Danny Care

In the space of little more than two teenage years, he went from sitting on the bench with Jamie Vardy against Man Utd to making a European rugby debut in Spain, scoring a try, kicking goals, breaking a leg and then losing his crutches to a drunk team doctor. Life has never been dull for Danny Care.

Roughly around the time when the likes of Benito Carbone, Paulo Di Canio and Des Walker were helping Sheffield Wednesday to a succession of lofty mid- to lower-table placings in the English Premier League, two young wingers were cutting it up in their youth team.

The two teenagers, who could play out wide or up front, might not have had the stature of some of their rivals, but they had pace, confidence and an eye for goal. But, a change in manager at the academy brought their three-year forward partnership to an end, one of them would leave, ultimately for a different sport altogether. The other would plummet down the leagues, before returning to win a Premiership title, play for England and score 127 top-flight goals [and counting]. “Yeah, me and Jamie Vardy played in the same team for three years,” explains Danny Care, when we meet at his Cobham home. “I signed for Sheffield Wednesday when I was about twelve, and we played on either wing, or up top – I was top goal-scorer though.”

Even before he’d hit his teens, Danny – who’d also shown promise at rugby – was committed to football. “I always remember starting against Liverpool [the side he supports] and I scored in the first minute, it was one of my greatest-ever football moments.

“Jamie was good, he was pretty much as he is today: confrontational, gobby, backed himself – I loved it.

“But I’ll always remember this new academy manager coming in and taking one look at our team and saying we were ‘too small, not going to make it’,” continues Danny. “He said that openly to us. Slowly, they started playing the bigger lads, who weren’t the most skilful, and I remember being sat on the bench with Vardy most weeks, getting ten or twenty minutes here and there.

“At the end of the year, I was about fifteen, and we played Man Utd at home and lost 2-0 and I didn’t get on at all. I remember saying to my dad, ‘I just want to play football’.”

While Danny left almost immediately, the now Leicester striker, stayed until the end of the season. “And he went down the leagues, non-league, kept playing and then, ultimately, killed it!”

That Danny chose football was little surprise, given his dad’s pedigree. “Dad loved football, mum too,” he explains. “Dad was a good footballer back in the day, he always said he could’ve made it.

“He says there was a cup final and all the West Brom scouts were there and the first half was 0-0, really boring, nothing happened and so they all left. 

“Then, the second half, he scored four, they won 4-0, but the scouts were gone.”

Although playing football, Danny – who had started rugby aged five at West Park with his brother – kept his rugby hand in at school, and with the fading of his footballing hopes, came the peer pressure from his mates to join the local side, Otley. A dads’ and lads’ tour to Dublin with the club – including a few WKDs for an underage Danny – sealed the deal. “The whole team ethos was different,” he says. “It wasn’t like football, where everyone was out for themselves.”

And with his commitment to rugby, came a rapid rise through the game, playing Yorkshire, North of England and then England under-16s. No sooner had he left one professional sporting dream, than another became reality when he was signed for Leeds Tykes by Stuart Lancaster.  “He was a bit of a head teacher,” recalls Danny. “He was terrifying and, as a young lad of sixteen, I remember being invited to my first session where, if you’re good enough, you get invited back to train regularly. 

“I’d come from football and I remember going to this session and it was very much, ‘this is what we need you to do’ but I was a footballer and just thought, ‘give me the ball and I’ll do whatever’.

“I got really poor marks,” he admits. “I got a letter from Stuart, and I think my dad still has it, but it says you’re not at the level to even train with this lot. 

“I remember looking at it and thinking ‘this lot? Are you serious? There’s some lads here that can hardly run.’”

After that first experience, Danny went on to win international age-grade honours, and was offered a contract. “I think maybe I wasn’t that bothered, which probably showed,” he says of his first trial. “I wasn’t arrogant, but I knew I could do it, I just wasn’t doing it the way a rugby player should do it, I was probably a bit loose. They didn’t like that, they wanted me to be more technical, and I needed to toe the line a bit more.

