Dave Attwood

He was supposed to be the epitome of a Bath man, finishing his rugby days in the club less than a mile from his home. But as he called bingo numbers in a town hall in France, helping an old lady win a telly, Dave Attwood knew things hadn’t quite gone to plan.

Patrick puts on his dad’s scrum cap, picks up a size five Bristol Bears ball, and declares that he supports ‘the whites’. His next move is to find out who the man is that’s just walked into his house to talk to his daddy. After giving the necessary details, he mulls them over for a split second, before giving his measured response. “There’s a boy called Alex in my class – that’s the same as you,” he informs us. “There’s two Alexes and two Nathans too – one big boy Nathan, and one really big boy Nathan.”

Names checked and approved, the three-year-old interrogate then follows his dad’s suggestion and sits down to watch Rescue Riders. “We’re just coming out of the Paw Patrol phase now,” explains his dad, also known as Dave Attwood. “Rugby is an incredibly convenient employment avenue for childcare,” he continues. “It’s a short day, you’re often finished by 2-3 o’clock, so you can do school pick-ups and drop-offs.

“But most weekends are a write-off, half of the time you’re away, and the ones that are at home are quite high intensity, so you can’t really look after children on game day, and you need to get a good night’s sleep the night before.”

Not that his children don’t get to games. “Jess loves the crowd,” he says, “we got her out on the Rec pitch a few times and she was always waving to people, having a great time, Patrick was a bit timid. They’ve both done it a lot now though, they’ve been to Twickenham too, and not just in the crowd but on the pitch and that crowd feels a lot more oppressive when you’re pitchside  than when you’re in it.

“Jess now is old enough that she can sit through most of a rugby game without losing interest,” he continues, “they don’t get the rules, but then most adults don’t understand the rules. 

“Patrick wants to support the ‘white’ team, and the Bears thing is quite convenient, it’s a lot easier to relate to the Bears than Bath.”

Our interview at the home of the former Bath, Gloucester and now Bristol Bears lock, is sandwiched between the end of Patrick’s nursery and before the school pick-up of older sister Jess (aged four). “If you’re with someone who works five days, nine to six, that works quite well,” continues Dave, “rugby is also quite a short career, and with people having kids early-30s these days, that’s also about the time when you’re pretty much done, and hopefully any success you’ve had can afford you some time to be around and present.”

Still living in Bath, the city he’s called home for the past eight years, it would be easy to think he’s nicely settled. Which he is, on many fronts. He’s just signed for the club he supported as a boy, he’s about to begin a degree that will set him up for life after rugby, and both Patrick and Jess seem be smashing it on the being-lovely-little-people front.

Yet he’s actually just coming out of the most tumultuous two-year-period of his life. A period that involved injuries that wouldn’t go away; saw his England career halted, just as it had properly got started; faced doubts over his future and suffered a loss of faith in the club he loved and some people he trusted. He moved country, he moved back again, he left Bath, he came back, he left again. And, worst of all, it all put strain on the two things he values most, family and friendship.

The actual story begins to unfold, more than two years ago, just before he earned his 24th Test cap for England against South Africa, in November 2016. “The essence of it, is that people aren’t designed to be as big as I am,” he says. “So, after a while, the cartilage in your knee wears away. 

“I’d had an intense week of training with England and Eddie Jones out in Portugal – a particular rough training week, lot of volume in there, and hard ground – and my knee blew up with inflammation.

“I went to see the doctor and physio, and they said, ‘well we’ll drain it, you might have done something, so they take a lot of fluid out, they put a steroid anti-inflammatory  in there, and the next day it was the same size again. 

“I played against South Africa that weekend [coming on as a 70th minute replacement for Billy Vunipola] and, after that, there was more fluid so they said I should get it scanned and checked out, and duly did that.”

He got the scan and was told there were some areas of degeneration, but “nothing abnormal for someone my age and size,” continues Dave. “They said it was actually surprising there’s that much fluid because there doesn’t seem to be much damage.” 

