Lawrence Dallaglio

Eileen Dallaglio walked up to Jack Rowell, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Who are you?” asked the England coach. “I’m the mother of the number eight you brought on 25 minutes too late ... he needs to start.” The coach walked off saying nothing, but Lawrence Dallaglio started the next game.

The Marchioness disaster should never have happened. Just over half an hour after the 85ft party boat left its mooring near Battersea Power Station, at 1.12am, it was hit by the 262ft, 1,472-ton dredger Bowbelle. Within moments, the pleasure boat was mounted and, according to one witness, ‘pushed under water like a toy boat’. 

Of the 130 people on board, 51 lost their lives, including the nineteen-year-old talented dancer Francesca Dallaglio, sister of a sixteen-year-old Lawrence. “We were very close,” says Lawrence, when we meet for lunch at his favourite café in the backstreets of Richmond. “I mean, we’re an Italian and Irish family, so you’re going to be quite close-knit. 

“But, yeah, we were very close and obviously that incident and that tragedy, was horrific, and, you know, it blew us apart really in many ways, as it would do to anyone when you lose someone so close to you.”

At a pivotal time in the life of any teenager, losing your only sibling naturally threw Lawrence into something of a tailspin. “It was a very difficult time and I genuinely reflect on it now,” he says. “For a couple of years, I was definitely questioning the reason for being, questioning what’s going on, and it took a bit of time ... I was making some poor life choices, and not really heading in the right direction.”

Lawrence had played rugby at school – at Ampleforth, Yorkshire – but had become disconnected with it since leaving, but the aftermath of the disaster brought him back to the sport. “I knew I needed to do something to change,” he says. “And the challenge was that my parents were really struggling, as was I, we were collectively going through a lot of grief. 

“And so I joined Wasps,” he adds. “I joined the club because I needed a sense of identity, having left school in difficult circumstances, and having sort of wandered away from sport.  

“I felt a connection with them, and that’s why I probably stayed there for my whole career, they gave me as much as I gave them...”

The Marchioness continued to play a role in the life of the Dallaglios, and not just because of the loss they’d always felt. “Well, first and foremost, it was a tragedy which wasn’t really handled by the government or the people involved very well at all,” explains Lawrence. “There was [initially] no public inquiry, which there should have been, like Hillsborough. 

“All these things happened, and you kind of get a bit of anger and think, ‘why no public inquiry? Why are the company making £65m pre-tax profits not able to admit culpability or even support any of the families of the 51 victims that have died...’  

“Unfortunately, they came across some formidable people, including my mother Eileen Dallaglio, who fought strenuously and vigorously for justice, as did everyone. 

“She bought one share in Ready Mix Concrete [RMC Group, which owned the Bowbelle],  she went to the AGM and ultimately, six years later, they got a public inquiry. 

“Sadly, it took a change of government to get that [from Conservative to Labour] as inevitably it does, but you start to realise there’s lots of ‘clubs’ in this world, and some of them do good things and some of them don’t.”

Born in East London to an Irish family with nine siblings [six sisters, three brothers], Eileen was a big presence in the life of not only Lawrence, but also every coach he played for. “In my first appearance for England in 1995, we lost to South Africa [14-24],” says Lawrence, looking, it has to be said, still fit enough to do a job today. “And I’d come off the bench for twenty minutes to make my debut and played well at Twickenham. Afterwards we went upstairs to the Spirit of Rugby [restaurant] and my mum gave me the full debrief, as she often did – always positive by the end though. 

“And then Jack Rowell, the England coach, walked past and she said, ‘oh, who’s that?’, and I told her, and she said, ‘Oh, I need to have a word with him’. So, she walks over taps him on the shoulder, saying, ‘can I have a word with you?’. He said, ‘sorry, who are you?’ ‘Who am I? I’m the mother of the number eight you brought on 25 minutes too late in the game. It’s pretty obvious what needs to happen ... he needs to start.’

“He was stunned into silence and just walked off. Sure enough, three days later, I was named in the starting line-up.”

Eileen met Lawrence’s father Vincenzo in London when he’d just arrived from Italy. “My father’s Italian by birth and came over to England in the Fifties and settled in London,” he says. “He was only coming here for a short time, but then he met my mother. For the first few years of my life, they ran a  sweet shop in Bethnal Green.

“The East End of London was a real community then, you know. It was a hard way to earn a living, but even though the East End was a tough place, everyone still had a smile on their face.”

From there, Eileen and Vincenzo took the family to Barnes. “My mum knew that she needed to strive for a better standard of living and a better opportunity,” says Lawrence. “My father started to work in the hotel industry and when we moved that was really where the journey started. I attended local schools and my parents took me out of state school and put me into the independent system. 