“To be fair,” adds Danny, “Stuart got hold of me a little bit and hopefully saw a bit of potential. Every report though, it was always about my attitude. ‘I don’t think you’ve got the drive’, he used to say. ‘I don’t think you’re as good as Dave Doherty – he’s going to be world-class.’

“Stuart put a lot of time into me though,” continues Danny. “We did a lot of passing sessions where he’d throw water on all the balls, make me pass in bad conditions. We had a couple of fallouts on the way, usually when I was late and he’d put me on the rowing machine.

“We also had a school game on a Wednesday night and he said, ‘don’t play in that school game, we need you to play for the seconds on Saturday and it’s a huge game for you, you’re starting’. I said ‘yeah, cool’. At the game, I said to the coach, ‘I’ll just put kit on, sit on the bench, to be part of it.’”

With his school side ‘smashing’ the opposition, Danny badgered the coach to let him on and he eventually relented, only to then report it to Lancaster. 

“He stitched me right up,” says Danny.

Danny only found out when the second team was read out at the academy and his name wasn’t on it. “Stuart said, ‘Right everyone get out and train, except for you Care’, and he’s similar to Eddie [Jones], and as I was young, I was petrified – he had this stare. He basically tore me a new one for five minutes: ‘why did you disrespect me? I told you not to play! You were badgering the coach’.

“He said it was going to hurt watching that second-team game without being involved, and it did.”

Again, Danny didn’t have to wait long, for either second- or first-team game-time. “I got called in to play ten in a European Shield game away to Valladolid,” he says. “I’d played fly-half at school, I definitely wasn’t ready for first-team fly-half, but I backed myself.”

The game, in 2004, saw Leeds take just four replacements with them, but having won 121-0 the week before at home, they were fairly confident of victory. It was still a huge game for a seventeen year old, still at school studying for his A-levels. 

“Within twenty minutes, I’d scored a really cool try, kicked a couple of goals and broken my leg,” he says. “I’d had two guys hit me from either side, and my foot got turned all the way back.

“Although, I always remember after the game [which was won 53-11] more than the game,” he continues. “Because we were a big club from the Premiership, they did a huge after-dinner function in town, a load of wine, load of food, and I’d been to hospital and been brought back to the event. I was in so much pain, my leg in a cast, and everyone was dancing around.

“I remember needing to go to the bathroom and looking for my crutches, and our doctor Terry Crystal – bit of a legend, the old England doctor too – was up on stage, blind drunk, top off, dancing with my crutches, singing some song in Spanish! It was a cool little memory of a shit time.”

Despite the time off with the injury, a year later he signed his first contract, joining a squad that including a true galactico scrum-half in former All Black Justin Marshall. “He was a bit of an icon in the game, so it was amazing for Leeds,” recalls Danny. “For me, personally, he didn’t teach me in a ‘Danny, come and watch this, we’ll work on this’ kind of way – he was too busy for me – but I just spent a lot of time watching him in training, watching how he drew defenders how he got the best out of the people around him.  I thought that was probably the thing that I admire about him the most. He was way bigger than me, a completely different scrum-half; he was almost like an extra forward, just picking and going and running past people, handing them off.

“But the way he ran across the field – and people always say you shouldn’t run across the field – but the way Justin did it, he would be running around with a purpose to draw the defenders out. He could manipulate people and I learned so much just watching him do that. Now, I think that that’s a good part of my game.”

It was also his manner off the pitch that caught Danny’s attention. “He was a bit different to everyone else, but he’d earnt that. 

“Normally when you’re late for a meeting the door would be locked and you wouldn’t be let in, but Justin would turn up late with sunglasses on, a coffee and a sandwich, and Phil [Davies] would be like ‘alright, Marsh’. And I know I shouldn’t have been thinking that that’s cool, but I was a bit, ‘that is quite cool, he’s got that power because he’s done so well’. 

“And because he always plays well, he’s a bit of a maverick and I thought, ‘I’d quite like to be like that, to be that person, that confident’, and he was confident on the pitch too. He backed himself and that’s the way I like to be.”

