Zoe Aldcroft

“Zoe Aldcroft is powerful, athletic and hard to tackle. An intelligent rugby player, from playing in the backline, her understanding of ball carrying in space and running lines is excellent. Zoe hasn’t reached anywhere near the potential she has, and is already playing for England. She can keep getting better and better. There is much more to come.”

Tamara Taylor, 115 caps, England

Selection for the tour to New Zealand, less than two months before the 2017 Rugby World Cup, was key to Zoe Aldcroft’s chances of making it to the game’s biggest stage. She’d made her debut the year before, snatching four minutes and her first cap against France in Salt Lake City, and even though she’d clocked up less than half a game’s worth of minutes in two Six Nations caps against Wales and France, she’d been training well. “Fergie [Matt Ferguson] sat me down and said, ‘we’re not going to take you to New Zealand’,” remembers Zoe. “‘You’ve just been really unlucky’ – I was absolutely gutted, crying my eyes out, I didn’t really know what to do.”

Two of her Darlington Mowden Park team-mates, the England centurion Tamara Taylor and Abbie Scott, together with Lichfield’s Emily Braund had been given the nod instead of the 20-year-old from Scarborough. It didn’t help the tour turned out to be a huge success, with victories over Australia [53-10], Canada [27-20] capped off with a 29-21 defeat of the Black Ferns in Rotorua, spurred on by a growing British & Irish Lions crowd that had been in town to watch the men in red face the Maori All Blacks. “The second rows were scoring all the time and I thought ‘I bet he’s really pleased he didn’t take me’,” says Zoe. “I’d seen Emily [Braund] get taken off the pitch but I didn’t know it was that serious, and besides I never like getting a place due to injury.”

The injury was serious, ruling Emily out of the fast-approaching World Cup. “Fergie came all the way up to Scarborough and gave me a brutal training session – my brother came and held a pad for me and, by the end of the session, Fergie said they were going to take me to the World Cup and I started crying again.”

That brutal session, reckons Zoe, was Fergie’s way of ensuring she’d stayed on her game. “I could have gone either way,” she admits, “[after being dropped] I could have been like, ‘fuck this I’m just going to chill’, or train really hard and, thank the Lord, I did train because that session was horrible. 

“I think because I was so young, I couldn’t really be angry [at being dropped] because those guys had been training hard, and I just needed to train harder than they did. That way, further down the line, I could say I deserved my place.”

So hard did Zoe train to prove her worth, it also proved to be her undoing. “I actually broke my foot because I’d trained on it so much that, two weeks before we were due to fly out [for the World Cup], I went out to training and we were just warming up with a bit of speed and my foot just crumbled under me. I was like ‘what is that?’ I went to see the physio and my foot just kept giving way.”

She was sent for a scan to discover the damage. “I was panicking and I was like whatever it is, I’m going to the World Cup,” she says.  “The next day they said, ‘you’ve broken your foot’.”

Still determined to play, she signed a disclaimer, but was told by England if she couldn’t train or play to her full potential, they wouldn’t be taking her. “So I’m popping pain killers to make sure I get through the training sessions,” she explains, “I passed and went to the World Cup with a broken foot. 

“The surgeon said the injury could lead to being out for a year, but you never really know what’s going to happen and I’d trained so hard to get to that point and I didn’t even have it in my head for a second that my rugby career could be finished.”

At the World Cup, she played 80-minute games against both Spain and Italy. “The adrenaline took over in the games,” she says. Although they were her only games before she succombed to the foot injury. “It was pretty tough to watch, particularly at the final because the girls lost. You just feel helpless but I continued training just in case there was another injury and I had to play, and there was a moment when Tam pulled up with a neck injury, so I was training and wondering if I might get to play in the final, but in the end she was fine.”

An operation the following September, signalled the start of a full year away from the game. “I went back to university in Hartpury,” she says. “I was going to get the best possible care in Gloucester with everything there on site, so I could do my studies while getting my physio treatment.”

Still technically a Darlington Mowden Park player, when she finally returned, it was with Gloucester-Hartpury. “I was a bit worried but once I got back in the swing of it I was fine,” she says, although crucially adds, “and then in December I broke my other foot. 

“A couple of games before we broke up for Christmas, we were playing Loughborough and I came down in a lineout and landed on someone and broke my talus [the large bone in the ankle]. It was really painful, it was freezing cold and I couldn’t really walk and the physio…”

Just the three months out this time.

If you’ve not been to Scarborough, you should, it’s quite lovely really. It’s got a 3,000-year-old medieval castle, and a golden curve of sand for a seafront. Almost literally cornering the market for seaside snacks are Zoe’s mum and dad. “Both my mum and dad own a café on the sea front: one on the north, one on the south,” explains Zoe. “Dad’s is burger and chips, with outside seating and my mum’s is like a proper coffee house, with afternoon tea that sort of thing – they’re called the Promenade Café and Bay View Coffee House. I worked in both of them, my dad had his first because he was made redundant and thought he’d buy a café – I worked in there when I was twelve and I got £2.50 an hour.

“Then my mum got hers a couple of years later – she worked in a bank before – and then I worked there because I liked it better and didn’t smell of chips all day.”

