Mui Thomas’ skin grows fourteen times faster than normal. She can’t sweat, kids (and parents) have pointed at her in the street, her bones have been so brittle they were compared to that of a 110-year-old and, put simply, doctors didn’t expect her to survive. Yet, the match official is living her best life and, she says, rugby has played a huge part in that.

Playing dustbin cricket in Trinidad, he couldn’t even dream of being Brian Lara because he wasn’t left-handed. Instead, he had to settle for playing rugby for England and becoming a European champion alongside some of the game’s greatest players, all while living in the south of France. So, tell us, Delon Armitage, where did it all go wrong?

At a freshers’ fair sometime in the early 2000s, future England captain Sarah Hunter attempted to coax girls into playing for her uni side with the hope of getting a half-decent XV together. Now, 123 caps, three Rugby World Cups, an MBE, and a good chunk of two decades later, it’s fair to say both Sarah and Loughborough University are doing okay.

The Chilean capital of Santiago has recently been at the heart of social unrest, the like of which hasn’t been seen since the military coup of the 1970s. But, amid the turmoil, professional rugby is making its first tentative steps as the country aims to move out from the shadow of Argentina.

In a café full of fisherman on the Devon coast, a 20-stone man that looks a bit familiar rocks up on a Triumph bike. He’s here to share stories of gun-wielding hardmen in dark alleys, chainsaw-toting vigilantes, taking uppercuts from Francois Pienaar, the friendliest divorce ever and having ‘Bob in Luton’ trying to brand him racist on Twitter. David Flatman is more than just a pretty face.

At fifteen years of age, some inner-city kids are teetering on the edge of a life that can go one way or the other. Luckily for Beno Obano, who had started his rugby life as a six-try-scoring winger, he had no such choice – not with his mum Patricia on the case.

It was Simi Pam’s first night out in months. As a doctor, she’d been on the NHS frontline and there was also a rugby season with Bristol Bears to toast. But instead of celebrating, she was called a ‘black bitch’ and told to ‘go back to Africa’, then blindsided by a punch to the head.

Every day, five-year-old Sanjay could be found at Kolkata’s Howrah station, along with countless other street kids that called it home. There are 100,000 like him across India. But in Sanjay’s case, he got lucky, a charity found him, he learnt to play rugby, and now, years later, he not only has a family of his own, but he also coaches one of the best junior teams in the country.

He ‘runs like Forrest Gump’, could’ve been in the next Jonas Brothers, almost played for Tottenham Hotspur and his dad is a country-hopping rugby international. His mum though, gave him the skills. This is Marcus Smith.

Sam was a 30-goal-a-season striker (for one campaign) and Joe found the rigours of life at Torquay United ‘too serious’. Luckily, salvation was found in rugby, at Teignmouth RFC, where two Simmonds brothers had already tore it up many years before.

See the iconic British & Irish Lions play at home for the first time since 2005 by entering our competition to win two tickets at BT Murrayfield.

2020 was meant to be the year that Emma Uren finally had a story to rival that of her mother Lotta’s tales of working with Madonna and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Instead, she underwent major hamstring surgery, was made redundant, and ended up modelling her mum’s Swedish clogs more often than she pulled on a pair of rugby boots.

On a farm in Leicestershire, in what was once a cow shed, the world’s best rugby player is using straw bales for squats, doing pull-ups on pallets and kicking balls though old tractor tyres. The only real challenge for Emily Scarratt, is a 500-piece puzzle. Now that’s ‘next-level’, she admits.

Obsessed with winning the World Cup, Eddie Jones failed to change and it cost him his job. It wasn’t his fault, it was everyone else’s. After trying to prove points, he rediscovered his love for coaching with South Africa, which led to Japan, England, and another World Cup final. He may have lost, but he’s not done. He wants to create the greatest team in the world. And then? He’s off to Hawaii.

In 2014, owner Mike Gooley sent a letter to club members to clear up a few misconceptions about his involvement with Ealing Trailfinders.

In Rwanda, the scars from a genocide that saw the massacre of close to one million people, are still visible in the most literal sense. Yet they continue to reconcile with each other, as a society, coming together to remember, to never forget. As they strive to remove all divisions, rugby has played a small part in helping people unite.

“I had those thoughts for sure and, I suspect a few of the other guys did as well, thinking ‘what am I hanging around for? The universe is telling me to move on to pastures new’. But no one’s really seen that as an option.”

“We’re in the same boat as the people in the entertainment industry, we can only do what we love to do and what we’ve trained so hard to do. So when they say, ‘you’ve just got to retrain’. Well, no. We still have goals and aspirations and you can’t just walk away from that.”

Before lockdown, Celia Quansah and Meg Jones were living their best rugby lives. Paid to be professional sevens players, the former heptathlete and 2017 Rugby World Cup finalist had the Olympics in their sights. One Zoom call from the RFU’s Conor O’Shea later, and it feels like it’s all over.

For world-champion coal carrier Phil Ounsley, seeing his daughter haul a bag of carrots around the kitchen was a sign she had a sporting future. He was right. Four years after first picking up a rugby ball, Jodie was offered an England contract and the former cat photographer had set her sights on the Tokyo Olympics.