His early life as a professional was an easy one. “I was living out of home, loving being a professional rugby player, on twelve grand a year, so a grand in my pocket, and just thinking ‘this is amazing’.

“Any sniff of a first-team appearance was a bonus.”

In his final year at Leeds, the club were relegated, and Danny started to get more appearances, enough to catch the eye of other clubs – something that would be more useful than he’d anticipated. “There were five of us on this twelve-grand-a-year contract and one of the lads came into training one day and said, ‘do you know, we’ve got a relegation release clause in the contract?’. And I was like, ‘No, I didn’t’. I got my agent to check and he was like, ‘yeah, you do’.

“Academy players weren’t obviously meant to have these clauses, so word was, somebody had taken the front sheet of Justin Marshall’s contract, changed the money and details, but then copied the back with the clause on and used it for us.”

He’d had a taste of the Premiership and that, combined with a mass exodus of players, made Danny’s mind up and he went to meet three rival clubs. “I went to Northampton, then Saracens where I met Eddie Jones and Alan Gaffney. They took me for lunch and I was pretty sold. Especially when they told me how much the money was, I was like, ‘wow, okay’, I remember me and my agent walking out and saying ‘yeah, this is the one’.”

The money was £100,000, and combined with Eddie’s belief he could play for England, it sold the club to Danny. “Then I went to see Quins, but I basically said to Eddie, ‘I’m pretty sure I know where I want to go’. 

“But then I met Dean [Richards] and Andy Friend, we didn’t go out for lunch, but we talked about me and my family, what they liked about how I played, what this team needed, and that they thought I’d make England in the next few years...”

“But I was a young kid, I was nineteen, and it was a lot of money, I was on twelve, they [Saracens] had offered me a hundred...”

The presence of England under-20 colleagues Jordan Turner-Hall, Chris Robshaw and Mike Brown finally twisted his arm, for twenty grand less than the Saracens offer. “It was still an incredible amount of money for that age, and to be playing for Quins, with a load of mates, but I wasn’t far from signing for Saracens,” he admits.

That first campaign was also the first for Harlequins back in the Premiership after being relegated two seasons before. Initially, only Steve So’oialo stood in his way, but Richards signed then England scrum-half Andy Gomarsall. “I was a bit annoyed,” he says. “But I think it was an absolute blessing in disguise because I wasn’t ready to play. I thought I was, but I definitely wasn’t and I probably played three or four games that first year.”

It didn’t stop him knocking on Dean’s door on a regular basis trying to get more game-time. A knocking that intensified as his friends Turner-Hall, Robshaw and Brown started to play more. “I just wanted to play,” says Danny. “I’d come down from Leeds, I was missing home, I wasn’t playing every week and I was just like, ‘come on, give me something’, and he just said, ‘look, I don’t think you’re ready, but you will be ready’.

“When it was my chance to have a go, we weren’t playing particularly well as a club, and he gave a few of those youngsters a go and threw me in and we started playing quickly, in a slightly different style, and he was like ‘I told you’. So, Dean was right all along.

“Deano’s obviously a scary man, but deep down he’s one of the nicest blokes I’ve ever come across. I had a great relationship with him from the start.”

He shared a flat with fellow northerner Dave Strettle, who’d joined from Rotherham, and played with Danny on the sevens circuit. “He was my big brother down here, two northerners together,” he says. Living with him was brilliant, he was an old head, loose as a goose mind, so we had some amazing times. 

“I remember the first time we drove to training and had no idea about London, and we drove through Richmond Park, and there were deer everywhere. 

“We just looked at each other and said, ‘you drive through a park and there’s deer, what is this? Never seen anything like this up north.’

“He turned into a bit of a rock star, playing for England, long hair, surfer-dude looks,” continues Danny, “I was his professional cameraman in Oceania for most nights...

“But I had a wicked time,” he concludes. “And then we all started playing the year after, and they were building a team around the young lads, sprinkled with experience.”

Danny had seen all levels of Quins, including seeing another All Black legend playing second-team rugby. “Mehrtens wasn’t getting picked and he had to play with me for the seconds, away at London Irish. He looked at me before we went out, and it was just sort of ‘what am I doing here?’ and then it was ‘come on, let’s have some fun’. And I remember him pinging off left- and right-boot spiral kicks. It was an absolute masterclass. The gulf in class was that vast.”

