Estonia

In Estonia, just south of Finland, next door to Russia, Rugby World Cup winner Graham Smith ponders thirty years of coaching. For a slaughterman who almost had to literally fight off the bailiffs, the Black Country boy has done well.

It’s impossible to know where to begin with Graham Smith. The abattoir? The doorman days? When he was on the dole? Or maybe when the bailiffs arrived on his doorstep? That’s before you even get to a rugby career that saw him earn everything but a full international cap as a prop for Moseley, earn his coaching spurs with Glen Ella at Stourbridge and then win a Rugby World Cup as a coach. 

So, we begin with Gladiators. Not a metaphor for the warriors he coached, but the actual 1990s ITV show where muscled men and women tried to beat members of the public to a pulp with giant ear buds or throw them off giant soft-play pyramids. This was peak Gladiators too: audiences of fourteen million; John Fashanu and Ulrika Jonsson; Wolf, Nightshade, and Graham Smith, prop, a Midlands rugby development officer. “My first experience of coaching women wasn’t in rugby, it was Gladiators,” explains Graham, when we talk from his current home-from-home in Estonia. “I was working at the Birmingham Sports Centre and we had a communal office, and there was soccer, basketball, hockey – Denise Lewis was one of the admin staff in there. 

“Robin Simpson was the athletics development manager and he was married to Judy Simpson, who was Judy Livermore, the [three-time-Olympic] heptathlete, who was Nightshade.”

Among the games Nightshade had to compete in was Powerball, where contenders had to put balls into cylinders while trying to avoid the attentions of the Gladiators. “It was essentially a tackling exercise,” he says. “And she hurt her neck doing it in the first series, so Robin asked if I’d do a bit of coaching with Judy and give her some tips on tackling.”

Armed with tackle bags, Graham took Nightshade to the dojo in the sports centre, and the sessions worked well. “I got a phone call from a guy called Nigel Lythgoe, who ended up as the producer on Pop Idol, and he said ‘Look, Judy is really impressed with your work, would you come and do some work with the all the girls?’.”

Now coaching Jet, Lightning, et al, it wasn’t long before the men took notice. “All these girls were doing well, and then, Christ what’s his name?” explains Graham. “Great, big hulking bloke, can’t remember his name…”

Wolf? Cobra? Saracen? “Anyway,” continues Graham, unable to recall the Gladiator. “he said, we don’t need your help, I used to play rugby for England schools.”

Needless to say, he hadn’t, but even so his colleagues weren’t quite so dismissive of Graham’s usefulness. “Hunter came up to me and said, “I might be a big guy, but all this hitting people stuff, could you give me some tips?’.”

And so, with Lythgoe’s permission, Graham then began to coach any Gladiators that needed his help. 

Perhaps only Graham Smith could be a contact guru to real-life people of superhero proportions. Born in the Black Country, and while Burntwood – near Lichfield – is where home [and wife Karen] is, much of his time is spent Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where he works for the country’s only fifteens club and is director of rugby at the national union. It’s a role he’s held for eighteen months, following on from a previous role coaching club rugby in Barcelona, which was ended due to the financial strains of the pandemic. “They reckon they had a mild winter last year,” he says. “And we got down to -20, and it was snow and ice on the ground from mid-November to April.

“I personally believe in global warming,” he continues, “but it reminded me of winters when I was a kid, growing up in the 60s and 70s in Wolverhampton, and we had winters like that regularly. Maybe not as cold, maybe not as much snow, but certainly, the longevity of it was there.”

It’s four degrees as we talk, so positively balmy. “Tallinn doesn’t get the worst of the weather because it’s right on the Baltic,” he says, disproving the phrase of colder things being ‘Baltic’, “The Baltic keeps the temperature up slightly, you’ve got that coastal warmth. But if you go north, that’s where you get your eighteen inches of snow in 24 hours.”