“My sister got a scholarship to dancing school and then I started playing rugby from the age of about eight or nine at Staines.”

The influence of both sides of the family was always evident. “My father came from quite a large family in Italy as well, so I’ve 44 first cousins,” says Lawrence. “I always say half-Irish, half-Italian makes you quite a dangerous Englishman. 

“I’m proud of my Italian and Irish heritage, though I’ve always felt English.” 

The Italian influence was always apparent at the dinner table . “We had olive oil in the house 40 years ago, the best balsamic vinegar, the best coffee, the best bread, the best everything, because Italian food was so important to my dad.

“Having parents from two different countries is a blessing really because it opens your eyes to different things,” he continues. “Dad’s from Emilia-Romagna, but during the war, he grew up in Turin, where his parents ran the fruit and vegetable market. So we always had many, many family holidays, going backwards and forwards to Italy.” 

Eileen was always the source of inspiration for Lawrence, he peppers our conversation with her words of wisdom. “My mum used to say to me, ‘the greatest gift in the world is to try and make every interaction you have with people a positive interaction, try and leave people in a better place than when you started’. And I think that’s pretty sound advice. It’s not possible on every interaction but...

“And,” he adds quickly, “she also used to say to me, ‘you can always catch up on a good night’s sleep but never a good night out’. So that’s another one which has served me pretty well.”

The passing of Francesca continues to affect Lawrence and father Vincenzo today, but he’s at least always been able to look forward. “It had an impact and it still does now,” he says. “As did my mother’s passing in 2008, but my father is still alive, although very much in his latter years at the age of 87. 

“It had a huge impact on all of us, really,” he repeats. “But I think you recognise that life is a journey, as we know. And it’s not a straightforward one for any of us.

“Unfortunately, great things happen in life but also tragic things and to lose someone so young was tragic because she was an enormously talented young girl. 

“Scholarships at every stage,” he continues, “got honours in every single ballet exam and she was just about to embark on the best days of her life, but that life was tragically taken away. 

“But, you know, everyone has bumps in the road on their journey, and for me one of those bumps came a lot earlier than I anticipated and expected. It makes you stop and reflect and ultimately, what you have to try and do somehow is to take the great memories [of your sister’s life] out of that, and to move on and move forward. 

“In many ways I do attribute a lot of the success throughout my rugby career, not exclusively to that incident, but it’s definitely had a big impact on it.”

The impact of the Marchioness also went far beyond the lives of the Dallaglios and the other bereaved families. “The river is a safer place to be than it ever used to be,” he says. “Hopefully no other families would ever have to go through that kind of tragedy ever again. 

“There are RNLI lifeboat positions on the River Thames in three different places, and they’re called out 90 times a year, and lives are saved. 

“You always look at those sliding doors moments,” he continues. “And I was invited to the same party with my sister. We had dinner the night before. I chose not to go, probably one of the few parties I’ve ever turned down, and she went along, and she passed away. I decided not to go along and I’m still here.

“Yes I still have good days and bad days when I miss her enormously, just as I miss my mother as well, but you’ve just got to deal with that and you move on and you try and take the positives away and make yourself a better person every day really.”

The steps towards making himself a better person began when he managed to find Wasps. Literally. Having read about the club taking the Courage League Division One title, he decided they were for him. Rosslyn Park were closer to his home, but were struggling, and Harlequins? He ‘didn’t fancy the shirt much’. 

“I got on a tube, went to Sudbury Town, asked six people where Wasps was, but none of them spoke English. 

“Eventually I got pointed down to some housing estate in the back streets of North London, and I thought ‘this can’t be right’, but there was Wasps. It had two rugby pitches, in a state of disrepair, and a clubhouse, and – having come from a school with 28 pitches – I thought, ‘wow, this is very humble’, it was like a working men’s club. 

“But when I walked in the door, I felt very much at home,” he says. “It felt like there was a community, there was real family. All I needed was someone to put their arms around me, not ask about the past, and just treat me for who I was. And that’s what I got at Wasps.” 

From his days at Ampleforth, he knew he could play. “I remember having an under-18 England trial and I thought I did enough to get picked,” he says. “I scored a try in the final, and maybe I didn’t go to the right school or maybe because my dad didn’t play for England, I didn’t get picked. 

“And I felt a bit peeved at that and so I when I joined Wasps I also thought ‘right, I need to put that right’.” He made England age grade, then England sevens, becoming a member of the side – together with speedster Andrew Harriman and his future fifteens team-mate Matt Dawson – that won the World Cup in the abridged game in 1993.