When Danny became a first-team regular, he became pivotal to the way they played. Quick ball, fast tempo. “They told us to play fast, unstructured rugby, unpredictable,” he says. “Andy Friend was crucial in that attack, they just said ‘do what you want, quick tap everything...”

The pack was building a reputation too as the side continued to rise, with ‘bloodgate’ a serious bump in the road. “I didn’t have a Scooby anything sinister had happened even the day after the game,” he says. “When you’re in the game, you’re already thinking about who’s coming on or off, I just remember thinking we’d lost Nick Evans early, Chris Malone came on, ripped his hamstring off the bone and I was thinking, ‘this is my chance to play at ten again’. 

“We had Gomers on the bench, we were losing like 6-5 and I was thinking ‘this is my moment’. And then I saw Nick Evans come back on again and thought that was weird...”

What unfolded does not need repeating, but it involved blood capsules, a wink, and all hell broke loose. “The next day I came in and one of the boys said, ‘we’re in big trouble, something to do with that blood replacement’. “I had not heard about any club using these blood things, but some of the guys were like ‘no, all clubs are using them’.

“It’s a bit of a blur now,” he admits, “but we were in this media storm, and people were saying things left, right and centre, we’d no idea what was going on...

“Some really good people lost their jobs though,” he concedes, “like Wendy [Chapman, the doctor] and Dean lost his job and couldn’t work for three years...”

Danny knows the work done by Richards paved the way for future success. “The foundations Dean left at the club were brilliant,” he says. “We were young lads and we had a way of playing, Conor [O’Shea] embraced that and perhaps even more so than Dean, just saying, ‘I don’t care if you win or lose, play the way Quins play, have fun, move the ball, I’ll be more annoyed if you win but don’t try things.’

“He was a second dad to me,” says Danny of Conor. “He put his arm around me and the other lads, and you could go to him with anything; he’d sort things out.”

After breaking into the England team in 2008 with Martin Johnson in charge, international rugby  became a bumpy road when the boss was replaced at the end of 2011. Although he admits that being a ‘dickhead’ off the field – he was convicted of drink-driving – cost him Six Nations caps in 2012. 

The new coach was, however, a familiar face. “I was a bit surprised, because he’d kind of come a bit from nowhere,” says Danny of Stuart Lancaster’s appointment. “But me and Stuart had a really good relationship while I was playing for England under Martin Johnson, and he was kind of on the periphery.”

When he found himself back in the England camp, after winning the Premiership title in 2012 and being the driving force behind the Harlequins attack, he was behind both Ben Youngs and Lee Dickson. “If I believe in something I really struggle to stay quiet,” he admits. “And after one training session, I said to Stuart, ‘are you telling me these two are playing better than me? You can’t tell me that Dickson deserves to play ahead of me?’”

On that summer’s South Africa tour, England lost the first two tests, starting Youngs and with Dickson on the bench. “Then for the third test he goes ‘you’re going to play’, and I was, ‘right, I’ll show you’, it was a ‘fuck you’ type thing – and we went and drew [14-14], and we should have won too.”

He continued to battle Youngs for the shirt, but then also found himself behind Richard Wigglesworth by the time of  the 2015 Rugby World Cup. 

“My big kind of annoyance with that was that Wiggy was really good mates with Andy Farrell,” says Danny. “They were mates and went on holiday together, and I remember the first two selections for Fiji and Wales and he said, ‘Yeah, Faz wants to pick Wiggie’, and my response was, ‘who’s the head coach?’...”

It was another bump in the road for Danny and Lanny. And when his former Leeds coach left the England role Danny admits, “it was obviously tough to see but I think it had to happen. And then me and him didn’t speak.”