He’s also got the darkness to look forward to. “In the winter, the sun in Estonia gets about ten feet off the ground, and the light’s not too bad now, but as we get deeper into the winter, I think we’ll get about four to six hours a day of sun.”

The northern most peak of the European mainland before the curve of the Scandinavia peninsular begins, Estonia is bordered by Russia [which it was part of until the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union] to the east, with Finland to the north [across the Baltic]; and Latvia to the south. Germany and Sweden have also ruled here, but don’t ever compare Estonians to their most recent overlords. “If you mentioned Estonia was like Russia, they’d kill you,” says Graham. “Because it was communist for a long time and because Russia have invaded twice, the last time they were kicked out was 1991, there is a lot of Russian influence in terms of the architecture. 

“The Estonians are very, very reserved people because, from that time, if you spoke out you got shot,” he continues. “But historically the Estonians are Vikings, they’re Scandinavian, they’re Northern European. 

“The fact that it’s on the Russian border is just geography,” explains Graham, “if you go around the Old Town in Tallinn, it feels very Scandinavian, they’ve got a similar culture.”

Russia’s influence did however impact on the culture in one way. “The only way they could rebel in the communist era was to have the singing festivals,” says Graham. “If I could get the rugby players to go to rugby with the passion they show at singing festivals, we’d be number one.”

Instead, they don’t even chart. Estonia’s last dalliance with international rugby came over a decade ago. “I think they got promoted into the second or third tier of fifteens for Rugby Europe and then they dropped out completely,” he says. “They played their first international at fifteens in 2010 and played their last fifteens in 2019.”

Covid put paid to rugby here, but it’s more than that. He starts by talking generally about rugby. “People have lost the habit of coaching,” he says. “People went to training to get out the house, that was their break, their hobby and playing on a Saturday was almost a religion, their church. 

“If you speak to my wife, she’ll tell you I’m the most selfish person in the world,” he says, acknowledging how Saturdays, or weekends, have always been rugby for him. “But the difference for me is that, for the last thirty years, I’ve been paid to be a professional coach. So, there’s been some recompense. 

“But I’ve still been selfish within that to achieve what I’ve achieved,” he continues. “Here, in Estonia, the habit was lost in Estonia of going out, and families have got used to people being in [due to Covid], so when restrictions were lifted and the rugby started again in 2022, families were saying, ‘where you going?’.”

It wasn’t many families either. Graham was first brought over to coach Estonia’s only fifteens rugby club, RFC Tallinn Kalev, and across the country there were only twenty registered men and five women. His side play in the top division of the Finnish league and he was lucky to have a small playing resource in the ten thousand or so NATO troops based at the Tapa Army Base an hour east of the capital. “I’ll be forever grateful for those players in my first game, as about eight to ten of them played for us, and paid to register in the Finland league too,” he says. “And for me, it was interesting because there were a lot of Fijians and coaching Fijians is a completely different skill set.”

The side started to win, and Graham began to get noticed at international level – where Estonia were attempting to gain a foothold in the sevens. “After being here for a week, I was asked to go to Serbia with the women’s sevens team. I asked, ‘right, what’s the situation? How many times have you been training? How many players?’. 

“And basically, this was the first-ever attempt of Estonia to put a women’s team together. We travelled with eleven players after about five training sessions.”

They lost their games, but were at least the only side to score against eventual champions Austria, albeit in a 44-5 defeat. “The goal of the trip was to get Estonian women playing in an international shirt for the first time, and so we became the 148th international women’s team to play rugby union.”

Next, he was called to manage the men’s sevens in Malta. They lost, 51-7, but the role had truly begun. He now works across all aspect of the Estonian game. “It’s men, women, sevens, fifteens, coach development, player development, schools, union universities – it’s like the old YDO [youth development office] job back in the day,” he says. “Which is a role absolutely, truly missed by the RFU by the way,” he adds, referencing England’s 2020 decision to make every RDO [rugby development office] and CRC [community rugby coach] role redundant. “But I won’t go into that…”

What he does go into is quite the backstory, which begins in an abattoir. “I was a slaughterman,” he says. “I had a licence to kill, that was my early work. How can I put it? In the modern world, it would be seen as a lot of bullying. In my world, it was character building. You’ve got a lot of big men with sharp knives. 

