Tamara Taylor

At 39, and after 115 England appearances, four Rugby World Cup campaigns and fourteen years playing for Darlington Mowden Park, Tamara Taylor felt she was being forced out of top-flight English rugby before her time. But then she fired up her Twitter account.

“I was so upset and angered by how I’d been treated, I felt I had to say something. I wrote it and re-wrote it about a million times, and checked it with other people too…I was all, ‘shall I, shan’t I? I’m not really sure’. I wanted people to know that I do want to keep playing, that I’m not being retired by a couple of people at one club who, for whatever reason, don’t want me there. 

“My concern was that as the situation unfolded, there was going to be a false story going about and because that team [Darlington Mowden Park] has meant so much to me for so long, I was really gutted and I didn’t want people to think something of me that wasn’t true.”

The ten months leading up to Tamara’s departure from DMP had been an ordeal by obfuscation. She was frequently told one thing, only to see a different picture in the actions of the club’s management. She was a club legend, an England legend, a World Cup winner no less, and had enjoyed a decent first season as player-head coach, helping the team to their best ever Premier 15s finish of sixth. Only a special set of circumstances could have forced Tamara to overwrite her natural stoicism and take to Twitter. But she had reached breaking point.

“Everything started going weird around Christmas-time last year. The club was having to re-tender for its inclusion in the Premier 15s, and staff had to re-apply for any roles that were paid positions within the women’s team. That was normal, and fine.

“I re-applied for the head coach role, but it went out to advert, once, twice and then again. All the while I had applied and been shortlisted for the role. That made me feel uncomfortable and devalued by the whole of the club, because surely if you had candidates that you were interested in keeping, why would you keep putting the same advert out? 

“Whilst that process was ongoing, I was also in the playing pool so I had to have a conversation with the head of performance about ‘what I am’ to the club. He didn’t want me to be a player and a coach, I had to be one or the other. Which is fine, that’s his decision, I don’t have anything against that. So I pulled out of the coaching interviews so I could be a player. 

“That’s when we had this strange conversation where he was asking me whether I going to agree with decisions that were made, and that I was very influential and how was I going to be reacting if I didn’t agree with stuff. He was implying that because I had been the head coach, I was going to have a problem with a new head coach. I was like, ‘I’ve only been head coach for nine months, for the rest of my rugby playing career I’ve been coached so I probably can be coached!’. If I wanted to coach, I wouldn’t have pulled out of the coaching interviews. But I had already made that decision to just be a player.”

With the path seemingly clear for her to keep playing at DMP, the next step should have been a formality: filling in the requisite medical forms and undergoing a GP’s appointment. The process took ten days during which time Tamara had an appointment with the club doctor and was in regular contact with the club’s medical staff. Yet, after sending over her forms, she texted the head of performance “to see what’s happening as I hadn’t heard anything from him” only to receive a call back saying she wasn’t in the squad. The ten-day turnaround was cited as a reason for assuming she wasn’t interested in playing.

“The way I was treated... with him going from saying that I was going to play, to having a couple of disagreements with him, to him still saying I was going to be in his 40 [the playing squad], to me filling in all my paperwork, to him then saying ‘ah no, you’re not going to play.’

“I thought ‘if that’s how I’ve been treated, God only knows what’s going to be said about me.’ I don’t want people thinking I’ve suddenly chosen not to play, or that I’ve left the girls, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. I didn’t want to walk away from the players but my hand was forced.”

Having pursued every avenue to try and stay at the club she’d been part of for fourteen years, Tamara posted the following on September 9th : 

I was going for the old “one more year” .. ..but the (new) staff at @DMP_Sharks have now decided I won’t.. 

Shame I wasn’t given enough notice to sort anything else out..  

I’m still keen to put my boots on.. 

They can try...but I don’t disappear that easily.. 

#loyal

“I didn’t expect anyone to care. I certainly didn’t expect the amount of messages of support I had saying, ‘why don’t you come and play here?’. Sarries were one of the people who did that and the head coach Alex Austerberry dropped me a message saying, ‘how you doing? Do you want to chat?’.”

Less than a month later and she was joining Allianz Premier 15s champions Saracens as a player-coach. When Rugby Journal caught up with Tamara – on what proves to be the last warm outing of autumn –  she’s six weeks into calling Allianz Park home, or at least a home from home, as she’s still living in Sunderland.

Barnet to Sunderland might just be the longest rugby commute ever. Andy Goode’s commute up to Newcastle for a three-month stint at the Falcons in 2016 was longer in terms of miles but Goodey was travelling by plane from Heathrow. Tamara is driving. 

Her typical weekly routine is to train on Tuesday nights with her old club in Newcastle, Novocastrians, then head south on Thursday arriving in time for evening training at Allianz Park. She stays for Saturday’s match, and travels back up to Sunderland afterwards. 

For home matches, such as this weekend, that means four-and-a-half hours down, and four-and-a-half hours up. Mercifully, her car looks to be a comfortable ride, one of the England-branded Mitsubishi pick-up trucks which Tamara drives thanks to her day job with the RFU as a coach development officer. Alongside her job, and being a player-coach at Saracens, she’s also the assistant coach for the Sweden women’s team, a voluntary role she took on at the start of the year. Whilst last year, she was involved in developing rugby in southeast Asia, in Laos, for a charity called 100 World Legends. 

