Plymouth Albion RFC

They had fixtures against rugby’s elite, including the All Blacks. They produced players for England and even had the tenacity to have a level playing field. Albion, a side made up of dockyard workers in the city of Plymouth, never knew their place. And they still don’t.

The Albion dined at rugby’s top table almost from the very beginning. They were formed from the apprentices at the naval dockyards: the blacksmiths, the steelworkers, the carpenters, in 1876. 

Before the century had even turned, they were Devon Cup champions, beating Exeter 3-0; they were touring Wales and beating Llanelli; they were travelling to London and defeating the mighty Blackheath; and they were hosting Oxford University in front of 17,500 on a Wednesday afternoon. And they were even doing so, for a short time at least, at a ground – Home Park – that was the envy of England, complete with a levelled pitch, clubhouse and even changing rooms. “We were playing the likes of Bristol regularly and you can think of the logistics behind that, back then,” says Dave Fuge, a former Plymouth Albion player and now the club historian. “Presumably you were having to get a squad of players up there by horse-drawn carriage.”

When the century dawned, their fixture list included everyone from West Hartlepool and Castleford in the north, to Leicester and Northampton in the Midlands, and Swansea and Neath across the border. They beat nearly everyone too, in the 1900-01 campaign they notched up 808 points for, with just 84 against, in 36 games, suffering defeat just once, to Swansea.

The All Blacks even included them on their iconic 1905 tour – The Originals winning 21-3 in front of 19,000 – and in those first glory days, up until 1912, they had ten of their own earn call-ups for England. 

It was undoubtedly Albion, and not Exeter, that were the west’s original rugby pioneers. 

As with every club, World War One brought rugby to an end for the Albion, but when they reformed, they did so with a Plymouth prefix. “We added ‘Plymouth’ to Albion so people from up country could locate where Albion was,” says Dave.

Soon they were once again playing the best in England and Wales, but also doing the job of winning the Devon Cup in its first year back after the Great War. 

On the face of it, Plymouth Albion were ideally located to dominate the sport which is the ‘national’ pastime of Devon and Cornwall. If Exeter is the gateway to the west, then Plymouth is its epicentre. To the right, it has the whole of Devon, to the left there’s Cornwall, to the south it’s got the ocean, into which it’s seen the launch of everyone from the Pilgrim Fathers, Captain Cook, Charles Darwin, Napoleon and Sir Francis Drake to naval fleets, both above and below the waves, as home to what was once the greatest naval port in the world. Its population is by far the biggest of both counties, roughly around the 250,000 mark, almost double that of Exeter, and ten times that of Cornwall’s biggest metropolis, St Austell. 

It’s also a city that’s seen things it wishes it hadn’t. In World War Two, the Germans dropped more than 200,000 incendiary bombs and 6,000 high-explosive bombs on Plymouth, taking the lives of 1,174, leaving 40,000 homeless. “When you listen to these programmes about World War Two, you always hear them talk about Coventry but Plymouth was blitzed just as bad,” says Dave.

But the city always bounced back. After the Great War, not only did it reclaim its place among elite club rugby, it also delivered for England, with the second tranche of Albion internationals totalling seven from 1920 through to 1929. “It was because we weren’t locked down in Devon,” explains Dave, “we were going away to play the likes of Bristol and Northampton, so the selectors were seeing our players and realising how good they were. 

“We’ve had twenty true-born Plymouth England internationals,” he continues, “and when we say that we mean they earned their caps when they were at the club, we don’t count someone who’s earned their caps before they played for us.”

Redruth are today’s opponents, it’s a pre-season friendly, but it’s more than that. The clubs’ rivalry dates back more than a hundred years and it’s also Devon versus Cornwall, a timeless cross-border county rivalry fierce enough for one of the stewards to subconsciously lower her voice when she tells us she’s from Cornwall. “Albion is my club though,” says Linda James, part of the club’s famous collective, the ‘Girls on the Gate’. “I first came here when I was about four, I remember picking daisies under the posts and my dad teaching me to shout, ‘up Albion’ and buying me a pair of cherry, green and white socks – I was very proud of them. 