“I worked in a traditional abattoir,” he continues. “It was cattle, sheep, and pigs, extremely physical work. I’ve been training in the gym since I was eighteen, but a lot of my physical strength, and my aggression came from the job. Because you know, the lifting you have to do is sometimes immense, and managing the livestock when they come in as well, it’s challenging.”

Graham learnt the entire process from livestock to shop, from shepherding them in to stun gun to butchers block. He stayed for five years. “I didn’t think I was getting what I deserved, which was a stupid thing to do, so I left without a job.”

He’s also had stints as a greenkeeper, a jobbing foreman – “it meant having a little bit more responsibility than a labourer” – and also on the dole, which ironically was when he first started coaching. “I was out of work for nearly two years, unemployed on the dole, and I started doing a little bit of coaching at a technical college in Wolverhampton.”

His wife Karen worked, and they had two young kids so “claimed whatever we could claim,” and they made it through.

Ironically, at the toughest of times his own rugby playing career was peaking, earning a Scotland B cap the year after signing on. “I’d played for England at under 23s,” says Graham, who was then playing at Moseley, having started playing at Wolverhampton. “But the regulations between how you could change from one country to another were different, although I have genuine Scottish connections, my family are from Dumfries.”

At school, he’d been a goalkeeper, at 6ft 1in, even catching the eye of Wolverhampton Wanderers, until at sixteen he was told by then manager Sammy Chung, ‘he’d never make it’. “And I sort of got very big and very fat and drank a lot and ate a lot – my dad was a chef, so I had a big appetite.”

It was his thirst however that led rugby him to rugby. “The only reason I started playing rugby was that when Wolves finished on a Saturday afternoon, we got the bus from near Molineaux and it dropped us off near the rugby club. Then, pubs didn’t open until six, but the rugby club was open, so we’d go there for a drink.”

Naturally, the presence of a solid-looking, six-footer, drew the attention of the club regulars. “I was asked to go and train, and we went down to this disused railway and told to run up and down the banks and up and down the railway,” explains Graham. “I was sick as a dog and I thought, ‘if I’m going to stick with this, I’ve got to change’.”

He did just that, going from colt, to county player within two seasons. “I think just after my nineteenth birthday I played for Wolverhampton first team, and by the age of 22 I was at Moseley.”

He was among the first tranche of new breed props who could do more than scrummage. “I remember Paul Rendell, God rest his soul, at an England training session, saying ‘tell him to stop running’,” he says. 

But, one Scotland B cap aside, he never reached his ambitions despite becoming a stalwart for a then-strong Mosely side. “I didn’t achieve everything I wanted,” he says. “I didn’t get a [full] cap for England or Scotland. I didn’t play for the British Lions, that was my ambition.”

When Graham found full-time work again, it was with the RFU, as a youth development officer for the North Midlands in 1993. 

Coaching followed at club level too, as he was tempted to ambitious Stourbridge, where he’d work alongside Wallaby great Glen Ella. “One of Stourbridge’s stalwarts was living in Sydney, and he funded Glen’s trip to come over and experience England,” he says, explaining how one of Australia’s most famous players ended up at fourth division side. “I learnt a huge amount about how to play the game from Glen,” continues Graham. “And I think he learnt from me how forwards were important because you can’t play the way he wanted to play if you don’t have the ball! 

“For two seasons running I think Stourbridge scored more tries than any other team in the country – the highest we finished was third, but we had an attitude. We’d be winning games 35-34, 45-44, 38-30, things like that. Glen was a big part of my understanding of how the game should be played.”