At least until a chance encounter a year later. “I was in Dubai, at this restaurant, and it was one of those hotel restaurants where you like get a gondola to the restaurant,” he recalls. “I remember looking over and thinking ‘that looks a lot like Lanny, that’ and it was. Stuart Lancaster and his wife were coming in on this gondola. He walked past but didn’t see me. And, bear in mind, a load of players had sold a lot of stories and said a lot of things, but I’d never said anything, and I was like, ‘right, I’m going to speak to him, I don’t need to have any bad blood with anyone,’ so I went to speak to him.

“We made friends again,” he says, summarising their chat. “I saw him not long ago when we were playing Leinster and we’re all right now, but it’s kind of a weird relationship we’ve had in the past.

“I am so chuffed that he’s doing so well now and showing at Leinster what a brilliant coach he is,” says Danny. “Because he always was a great coach, but I just think there’s a difference between being a great coach and then effectively being the manager of England.”

At club level, Harlequins struggled to find their feet without Conor O’Shea, when he left to become the Italy coach in 2016. They first chose the much-loved and respected John Kingston, but he was not the right man for the job. “I love John,” says Danny. “I still speak to him a lot now. Some of the stuff he knew about rugby was exceptional, some of the moves he came up with to spring defences, I think England were using him on the side to develop their lineout.  

“But being a DoR is a different job,” he says. “I was the captain at the time they made him DoR, and I’d been asked by the club to get a load of thoughts from the lads on what we needed. I did a load of work, getting their thoughts and I went back and said, ‘it can’t be anyone that’s already here; great coaches, but we need someone who’s done it before’. Someone like Conor – who’d obviously left big shoes to fill –  that can oversee it all. And then they came back and said, ‘John’s got the job’. I remember saying to David Ellis, the chief exec at the time, ‘I don’t think it’s going to work’.”

He knew when the time was up. “I think it was when John wasn’t John anymore, it was the same with Stuart when he wasn’t Stuart anymore... 

“I remember losing to London Irish, and the lads were done, they weren’t trying – and then Gussie [Paul Gustard] came in...”

Gustard seemed an inspired choice with a winning Saracens and England pedigree. “He’s a brilliant defence coach, great with England and I was delighted when he got the job because I thought, ‘right, he’s gonna be great’. 

“But again, I think because he wants to be the best coach in the world, I think he cared so much, he tried so hard, that he ended up thinking he had to do everything. He couldn’t trust other people to do stuff and I think, again, it got too much for him.”

There was also a conflict of playing styles. “I think he wanted us to play this way and it was very similar to Saracens,” he says. “As a club, we don’t really like Sarries, and we don’t really like the way they play, so it was always going to be a tough sell.

“We pushed back against him, we would offer our feedback and say ‘we think we need to play a bit more’ and it wasn’t really taken on board. 

“His way of doing things was work harder, more training, and we were all a bit like, ‘we need less’. And I think half of the squad switched off after about six months, because they were drained. 

“I genuinely tried a few times to say, ‘give us a bit of the burden, let us, as players, help you’, and because he was so determined to be a brilliant coach, so determined to make it work, he felt this was the way to do it. In the end it didn’t pay off. And then he goes as well.”

Danny had  gone from two brilliant DoRs in Richards and O’Shea, to great coaches unable to step up, but Gustard’s departure led to one of Premiership rugby’s greatest fairy tales. “Complete reset,” says Danny of the new era. “I remember the first meeting where Billy Maynard, the general manager, had got the senior players and coaches in, because there’s obviously a difference of opinion; some lads were happy Gussie had gone, some sad, so it was a really weird vibe. 

“They basically said to us, ‘right, what do you need? Players, what do you need?’ And we all thought, ‘well, this is new’, because normally you get asked, you ask for things, and then are told you can’t have them. 

“And the first thing was we had to change the way we play, we couldn’t play like that anymore. You can’t tell Marcus Smith what to do every minute; let him do his thing, let me play with him, let us run around. 

“We’ve also got to change training and training has got to be fun, we’ve got to enjoy each other’s company and have a good environment. We’ve got to take the piss out of each other and enjoy coming in to training every day.”

They changed the weekly routine which had including coming in on the Friday before a game to train. “It was fucking pointless,” says Danny. “We just said, ‘give us that day and then you get the boys coming in fresh and we’ll show you on the weekend what we can do.’”

