Will Carling

England were a shambles. A quarter-final World Cup defeat to Wales, fifth place in the Five Nations and without a title for almost a decade. The new coach Geoff Cooke was part of the answer, the other came in the form of a 22-year-old son of a Lieutenant Colonel called Will Carling.

The Army was where Will Carling was supposed to spend his working life, a captain maybe, but not of the rugby kind. As the son of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Carling, an officer in the Royal Regiment of Wales, he’d attended Sedbergh and then a course at Sandhurst before going on to a psychology degree in Durham, after which he was supposed to return for a life in the military. “But while I was at Durham, I got capped,” explains Will, meeting us on the edge of London’s Covent Garden. “Which basically was the end of any army career. 

“The guy who was commandant at Sandhurst said, ‘look, when you’re here, you can’t go and play rugby for England or anyone else’. But playing rugby for England had been my dream, so...”

Ironically, the role he would take on with England was what had inspired him to follow a military life. “The whole leadership thing had always fascinated me,” explains Will, who would captain England on 59 occasions during his 72 caps. “I wasn’t made captain at school because you know, they were quite a bright school, but for me the army was just that challenge of, ‘do you think you can actually go and lead someone?’.”

Fresh out of Durham, 22-year-old Will was named captain by incoming England coach Geoff Cooke, and so became the youngest England captain since 1951. When announced to the squad, the news was met with silence. “I’m sure the likes of [Jeff] Probyn and Paul Rendall probably thought, you know, ‘[who’s] this posh young back standing up saying, we need to get fitter, we need to change?’. And then you had [Brian] Mooro, who was hugely bright and eloquent, and every time you’d stand up and suggest something, you had to know everything, because he questioned everything: ‘Why would you do that?’, ‘Why are we doing this?’. Which was unbelievably annoying, but actually really good.

“Then people like Deano [Dean Richards] just used to sit at the back and look at you. You had no idea what he was thinking. 

“Loads of them were like that and, not being funny, when I look back at it, I’d watched all of them on TV, they were my heroes, so, I was petrified.  

“At the same time though,” he adds. “I thought they were great players, and I didn’t understand, when I looked at what [quality] we had, why we weren’t winning more. And I hate losing, I still can’t lose to my kids, they always laugh at me, so for me wearing an England shirt and losing ... I fucking hated that.”

Worst defeat? “Scotland, 1990,” he says, without hesitation, referencing the 13-7 Grand Slam defeat in Murrayfield.

The job he’d taken on was far greater than he expected, even beyond dealing with the dressing room. “I’d been working for Mobil Oil for about eighteen months,” recalls the 56-year-old Will. “I was selling oil to the some of the big dealerships – I sold a lot of oil, just didn’t have any margin – but when they made me captain, there was so much to do [for England], and they didn’t have the staff they have now, so I gave up my job.

“I remember going home and telling my parents, ‘look, I’ve resigned my job’, and my mum was like, ‘what are you going to do for money?’. ‘I don’t know’. I was 22 years old and when you’re young you make decisions like that, but there was so much that needed sorting out and no one else was doing it.” 

The first job was understanding the men in front of him, looking beyond their rugby lives. “My view was that if you’re going to captain guys, then you need to try and find out about them,” says Will. “So, I went off to sort of see where Rob Andrew worked and the same for lots of guys, to try and find out about them and their environment. I thought I needed to be in touch with them once a week,  so that when they came into camp, I knew what had been happening with them.”

And he used the information he found to try and make their England lives easier. “I remember there was a young prop called Martin Hines who got picked and we were playing France away. I said, ‘do you have a girlfriend? Is she coming to the game?’. He said he couldn’t afford to fly her out, so I said to the RFU, ‘you’ve got to pay for this’. ‘We don’t pay for things like this...’ And yet they paid for the committee to fly out. So, I had a massive argument and got his flights paid.

“But there was just loads of stuff you were trying to change and had to fight for,” he continues. “My view was, if you don’t put any time or effort into people, what gives you the right to lead them, what gives you the right to ask them for more effort?”

He wasn’t afraid to take criticism from his team-mates either. “I remember very early on, I introduced the upward appraisal, and gave them sheets of paper to write things I needed to get better at. They were like, ‘fuck off’, but I needed to learn, to get better. And they were like, ‘Yeah, you do’. 