A stint at Moseley followed, then he was part of Worcester Warriors academy with Nigel Redman. Two years later, he applied to coach England women.

The women’s rugby union, at that stage, were still a separate entity from the RFU. Geoff Richards was head coach, and together with Gary Street, Smith was the fresh coaching blood they’d hoped could help England make up for the 2002 19-9 final defeat to New Zealand. “England lost the 2002 World Cup to New Zealand, so the 2006 World Cup was the target. I was given a very specific job by Geoff Richards, and that was to make the forward the best in the world. 

“I knew Gary for Aston Old Eds [a Birmingham based side] and I always thought he should have come to Moseley,” says Graham. “He was skilful player, a little rotund scrum half with a big gob on him. An annoying little person to play against, but very skilful. 

“Gary’s the best attack skills coach I’ve ever seen,” he says, going off on a tangent as he thinks on his closest of friends. “Bar none,” he adds. “How he didn’t work in the Premiership, how he hasn’t continued to work for England, I haven’t got a clue. Why Gary and I were let go by England. I haven’t got a clue.” 

With the promise to return to that infamous end of the coaching duo’s international days, Graham returns to the timeline and his job description to make England’s pack dominant. “And I did that,” he says, “we were the best scrum in the world, we had the best lineout in the world.”

England lost again to New Zealand in the 2006 World Cup final, 25-17, and Richards quit the following year, leaving Gary and Graham to take the side on. It was one packed with talent.

“We had some very good players,” he says. “We had a great lineout forward in Jenny Sutton, we were developing some really good front row players. Rochelle Clark is obviously one of the most famous players in the world, we had Amy Garnett at hooker, Vanessa Huxford, Claire Purdy, Sophie Hemming, Emma Layland, Vicky Fleetwood at hooker, and Tamara Taylor is probably the best lineout forward I’ve ever worked with, her knowledge of the lineout play is phenomenal. 

“But the back row became the real threat,” he says. “Catherine Spencer at number eight, an amazing player; Sarah Hunter, one of the nicest people in the world and one of the best rugby players I’ve ever worked with...”

And completing the trio was a player he saw before he was even in the role. “The first proper game of women’s rugby I watched was what they call the Super fours, which was an England trial, and it was London and South East playing the North.”

“There was an inside centre playing for London in the South East and I said to Geoff, ‘your number 12 is in the wrong position, she needs to go and play seven’. And that was Maggie Alfonsi.”

A position switch would mean losing her funding until she regained a place in the new role.

“I sat down with Maggie and I said, ‘Look, I think you’ll get a couple of caps at 12, but I think you’ll be a world beater at seven. It’s your decision, but if you’re prepared to do it, and she said, ‘yeah, okay’. She tirelessly worked on it. I remember going to Bramley Road, Saracens old ground, with her and tackle pads just to work on becoming a seven.”

England lost the 2010 final, but they’d built momentum elsewhere, winning seven Six Nations in a row, six Grand Slams.

In 2014, at the Stade Jean-Bouin in Paris, England won the World Cup for only the second time, beating Canada 21–9. “The first try we scored in 2014, in the final, I believe it’s the greatest try you’ll see in a World Cup final,” says Graham. “When Gary and I are asked, ‘what is your philosophy on rugby?’, we just mention that try. It involved every player on the pitch, doing the right thing at the right time. We had a vision of rugby, and that was a fusion. Forwards and backs, unless it was a scrum, lineout or a set play with the backs, everything else needed to sync.”

The final brought one thing. “It was relief,” he says. “And it goes back to January 2011, because if we’d have won in 2010, I think a number of players would have retired. 

“But because we didn’t, the following January, we sat in a room and Gary just wrote on the on the flip chart ‘Why?’. And that was the question. Everybody had to ask themselves why we’re here. 

“We had a long meeting about that, and we got out of that and then we started setting goals, and we followed those goals religiously.

