuart Lancaster wanted Simon to continue, but on a full-time basis, leaving behind his long-standing job in glass manufacturing. “That was probably the biggest decision I ever made in my life,” he says. “At the time the kids were something like seven and three or six and two. I knew taking the job would more than halve my salary for the whole house as Jan [his wife] was a full-time parent. 

“As with everything, we sat down and talked about it and Jan was like, ‘if you don’t do it, you’ll never forgive yourself’. So I bit the bullet and gave my job up and went full-time at Leeds.”

The club gained promotion back into the Premiership in 2007 but were again relegated in 2008 which saw the departure of Lancaster. Neil Back then came in, holding the top job until 2011.

A pivotal moment in Simon’s career. Having taken every step on the coaching ladder, the time felt right for the head coach role. “Yeah, that was tough,” says Simon, taking a breath to gather his thoughts. “What happened was, when Neil Back left Leeds, I went for the head coach’s job. It looked to all intents and purposes like it was going to work out for me. 

“I went on holiday with the family just expecting a call to say, ‘congratulations’ and I got a call saying, ‘mate, we’re going with someone else’. 

“For the first time in my life, I had no job and that was a pretty stark moment.”

For four months, he was out of full-time work, but kept his hand in with Pontefract RUFC. Although a lower level of rugby, the experience of being in charge, the first time he had not been a specialist coach, taught him about what it meant to be a head coach. He understood ‘the accountability and pressure’ that comes with the role which primed him for his next job – director of rugby at Bishop Burton College.

His boss back then, principal Jeanette Dawson, is someone he still thinks of fondly. “She was probably the best person I have ever worked with in terms of a boss,” he says. “Nicky Ponsford [the Rugby Football Union’s head of women’s performance] is a great boss, I love working with Nicky. But Jeanette, I never knew anyone who worked as hard as she did. She had two PAs, that’s how busy she was!

“She would go, ‘justify what you’re telling me and I’ll give you the resources for it’. We just built this academy, changed the whole place and it was one of the things I’m most proud of in my career. Working there and building that academy there, but I had fantastic backing. 

“So I went from this pit of despair of not getting the Leeds job to a few months later being in a totally different environment,” he continues. “DoR at a college, never having worked in education before – what an eye-opener that is. That taught me a few things, great things about young people that translates so much now into managing the side. 

“I’m going to keep getting older but the players stay about the same age as the new ones come in, so you have to move to them,” he explains. “That’s one of the things I learnt at Bishop Burton. People talk about you should respect your elders; I think it’s definitely the other way round as well.”

By now, Simon had thought his coaching days in the professional game were over. The only elite level work he’d been involved with around that time was with his friend Gary Street [England women’s head coach from 2007 to 2014] to help run some defence sessions for England ahead of the 2010 Rugby World Cup. It would develop into a more serious role four years later, as he took on the job of head coach of the Red Roses sevens team, combined with a role on Street’s team for the 2014 Rugby World Cup.

It was a golden ticket combination with his friend as England took the title, but while Street moved on, Simon stayed to finally take on the top job, as head coach. First, he led Great Britain Sevens to fourth in Rio, and then took England to the 2017 World Cup where they made it to the final, losing to arch nemesis New Zealand 41-32. “I was like ‘we have got to win this trophy next time round, we have got to win this trophy’,” he says. “Our focus is on what did we not get right. What areas did we struggle in that we have to be able to improve on next time? Squad depth was one.

“The impact of some of the injuries we had right at the end of World Cup preparation was huge, it had massive connotations in terms of building a squad. So that was a huge thing for us this time around.”

Women’s rugby has been hugely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic but the biggest change to the World Rugby calendar was the postponement of the World Cup.

Due to start in September this year, Simon said the announcement that it would be postponed until 2022 did surprise him but he saw it as a positive. Given the fact only a few teams have been able to do any preparation over the last year, he believes the competition wouldn’t have been credible had it gone ahead this year. “To be fair it was a bit of a bolt from the blue,” he admits. “But apart from the immediate disappointment, the reality very quickly took over for me. I think it’s a blessing, that one of these competitions had to go for us to stand the best chance of winning the World Cup.

“So it’s a bit of relief for the credibility of the competition,” he adds, “because no way could we have held a credible World Cup with only two teams, and I include us in that, maybe three with France, being able to prepare. To the extent you’re allowed to prepare when you go into the world biggest tournament.”

While Simon won’t be able to compete on the world stage, he has continued his trophy success with the Red Roses this year. He won his fourth Six Nations title in charge after England defeated France in the 2021 final.

England have dominated European rugby during his tenure, but Simon, like everyone connected with the Red Roses, wants the World Cup. After that final is played, Simon’s contract is up. 

And what then? Finish on a high if you win, roll the dice again, if you lose? “Honestly I don’t think I’ll ever change my philosophy of ‘I’ll just roll with life and I’ll see what pans out’,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’m in a position now where I don’t have to worry about supporting my family which puts you in a stronger position to pick and choose what you want to do a bit more.

“But if there’s a World Cup in 2025 and it’s hosted in England that’s definitely something I would be interested in. But at the same time, I would quite like to test myself again in the men’s game. See what I’m like. How I stack up. 

“I may look at a different sport altogether,” he adds. “Maybe look at a different international team, take the family abroad for a few years. I am really open minded about it.

“Ultimately,” he concludes. “I love doing the [England] job and at this moment in time I have no desire to think about not doing it. But that’s probably because I’m thinking about the World Cup.”  

Story by Sarah Rendell

Pictures by John Ashton

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