Billy was in charge, with Nick Evans, as the most experienced coach, running the attack, Jerry [Flannery] the defence and Adam [Jones], scrum and contact stuff. “But it was also the players,” says Danny answering the question as to who was in charge. “We often said it was the lunatics running the asylum.”

Coffee and cake club on a Tuesday helped too, as did fish-and-chip-truck Wednesdays. “It forced the lads to sit down and chat to each other,” he says. “Just these two little things made the whole squad happy. And even though some twenty or so lads aren’t playing at the weekend, they’re enjoying training because it’s fun and it’s challenging and they feel like they can actually show what they can do.”

Less training time too, with the days of arriving at 7.30am and not getting home until 5.30pm made a thing of the past. “Gussie was used to England where they had shorter more intense periods together, but you can’t do that with a club side every week,” explains Danny.

And balls were thrown around, by everyone. “Forwards and backs.”

The change put Harlequins into the play-off spots in the spring of 2021, to such a level, that they were almost picking where they finished. A performance against Bristol where they’d lost late in the game, gave them the confidence that they knew how to beat them, so despite the dominance of the league leaders, they were their preferred semi-final opponents. Rather than risk facing Exeter, they rested players for the final league game against Sale, and lost 45-12. It was a decision that, when losing to the Bears in the semi-final, they seemed destined to regret. 

“When they were 28-0 up, I remember looking at Marler, and thinking ‘why the fuck didn’t we go to Sale?’ They were brilliant for twenty minutes,” he acknowledges, “it was Harlem Globetrotter stuff.

“But,” he adds, “they made one mistake at the end of the first half, and they came in laughing and joking and stuff, and we thought, ‘right we’ve got them’. A few of us just had this confidence. 

“They’d made a few errors and we thought, ‘score one try and they’ll start worrying, two and it’s game on, three we’re winning...’

“We’d backed ourselves up to this point, we’d thrown the ball around, we had no coach, the players were kind of running the whole club, so it was ‘let’s just go and do one more special thing’.”

And they did, winning 43-36 after extra time. Surely their day in the sun with the serial finalists Exeter Chiefs was coming next? “Then after we won, we were just like ‘fuck it, shall we just go and beat Exeter now and win the league?’.

“Stephan Lewies [Quins captain] asked me to speak to the team and I basically said it was us against everyone, nobody wants Quins to win the league, they don’t like Quins, and about how many times have we watched Saracens lift trophy after trophy? My whole motivation was wanting these lads to experience what I did in 2012, because it was the best experience I’d ever had.”

And they did, as Quins won the final, 40-38. “That became the best moment I’ve ever had on a pitch, because it was even better the second time because of the fact that I had my family there with me.

“I remember the morning of the game I jumped out of shower and me and Blake [his seven-year-old son] brushed our teeth together and I said, ‘do you think we’re gonna win today?’ And he was like, ‘ah, I don’t think so Dad, Exeter are really good, they’re better than you. But I really, really, really want you to win and bring the trophy home’. 

“I said, ‘I promise I’ll try my very best’ and when we did, I remember seeing his face in the crowd and I’ve never seen a happier face in my life. And then two days later I brought the trophy home and put it in his bedroom...”

Eddie Jones has influenced many during his time with England and Danny is no different, although, the 84-cap scrum-half was unsure of his future when the Australian succeeded Lancaster.  “When I heard it was going to be Eddie, I was like, ‘shit’,” he admits. “The last time I’d seen him I’d told him I was pretty much going to sign for him and then didn’t. I presumed he’d think I was a twat like most people do.”

A conversation with an agent confirmed he was in the clear: “don’t worry, he likes you”, Danny was told.

Danny can think of few, if any, rugby brains as brilliant as Eddie’s. “He predicts what’s going to happen in rugby a year before it happens,” he says. “I’ve never seen a man more diligent and his knowledge is exceptional.