“I always think of rabbit pie too, when I think of Albion,” she continues, “because after every game my nan always used to make a rabbit pie with lots of parsley. 

“The atmosphere here today is getting there now,” explains Linda, changing topic, as fans begin to file in, an hour before kick-off, “it’s getting to be a little bit like the old atmosphere.”

Also revelling in the return of fans to Brickfields, is fellow Girl on the Gate, Debbie Northcott. “It’s so good to be back, it’s what Saturdays are about,” she says. “It’s been something to look forward to, to get you through the last lockdown just knowing that it’s going to come back.”

Both Debbie and sister Tracey, manning the same gate, are stalwarts of the Albion matchday team. “Come rain, shine or snow, we’re always here,” says Debbie.

And they’re both fans of the of the Venables family that now run the club, including former player Dave, and his son Max – the club’s managing director.  

That’s despite Dave Venables, together with then co-owner Bruce Priday, moving on one of Albion’s favourite sons, ex-Bath and England hooker Graham Dawe, when they took over back in 2016. “We were here when Graham Dawe went,” says Tracey. “I thought, ‘oh my god, what have they done’. 

“He was an icon for the club,” she continues, “it was hard to watch him go, especially that last game, but you have to move on. He’ll always be part of the club’s history nothing can change that. But the club has got to evolve.”

Dawe took over in 1999 as player-coach when Albion were in the fourth tier, leading them to two promotions, and making them contenders in the Championship. Before then, the club had struggled to retain their position at the top of even the county tree. 

Reflecting the switch in local fortunes, from 1983 to 1988, Albion won every Devon Cup, but from 1989 through to 1996, it was all Exeter. “Things really didn’t alter until they brought Graham Dawe on board,” says Dave [Fuge], “back then we did have a gentleman, who wished to remain anonymous, who would financially back the club and we had a very successful twelve-and-a half-year stint.

“I think the record still stands today, but we went undefeated for 41 National League matches.”

No sooner had they reached the Championship, they were competitive, finishing third in both 2004 and 2005, with the latter, the promotion that got away. They’d beaten second-placed Exeter and fourth-placed Penzance home and away; and eventual champions Bristol had also been beaten 12-7 away. A rescheduled home game against Bristol fell badly for Plymouth, with key players injured, they were beaten 23-28 and the momentum to their title charge – with a side featuring players such as Dan Ward-Smith, Lee Robinson and Luke Arscott – was lost. Plymouth had been hoping to cross the Premiership line before Exeter, the fans had backed them too, with an average attendance a third higher and a season’s high through the gate of 5,354, compared to Exeter’s 4,380.

They remained in the mix for two more seasons, with Exeter’s consistent rise mirrored with the slow demise of Plymouth. In the season Exeter won promotion, 2009-10, Plymouth finished eighth. Although, as another former player, Keith Shepherd, tells us outside the pasty hut, there is at least one saving grace. “We can at least rest on the fact that the last time we played Exeter, we beat them,” says Keith, who first played for the club in the 1960s. “It was the year they got promoted and it was a frosty day and [Rob] Baxter, didn’t really want to play but the referee said, ‘a school match has just taken place, so if they can play, then you can’ – so we always think they lost it in the changing room that day.”

The 23-13 win was one of the last hurrahs of Dawe’s first reign. When the club were struggling in the Championship, they sacked their long-standing director of rugby. It was only November. “An article appeared in the local rag with Dawe asking fans to keep the faith, and they sacked him two days later,” says Dave. 

“They brought in Pete Drewett – ironically a former Chiefs coach – and Phil Greening thanks to the financial backing from a different unnamed gentleman, but at the eleventh hour, he pulled out.