Most of Tamara’s endeavours in life: professionally, voluntarily and socially, converge on rugby. And her enthusiasm for the game extends to photo shoots. Ben, our photographer, has brought his stop-motion gear with him today, which means lots of takes of exactly the same action. Tamara is beaming throughout and passes the time like it’s a kickaround in the park. At the end of the shoot she asks if Ben can take a couple of extra pictures with her hair down, for her mum: “she always likes me to put my hair down, so this will make her happy.”

Rugby is undoubtedly lucky to have people like Tamara, and whilst there are dedicated folk taking on more than their fair share of work at every rugby club in the country, there aren’t many with 115 England caps.

Her energy and enthusiasm for the sport is unrelenting. In that regard, she is in good company at Saracens where Rochelle ‘Rocky’ Clark – aged 39 and with 137 England caps – is also a player-coach. 

“I think Rocky will be playing until the day she dies,” laughs Tamara. “She’s already said she can see herself playing at 50 for a vets team.

“For me, I just really like the game. I remember having this conversation with Susie Appleby, who was in her 30s at the time and she was saying ‘it’s time for me to step back because the youngsters are coming through’ and I remember thinking ‘does it matter how old you are?’. She was first to every breakdown, she was the fittest player I’ve ever seen. I thought why retire now, you’re at the top of your game, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it! 

“I didn’t plan to play for England, or to be a coach, but fate plays a bit of a part in it, and that’s the way it’s gone for me. I love learning and if I’m in an environment where I’m learning then my view is ‘I’m fresh, use me.’”

Tamara made her England debut in 2005 on tour in New Zealand but her involvement with England representative sides goes back further, to the turn of the millennium and the days of one-size-fits-all shirts. 

“We didn’t have any of the things that you understand as professional now. We didn’t have time, we didn’t have money, and we were in over-sized kit. In the academy and A teams it was Gilbert, one-size-fits-all. I remember vividly playing for the A team v Spain in the early 2000s. Swiss Life were the sponsors. The kit was re-used year-to-year and whoever had my kit before me had cut the bottom off it because it had been too long! Can you imagine cutting your England shirt? It would be a crop top now if anyone did. 

“But I know the women who played before us such as Giselle Mather, Susie [Appleby], Gill Burns…they were sowing their England badges on to their kit! They were having to do it all themselves. It’s how these things start. 

“With Umbro as new sponsors, just think what kit the girls will get now.”

Tamara started playing rugby at fifteen when Henley – the club her brother Jason played for – started a women’s team. Rocky was a team-mate even back then, and the pair would steadily progress through the England age-grade ranks, making their Test debuts within a few seasons of each other. 

In the fifteen years since, there have been seismic steps forward in the women’s game in England, with Rocky and Tamara at the heart of most of them.

“I remember playing at Twickenham against New Zealand in 2009. Our match followed the boys and that felt like a pretty big deal; the same venue, same opposition. But the boys had lost fairly decently, and we won!

“Because the boys had lost, the people that stayed really got behind us. People have since said that that match really helped to showcase the women’s game.

“I remember when the Six Nations were aligned, that was important as well. We started having the same opposition as the men, on the same weekend, not at the same venue but it started to feel more like this was the men’s and women’s Six Nations. People were taking it seriously.”

Very seriously, if the recent women’s Six Nations attendances are anything to go by. In 2018, France beat England in Grenoble in front of 17,440 fans. In 2019, England beat Italy in Exeter with 10,545 cheering them on. And in 2020, England faced Wales at the Stoop with 10,974 in the gallery.

But for Tamara, the tournament which kickstarted the rapid rise in attendances at women’s games was the 2010 Women’s Rugby World Cup, in which hosts England lost narrowly to New Zealand in the final, 13-10. Tamara started that final alongside second-row partner Joanna McGilchrist, after a tussle for the shirt throughout the tournament with Becky Essex. 

Four years later in France, and Tamara was in a class of her own at lock, starting four of England’s five games as the Red Roses lifted the World Cup for a second time [England’s first title having come in 1994]. 

Her tournament though will most likely be remembered for two involvements in one particular passage of play in the final, leading to Danielle Waterman’s first-half try, which set England on their way to an eventual 21-9 victory over Canada.

The first was a useful carry off inside centre Rachael Burford which split Canada’s centres and got England some useful go-forward ball. England’s backs attacked off it down the left wing through Kay Wilson. The second came a phase later and was something else entirely. With space developing outside her she took a pass from Sarah Hunter, sold a dummy to Canadian No 8 Kelly Russell, ran through, and put Maggie Alphonsi in the clear for Waterman to score.   

Let’s deal with the big issue first. It was one hell of a dummy. 

“Haha, it was a whole team effort which winds back a lot of phases. I remember Smithy [assistant coach Graham Smith] gets really excited by that try because everyone did everyone else’s jobs. Rocky makes a scrum-half pass. Rachael Burford rucks over out wide. I feature in it which was great as I don’t feature in a lot of tries! I think that was us playing at our best.”