“I just genuinely believed that sort of stuff, I needed to hear what they thought of me, what I needed to work on, what I need to improve. Most people when they become a captain, they just start telling you what to do.”

Will Carling’s captaincy signalled a new era for England. Geoff Cooke had taken over months after England had lost to Wales in the quarter-finals of the inaugural Rugby World Cup, with his first Five Nations campaign the following year in 1988. His first Five Nations match – against France in Paris, a 10-9 defeat – saw him hand a starting place to Will.

England’s last Five Nations title had been the Grand Slam of 1980, but under Carling and Cooke, they’d secure back-to-back Slams in 1991 and 1992, the former coming in the same year they reached the Rugby World Cup final against Australia, narrowly losing 6-12 at Twickenham. Did it feel like the start of a new era? 

“You don’t know at the time, because you have no real context of before, when I wasn’t around,” admits Will, “but I think a lot of the guys who had been there for four or five years, thought it was very different. 

“And you know, Geoff Cooke never gets the credit he deserves,” he adds. “Clive [Woodward] won a World Cup but when you look at the transformation of English rugby under Geoff Cook with no budget...

“Clive was smart and did lots of great things,” expands Will, “but he got a huge budget and Geoff got nothing. His success was down to making some really brave calls on things like [Stuart] Barnes or [Rob] Andrew; being consistent in his selection and creating the right sort of environment; and Christ, the change under him... I think England went from winning 33 per cent of games to 70 per cent or something – that’s massive.”

Only the summer before Will’s appointment as captain, England had lost 2-0 to Australia in a series Down Under, but in his first match leading England, they won 28-19 at Twickenham. South Africa [twice] and the All Blacks [once] would also get beaten, although his side never managed to maintain a dominance over the southern hemisphere. “We were never the best side in the world,” he admits. “We might have got close a couple of times, but I don’t think we could have honestly said, ‘yeah, we were the best side’.  “And I don’t think anyone could ever argue that with 2003 England team. We could have won a World Cup, but I still wouldn’t have said we were the best side in the world.

“I think we never quite got over that mental barrier, if I’m honest,” he admits. “One of the smartest things Clive did was just get to play them [the southern hemisphere nations] regularly so the players realised there is no great mystery.”

And 1991? “We still have these arguments with Brian Moore: just last year me and Wints [Peter Winterbottom] were there saying, ‘but Brian, we weren’t the best’. We lost to the All Blacks in the first game, people forget that bit. 

“And we’d lost to Australia that summer, 40-15, we got hammered, so you get to the final and you change a few bits and pieces and, yeah, we could have won it. 

“There’s a frustration that we could have won,” admits Will, “but I don’t look at it as a game that will always haunt me because we were better than them – because we weren’t. They were a better side than us. 

“Look at what they did to the All Blacks in the semi-final [winning 16-6]. I don’t think they actually played that well against us, we probably just played way better in terms of our own standards than they did.

“But no, as much I would love to have won one, I don’t wake up in the morning thinking ‘shit my life’s incomplete’. I just think, ‘yeah, we got close’, but there’s lots of games that you lost when we should have won that hurt far more than that one.”

Which brings us back to Scotland 1990. “If we played that Australia side ten times, they’d beat us seven or eight and, not being arrogant, if we play that [1990] Scotland side ten times we’d beat them seven or eight. So that annoys me more that we lost,” explains Will. “We know we were beaten on the day, because we didn’t get ourselves ready, we didn’t prepare well enough, we didn’t execute well enough against the side who, without sounding arrogant, we were better than.”

Defeat still rankles. “Shit, it hurt,” he says. “I remember walking down the corridor to the main meal and I was behind Jim Telfer. He didn’t know I was behind him, and he was talking to this other guy and they were laughing away. And Jim said, ‘what I worry about is I hope it doesn’t come back to bite us on the arse’. 

“I remember walking on thinking, ‘I hope it does’.”

It’s impossible to not discuss controversy with Will. His relationships, his break-ups, his friendships, have taken him to the front and back pages, unlike any rugby player before him. In a rugby world where we have so few household names, Will was an accidental pioneer. “I’ve always been quite a shy guy, so the public side of it I’ve always found quite awkward,” he says. 