Professionalism arrived early in his Wasps days, when he was 23, and the first major move by a rival club impacted directly on the London side. “That first seismic change was when Sir John Hall decided to take Rob Andrew and Dean Ryan and about seven or eight other players up to Newcastle,” he says. “That really threw us in the deep end. And it was a real kind of ‘wow, this is serious. This is professional rugby and it can really hurt.’ In many ways it hurt us, but also it helped us because myself and all the younger players were really thrown in the deep end and we had to sort of rebuild and take over the club.”

With Lawrence made captain, he also had to work with coach Nigel Melville, on what the working week looked like. “Nobody knew what professional meant,” he says, “so there were a lot of mistakes in the early days, and I would imagine people still make mistakes now. 

“How do you go from not being paid anything and people turning up on a Tuesday and Thursday evening for a couple of hours and then play a game on a Saturday, to being fully professional? You’ve got a blank sheet of paper. 

“I remember being with Nigel Melville – who was one of the free thinkers in rugby, quite a calm Yorkshireman – and we sat down together and said, ‘well, what should we do?’. How many hours should we train? Some clubs were bringing players in at eight in the morning until six in the evening, all day every day. 

“I think what we understood was that rugby as a sport generally is about output, not input. It’s a results-driven business, so it’s about what happens on Saturday and Sunday. It’s not about what happens on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.”

Not beasting the players on a daily basis, seemed to work too, as Wasps won the first title of the professional era. “We didn’t have the most money, the best facilities and we didn’t have the biggest support,” he says. “What we did know is less is more. We beat Bath by six points and a lot of that was down to Nigel Melville, Rob Smith and the coaches working out you didn’t need to flog players.

“Many years later, when Warren Gatland and Shaun Edwards turned up, we sort of refined that.”

Aged 24, and with just eleven England caps to his name, he found himself starting all three Tests in one of most iconic British & Irish Lions tours of all-time, to South Africa for the famous series win of 1997. The same year he was made England captain, but was forced to resign less than two years later, following allegations made in the News of the World around drug-taking at a party. “The tabloid stuff that happened in 1999 was a disappointing part of my career,” he says, “but that’s something I was able to reflect on individually, just look at it in perspective. Once you’ve lost your sister aged sixteen, there’s nothing that’s going to come close to that... 

“I wasn’t blameless in the whole affair,” he admits. “I learned the lessons and I think it tells you everything you need to know about the fact that my career carried on – I missed one game for England and it carried on pretty successfully – but the News of the World is no longer here. That’s not an ‘I told you so...’, that’s just a fact that, you know, they were operating in a way which was highly inappropriate, and wholly unnecessary, and continued to do so for quite some time until the Leveson report.

“But you learn lessons, and at times they’re a painful lesson. Ultimately, what upset me most is that I had made people around me, my family and friends, quite upset and, above all, they mean everything to me.”

The loss of the captaincy wasn’t something to dwell on. “I didn’t need to be captain,” he says. “If I had something to say, I’d say it. And I played with one of the best captains in the world in Martin Johnson, I captained him, he captained me, and we won the World Cup together. I don’t feel any less sense of achievement because I wasn’t captain of the England team when we won the World Cup. I really wasn’t bothered about that at all.”

Between his fundraising cycle rides, punditry and work with his charity, Lawrence has been visiting his team-mates from the class of 2003. Part of a book project celebrating the 20th anniversary of the World Cup win, he’s asking them about the impact it had on their life. When he thinks on that momentous evening, his mind wanders to the changing room after the game. “There were certain players whose careers ended after that,” he says.  “Martin Johnson, Paul Grayson, Jason Leonard, lots of people didn’t play for England again, and Jonny [Wilkinson] didn’t play for England for another four years. 

“Probably the happiest time we all had was when we were back in the changing room in the stadium in Sydney and shut the door,” he continues. “There were all sorts of emotions going on: people in tears, people laughing and all the players, and all the management team just knew for that moment in time, it was very special, because that group of people will never be together again.”

The 17-20 extra-time win over hosts Australia, brought to an end a six-year journey. “Clive [Woodward], sat in a room in 1997 and said, ‘what do we all want to achieve?’ and ultimately that was to be the best side in the world. 

“He said he wanted us to be household names – although maybe not in that way, Lawrence – but we got there in the end, right.”

He jokes about his tabloid appearance, but whichever way you look at it, it did help make him a household name. “I’d like to think incidents like that, even though they were awful and bad, did start getting white van drivers talking and thinking about rugby.”