Career-wise, Zoe had thought about being a hearing aid specialist. “I saw my granny have hers tested once and they put this really cool green slime in her ear to measure it and I just thought that was such a cool job,” she says. “But I then changed my mind and decided I wanted to be a chiropodist. I feel like no one likes feet and I really like them.”

Rugby came into her life through her brother Jonny, following him to Scarborough RUFC when she was eight. “I’m now a centimetre under six foot, so I was always as tall if not taller than the boys,” she says. 

At twelve when she could no longer play alongside the boys, she moved to West Park where they had junior girls’ sides and from here, while playing a regional tournament down in Hartpury she was told about the AASE programme – a scholarship where she could train virtually full-time while studying for a BTEC in rugby. “There were twelve spots [in the country] and there were fifty people at the trial,” explains Zoe, “some were called back to a second trial but me, Sarah Bern and Jade Shekells [now at Worcester] got in straight away.”

Moving away from Scarborough straight from school proved far from easy at first. “The first two weeks I really hated it, I was ringing my mum saying ‘please let me come home’,” she recalls. “We had to cook for ourselves, do our own washing and it just gave me a fright. Then all the girls started getting to know each other, playing pranks all the time and I never looked back. 

“There were sixteen bedrooms in the whole block, each of us had our own en suite, a single bed and we were supposed to go up to the canteen to have our meals but it wasn’t very nice. So we all had George Foremans, which we weren’t allowed so we had to have someone on watch for the wardens, as we cooked in our block – we were having steak, salmon, chicken fajitas. In the second year we snuck in a hotplate and even managed to do a roast one time because someone bought a slow cooker in. I remember a warden coming in and asking what the smell was, and we’d quickly had to shove the roast pork under the bed!” 

As well as lessons, both technical and tactical and on anatomy and physiology, the rugby girls (and boys) would hit the gym three times a week, have rugby training four times week and then have skills and conditioning sessions. “It was pretty full on,” says Zoe. “I’d say we’d train more then than we do now, Nolli Waterman was our head coach until she had to focus on the World Cup and then Peter Cook, who’d played for Leicester, came in.”

After Hartpury she returned north to Northumbria where future England team-mate Abbie Scott was already in the backrow and, although a back her whole rugby life, Zoe would join her at No.8. “All through college I was full back but Nolli sat me down and said, ‘have you ever thought of being a No.8?’ I hadn’t, but from then I did both forwards and the backs skills at Hartpury, and went up to Northumbria with the idea of being No.8.” 

Turning out for Darlington Mowden Park at eight in the Premiership, Zoe – who’d played England under-20s on the wing – was invited to the ABC camp for England forwards. Only then did she think full honours could go her way. “In the ABC camps, I first thought maybe...” she admits on the subject of a possible contract. “In the January when they were giving out contracts Fergie rocked up at my student house to tell me that I would be getting one.”

Suspending her university degree, as an England professional from Monday to Friday, she had to be down in London and then head back to Newcastle for the weekends. Involved in all the training camps for the Six Nations, she had to wait for the summer tour to America and Salt Lake City for that first cap.

Back from the second foot injury and Zoe began to find her feet, slowly building to become the regular starter for England at this year’s Six Nations. “I felt really confident in those games which is something I hadn’t had playing in an England shirt before,” admits Zoe, who still wears the colours of Gloucester-Hartpury. “I just felt I was meant to be there. I got man of the match on the Ireland game and I think against France – and this is such a second row geeky thing – we got 100 per cent in our lineouts and I was leading them. That was a very proud moment.”

Now, having used lockdown to do everything from learn to read music again to renovate a house, Zoe has her eye on the rugby future again. Not just her own future, but also the game’s. “It’s frustrating that we don’t get the recognition,” she says, “people judge our game a lot quicker than they’d judge the men’s game.

“But we’re definitely growing, you can feel we’re growing our reputation.

“We want to see more audiences, more involvement and a lot more promotion. I would want to make sure the women are getting equal opportunities as their equivalent men. 

“I’m at Gloucester at the moment, and we have nothing to do with the men. We don’t even get food at the moment, whereas they get team meals every day.”

Can she see a day when club rugby is professional for women too? “Yes, definitely, the men were amateur just in the last 30 years, so the next 30 years for us we need a big drive forward. 

“You can’t blame the men for getting paid more because they get bigger audiences but it would be nice to see the women moving in that direction. We play a lot more ball-in-hand rugby, our game is more entertaining to watch, it’s up and coming and people should give us a chance.

“I did my dissertation on the perception of female rugby players and a lot of people who haven’t been to watch, judge it really quickly, but those who have been to watch have their whole mindset changed and are like, ‘I don’t understand why people aren’t watching female rugby’. 

“We need to make it more accessible for people to watch – people probably don’t know that we are playing on Saturdays at a ground near them. 

“Female rugby players can get that message out there and make sure we’re in the best shape and we’re not like fat lumps that are just running round the pitch. We need to make sure we’re in the best condition, training well, presenting well and keeping our skill levels up.”

With all that in mind, Zoe is still incredibly happy with where she is right now. “I get to put everything into something I love doing,” she says. “I love that I can play rugby for a living.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Philip Haynes

This extract was taken from issue 11 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.