“I’ve tried to say to people, ‘when I was a kid I dreamt of playing for England, I didn’t dream of giving interviews and standing in front of cameras and I didn’t dream of signing autographs’, that’s not why I played rugby. 

“So, when it comes along, there’s part of you that goes, ‘I fucking hate this’, and people say, ‘no you don’t’. ‘Yeah, I fucking do’. But you can’t get away from it. You’d also be uncomfortable because you’re part of a team. I was lucky, I was part of a great team with some great characters, but I was singled out the whole time.

“I remember talking with Peter Winterbottom who is always a straight-talking Yorkshireman and he said, ‘Will, don’t be worried about it, because if any of us were in that situation, we’d be taking what we can, that’s the way it is’.”

Will tells a story about his sons Henry and Jack coming home from school one day, when they were nine and seven, and asking if he’d played for England. “I just went, ‘does it matter?’. And they persisted, ‘did you ever play at Twickenham?’ ‘Have you got any shirts?’.” Will retrieved the shirts from the storage, but for Jack it wasn’t enough. “Jack just goes, ‘you didn’t play for England, because you’re my dad and you’re too fat’, and just walked off. I sat on the floor with my shirts, just pissing myself laughing, feeling like a sad old man.

“But yeah, the older two did occasionally come back with questions like, ‘were you a friend of [Princess] Diana...’, and you sort of go, ‘don’t read that sort of stuff, because it’s not true’. It’s sort of not talked about because it’s irrelevant.”

There were periods of his life, when rugby was coming to an end, that he admits were tumultuous. “Towards the end, other bits, the private life, was crazy,” admits Will. “I remember I had a flat over there for a year with underground parking,” he says, pointing to a nearby road in Covent Garden, “because then the paparazzi wouldn’t know where I was. I didn’t open the blinds in that flat for a whole year and no one had the number for there either, not even my parents. 

“I got followed probably for about eighteen months solid, every fucking day, it was just unreal. And the weird part: the media’s never been my thing. That sounds crazy, but it’s just not what ever drove me or sort of appealed to me. 

“I look back and think I should have been a lot smarter about everything. I didn’t handle the media well, I think it was my third press conferences as captain and I told them all to fuck off. Which, when you look back, is ridiculous. 

“But, you’re a young guy, and they’re criticising players who are yours, and you say, ‘that’s out of order’, and they go, ‘don’t you talk to us like that...’ then you go, ‘ah fuck off’. But, no, it’s not clever...”

While it is hard to exclude his relationships from any retrospective of Will’s life, the same can certainly also be said of his famous quote from 1995, arguably the most famous in English rugby. Four words often repeated, ‘Fifty-seven old farts’.

“That was off camera to Greg Dyke, the guy who headed up the BBC,” he recalls. “We did an interview like this, I knew what he was after, he wanted a whole critique of the RFU and I was very diplomatic. I had a microphone on, he had a microphone on, and the camera was just behind him. 

“We finished [the interview] and I took my mine off, turned it off, put it on the table. He put his microphone on the table, and what I didn’t notice was he left his on. So, I walked past him and the camera and I was just about to go out and he said, ‘Come on Will, if it goes professional, what do you think?’. And I turned around from where I was, and said, ‘I don’t know Greg, but if the game is run professionally you probably don’t need 57 old farts to run it’, and walked out.”

Playing golf on the day the programme was due to run, his PA rang.  “She said the phones were nuts,” he recalls. “I asked what about, she said the quote, and I genuinely didn’t know what she was talking about, I just thought, ‘I’m not that stupid’. 

“I had to ring Dennis Easby [then RFU president] and we met at the East India Club and that’s when he just told me I was sacked. 

“He said, ‘You don’t have to apologise, because you’re no longer England captain’. It was ten days out from the World Cup or something, I asked if I was still playing and he said ‘yes’, and I just said that was fine. 

“I wanted to lift a World Cup and whether I lifted it first or last I didn’t give a shit. They’d been after me for seven and a half years.”