“So, after about four weeks, that was the end of Pete and Phil,” says David, “they were firefighting the financial side of the club by this point, because the first anonymous backer [it was a different one that was set to fund Drewett and Greening] decided that if Graham wasn’t there, then he was gone too. It was a tsunami really, because they’d lost a very good coach and the money man at the same time.” 

The club slid into National One in 2015, ten points adrift of Moseley. Dawe, who had been coaching the Cornwall county side, returned again to Brickfields, bringing with him many of the Cornish players. Despite the club being put into administration, the 30-point deduction took them only as low as eighth (from fifth) and well clear of relegation. 

Bruce Priday and Dave Venables took over the club and, within two weeks, an ‘icon’ left the club. Dawe was gone. The fans responded by wearing Dawe facemasks to the second next home game, but it didn’t bring him back.

Dave Venables had hoped to make his fortune in the ice cream business. “I bought an ice cream factory, but it all went wrong,” explains the Plymouth Albion  owner, as we meet just before kick-off. “The weather was bad, it didn’t work out, and we lost everything. It was a family business, Williams Ice Cream, and my uncles are still in it now but they’ve only got ten trucks each or something. They should’ve stitched up all of Devon and Cornwall, but it didn’t happen.”

Instead, on his uppers, he ended up launching a successful recycling business on land in Saltash lent to him by his father-in-law. The success of Brunel, which he’s now handed down to his three children Brian, Max and Ellie, combined with his own playing career with Albion, led to him often being called upon to assist the club. “When I was playing in the 1970s, we were in the south-west merit table and all that, so we’d have games against Gloucester, Bath and Bristol,” he says of his playing days. “We’d beaten Bath 9-3 down here, then they’d beat us 12-6 at home, I’d say we were in the top fifteen sides in the country.”

Just as the rugby side was mixing it with the best, so too was the football team, with Plymouth Argyle playing in the second tier. “They should have been higher, but they couldn’t draw the big names down here,” says Dave of Argyle. “There’s no night life in Plymouth, whereas in Liverpool, London and Manchester, everything is open all night and packed.”

And night life was important. “We used to go out with the Argyle boys all the time, Paul Mariner, Gary Megson, Tommy Tynan, George Foster, all that lot. They were on £200 a week and that was big money back then. 

“George Foster used to say to me and Gary Lovell [the late former Albion forward], ‘if I could teach you boys to head the ball, you’d be division one players’.”

Football’s loss was Albion’s gain, and the Plymouth club approached Dave when the financial troubles started to unfold. “They approached me in 2009 to come on the board,” he explains. “I came on board and sat there and listened, and just thought ‘this is not for me, tail wagging the dog’. Being honest, with the players they had, the money they were paying them, they should’ve got Premiership rugby.”

He resigned soon after joining the board but was then approached again five years later. “I said no and then, when they were on the verge of bankruptcy, I got involved with Bruce, but the only way we were going to do it was if they went into receivership, got rid of the debt, then we’d start again.”

When they started again, they decided to do it without Dawe. “I always respected Dawesy, he was playing when I was playing, and he was travelling up and down to Bath three times a week,” says Dave. “But I was told he’d been trying to get his own backers to fund a takeover. I remember standing in that doorway there, with his wife for twenty minutes and she was saying, ‘I hope it makes you proud of what you’ve done to Graham’. And I said, ‘I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but he backed the wrong horse and went looking elsewhere’.

“I never had a plan as such [to get rid of Dawe],” he continues, “we were going to come in and sit down and talk, but he was uncontrollable.”

Dave’s co-owner then, Bruce, had been a player with Exeter, but the two had met through Devon county rugby. But, says Dave, it turned out the pair weren’t quite aligned in their thinking and parted company. “I’ve since found out that Bruce wanted to build it, sell it on,” he says. “But I wanted to put something back in the community. I’m where I am in business now because of the friends that I’ve met through rugby.

