Claudia MacDonald

In the space of just one week last year, Claudia MacDonald managed to produce a career-defining performance against the Black Ferns, while also suffering from an injury that almost brought her career to an end.

Claudia MacDonald didn’t want to take a backward step, even in training, even with an entire pack of England forwards bearing down on her. “It was essentially a fifteen-a-side game against each other in training,” explains Claudia, the England and now Exeter Chiefs scrum-half, when we meet in London. “I caught the ball from the lineout, the forwards flooded through, I didn’t want to get pushed back over my try-line and put the ball down, so I sort of dipped and drove myself forward. 

“And then I guess because there was a bit of a resistance,” she says, understating the presence of the onrushing Red Rose forwards, “I held for a second, but when more forwards joined, I crumbled, my head being pushed down, my chin into my chest.”

The training session, ironically at what is now her new home of Exeter, was ahead of last autumn’s first Test against the Black Ferns. “It hurt quite suddenly, and I was on the floor,” she says, “but I thought I’d overstretched my neck, you know, neck soreness isn’t that uncommon in rugby, it’s a high-contact sport, a lot of collisions. And it was just really sore.”

And then, nothing. Without the symptoms of anything serious, after medical checks, she carried on. “It was presenting as just a soft tissue kind of thing.  I played that game, I started, and it was amazing to start against New Zealand. 

“From the minute that we stood up against them and with the haka in front of us, we had our plan,” recalls Claudia. “We knew what we were going to do, we knew the plan, we’d been over it again and again, and we beat them.”

They didn’t just beat them; the women in black, the reigning world champions, on their 100th Test, were put to the sword, 43-12 at Sandy Park. In front of almost 10,000 supporters, England took a first win against New Zealand since 2017, and Claudia was starting at scrum-half.

“It was huge,” she says. “I mean, you’re talking a year out from a World Cup, the sort of time when you want to solidify your place in a team and put in performances that add points in favour of your name.

“If I’d been asked before that game what was my favourite England game that I’d ever played, other than my first cap, I’d have said beating France at Twickenham and then losing to New Zealand when I played on the wing. Now, fast forward a couple of years and I’m starting at scrum-half, a position I’ve struggled to get to grips with – I’d only played it for three seasons. It was the first time, I guess, where the shirt felt like it fitted.”

The game was a turning point for England. They did even better the week after, beating New Zealand 56-15 at Franklin’s Gardens. 

The games meant everything to Claudia, not least because her family were in the crowd, including grandparents, dad, siblings and niece for the first Test. For the second, it was just her eighty-year-old grandmother. “Nanny is there, she’s at every single one of my England games,” says Claudia, “she won’t miss anything, she’s everywhere. 

“I have this very distinct memory of the second New Zealand game,” she continues. “My grandma got on the train on her own, arrived about an hour and a half before kick-off and just sat there, with her little hat and glasses, legs crossed, tapping her hands on her knees to the music, having a lovely time.

“It’s special seeing her at the games, for her, but also because mum can’t be there.

“My mum died when I was seventeen,” explains Claudia, “she actually never saw me play rugby [Claudia had only picked it up while at Durham university], she was a netballer. 

“I played with her once actually,” continues Claudia, happy to chat about mum Jane, a huge influence on her life. “I would have been fifteen and trying to keep up with my mum on the court turned out to be incredibly difficult. She was sort of light on her feet and sort of throwing balls around left, right and centre.”

The family had moved to Dubai from their home in Surrey, for dad Roger’s job, in 2008, There are four siblings, two older brothers, Alex and Seb, and younger sister Lydia, who now plays for Richmond. “My mum developed lung cancer and when they discovered it, she was stage four. That was in the January of 2012, and she moved back to England for treatment, and we had this weird four or five months where we had to stay and finish school in Dubai. My grandparents came out to look after us in Dubai and dad was going back and forth.”

She passed away more than a year later, in March 2013 – Claudia significantly gives the exact date, the 23rd – which was longer after the diagnosis than they had expected. “They’d said it would be four to six months, but it was fourteen months, which shows what an impressive fight she put up.”

They moved back to Surrey, although not to the family home, which was being rented out, and adjusted to their new roles. “Dad had to take a job in Ghana, so my godmother moved in to make sure we were still going to school and everything,” says Claudia. “It helped that there were four of us, if I was an only child, I think it would be much more difficult. 

“We’ve had each other to sort of lean on I guess and get through times, but I definitely lost a lot of sleep because of crying myself to sleep at times.”

The change in lifestyle was dramatic. “If I rewind to when I was sixteen and we were living in Dubai, everything’s glamorous and wonderful and great and you’re off doing water skiing at the weekend and just living this very sort of Dubai-esque lifestyle really. And then you fast forward a year and life has completely changed.