On top of that, he wasn’t experiencing any pain or discomfort. “There was no need to go in and have any major surgery, so they were just trying to get the fluids out of it, and we went through a long period of trying different avenues to reduce inflammation – some of that was drug related, and I also bought one of these game-ready ice machines. For a year and a half, every day I’d spend an hour and half compressing and cooling my knee.”

No longer playing rugby – aside from the odd game or two – he had a clear out of the knee in the summer of 2017. “It was just to flush out any bits of debris or torn cartilage that might have been causing irritation – it was just very minor.”

Beyond that, the next step would’ve been major surgery, specifically microfracture surgery which involves creating tiny little fractures in the underlying bone to stimulate new cartilage growth. “They do it quite a lot with basketball players,” explains Dave, “but it’s quite undocumented. The thing was I didn’t really have any issues running around, so why have major surgery – even the surgeon couldn’t really say if it was worth doing. So the decision was made to just rehab and get back to playing.”

The best part of a year had now passed since the South Africa Test. “I essentially started the season two months late and then I was back into training, available for selection. 

“The first game was Newcastle away [September] and the decision was made not to pick me. The conversation was, well, it’s a rubber crumb pitch maybe it’s not the best first game back given the type of injury I’ve got. 

“Then a couple of European games, and I wasn’t registered for Europe as I’d missed the start of the season, so that was no surprise, but then it was Gloucester home [now in October] and I’m not picked, and I was like ‘what’s going on here?’ I’d been back training for a month. 

“Rather riled I’d gone to see Todd Blackadder, and, essentially, what it boiled down to was that he’s under the impression he can’t select me for Bath. We’d had a number of injuries and had to bring a number of people in and the way it works with the salary cap, is that you’re not included in it until you play for the team, and I’d started the season  injured.”

Effectively, as Dave saw it, they couldn’t afford space within the cap. “They professed that if my knee was okay, they’d get me back involved. I was a first-choice second row and they wanted me back, so they said, ‘how about you go on loan to London Scottish for a couple of weeks and if you prove your fitness we’ll get you back in.”

The lack of clarity over his situation, whether or not he could or couldn’t be picked began to have an impact on Dave. “None of this had been communicated to me, I just thought I’d be able to get selected, so it felt slightly underhand,” he says, “it soiled my relationship with the club a little bit. 

“On a personal level, I feel like rugby is about people and relationships, and to run a rugby club properly, that needs to be first and foremost. 

“Business is important I understand that, but to me this felt like a business decision without much consideration of the person, and that’s kind of a theme with how things have gone over the last few years.”

Either way, the loan move was still on the table. “At first it was whether or not they’d sell me to another team, and then buy me back, because if you bring in a new player, their salary counts pro-rata, so it’s half a year, and, in theory, they could’ve accommodated that. “I had this bee in my bonnet because if I agreed to go on loan, the club needed to agree to bring me back. Potentially, what happens here, in a cynic’s world, is that I agree to go on loan and Bath don’t agree to bring me back, so I spend the rest of the season at London Scottish. 

“Bear in mind the last proper rugby game I played was against South Africa, so I felt this was ludicrous. I’m an international second row in the prime of my career, and I was being sent to play in the Championship for the rest of the season.”

Not convinced by the prospect of time in the Championship, he started to explore other avenues. “We ended up talking about going to America, because Gary Gold [head coach of USA] had been a good friend since he’d been DoR here.

“While that would not be of benefit to my rugby, it might be a life experience – I was trying to see some silver lining. Todd was also looking at some links down in New Zealand, but nothing seemed to come to fruition.”

Disillusioned with his situation, Dave had even contemplated leaving the club empty-handed. “I’d written out a letter of resignation,” he admits. “I’m a good rugby player, but I’ve got a wife, kids, mortgage, and what I’m doing here is rendering myself unemployed with immediate effect, it wasn’t an easy thing to do, but it was a really stressful time.

“I was driving into the club to hand this in, when I got a phone call asking how I felt about going to Toulon? I said, ‘I’ll be honest, slightly better than I felt about going to London Scottish’. ‘They need to do a medical on you’. ‘When’s that?’ ‘Tomorrow’. So I packed a bag, flew out, had a medical, met a load of people including Fabien Galthié, and then flew home again that night. The following day I flew back to Toulon and we drove up the alps to go skiing for the week.”