“He said to me and Youngsy, “right you two are my nines, I’m not bringing anyone else into the squad. You two run it, and whoever is playing best, plays. I want you to play it quick, control the game, but with high tempo.’ Me and Youngsy were like, ‘this is awesome’. He picked me for the first game [of the Six Nations], then he picked Youngsy for the next three, and then for the France game, he called me into his office. I thought, ‘this can’t be good.’ I’d been on the bench, and he said, ‘you’re starting this week, this is your game’. 

“Normally if you sit on the bench for three weeks, that’s it, but he wasn’t afraid to make a big call. He said, ‘there’s going to be some gaps for you and I want you to explore their lazy defenders.’

“I was nervous because I was like, ‘fuck, we’ve just won four in a row, this is our chance to win a first Grand Slam in however many years. And so many of us had really badly missed out. Just before we got to go out – and he always used to do this, give you a little nugget – he said to me, ‘mate just look for their lazy defenders on the blind side, you can have a go at one of them’. 

“Lo and behold, twelve minutes in, there was a little lazy defender, out on my periphery and I go through, handing off, and run fifteen metres untouched in the Stade de France with a big dive to score the opening try.  

“Eddie gave me that great moment. I’d like think I’d have seen it, but that’s why he’s such a good coach, he just puts something in your head that might happen and then you kind of go for it. And that was my greatest moment in an England shirt without doubt.”

The rivalry with Youngs has almost defined his England career. “We’ve always been great,” he says. “I’ve always known how good he was. I remember I used to play with Tom Youngs his older brother in the u16s and he always used to say ‘I’ve got a little brother who’s a scrum-half and he’s pretty good’. 

“I remember saying, ‘yeah whatever mate’,” laughs Danny. “I’ve always really rated him and when he scored that try against Australia – when I’d been the only person to drop from test one to test two – I remember looking around and Richard Wigglesworth was in the crowd and we both went, ‘fuck, yeah, we’re done here’.

“And with Youngsy,” he continues, “it was a combination that worked well, especially on that eighteen-game streak. Everything was rosy for three years.”

It stopped being rosy in the autumn series of 2018. Ahead of Japan, Youngs had been given a week’s fitness training to get match sharp, with Wigglesworth coming in, leaving Danny to start. “I scored a try in the first couple of minutes, then tweaked my hammy, but I was like, ‘there’s no way I’m going off’. I’d not started for ages, so I was playing on.

“Hindsight is a wonderful, wonderful thing,” he adds. “I do often sit at home and wonder if I’d have gone off then, would I have played a lot more times for England? I don’t know. 

“I played on, didn’t have the greatest game, made a couple of mistakes,” he continues. “But it is a tough ask against teams like Japan, when you’re expected to beat them by 50, which never happens, it’s their World Cup final. We made a load of changes, we ended up winning by 20 points. 

“Wiggy had come on for the last twenty. I remember we got a couple of days off and they sent us home. I went home and got got a voicemail after I put one of my kids to bed, saying, ‘we don’t need you this week, didn’t think you were sharp enough’.” The message, from Eddie, was about four seconds long, and that was the end of Danny’s England career. 

“I had to move my stuff out of the hotel, and rang Eddie to see if we could have a chat.” Danny went to his office, and put his side across, feeling he didn’t do that badly, so should he go from first to third choice? “It wasn’t a great meeting,” he admits. “I walked out of it, rang my missus, and said ‘that’s me done’. Because anyone that’s ever really had that reaction from him, hasn’t got back in. 

“It’s not that we’ve had a big argument,” he reflects. “I’ve just said I’m annoyed and upset that I’m not played. Hopefully, I thought, you know, it’d be alright. And then, obviously, it wasn’t.”

Japan was his 84th and, as far as we know, final cap. But the impact was felt by Danny for long after, including up to the 2019 World Cup final. “I watched every game [of the Rugby World Cup] apart from the final,” he admits. “I couldn’t watch it, so I went trampolining with my kids, I just couldn’t bring myself to watch it. 

“Did I want England to win the World Cup? I wanted some of the lads to win it. Did I want Eddie to win it? Probably not. And that probably sounds selfish, but it was that feeling that I felt I deserved a chance to try and win the World Cup. 