Lifting the World Cup in Paris that evening crowned an incredible journey for Tamara and her team-mates, and the emotions flowed. 

“When we picked up our medals I remember saying ‘this is gold, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but this is gold!’. Probably the most memorable part was joining all our friends, family and fans at a pub just outside the stadium. There were so many people there, singing and dancing, with England flags up. I get quite emotional about it now. Our bus arrived, we opened the door and Katy McLean and Sunter [Sarah Hunter] were stood with the World Cup. There were ex-players there, Gill Burns had her guitar. It was absolutely amazing, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t 80,000 people, everyone was just so happy and the players that hadn’t quite made it to those World Cup finals were there and they were still in it and feeling it with us. That was an incredible experience to step off the bus and feel like we’d all achieved it together.”

Tamara would go on to win her 100th cap in 2017, and start in another World Cup final later that year when England and New Zealand played out one of the all-time great World Cup matches, New Zealand winning it 41-32 in Belfast. 

In the following season’s Six Nations she surpassed Jason Leonard’s haul of 114 caps against France in Grenoble – in front of that bumper crowd of 17,440 people.

That was Tamara’s most recent game for England. Should it prove to be her last, she picked a fine game to say farewell – the match attendance was a world record in the women’s game. 

The early chapters of Tamara’s life set her up well for a career in sport. Born in Exeter, she flew with her parents to Zambia when she was just four weeks old. Her father worked for the government and her mother was a PE teacher in a school. The family moved to Botswana when she was three, to an area outside the capital Gaborone, not far from the Kalahari desert and close to the South African border, from where Pretoria and Johannesburg are just a three-hour drive across the Highveld.

“We had a really outdoor lifestyle. We went to school early, finished early, and because my mum was a PE teacher we did a lot of sports. We swam, did athletics, did tennis, we had a pool in the back garden so I learnt to swim at a young age. For me, that’s the kind of life that’s a really good quality of life, it’s not raining outdoors the whole time! I feel like maybe it helped me have a slightly more balanced view of life.”

In between these activities Tamara developed that younger-sibling need to do everything her elder sibling did. Eventually that mindset would lead her to playing rugby – but in Botswana it led her into trouble. 

“One day my mother was teaching my brother how to dive in the pool. On the condition that I didn’t jump into the pool, I’d been allowed to perch on the shelf in the shallow end and play with my action man or barbie or something like that. One minute I was dangling my feet over the side, whilst mum’s teaching Jason, and the next minute, I’ve plopped off the edge. She always says she can remember seeing my big boggly eyes underwater as she was trying to wade through the water as fast as she can. That’s her favourite story of me wanting attention and wanting to copy Jason.”

Having survived such escapades, Tamara returned with her family to England and again tagged along with Jason to The Oratory School near Reading. The school had just turned co-educational and Tamara was the only girl in her year.

“It just wasn’t set up for girls so I did whatever the boys did. In PE lessons it was rugby, football, and cricket, but I never got to play for the school because there were so few girls.”

But by her mid-teens she had found rugby at Henley, where she quickly excelled. Having begun in the backs, she was moved to the forwards when she started ‘filling out’. After A-levels she went to Newcastle University to study Biomedical Sciences. On the rugby front she was soon identified as a strong prospect for the recently-formed RFU Academy, run by Gary Street the coach who would go on to guide England through to World Cup glory in 2014.

She found that she liked the north-east, and stayed on after graduating.

“I’ve probably struggled to fit in wherever I’ve been. I was born in England, then went to Africa, then school [in England], then to the north-east. I’ve always been a bit of a nomad. But I found that people in the north, generally, are a bit friendlier. I just quite liked that it was a bit more community-focused and people were happy to have me around.”

She joined Thirsk RFC, a Premiership club which played on the backfields of Thirsk racecourse. In 2006 the club moved to Darlington – a 45 minute drive north – and became affiliated with Darlington Mowden Park RFC, changing their name to better reflect their new home.

And Tamara hasn’t looked back since, with one exception being the season she played for Lichfield in 2012/13 whilst working for Worcester Warriors as a community coach.

“I lived in Worcester for three years but for two of those years I still played at DMP. It was pretty much breaking me. In my third year down there I just didn’t have any money, or life, so I played for Lichfield and then got a job back in the north-east, which allowed me to play for DMP again.”

Having been deeply happy at the club for so many years, she’s still coming to terms with how it all ended. 

“I’ve felt pretty devalued and quite sad about it for the past few months so I’m looking forward to finding a bit of love again here. It’s been really nice to feel valued and wanted at Saracens. Hopefully I can return that favour.”

Another opportunity to do just that knocks this weekend. The visiting team? Darlington Mowden Park. 

“It’s going to be emotional,” Tamara says without smiling this time. “It won’t be something I can just push to the back of my mind. It’s going to be in my face for 80 minutes.”   

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Ben McDade

This extract was taken from issue 12 of Rugby Journal

To order the print journal, click here