He’d arrived in time for a week of team-bonding.  “It was amazing,” he says. “I turned up and I roomed with Bryan Habana.

“I’d literally grown up watching these guys – Vermuelen, Bastareaud, this was Toulon, the Galacticos. I had a full head meltdown. 

“I’d not been skiing before and neither had Bryan, so me and Bryan were doing a ski lesson together, and I was very much, ‘this is so clean-off, this is so far removed from anything that would ever happen in the Premiership’. 

“One of the guys went tobogganing and flew into a tree and split his eye open, but aside from that there were no dramas or injuries. It seemed like a very grown-up way to treat people, it was, ‘we’re going to do this, if we get injuries there might be some problems, but we’ll give you some rope and see what you do with it’.

“That was my impression of France in general really,” continues Dave, “because as soon as you tell people you’re in France, especially Toulon, they’re like, ‘oh my God, chaos and carnage’. And there is a degree of that, they’ve got all sorts of crazy going on, but it is what you make of it. 

“Toulon have such a pedigree of players over there and Bakkies Botha is not going to ask, ‘what shall I do in the gym today?’ – he knows what he’s got to do in the gym. Jonny Wilkinson knows what he’s got to do. 

“So when people are like, ‘oh the S&C is terrible, the physio is terrible’, it’s not at all, they’ve got very good, very competent people and facilities, but they won’t spoon-feed  you. 

“If you need physio, rehab, treatment, it’s all available, but you’ve got to come in and ask for it. In the Premiership, if you’re injured you get a return-to-play schedule, and it’s 7am, you’re here, 8am you do this, 9am do this, 10am go here, 11am go there… 

“Out there, you’ve got the team schedule, which says meeting here, training here, meeting here, and that’s it. Anything else you want, you sort out. 

“It’s all there, but it requires you to be a bit of a grown-up about it.”

Toulon reinvigorated Dave. “I loved it,” he says. “I got out there, they needed a second row, and I did what they needed me to do, I played every week. 

“I loved the way they played rugby, the lifestyle they lead, the passion. Don’t get me wrong, some of it is crazy, and you’d listen to team talks in French and it would be about releasing your inner-child and use all this beautifully emotive language.”

Did you speak French? “I spoke a little bit at school, and I went out there on my own, so when we finished training, I’d go off to a little seaside town, or a little vineyard somewhere, and sit down for dinner, and I’d start talking to the waiter in French. 

“I’d have to fight to speak French though, because so many French people speak immaculate English and they’re proud of it, so I’d go into a place and say ‘bon soir’ and they say, ‘hello sir, how was your day?’.”

Not content with ordering steak-frites, he also got in on the local community action. “I got asked to do a club appearance at a bingo hall,” he says. “No club representative came with me, so I was on my own, and it was a local rugby club charity day and there were loads of young kids, loads of old people, trestle tables as far as you can see, and they wanted me to call the numbers for bingo.

“I’d only been there for three weeks and I was calling bingo numbers in French and some old lady has just won a TV, it was so bizarre.”

He also saw the spontaneous nature of owner Mourad Boudjellal. “We were playing Grenoble and I’d hurt my shoulder so was missing the game,” explains Dave. “But the salary expenditure was so different to Grenoble, that they sent pretty much a second team because they just thought they were going to walk it. 

“They flew up to Grenoble, lost the game and Mourad cancelled the flight back. ‘You need to understand,’ he said, ‘that it’s not acceptable you lost this game, so you have to find your own way back, you can see what it’s like to live in Grenoble if you want, go and join the local club’.

“To be honest, I kind of sympathise  with the owner,” admits Dave, “there were guys getting paid a fortune that just didn’t turn up. 

“In the end the team manager organised a flight but I think ultimately he lost his job over it – that tore a bit of a rift between him and the owner. Ironically Fabien Galthie wasn’t at the game either – he was commentating on the French international in Paris, which was another bone of contention.”