“I’d done three of the four years, plus what I’d done ten years previous to build up to that, and that was taken away from me. And yeah, people will say ‘well, you didn’t deserve it because you weren’t playing well enough’, and that’s fine. But yeah, it was hard to watch. And my wife was due to give birth in two days’ time [to daughter Koha] as well, so we had quite a lot of stuff going on, which was probably a good thing.

“If they’d won and got MBEs, it would’ve broken me,” he admits, half-laughing. “It took me a while, probably over the last year [to get over it], but I don’t care anymore, I’m just happy to be playing for Quins, it’s a great environment. 

“I’m very lucky at home, and I still feel I could’ve played more for England, but I got 84 caps and I’m lucky to have got that. I’d have liked to have won 100 caps, so few players get to do that. I still feel I could help, but they’ve moved on.”

Even with Eddie, he says, “we’re cool now. He has provided me with some of my greatest moments in an England shirt, so I’m grateful for that. But, yeah, it’s a weird relationship, but we’re cool now.

“I still send him the odd text saying, ‘I’ve still got it, if you need me...’”

We’ve been talking to Danny for almost three hours. He’s honest, affable, funny, confident and wary of sounding arrogant, always highlighting where he’s concerned he may have come across that way. But, he has self-belief, and it’s justified. A trait that’s shared by his halfback partner. “The self-belief Marcus has,” says Danny. “He’s right up there [with the best], he’s got something in him that I haven’t seen in another fly-half. When he does his little goose step and his hitch kick, I’ve never seen a fly-half do that apart from Quade Cooper, and I think Marcus is faster than him.

“I’m very lucky to have played with the likes of Nick Evans, Mehrtens, Jonny Wilkinson, Charlie Hodgson, but for me Marcus has that X-factor. The others are brilliant, Jonny is the GOAT, but Marcus can do stuff that Jonny couldn’t do. Which is mad when you say it like that. 

“But also we won that final because of his kicking at a clutch moment, he nailed it every time. So yeah, I think for him, the world is his oyster.”

He rates his new boss, Tabai Matson, too. “Tabs is great,” he says. “And it’s the little things he does too. Like at a gym session and he’ll come in for an hour wearing this big tackle suit and stand next to the big mat and say ‘anyone want to practise their tackling? Come and tackle me’.

“He’ll probably get hit 50/60 times each session. But he’s doing it to help the lads with their tackle prep, dropping their tackle, getting their technique right. 

“It’s fine when it’s the backs hitting him – apart from [Andre] Esterhuizen, the 17st back – but when it’s a forward session and Wilko, Marler, Dombrandt are tackling him, I’m like ‘what you doing?’ ‘Ah it’s for the boys,’ he says. He’s literally putting his body on the line to get them that extra one per cent.”

Danny’s nature – despite what rivals might think, especially when talking about a nine – also makes him incredibly likeable, something he’s hoping to put to good use in his post-rugby life. “I’ve just done a show on Monday, it’s about musicals,” he explains, as our conversation finally draws to a close. “They took six of us from different walks of life – some actors, actresses, and me – and we learned a musical song and performance. 

“I did a Greatest Showman song, I loved it,” he says. “I kept it really quiet from the lads, I didn’t tell any of them that I was doing it, until I actually performed it. But I think it went alright, I think that’s going to be out in the new year but it was awesome to do something completely out of my comfort zone.”

To prepare, Danny spent a month practising singing in front of people, taking vocal lessons and choreography. “I was petrified at first,” he says. “Then I learned the song and I got kind of comfortable and I was like, ‘okay, I actually really want to do this now’. And then I got to it and I’ve never been more scared in my life. 

“On a stage with people in the audience, filmed as live, cameras everywhere, with judges and it was, ‘yeah, go and sing and dance’. I just thought, ‘what am I doing?’ But I got a great buzz from it and I’m really proud I did it. To get an opportunity to go and sing in a musical was pretty cool.

“My big dream is to host a TV game show,” he admits. “I’d love to do that, that’s the pipe dream.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Philip Haynes

This extract was taken from issue 16 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.