The World Cup wasn’t just about those four years either. “People talk about the Olympics and people talk about a four-year cycle. It’s not. Nobody wins an Olympic medal in four years, they’ve usually been training for eight, maybe twelve, maybe sixteen years.”

Another segue, as Graham’s own line of thought brings him onto the sevens programme, which England moved players to and from during his time. “I’m gonna say a few things here, and then I’m not gonna say anymore,” he says. “I don’t think we managed the sevens programme very well. There were girls who didn’t play rugby for twelve months, because they were taken out of the system to play fifteens. We spent a lot of money achieving very little and I honestly don’t want to talk any more about that.”

We move on again, to Gary Street, well almost, via a few more narrative twists and turns. As we talk about his greatest high, we also ask about the lows. “Being out of work,” he responds, before recounting a tale of the bailiffs coming to his door, with his wife and eighteen-month-old daughter inside. They’re after someone else, the owner perhaps, as Graham is only renting but they persist, forcing his hand. He said they can call the police, or… “I’m going to shut the door because my wife’s in there and the baby’s crying,” he begins. “And I said, ‘now you two are big guys, but you’ve got to ask yourself this – which one of you wants to go home hurt, because one of you will. I’m not going take both of you, you’re big guys. But one of you...’.”

He also worked on the door as a bouncer, which also had an impact on him. “I have this body language that tells people to stay away,” he says. “Big chest, arms crossed, and for years Streety, said, ‘you’ve just got to change your body language’. I said, ‘why, this is just me mate?’. He said because you walk in the room and the players shit themselves’.

“It comes from being not willing to open up to people,” continues Graham, explaining his physical and mental stance. “I saw that as a weakness, but the girls changed that and you know, those girls, I bloody loved them to death, and I’m an emotional person, and they dug into that as well. Once you open up, you realise that’s what truly makes the friendship, what makes the bond.”

He counts many of his former charges as close friends, saying those friendships were his greatest achievements. So too, his friendship with Gary, that led to not only them talking to each other more than their wives, but also sharing the same thoughts, the same way of thinking. “We shouldn’t really get on because I’m from the Black Country and he’s a Brummie and we don’t like each other, Black Country Boys and the Brummies have been at war since the Vikings were here.”

But together they led England to the World Cup, a win that’s even more valuable following the crushing final defeats that have followed since. They rode the wave after the World Cup win. “We were invited to the Houses of Parliament, we met David Cameron at Number Ten. We won Sports Personality of the Year, which had always been a massive ambition of mine to be on that stage. 

“I’d watched it since I was a kid,” adds Graham. “I’d watched it since Henry Cooper was Sports Personality of the Year, going back to the 60s. 

“We were just enjoying the moments and, and then we had a training session early January, I think it was the 6th January and Gary and I were invited down to London to meet. And we were met individually, and told that our services weren’t required anymore.”

The departure of Gary and Graham was brutal. “I was told it wasn’t performance based, I replied, ‘good fucking job, because we just won a World Cup’,” he says. “I was told that there needed to be a new face and a fresh voice. 

“And I was also told the decision was backed by the CEO, and the head of rugby and Stuart Lancaster, that’s what I was told.”

The pair have spoken regularly since about their departure. “What I believe is that Gary and I were prepared to fight for fifteens to have parity with the sevens [which had Olympic status], and that the powers that be didn’t want that confrontation,” he says. “So, the easiest way of doing that is to take the confrontation away. That’s my assessment. I’ve never had a true answer. 

“It still hurts me,” he admits. “And, since that moment in time, apart from doing consultancy work, I’ve never been able to get a full-time job in England, whether it be at a university or school or a club. And that sort of hurts a little bit because I don’t know why that is.”

He thinks they’re linked? “The paranoia in me does, yeah.”

“And you know,” he adds. “People out there might think this is arrogant or a bit of BS but if you put me and Gary in a pro club in the Premiership, we’d make a huge difference. We would do things that, at the moment, I think are just not being achieved in the Premiership.”