“I was watching Country File last Sunday,” he says, seemingly going off on a tangent. “And there was something on community farming, and that’s what I’d like to do.”

Albion fans need not worry. Dave doesn’t intend growing wheat and barley on the sacred Brickfield turf but use the ground as a sporting hub for the community. 

“I don’t want it to cost me money,” he adds, “but I can provide facilities for other people to use and give back that way – that’s what I want to do here with this 38 acres, make it available for not just rugby, but all sports.”

After Albion’s dicing with financial death – the general consensus is that had Dave and Bruce not come along five years ago, the club wouldn’t be here today – Dave made swift work of changing the outgoings of the club. “When we took over the playing bill was £700,000, that was immediately reduced to £250,000,” he says. “I do a lot around here for nothing, Max is being subsided by Brunel, Ellie too, my wife works here for free – we work as a family.”

One big concern is the future of the game at this level. Plans, including that of Ed Griffiths, continue to be put on and off tables, but few decisions get made. A realistic approach needs to be taken. “I believe the players deserve to be paid,” he says, “but not to the level where they cannot sustain it. We have one of the top crowds, even in the Championship we’d be up there, and we’re getting 1,000-2,000 people through. It doesn’t take Einstein to work out that if it’s £15 a ticket, that’s only £15,000 coming in per week, and when you’ve got a playing budget of our level, £250,000, you’re behind from the start, as it ends up costing around at least £10,000 per week, for thirty games, home and away.”

But, insists Dave, there’s definitely opportunity in Plymouth. “We’re a sleeping giant,” he says, of both the city and the rugby club. “Look at what you’ve got here, look at the facilities we’ve got, Plymouth is now developing as a city, you’ve got the hoe, the sailing, the moors, beautiful golf courses, and the jobs are coming here.

“And I think if we start winning regularly, playing entertaining rugby, and we get the message out there, I think those crowds will go up – look at Argyle, they’ve sold 6,000 season tickets. 

“People are hungry for somewhere to go.”

Honesty, however brutal, does seem to be the policy of Dave, even when discussing the merits of his son Max, who is now coming into his own as one of rugby’s youngest managing directors. “I wouldn’t say I haven’t had any doubts, that would be a lie, but he’s coming on very well now,” he says, giving a nod of approval to Max. “When he first started, I thought ‘what have I done?’, but he’s learned very quickly.”

We meet Max in his office, which adjoins the clubhouse, or rather is in the clubhouse. At 32, he’s young, but he’s intelligent, energetic, full of ideas and ambition, not to mention possessing a clear idea on the rugby reality around him, not least because he was once on the pitch himself. “I came here at eighteen,” he says. “I did okay, but by the time I was 21 I was sick of it. 

“The Championship – where Plymouth were then – is a horrible place to be for a young player, you’re stuck on seven and half grand a year, no match fees or anything, and training full-time – I’d literally be in a position where if the boys were going to the cinema after training, I’d say no because I couldn’t afford the £20.”

He spent a year in Australia, before returning to the club at the behest of Dawe, but with no money to spare, he was asked to tap up his dad for financial help to bridge the gap. “I went to the old man’s office and was like, ‘Graham’s asked if you could just sort me out, for a couple of weeks’.

“He was like, ‘you want me to pay you a wage to work for somebody else. You can fuck off, if you want to work for me that’s absolutely fine, but I’m not paying just because Albion can’t get their shit together’.”

Instead, Max returned to playing local rugby for his home-town of Saltash while driving a skip lorry. “I was working Monday to Friday, earning £10-11 an hour, and I was so much happier,” he says. “I did plan on coming back to professional rugby, but Albion when went bust the first time, I wanted to steer clear of there, and they were the only side I wanted to play for. I got a couple of offers from Esher and Moseley, but I didn’t want to move away.”