Woodward also got the England players comparing themselves with the best, in order to be the best. “I think the recognition came very quickly, that a lot of those players who were the best in the world weren’t from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. They were from New Zealand, South Africa, Australia at that time. So you had measure yourself against the best, and not give yourself a pat on the back because you’re the best of the rest. 

“I think from 2000 onwards, we really started to realise that there was there was something quite special about this group,” he says. “We had a lot of guys who captained their clubs, and I think that is important.

“We beat South Africa in Bloemfontein [22-27], and then that run of games from June 2000, right the way through to November 2003, I think we beat the Southern Hemisphere fourteen times consecutively. Home and away. And I think we won 45 out of 50 games.

“In true style, you have a proper celebration,” he says of the days following the World Cup win. “It probably extended on for about three or four days and I remember [Wasps boss] Warren Gatland, phoning me up when I got back and he said, ‘first of all, I’m as proud of you as anyone and I’m from New Zealand. Have a week off – you’ll probably need to sober up – I’ll build some more recovery in for you, but I need you playing again, in a week’s time’. And I said, ‘yeah, sure’.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” he says. “I was on the smash for a few days, and then I was fit. I’d worked so hard to get fit for the World Cup, so I was in the shape of my life as we all were and I thought to myself, ‘well, let’s not waste this, let’s crack on’.

“I had the best year in my rugby life – season 2003/04 – and it started by winning the World Cup. Actually, it started before that because we won the Parker Pen and Premiership in 2002/03 with Wasps – we beat Gloucester by a record margin – then I won the World Cup in November; we then won the European Cup in May; and the Premiership [again] in May as well. So, I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that in rugby, that’s like a royal flush.”

A broken ankle ended his 2005 British & Irish Lions tour, just as injury had put paid to his 2001 series, but he had one more hurrah, helping the unlikeliest of England squads reach a surprise World Cup final against South Africa in 2007.  

“It was completely chalk and cheese in terms of the organisation, the structure of preparation,” he says, comparing 2003 with 2007. “And then I guess it just shows that you know, when things go wrong, you can turn it around and to underestimate England is dangerous. 

“I felt a lot of sadness for the other guys in the team,” he says of the final defeat, “I was just as gutted as anyone that we lost, but I’d already won a World Cup as well. It was my last game for England, so my last opportunity, but I could reflect on it afterwards, and think, well, I’ve been to two finals, I lost one and won one.”

He ended his career after the following campaign, helping revive a struggling Wasps side to reach the final of the Premiership, where they beat Leicester 26-16 in front of 81,000 at Twickenham.

It wasn’t the first retirement though, as he’d also called time on England four years before, only to change his mind later. “England had planned to win the World Cup, but no one planned for what would happen after we won the World Cup. Succession planning has never been England’s or the RFU’s strong point – I think that’s obvious from the coaches that they’ve appointed year on year. 

“But I played non-stop rugby from the World Cup through to the game against Bath [in the final] and then Clive reappoints me as England captain and we went down to Australia and New Zealand on a three-match Test series and got absolutely obliterated.  We should have been on a beach somewhere. Someone should have said this. 

“It was relentless, nobody had given me a rest or any player a rest, nobody cares, you’re just a piece of meat.”

And the lack of care about players remains one of his bugbears today. “If you identify someone like [Maro] Itoje, who’s going to have a long, successful international career, you need to help them,” he says. “You don’t just say ‘Saracens pay you, we pay you when we need you, you’re a gun for hire’. They’re not. Be smart, let them have a sabbatical halfway through their career, send them out to Japan, so they can go and play twelve games in one season instead. You’re not suddenly going to become a bad rugby player because you only played twelve games. 

“The Kiwis are a bit more sensible about that because they’ve centrally contracted their players so it feels like they’ve got investment in the players, but over here I still think the relationship between our players and the people who employ them is wrong. 

“Fundamentally, for me, it was because no one came to me and said, ‘oh, I think we played too much rugby’. I mean, you used to almost pray for an injury just to get a bit of time off.”

Investing in players and extending their careers, he believes, will avoid ‘these big swings in England’s performance’. “It shouldn’t be governed by who’s playing and who’s not playing,” he adds. 

A seat on the board of directors  at Wasps, coupled with his commentary work, means Lawrence has views across the board, including the promotion of the game itself. “I don’t think it’s grown exponentially as it should have done since professional rugby,” he says. “I think rugby is very good at patting itself on the back and telling itself what a wonderful job it’s doing. 

“We are competing for people’s attention span,” he continues. “Rugby fans will always turn out to rugby matches because they love rugby. But what we need to do is attract new audiences to the sport. The Six Nations is still a great tournament where you’ll get 10.5 million people watching a game of rugby, but then the following week, the same players playing in club shirts might attract a tenth of that. 