He was famously reinstated days later, and took England to the semi-finals of the World Cup, where they were outclassed by Jonah Lomu’s New Zealand, although Will did manage two tries in the 29-45 defeat. “If someone said to me this is what would happen [the fall-out from the comment], I wouldn’t have done it. So while everyone goes, ‘oh, it’s great. You said it’, I’m always, ‘I didn’t say it purposefully. I didn’t know it was going to be picked up’. I wasn’t brave enough to go and say that,” he admits. “There’s lots of things I said because I think they needed to be said but you know, actually provoking them into sacking me wouldn’t have been my choice. But, in the end, I was sacked for, what, two days?”

He stepped down of his own accord the following year. “I just thought, ‘you’re not doing this as well as you should be doing this’, so I basically dropped myself. Which is what I said to Jack [Rowell, then England coach]. 

“He said, ‘I think you are’, but I knew I wasn’t doing it the way I used to do it. I wasn’t speaking to all of the players, just to some of them.”

Most of his playing career had been as captain, something he felt was to the detriment of his own game. “I think there’s part of me thinking I could have been quite a different player, if I hadn’t had the captaincy all that time,” he says. “I think I could have developed my game.

“I used to step up in games when it wasn’t going well, but if it was going well, I think maybe I could have done more. But you’re constrained as captain rather than just able to focus on your game, getting your game absolutely right.”

The British & Irish Lions feature fleetingly on his resume. He was injured for the 1989 tour and selected only for the Third Test in 1993’s series defeat in New Zealand. “I regret that I never played well for the Lions,” he admits. “But my dream when I was a kid was England not the Lions. It’s not an excuse, but getting the captaincy so early on consumed me; that was my focus. 

“I’d love to have gone on that Lions tour and played well but in 1993, England had the worst year and people like Wade [Dooley] and Teaguey [Mike Teague] were retiring and it completely messed my head up.

“I went on that tour and I was just working out whether I wanted to play anymore because I was thinking ‘all my heroes are going, so what does the future look like?’ In a way,” he considers, “the best that happened on that tour was that it was the first and only time in my rugby career I got dropped. 

“And so suddenly it was like, ‘Okay, do you want to stop?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ So it gave me a real kick up the arse.”

He rallied to win a Grand Slam in 1995, one he’s particularly proud of due to the rebuild that gone before. But it still comes second to the back-to-back era, with the World Cup final sandwiched in between. “The second Grand Slam in the row, we were just in a rhythm, we’d won a Grand Slam, not easily, but we were in a great place. We won the games, we were always in control of the games.

“I loved the quarter-final of the World Cup in ’91,” he says, giving a nod to England’s fiery 19-10 defeat of France in Paris. “It was just the most violent game I played in, and was one of those moments where, as a team, you loved it because you maintained control in an environment that was unbelievably emotional and violent. And that’s what we’d been trying to get to for a long time.”

On the club side, he spent roughly four seasons in the professional era, returning after club retirement for one last hurrah at the behest of Zinzan Brooke at Harlequins, but his mind was elsewhere. “My life was a car crash for a couple of years [after retirement],” he admits. “Because rugby had been the thing for me since I was seven or eight, it had been the focus my sort of drive, and suddenly that’s gone for the first time and suddenly you’re pretty rudderless. 

“You know, when I look at all the bits and pieces that happened in life around then, it was just carnage.” When did it stop? “When Lisa and I got together,” he says. “She was outstanding, although without sounding callous, that provoked more carnage for about another year.”

His extended family with Lisa is five-children strong, and Will’s clearly proud of how close they are, as he talks of the family dinner ahead, of the Italian Christmas traditions, of why he doesn’t miss rugby at all. 

“I was lucky I got to choose when I gave up the captaincy, when I finished playing, and I don’t miss it at all,” he says. “The kids will tell you, with my family, it’s just a different league. Rugby was great but it’s just a game. Family and what you get out of close family, is everything. I don’t have any issues. 

“I feel sorry when I look at certain guys who keep talking about it being the best time [of their life]. I loved running out in front of that crowd, I’m not denying that, but they don’t know you, they’re 80,000 people who don’t know you, even if they might shout your name. So what does it mean?

“For me, it was all about the team – they’ve seen you go through it all, they know you, that’s what it’s about, not the 80,000 who have no idea what you’re like. It’s about team-mates and I still see them, so, no, I don’t miss rugby.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Paul Stuart

This extract was taken from issue 20 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.