That year Toulon reached the quarter-finals in the Champions Cup, and the semi-final qualifiers in the Top 14. “That was their worst performance in the last ten years, so they sacked the coach, the manager, they sacked a load of people,” says Dave, “that speaks volumes about that club, that it was so bad, and they only got to the last eight.

“I was devastated because at one point I thought I might come to Toulon, do six months, and come back with two winners’ medals.”

There was no silverware in Toulon, but plenty of value. “I was an institutional man,” explains Dave, “I wanted to be a lifer at Bath, get to ten years, have my testimonial, but being forced out to Toulon made me realise ‘well, actually there are other avenues and there is other stuff going on in life’. 

“When my time in Toulon was drawing to an end, I went to see Bruce to talk about what my options are. He’s got a house in the south of France, so I’ve driven to his house out there and sat down with him, and explained the situation and tried to come to an agreement. And, for a raft of politics, it’s not come to fruition. 

“Essentially he said, ‘you can’t leave, you’ve got a contract’, and I said, ‘I appreciate that but, you know as well as I do that you can get out of a contract if you pay a price for it’.

“He gave me permission to talk to teams in France, I had a conversation with a variety of teams, and it got the stage where I drove a removal van from Toulon back to Bath in order to drive a full removal van back – I thought I was going to be in Toulon for a considerable amount of time.”

Toulon had done so much for him. Like Wilkinson before him, he’d found the climate to have healing properties. “I had no swelling in my knee in France,” says Dave, “maybe the hot weather dried it up.

“The rugby I was playing in Toulon was the best I’ve played,” he continues. “Part of that was the unstructured free nature of it. The Premiership is a difficult beast to tame and you play percentages, you do things the way they’re supposed to be done. 

“Players have an amazing first season or two in the Premiership, then they become Premiership-ised, and start playing a little bit more percentages, which makes it less of a spectacle but more efficient.

“In the Premiership you cannot escape the feeling of pressure – the results are so tight, the teams are so close and friends of yours will lose jobs if you lose games. if you’re a big name they’ll never sack you, but they will sack friends of yours because you haven’t done well. 

“That pressure weighs on you quite a lot, so it’s quite hard to play with frivolity and excitement, and real lucid ambition to spread the ball around. But in France, it’s very different, the way they  coach and play are a lot freer.”

Despite his hopes, the removal van didn’t make the return journey to Toulon, at least not with Dave at the wheel, as he was told to return to Bath. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to play with all my mates,” he says. “And I really respected Todd and the coaches, but, by the same token, it was definitely contrary to what I had in my head.

Returning to Bath, he began what would be his last campaign for the club. “I continued the vein of form from Toulon, it was some of the best rugby I’d played,” he says. “So it came as a bit of a surprise in December when they told me I wasn’t having my contract renewed. Although usually if they want to keep you, they tell you a lot before that, but I had the conversation, and they said they don’t think it’s going to work. 

“It seemed slightly more business than people.”

With no shortage of takers for his services, Dave went full circle in his rugby career, by agreeing to join Bristol, the club with he first made his mark. “I was playing well, clubs wanted to talk to me,” he says. “And meeting with Pat Lam and Steve Lansdown – God it was a full sea change, such a different environment. 

“My time in Toulon made me realise there’s more out there, so I’d been looking at life after rugby, and I wanted to study law.

“One of the ways the salary cap works, is that if you fund education for life after rugby, then that fits outside the cap, so Bristol were supportive of that and I talked to Pat about having necessary time away from club for lectures.”

Talk about signing for Bristol, prompts nostalgia about when he first signed for them – as a teenager still at university. He’d been on the club’s radar as a 17-year-old, but had been told he wasn’t quite good enough. A year of senior rugby at Dings Crusaders later, coupled with the good fortune of having a university coach who was also academy manager at Bristol, and the club took a second look. “I sat down with Colin Palmer, to negotiate the salary and I was like a child. He said, ‘what do you think you’re worth?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know’. ‘Well what do you want?’ Well, I’m at a good university, if I came out of it with a good degree, I could walk into a job at £20,000’. And he had this pile of contacts in front of him and he took the one just second down from the top, and I was ‘nooo, what have I done?’ I’ve still no idea how much I could’ve got that day, but it taught me a life lesson.”