When his dad and Bruce purchased the club, he was drawn back into the game. “They bought it out of love, god’s honest truth, because it wasn’t worth much money,” says Max of his dad’s purchase. “This ground is leased, they had to put it into administration because I think they owed about £800,000, then they bought it for about £45,000. 

“They supported it with wages, and in the second year they lost just £70,000 on a million pound turnover, so not bad really.

“I said from the beginning I didn’t want anything to do with the rugby side,” explains Max, “there are two lads there now that I knew when I was a player, so it was going to be awkward.”

Instead, his remit for the first six months, was purely on the commercial side. “I plugged a few holes there, and started to do alright, then Ali [Hannaford, the chair], said ‘you’ve got to take control’ and that’s what I did. It’s not a big business, I’ve got five full-time on the commercial side, a lot of casuals, then the rugby side.

“We were starting to get somewhere, quite frugally, until the pandemic. We went from that 70 grand loss to 35 grand, then we’d lost just £3,000 and we were projected to make £30,000, so everything was just going the right way.”

But then the pandemic did its thing. “We had eighteen months of nothing,” explains Max, “and there were probably three points, when I was like, ‘fuck, close the gates, we’re done’.”

That challenge, however, is what he loves about the job. “It’s not a challenge if you go somewhere and it’s all tickety-boo,” he says. “It’s an opportunity at a place like this where you can go and see the problem and turn things around.

“And even now, we’re financially very stable. Yeah, we’ve got loans but we’re already repaying them, we’ve started repayment early.”

It wasn’t just the finances that the pandemic hit. “We’ve struggled with recruitment this year,” he says. “The money’s in the pot, but some players have got young kids and having been through the pandemic they’ve gone, ‘actually, I’d rather play for my local club and be at home with the family’. 

“There’s no one about that wants it so we’ve advertised on Facebook,” he continues. “My DoR was like, ‘I just think it looks a bit desperate’, but then we did it and then the next advert that came up was England Rugby and then Exeter Chiefs, so it’s just what people do now, they hit every outlet.”

Exeter Chiefs are both a help and a hindrance to the club. On the one side, their players – including the likes of Henry Slade, Jack Nowell and Luke Cowan-Dickie – have helped Albion, but the flipside is that the club hoover up every player in the first place. “I’ve spoken to Ed Griffiths as part the Championship review, and he started by saying, ‘I know you’ve got a relationship with Chiefs’ and I said, ‘let me stop you right there, I wish we didn’t’.

“Because if we could stop this system of them retaining players and loaning them out to Championship sides, we would. Then they wouldn’t be able to have all those players because they wouldn’t be able to give them rugby, and every other team would get stronger. 

“But as soon as one team does it, everybody has to do it. Like Sale FC for instance, who’ll sometimes play eight Sale (Sharks) players and they’ll pump you.”

They’ve also struggled with players being called back – once for an A-league game at a time when they had an important league clash – and also the specific players being sent. “Last year we’d been asked what we doing for a ten,” explains Max, “and they told us not to sign a second ten as they were sending one to us. 

“Then we got the list for this year and it was three loosehead props and a winger: ‘where’s the ten?’, ‘oh he’s going to Taunton’. And they’re now in our league!

“I wish that the RFU would turn around and say ‘right, you can have two loan players in your matchday squad, that’s it’.”

This also means that the side doesn’t have the local heroes it once had. “You don’t really get any local stars anymore, because they’re either sick of it, or they’re at Chiefs,” says Max. “They’re sick of it because they’ve been binned off by Chiefs or Pirates or whatever, and they’ve fallen out of the system and don’t want to play rugby anymore. 

“They fall out because the option is going back to their local club where they used to kick around in their Chiefs gear, and be like, ‘okay I’ll play for Saltash now’, and they don’t want to do it.”