“My brother Alex and I tried to look after our sister,” explains Claudia, “trying to play good cop, bad cop, and that could lead to a lot of rows with my sister, turning into, ‘you can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my mother’. Nope I’m not... It’s probably a bit the same today.”

Claudia always wanted to be in sport. The Olympics was a goal, just as it is with every sport-loving teenager. Education-wise, she’d relied on her mum. “My mum made a lot of my decisions for me,” admits Claudia. “What GCSEs should I do? What A-levels should I do? What should I do at university? She gave me a big book to read on courses, and I wanted to do all of them. She said, ‘Well, why don’t you go do PPE, politics, philosophy and economics?’. That sounded good, but Alex turned around and said, ‘you only ever do what mummy tells you’, so I did economics. I regret that now, she was right.”

Claudia went to Durham, where she picked up rugby, making her way through the teams, joining local club side DMP, and catching the eye of England. There was a tentative enquiry from Scotland due to her surname, but with no obvious lineage, it had to be England. 

She’d been playing on the wing, but Scott Bemand, the England backs coach, encouraged her to make a switch. “After one game for DMP, against Wasps ironically, he said, ‘can you pass the ball from floor?’, I did it, and he said, ‘right, go away and practise that’.”

Claudia moved to Wasps that September, with Giselle Mather continuing her scrum-half education, and played for England at nine against the USA the following November, winning 57-5 at the then Allianz Park, the first of her eighteen caps.

From then until the iconic Black Ferns series, Claudia challenged for the shirt. And, as she said, she only felt like she truly belonged in that position in the game when it all started to go wrong.

The conversation switches back to the New Zealand series, and Claudia’s biggest concern was for one of her digits, rather than her neck. “My thumb popped out and back in again in the same game, so I was more worried about that,” she says. “But weird symptoms started to creep in, each of them I could justify for different reasons.

“I had a weird feeling in my index finger on my left hand, it was almost like it was just achy, like I’d caught it in a shirt or a bib. 

“I raised it with physios and they agreed, I’d probably just irritated the capsule, probably caught it in a bib or shirt or whatever.

“Then my lat on my left side went really tight, but because I’d been in for an MRI scan – and you kind of sit like Superman in the machine with your arms out in front of you for forty minutes, it’s really uncomfortable – I put that down to that. Everything always made sense.”

She’d come off the bench in the second Test – which pleased Nanny no end – and then played the third game, against Canada [a 51-12 win, scoring two tries]. “I was fine, but then my whole left arm was just weird, I couldn’t explain it, it was almost like I’d slept on it, almost like pins and needles.”

She went for an MRI scan, ahead of the final Test match against USA. “I went up thinking I was going to be involved, this was three weeks down the line,” explains Claudia, “but I sat down with the doc, who said I had a bulging of C6-C7 [disc], it’s kind of that knobbly bit that sticks out the back of your neck. The C6-C7 was compressing and shifting my spinal cord to the side.

“The problem was compounded by a disc above I’d damaged before – C4-C5 – meaning if the C6-C7 didn’t heal itself, the weakness above would mean both discs would have to be fused together.

“At the time,” she continues, “the surgeon told me it was going to be three or four weeks [to wait for another scan], and I remember crying, thinking, ‘oh my god, three weeks, that’s ages’.”

They scanned again three weeks later, but there was no improvement. “I kept getting it scanned, every three weeks, with no change, then in February they changed the frequency so it became one every three months.”

Several options were on the table. The first was just waiting it out, in the hope it healed by itself, which meant everything could carry on as normal. The second was surgery at the C6-C7 level.

“But that could put additional stress on the C4-C5 level, increasing the chances of that level then worsening and needing its own surgery. That second surgery, if needed, would likely be a fusion (rather than the disc replacement suggested for C6-C7), which again would put more stress on the level above and below. It seemed I would be fixing one problem only to open up a potential load more. 

“The second surgery, as I understood it, would mean a return to rugby was off the table at that point.

“It was also contact sports, skiing, wakeboarding, little things you couldn’t do for the rest of your life,” she says. “I even asked about banana boating, because I wrote a list of all the things I would and wouldn’t be able to do, and who doesn’t love banana boating on holiday?”

It could’ve been worse too. “The first surgeon said, if I had a two-level fusion, I wouldn’t get back to rugby, but ‘you should be able to get back to running’ – and it was, ‘woah, no running?’. I don’t know even know how not to run – I ran to the train station today. That was an instant scare.

“They would also have to go through the front of my neck, which had complications – damage to voice box, vocal cords; then there were normal complications with any surgery; and then as it was close to my spine, there were other complications too. It was all a pretty scary thing to face. It took me until March to make a decision, I spoke to so many people.