The memory sparks another line of thought. “One of the issues in rugby, compared to American football,” begins Dave, “is that everyone has a ballpark idea of what everyone is earning, but the actual figures are all quite hidden, which makes it all a little cloak and dagger. It’s also an uncomfortable conversation to have with the guys either side of you.”

So you don’t talk about wages? “Not really,” admits Dave. “People have ideas, but there’s always this element of not wanting to be the minnow among your mates, so if you talk to some of your friends and they’re like ‘oh I really struggled to get £400,000’ and you’re, like, ‘I’m on £60,000’, it would get a bit awkward. 

“The fact it’s not public means some people get great deals and some people get terrible ones, but often they don’t know either way. I really think a lot of the mental anguish and emotional turmoil would actually dissipate quite a lot if that was more public. 

“I’m not sure how it would work, but having spoken to some American football guys there’s less stress because they understand the metrics of what salary they’re on – there’s less conflict because it’s black and white, you only get conflict when there’s shades of grey.”

His last stint at Bristol had ended with relegation in 2009, when he chose to join Gloucester. “It was the right decision at the time,” he says. “I wouldn’t have had the career I had if I’d stayed. That was a lesson for me, it taught me how this game is professional. 

“I’d grown up supporting Bristol and the sentimental thing would’ve been to stay after relegation, but this is a professional industry. I’m a commodity and if I breakdown Bristol aren’t going to stay with me because I stuck with them, and that’s the same across the board. The fans understood, there was some talk of ‘going to the enemy’, but when you had a conversation face-to-face, they understood.” 

At Gloucester he was capped by England in 2010, but the uncertainty at the club following the death of owner Tom Walkinshaw that same year, meant he decided to switch clubs the following season. “The year I was leaving, we had Freddie Burns, Jonny May, Olly Morgan, Henry Trinder, Charlie Sharples – just an amazing backline. And some really promising players in the pack as well. We had the makings of something special but there was real turmoil when Tom Walkinshaw passed away as they weren’t sure who was going to be in charge of the finances.”

He moved to Bath, where he’d spend eight seasons.

Patrick comes into the room, announces he needs to wee, and disappears again. Conscious that it’s getting close to pick-up time, we finish off a few loose ends.

First, the law degree. “I’d like to be a barrister,” he explains. “It seems like something that’s morally sensible, and it’s all about relationships with people, which is also what rugby is all about.

“You don’t really get any dickheads in rugby, because they get weeded out, you rely on relationships so much that people who cause friction and don’t work, they get pushed to one side.

“It’s very kind of cyclical like rugby. So you’re preparing for a performance on the weekend, then you have your performance, then you prepare for a new one. It’s always the same kind of performance but there’s nuances. This week it’s London Irish, next week it’s Gloucester, this week I’m defending an assault victim, the next week I’m prosecuting someone who stole a car. It’s the same kind of thing, you build up to something, do it, then park it.”

So it’s criminal law? “Criminal law is poorly paid, but I would like that to be some of my portfolio and then for that to be extended out, maybe intellectual property, contracts…”

The qualification is far from simple. First, he has a two-year law conversion degree, then two years of barrister training, then, finally, a year barrister pupillage. “There’s like 400 opportunities for pupillage, and something like 5,000 people with a barrister qualification each year, so it’s actually a very slim chance that I’d get to become and practise as a barrister,” he admits. “But it’s something I’m interested in and want to pursue, and you can’t pursue something thinking it’s not going to happen. If it works out, brilliant, if it doesn’t then I’ll use what I’ve learnt for something else.” 

With Bristol, he has big ambitions. He has, he reckons, joined a side “still high on last year and what they did”. But he’s joined them hoping to achieve more than safety. “I want to play for a top team in Europe, playing the big teams in big stadiums,” he says. “I want to win the Premiership too. They’re the big things for me. There’s a building process before that, but never say never.

“I don’t feel my career is over by a long way and I want to achieve significant things at Bristol. If I get involved back with England, great, but if don’t, I won’t feel like I’ve left anything unturned.”  

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 8 of Rugby.
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