Max and the RFU haven’t always been on the best of terms in recent times, not least for when the club lost their £20,000 travel funding due to ticking the wrong box on the form. Ironically, this year, forms won’t make a difference, as the budget has now been cut completely. “We obviously didn’t get any last year, because I cocked up that form, but we would get £20,000, and from that we’d pay referees which was £3k, and this year we’ve had no travel funding, and they’ve invoiced us £3k for refs, so that’s a £23k swing the wrong way.” 

As the side that travels the most in the division, journeys can cost £36k a season. “We want to play in the league, so we have to make it happen, but it’s a kick in the nuts when stuff like this happens,” he says. “I spoke to Bill Sweeney over this fine, and he seems a nice bloke, but they just don’t seem to care.”

Even the recent pandemic grant didn’t meet the needs. “The RFU gave us an equation to use to work what you needed as club to survive, and when I did the numbers, it was £186k. So I rang up the rep and said, ‘am I doing something wrong?’. They said, ‘No we’ve had two or three clubs with similar figures in National One, so go ahead’. 

“I put the number in and, at one point, I thought ‘fucking hell, are we going to get this?’. But then they told me it was capped at £50,000. Why didn’t they say that at the beginning? I think Topsham rugby club got £48,000 and I’ve got nothing against Topsham, but they’ve got a clubhouse and a pitch with a fence around it, so how do they get that?”

Frustrations with the governing body aside, Max has big ambitions for Albion.  “I want to own the ground,” he says. “I’m writing a dissertation on factors affecting professional rugby  at the moment and from everything I’ve read, rule one, is own your ground. That’s the next step for us, how can you survive when you’re ground sharing, moving in and out, that’s a bad base for anything.

“Then we want to utilise all of the ground, not for conferencing, that’s not right for Plymouth, but for other uses too. 

“Then I want us to become a solid Championship team, more on the Bedford model than the Richmond one, where they pay the set match fee to everyone, because you can’t get players to move down here for the same money. We’ve got Ryan Lamb here as a coach and he’s got an amazing network of players, but they won’t move down to Plymouth, it’s just too far.

“When you’re a solid Championship team, then you’re in the shop window, aren’t you? So, if somebody has got a lot of money, me and my family can go right, if you’ve got £20m, there’s a ticket to the Premiership. 

“If not, then it’ll stay as it is, as a good, well-run business, but hopefully in the Championship.”

Ironically, it’s former Exeter Chiefs lock, Damian Welch, who is charged with getting Plymouth back where they belong. Since leaving Chiefs in 2017, Damian has led a colourful career. He initially returned to former club Cardiff Blues, only to find a club in disarray, and with certain promises not kept, he left a year later. “Two years became one year,” Damian says of his contract, when we talk on the sidelines half an hour before kick-off. “I think it was due to money issues, in that they didn’t have any money.

“I spent a couple of years with semi-pro clubs, because I still wanted to be involved with rugby, and I’d started tattooing.”

Tattooing? “It is quite random,” he admits. “When I was Exeter, I got a fair few tattoos, and became friends with the artist. I’ve always been good at drawing and he offered to teach me.”

Who was your first subject? “The first tattoo was on myself, this is my first one,” he says, showing us a decent-looking bit of calf art. “There’s a lot of nerves, but you have to bite the bullet and get on with it, and accept you will make mistakes.

“There’s actually quite nice life lessons [in tattooing] for anything else you’d go into. Basically, you can’t be too precious, and you sometimes have to accept that things aren’t really perfect.”

When he made the decision to get into coaching, he sought the advice of Rob Baxter, Ali Hepher and Rob Hunter. “I met them for advice, what I needed to do, and after I spoke to Rob [Hunter], he must have spoken to Plymouth, because I then had a call from my agent saying Plymouth were looking for a head coach.”

His thoughts aligned with Max so much so that, despite Albion’s managing director having already decided on another coach, Damian got the job, and he intends on bringing some of the Exeter way with him. “One thing I’ve always said about Rob, Rob and Ali, is that they are the best prepared coaches I’ve ever worked for,” he says. “And when you see it from the other side of the room, it’s no surprise they’ve climbed to the heights they have.”

