Things are a little different around England’s training base at Pennyhill Park this year. It’s not just that they have a new captain or a couple of uncapped players, it’s that you have to go way back to 2009 to find the last time that one, the other, or, more often than not, both of Ben Youngs and Dan Cole weren’t with the squad.
The Leicester pair have been ever-present through the best and worst of the past 15 years of English rugby, until Youngs, 35, retired from Test rugby after the last World Cup. His great mate Cole, 37, went on one more year, until the head coach, Steve Borthwick, finally decided to leave him out of the squad this spring. Cole hasn’t officially announced his own international retirement but only because, he says drily, that “it would feel like locking the stable door after the horse has already bolted”.
Instead, you can find them at Welford Road most weekends – they just played their first cup match together since 2009 – and wherever you get your podcasts. Youngs and Cole launched their own show, For the Love of Rugby, this time last year on the Crowd Network. They are first and second on England’s all-time caps list and have played more Tests between them than all eight men who were on the bench against France last weekend added together, as well as being now in the intriguing position of analysing a team that has been at the centre of their lives.
It’s a good listen. There are plenty of rugby podcasts out there, but For the Love of Rugby, which mixes chat about snacks, sleeping arrangements, scrums and short lineouts, does a better job than most of giving a players’ perspective on the game. At its best, it feels like eavesdropping on the changing room on the Monday morning after a match. It’s a very different proposition to a regular gig working as a pundit on radio or television. For a start there’s no journalist or presenter steering the conversation, so they’re answering their own questions rather than somebody else’s.
“All we set out to do was be good company in a car or a train,” Youngs says, “but equally I think rugby can be pretty complicated at times, and one of our main aims is to try and put it in layman’s terms.” He’s right that professional rugby’s intricate array of pods, patterns and shapes can be hard to understand from the stands. “It needs explaining,” Cole agrees. “We try to tell people why a team is doing what they’re doing, not what we think they ought to be doing instead.” One of his great peeves is when he hears someone in the media describe a match as “dull”.
“There’s skill in box kicking, there’s skill in scrummaging, there’s a reason why we have caterpillar rucks,” Cole says. “There’s a thought process behind it. It’s easy to just dismiss it all as boring but that’s only going to make people say: ‘Why would I watch that?’ I think one of the things rugby needs to get better at is opening the game up and explaining why things happen when they do.”
Listening along can be a frustrating experience for a sports journalist. Truth is, I learned more about what made Ben Youngs the player he is in one and a half hours of his podcast than I did in one and a half decades of his press conferences. If you ever wondered why coaches kept picking him ahead of, say, Richard Wigglesworth or Danny Care, the answer is right there in the podcast, in the way he sees and talks and organises and shares his thoughts about the game. The same goes for Cole. There’s an unavoidable sense that after years of biting his lip, England’s most-capped prop is finally saying some of what he actually thinks.
As reporters, we would far rather have insightful, honest opinions to work with, so why are they so hard to come by? “I think sports people in general are media-trained to protect the team,” Cole says. “The one thing you don’t want to do is hurt the team by being controversial and that can make it very hard to get your personality across.”
In a recent episode, Joe Marler (who, to be fair, must have flunked his media-training 101) said that for England’s forwards the World Cup semi-final against South Africa in 2023 was all about “vengeance” for the beating they took in the 2019 final. In the week of the game, the players refused repeated invitations to say similar things. “Yeah, stuff like that, you probably wouldn’t say it ahead of the game,” Cole agrees, “because during the week it will get blown out of proportion, and as soon as your head starts disappearing up your arse in the first scrum, it’ll be the end of you.”
Cole recalls: “We played Scotland or something like that, and I remember going into a media briefing, and it was like: ‘You’re not allowed to talk about last week’s game against Scotland, and you’re not allowed to talk about next week’s game either.’ And it was like: ‘Well, what the fuck are we going to talk about then?’” Fortunately for everyone, it was when Eddie Jones was coach, so the answer was: ‘We don’t really need to talk about anything, because Eddie has made it all about himself.’”
This, Cole says, was one of Jones’s great strengths. “At first it was: ‘Oh my God, what’s he doing?’ And then you realised that by making it all about himself, he was taking all the pressure off the team. He was looking after us. And you think: ‘This is brilliant.’ He put a shield up for the players, and it meant we could just get on and prepare for the game. Especially when I think about the team we had in 2016, who were quite fragile after how things had gone at the World Cup. He basically deflected everything away from us.”
Jones turned press conferences into another part of the game. The problem was it sometimes made it feel like the media were another opposition. “Yeah, sometimes I do think with the media, especially when times are bad, there’s a bit of a ‘them and us’ mentality to it,” Cole says.
Youngs says one of the first bits of advice he gives new players is not to check the press. “I didn’t read the papers when I was playing, because you’re fully aware that if you go looking for it, you’ll find something that could throw you off,” he says. “Equally there’s often somebody that tells you anyway, I remember a match when I got an innocent message from a family friend who said: ‘Great to see you giving the nod again, especially after all the heat you’ve had the last few days.’ Well, I wasn’t aware of that, but I am now. Thanks.”
Cole says: “I do think it’s harder for guys nowadays. It probably comes back to social media. You probably write nine really nice things about a player, then you write one slightly inflammatory comment, and it’s the first thing that comes up on someone’s feed.”
Youngs had a taste of playing “them” himself last autumn, when Cole was still in the England team and Youngs had to grill him about England’s run of five straight defeats. It made for one of their best episodes, as well as a bunch of headlines. “It was difficult,” Youngs admits. “I was put in this bizarre situation where I was having to ask these questions to a great friend, and I’ve been there myself, I’ve been there where you lose a few results, and I know everyone’s working just as hard when you’re winning or losing. I found it hard, probably harder than Coley.”
Cole agrees: “You know the questions are out there, it’s just that a lot of times in camp, you can’t answer them fully for fear of being misinterpreted. I think that’s one of the great things about the podcast. What is said goes out unedited.” Which is true, and makes me painfully aware of how the choices I’ve made about what to include have shaped even this interview.
They’re currently taking the show on tour but I’m not sure either of them know exactly where it will lead in the long term. England have, they both say, got a lot better at handling the media since Borthwick took over. They encouraged Cole to take part in the podcast even from inside the camp, and Care did likewise with his own show on the BBC. “The fact is all rugby benefits from access and interest in the game,” Cole says, sounding more like a journalist than ever, “because ultimately, without it none of us have jobs, do we?”