Today, other issues have taken priority, specifically they health of Gary. “He found out last year that he had been living with a heart defect,” explains Graham. “He then started to suffer a bit more, and it came to a point where he was taken into hospital and they found that he got a problem with his heart. He was put on the waiting list for a heart bypass, that was delayed due to all the strikes. He’d started to look quite ill, he we went in for the operation probably four months ago. 

“The actual heart operation was a success, but during that operation, there was something that wasn’t quite right, and he came out of it, and there was some sort of internal bleeding. 

“They took him back in for a second operation and during that second operation, the process just was too much, he had a stroke, a bad stroke. They stopped what they were doing, got him back into intensive care. He was extremely ill, close to, you know, worst case scenario.”

Graham pauses, understanding the weight of his own words. Another operation took place. “He came out of that and he had to have a tracheotomy because he couldn’t control his throat, so he lost all his speech,” explains Graham. “He had no movement in any of his limbs. And so he was in a pretty bad way. 

“I went down to see him in October, and it was pretty emotional, seeing him like that, particularly when I left.”

Since then, says Graham, there’s been some recovery. “I think he’s had operation number five, which was to do something about the problem he was having with his throat – and that proved to be quite successful.

“There’s a WhatsApp group called StreetyWatch and his wife updates us all on what’s going on,” continues Graham. “When I went down to see him, he was in a wheelchair, I don’t think he could use his legs, and he’s only got limited use of his left arm.

“But, now he has improved he’s been able to stand up to the point that he went missing and they found him in the toilet a few days ago – which is typical Streety, because he won’t listen to anybody. He won’t bloody take advice sometimes.”

Even as we speak, and then when Rugby Journal goes to print, Gary’s progress is unclear. “There’s no prognosis at the moment about how he will be eventually,” says Graham. “I think the comment was, ‘we will try and get him to the most comfortable position we can’ but whether it will be back to the old Gary Street – cracking jokes, balancing stepladders and barstools on his chin and nose – we don’t know. But hopefully, we will see that man again.”

Gary and Graham’s rugby legacy is without doubt, yet, that they’ve never been given a chance to show what they can do together since is the game’s loss. In truth, the achievements of coaches in the women’s game, often don’t get the credit deserved. “I think the person who changed that credit was Matt Ferguson, who got a professional job with Cardiff after being the coach of England women. He was the AASE coach, then he took over the role when I left as the forwards coach for England women.

“I’ve known Matt for a long time, I coached him at Stourbridge when he was eighteen,” continues Graham about his former charge, who’s now at Northampton Saints. “Let’s put it like this,” he laughs, “I vigorously helped build his character, which he will happily tell you about. But we’re still good friends, me and Fergie, and I think it’s fantastic, what he’s done. 

“He started to break that, ‘Oh, it’s only women’s rugby’. And one of the things Gary and I really set out to do was break the phrase of ‘for women’, for instance, ‘that’s a good scrum ... for women’, or, ‘that’s a good kick… for a woman’. And we did that. Emily Scarratt and Katie McLean could kick a ball from anywhere as well as any guy could.”

Even at 63, Graham still has coaching goals. He’s loyal to Estonia, and wants to lift them in both sevens and fifteens, he loves his job, but don’t accuse him of having fun. “I don’t believe you have fun in rugby,” he says. “I believe you enjoy rugby. When people talk about what I do for fun, my family have been to Orlando five times to Universal and Disney World and all the rest of it, that’s where I have fun – family holidays abroad. 

“And my job has been able to give that to my family and me, so that’s what I’m grateful for, but to be professional in sport, is amazing. Are there disappointments? Do you get frustrated? Absolutely. But, you know, at the end of the day, for thirty years, I’ve been paid for doing a hobby, that’s not bad, is it?”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures from Graham Smith, Shutterstock, Getty Images and Unsplash

This extract was taken from issue 24 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.