He also has the added bonus of Ryan Lamb as a backs coach. “Having Ryan in as backs coach has been a massive,” he admits. “He’s very passionate, very knowledgeable  and obviously you’ve got a guy there who’s been in and around the England set-up, you know, working with the likes of Jonny Wilkinson and Charlie Hodgson, so he’s got a lot of ideas on the attacking front.”

When the game kicks off, while glimpses of the attacking mindset of Ryan can be seen, there’s more than a hint of ring rust from a side that’s spent 500 or so days in storage, not helped by the need to bed in new signings. A 24-14 win though, is still a win, however close the visitors came at times from taking a victory back across the Tamar. Ryan, who we speak to after the game, can only see positives from his role. “My wife’s from Plymouth, so we always had a little plan to move to the Devon/Cornwall area because we like the way of life,” explains Ryan. “So when I heard about the role from Mark Hewitt, who was my academy manager at Gloucester, it was a great opportunity for me to go to a club that are ambitious and want to kick on. 

“They’ve got a lot of history,” he continues, “this club were quite a dominant force and I think, while there are quite a few things to put in place, the Venables family really want to push it back to where it once was.”

Now 35, Ryan arrives at Plymouth Albion on the back of a brief stint as cover for the Scarlets, a role he only took up after his two-year stint with French side La Rochelle came to a premature end. “We loved the lifestyle in France, the kids loved the beach and the water, but my boy [William, aged four] got diagnosed with autism, so we had to  come home quite quickly,” says Ryan. “With the language barrier, it was quite difficult, and we wanted to make sure everything was right and coming back was just a lot more reassuring for our family.

“We noticed some things when he was about one or two, like his eye contact wasn’t the best and his communication and sleep too, we went through three or four years, when he wakes up through the night. It’s been quite a stressful time for me and the missus over the last few years, but he’s coming on, we’re really happy with his progress, he’s such a happy boy at the moment and he’s really interacting which is great.”

La Rochelle were set to be his final club, with a neck injury – nerve damage on the C5C6 from his days at Worcester – that had required two operations, being the main reason for calling it a day on a career that had seen him play for boyhood club Gloucester, London Irish, Northampton Saints, Leicester Tigers and Worcester Warriors. “I had to have the root canal opened and a bit of bone shaved off, it’s not a big operation, but I was having nerve troubles going down both arms and things like that, so I just thought I suppose it’s time to hang up my boots.

“We did originally think we’d transition over there to life after rugby and set up camp in France,” he admits. “But life throws you curve balls, doesn’t it? We made the right decision to come back though, we love life a bit slower by the coast. I don’t want to live to work, I want to work to live, and be around the family.”

The six-month contract he picked up with Scarlets after La Rochelle, as cover for Rhys Patchell, saw him take on coaching duties with some of the youth players. “I really enjoyed it, but I also had a coffee shop at the time, in Gloucester, and that had been the plan, but the pandemic changed that.”

Plymouth has at least been more welcoming for Ryan than when he first visited, as a player for the side then known as Pertemps Bees – aka Birmingham-Solihull. “I was on loan, and I was seventeen, and we played Plymouth and I remember it being very physical, very hostile,” says Ryan. “Then when Worcester were in the Championship, we played against Plymouth, and I think Sam Simmonds came off the bench.”

On the playing style side of things, he’s hoping to leave his mark, but not to the detriment of the club’s traditions. “I’ve been in teams a lot where they’ve tried to play to a certain game plan, because that’s the coach’s blueprint, but the squad doesn’t reflect the style of rugby that you’re trying to play.

“We’ve had a couple of pre-season games and our driving mauls have gone well, the set-piece has gone well, Damo’s happy with that, and we can’t go away from the identity of Plymouth. We want to have a big, strong forward pack, and we want to have a good set-piece, and I don’t think there’s anyone better to coach that than Damian.