“And it was strange because I was living a normal life at the time, doing everything – touch rugby, skills, running – except for contact. 

“People didn’t want to give their opinion, England were very much, ‘we’re not making the decision for you’ and my family didn’t want to influence my decision. If they told me to have the surgery and it went wrong, they didn’t want to have anything to do with that. And if they told me not to have surgery, and then I never played rugby again, they didn’t want to have anything to do with that either.

“In the end I looked at the odds, including how many people are paralysed during surgery, and asked myself, if this was a game of Russian roulette, would I play these odds? A £1m or the risk of a bullet?”

Claudia decided to dodge the bullet altogether. “I ended up deciding
life was a bit bigger than playing rugby, and much as I wanted it, and it had been a goal for so long, I wasn’t willing to risk all of that to play in one World Cup.”

Even with surgery, a recovery time of three to four months also meant she may not be fit, or selected anyway. And the stress was taking its toll. “It meant a lot of nights crying and working out what I wanted to do, it was pretty rough,” she says. “I made the decision I was going to wait, and maybe I’d play the next World Cup, or maybe I’d find a different sport I could try out.

“And once I’d made the decision life was so much simpler, it was like a cloud had lifted, even though I didn’t know if it was the right decision or wrong, a decision had been made.”

Such was the uncertainty with her England rugby career – her full-time job – she began looking at alternatives. “I went to a dinner party very soon afterwards with some of my friends from school, and one of them works at PwC in operational restructuring, and I was listening to them, thinking ‘that’s basically exactly what I want to do’ – it was a bit like sustainable consulting. Anyway, long story short, I ended up getting offered a job with PwC in that same team.”

The troublesome thumb which had needed surgery, but she didn’t want to miss the rugby time for an operation, was booked in to be sorted and she went travelling to Thailand to see her brother. 

Six months after single-handedly trying to take on an English pack in training, Claudia’s life plan had changed completely. New job, new sector, nights full of sleep, and a working thumb in the pipeline. “I got back – it was the beginning of May – I was lying in bed when I got a call from the England doctor,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Claudia, it’s really good news, the latest scan results have come back, the surgeon has looked at them, and there’s no reason you can’t play contact sports’.

“I screamed,” she says. “My girlfriend was next to me, and I hung up the phone and said, ‘I think this is it, I can play rugby again’.”

The thumb operation, which would have taken her out for three months, was cancelled and she began her comeback, starting with building neck strength. She was recalled to the England training camp in July, and while she couldn’t do contact work then, she began contact just over a month later. “My journey now for the World Cup is completely different,” she says. “Getting on the plane is the next incredible step; just being able to train and put my hand up, saying, ‘I’m here and can play rugby’, is amazing, although getting fit has been a killer.

“Now it feels like I’m chasing the clock, to see if I can get back in time,” continues Claudia. “I just want to show I can be part of the squad, I know it’s attainable because I’ve done it before. I know how I can play, as I showed against New Zealand, it’s just whether I have enough time to show them that.

Talk returns to her mum, someone she’d have gone to for advice countless times over the past six months. “It’s probably before the game I always think about mum,” she says, “although it’s not necessarily in the big moments. It’s kind of more when you’re sat in a car for example, and I go to ring somebody because I want to call for a chat and you have just half a moment, honestly, it’s just a second, where you think, ‘ah I’ll call Mum’, and then you’re like, ‘oh, no, I can’t do that’. 

“Even though in March it’ll be ten years,” she says, “I still have the odd moment where I think I’ll give her a call, or I wish Mum was here to ask her this question – because she made so many of my decisions for me...

“Especially with my neck,” she adds, “you have different conversations with your mum than you do with anyone else. I still think, ‘what would Mum do?’. She’s still making all my decisions really.”

She’d certainly have been worried for her eldest daughter. “She used to hate us going on the fun-fair rides,” says Claudia, laughing at the memory. “She was convinced they would break down and we would go flying off them. I think once all four of us went on one at the same time and she stood there and cried for the whole ride, I think she was convinced she would have no children by the end of it.”

Back to rugby; Claudia also made a big move this summer, together with her girlfriend, Irish international Cliodhna Moloney, joining Susie Appleby’s Exeter Chiefs. “I was just looking for something slightly different,” she says, “I think I needed a change for myself after a season that wasn’t the best for me in terms of injury and everything else.

“Exeter was just something different, they’ve got a really cool professional set-up down there, a really great sort of range of playing styles with the internationals, and it’s a change of scenery for me. And for recovery every day, you can jump in the sea – just perfect.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Philip Haynes

This extract was taken from issue 19 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.