“Rugby is regarded as the third biggest  sport in this country. But I think it’s still got a long way to go in terms of its growth, and I think it’s about investing in marketing, celebrating its stars, celebrating what makes it unique, celebrating everything that’s good about the game. 

“Why is my 24-year-old daughter, who’s never watched Formula One, suddenly infatuated by Formula One, and knows everything about everyone?” asks Lawrence, referring to the Netflix documentary Formula 1 Drive to Survive. “In order to fall in love with a sport, you’ve got to understand it and want to know more about the personalities that are involved in it. 

“And the England team have got a huge role to play in that, you know, we need to hear from the personalities, and not just Eddie, and we need people to fall in love with the game for different reasons.”

Two weeks before the interview, we carried out the photoshoot. Wearing a suit, he looked every inch the doorman you don’t want to mess with. And today, fresh from his 1,200km cycle across Portugal and Spain for his charity Dallaglio RugbyWorks, having shed more than a few pounds in the process, he’s looking trim. “The cycle will probably raise about £350-£400,000,” he says. “And we’re a lean charity, so it goes far.”

He set up the charity more than a decade ago, and it uses rugby to engage children who are excluded – expelled – from school and put them back on the right path. “Sixty-five per cent of the prison population in the United Kingdom have been excluded from school,” he explains. “That is an enormous number. It costs £2,500 to put a young person through the programme but it costs about £122,000 a year to put somebody in prison, so with an 85 per cent success rate I think that’s worth investing in, don’t you?

“We work with about 1,000 young people each year, but that’s a small percentage of what we could be working with, I’d like to grow the charity, you know, three or four times that size over the next few years. 

“I don’t think any young person is born bad,” he says. “They’re just often born into quite chaotic circumstances: poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, drug abuse, alcohol abuse... And I don’t think any young person should be denied an opportunity to really try and make their own choices in life.”

Lawrence is only too aware of the luck he’s had in life, including the fact that his mum was Eileen, who put all those coaches in their place, not to mention the government and big business, but also with how his career panned out. 

“I came off the bench against South Africa for twenty minutes on my debut, and I came off the bench against that same side in my last game in the World Cup final, so there is a lovely symmetry about my rugby career that I didn’t plan,” he says. “And I think it’s more luck than anything else that my last game happened to be a Premiership final that and I happened to win,” he says, though he is quick to add, “but maybe if I hadn’t won, I might have had to carry on for another season!”

The influences on his life have been many: even though absent, his
sister continues to be a driving force, as does Eileen, and needless to say his dad Vincenzo too. Lawrence has also got a son, Enzo, a student, and talented rugby player, and two grown-up daughters, who’ve graduated, and are “now working in much more creative jobs, they’re like their mum,” he says, also namechecking wife Alice, and the sacrifices she’s made.

On the field, more luck, he says has come from the coaches he has worked with. Ian McGeechan and Jim Telfer for the Lions, Woodward for England, but pushed to consider the greatest coaches and the greatest era of his glittering career, one edges ahead. “It’s hard for me to do so, without being too biased,” he admits, “but the periods we had at Wasps, the Gatland/Edwards kind of era from 2001 to 2005...

“Not only did we win everything – we had about seven trophies in three years – but we had so much fun, and it just felt like a great purple patch. The coaches, players, all of us went on to even greater success after that in many different ways. 

“And Shaun is continuing on that basis,” he says. “I think if you ask them [other Wasps players] the same question, they might turn around and go ‘yeah, we won Grand Slams, but it’s still hard to be beat that moment when we were together’.”

Shaun, in particular, comes in for praise. “He’s a special man, a special coach,” says Lawrence. “Rugby is very complicated and some people make it much more complicated than others, but Shaun is very good at making it simple. 

“And just being very honest,” he continues, “he helps players individually and speaks honestly, emotionally and from the heart. And he’s a serial winner. He’s won over 50 medals as a player and as a coach and I don’t think any of them are silver.

“He will be coaching England at some point in the future,” he concludes. “And who knows, maybe I might even have a role to play with it.”

In his earlier retirement days, Lawrence had considered coaching as his next step. “I thought long and hard about going into coaching,” he says. “And there’s part of me that still yearns to do that.”

Given his various rugby-based commitments, he doesn’t feel as if he’s ever left the sport, and given how forthright his views are, don’t be surprised to see him part of an England set-up someday. 

“Rugby is always gonna be part of my life,” he sums up. “You know, it’s been an incredible journey and I definitely don’t think it’s finished yet.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Philip Haynes

This extract was taken from issue 18 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.