“But I think if you want to win championships, and create an environment that young players want to come into, then you can’t just be doing scrum, mauling and kicking. They want to be able to come in and play rugby and make decisions for themselves, so we need to change a bit of what we do off the back those dominant scrums.

“It’s early days though, and we’re only training with them twice a week, and sometimes boys can forget what they’re told on a Thursday by the following Tuesday, so we’ve got to keep hammering those ideas down.”

Does he miss playing? “I don’t miss the contact so much to be honest,” he says. “When I see Damo go through the contact drills, I realise I made the right decision to retire.

“We’ve got two really good tens in Phil Jones and Tom Putt, two really young, ambitious lads, and I think they’d do a better job than me now anyway.”

How he handles those players will, in part be the result of how he was handled, and he’ll have plenty of sage advice to pass on, not least due to how he left his beloved Gloucester just three years after appearing in a Guinness Premiership final for them, aged nineteen. “You don’t really realise how big those games are when you’re that young, and how rarely they come around, so maybe I didn’t take them all in as much as I could have,” he says.

“I didn’t even think about leaving, you don’t when you sign a contract for your local club, the boyhood club you used to go and watch, but when you kind of get in there, you realise it’s a business as well as a game. 

“I mean, everyone talks about loyalty in rugby, but there is no loyalty in rugby. I mean, if someone’s been at a club for ten years and they get injured and can’t play for a year, they need to get someone else in, you can’t carry someone on a massive contract.”

For his own part, he was happy to leave Gloucester, if only to leave behind some of the criticism, and he was excited about the new challenge of Toby Booth’s London Irish. “I mean, to be honest, I think I was quite hard done by,” he says of his departure. “I was 22 years old, and I was getting told that I’m not developing and things like that. 

“I was getting hammered in the press, and Marcus Smith is only 22/23 now, you have to give these lads time to build.”

“People were saying I should have been playing international rugby when I was nineteen or twenty and that just doesn’t happen, it’s very rare you get someone in at that young.

“Seeing someone like Marcus develop is really nice to see,” continues Ryan. “I think they’ve handed him well and having a guy called Nick Evans, mentoring, I would love to have a guy like that above me when I was a bit younger. Those experiences I had when I was younger, definitely influence how I want to coach.”

Even his stints training with England have influenced how he’ll manage his Plymouth charges. “We want to set up an environment, a culture where boys want to be there, and they’re enjoying it, and they’re enjoying their rugby, they’re seeing themselves getting better and they’re seeing the vision of the club, That’s why we ask for feedback all the time. We want those boys from Exeter to go back and tell the others they really enjoyed it down here.

“I always performed better when I was in an environment I enjoyed,” he continues, reflecting on lessons from his playing days. “I remember going away with England and I hated it, to the point I didn’t really want to go away with England. 

“It was like the Martin Johnson into Brian Ashton era, and I hated it,” he continues. “I’m not going to lie, I used to turn up, you get told what to do: you stay in this place, you go to sleep at this time... 

“You’d come out from having a massive contact session the day before and they’d batter you again with one-on-ones. 

“I don’t know why they did it, you’re not learning anything. I’d be thinking, ‘what am I trying to do here? Trying to prove to you that I’m the toughest ten in the league’. 

“I didn’t enjoy it at all and it didn’t make me want to play for England and I don’t regret not playing for England.

“That’s the challenge for Plymouth at the moment,” he says, bringing the conversation full circle. “we’ve got to keep our best players and bring new players in and it’s the environment that’s going to get them here. I think with Damo at the head of that and the Venables family backing it, it is definitely going the right way.

“But it’s definitely a progressive thing,” he concludes, “it’s going to take time and some building blocks to get there, you don’t change everything overnight.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Philip Haynes

This extract was taken from issue 15 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.