Phil Vickery: Firsts and Lasts
Phil Vickery packed down as England’s indomitable tight-head prop for more than a decade, a relentless scrummager, powerful ball carrier and rock solid in defence.
In 1997, before being called up to the national team, he ran out for an English Rugby Partnership XV against the All Blacks at Ashton Gate. Clive Woodward, asked how the young prop would fare against New Zealand’s gnarly Bull Allen, said: “We’ve got our own bull, the Raging Bull.”
Phil has been Raging Bull ever since. A dairy farmer’s son from Cornwall, he first played rugby as an apprehensive 11-year-old at Budehaven School. Thanks to encouragement from his PE teacher Ivan Opie, Phil found himself “as a big kid feeling valued, with people wanting me in the team."
He joined his beloved Bude RFC at 13, where “the sense of camaraderie, being with mates, feeling I had a purpose” bred a lifelong passion for rugby. At the club for some filming just before lockdown, he sat in the home changing room remembering. “Just being back there makes me feel quite emotional,” he says.
Bude was where the other boys began to catch up with Phil’s height and he discovered he needed to develop the skills to succeed. That success he saw as reaching the heights Bude Colts..
“Rugby is just a wonderful game. It gave a Silly Billy like me the opportunity to play a sport which I am very passionate about. I feel and care deeply about it. I loved the ethos at Bude, being there with my brother, my friends, the unbelievable captain’s team talks of my first team captain Tyler Collins. Maybe they weren’t the greatest of all time but did they inspire me, yes they did! To play for the Bude team was amazing, representing my club, my town, I never lost sight of that.”
Redruth, Gloucester & England at 21
Redruth came calling when Phil was just learning to drive at 17. “Simon Blake and Terry Prior, who both gave so much to Redruth, came to see me and they said they wanted me to be the best I could be and to take me to the next level. Without my mum’s support I couldn’t have done it, driving me there and back two or three times a week was a hell of a commitment.
“The people at Redruth, the fans were awesome. I remember Richard Keast my absolute Cornwall hero came to talk to me. I’m 44 now but it still makes me feel fantastic, proud. His son Billy is now in Exeter Chiefs’ front row.”
A couple of years later it was Gloucester who came calling and “I just remember falling in love with the place”. The club sorted out part time work on a dairy farm for Phil until “within six months the game went so called pro and after 33 first team games I was 21 and getting my England debut in the last of the season’s Five Nations, with a record win against Wales.”
He must have been the first and only qualified cattle inseminator to pull on an England shirt. All he had wanted as a boy was to become a farmer but “I was lucky to fall in love with the game, to be able to become a professional, international player. Having rugby as a career I was really privileged, never mind all the accolades, the trophies, I just care about rugby, probably too much.”
A proud Cornishman, with tremendous pride in England’s rugby, Phil amassed 73 England caps and five for the British & Irish Lions. He played in the 1999 World Cup, in every match of England’s 2003 victorious campaign, and led the team to the 2007 World Cup final in Paris, beating Australia and France along the way.
Family Matters
Married to Kate, with daughter Megan, who loves sport especially netball, while her brother Harrison plays Gloucestershire age group tennis, family togetherness matters. “In the Vickery household we always try to be together at meal times and we live with Kate’s mum and dad who are a great support. We have board meetings around the kitchen table and the kids reckon the most positive part of Covid has been sitting together at the dinner table chatting. My love of food comes from being a farmer’s son. I love everything about the growing and making of food. The farmhouse kitchen table was always the focal point of the family and the farm.”
Having won Master Chef in 2011, Phil has set up No.3 restaurant in Cheltenham’s Royal Crescent with business partner and head chef Tom Raines, adding to his successful Raging Bull clothing brand. “I’m very lucky to work with some really good people,” he says. “It has been challenging to open a restaurant in a pandemic but I’ve been using the rugby skills and experience when things have been really tough.”
The veteran No.3 knows about tough, having come through various injuries which eventually caught up with him when he was forced to retire from rugby on medical advice in 2010.
“You don’t know when your rugby career is going to end. My last game for the Lions, in the winning third Test in South Africa, I had a standing ovation coming off the pitch which made me very emotional. My last game with Wasps was at Kingsholm against Gloucester. I remember losing the feeling in my hands and arms which was pretty worrying but I also remember Harrison, who was very little then, having a wee on the pitch!”
Phil captained his nation 15 times, firstly against the burgeoning Pumas in Argentina with an understrength England expected to lose. His last was at Twickenham when without a win England seemed likely to lose their coach.
First - June 22, 2002 Velez Sarsfield, Buenos Aires, Argentina 18 – 26 England
“We’d had the Lions tour the year before and were heading for a World Cup the following year so Clive (Woodward) was giving a lot of players the summer off. We’d got very much a second tier squad and if I’m honest I thought we were lambs to the slaughter. The Pumas had beaten the All Blacks and watching that atmosphere had been incredible. They’d also just beaten France, Scotland and Wales. I remember Clive asking me to captain and my first thought was that was awesome and then that this was going to be one of the toughest matches in one of the most hostile environments.
“We arrived and there were demonstrations every day up and down the town. We were advised not to go out and we were walking through the game plan, walking through lineouts. Brian Ashton worked on the attack and the way Clive wanted us to play made the England camp a joy to be around in 2001-02. The preparation from Andy Robinson, Phil Larder, Dave Alred was brilliant that week. Dave talked a lot about control, it was as much about mind set, how we controlled the pressure, as a game plan.”
“Buenos Aires was a scary place to be, with lots of anger around. On the journey to the stadium people were burning the St George’s flag and throwing stuff at the bus, with the Falklands and all that stuff being brought up. At Velez Sarsfield there was a 20 metre steel cage all the way round the pitch. The changing rooms were under the stand and when you came up the other side of the fence it was a scary place to be. The fence wasn’t there to keep the crowd safe!
“While we didn’t have the big names we had a pretty exciting England team. We had five debutants: Geoff Appleford, Phil Christophers, Alex Codling, Michael Horak, and Ben Johnston. Alex was so confident in his ability, Ben was solid as a rock. The London Irish boys were playing brilliant rugby. Then there was the likes of me, Steve Thompson, Ben Kay, David Flatman, and nobody wants it more than Flats. Alex Sanderson was in the back row. We’d got Stimo (Tim Stimpson) with his big boot at the back. We were a nuggety bunch and we were there to do a job. We were going to stick to it, we were going to keep going, not take a backward step.
“I’m terrible at team talks, I get too emotional and it wasn’t complicated. I had huge respect for my team mates and I said this was a moment where we’d got an opportunity to go out and do something, to win this game and be able to look each other in the eye knowing we’d given our best. When I sing the anthem I mean it and singing it in front of that crowd was really something, along with hearing Argentina sing their anthem which was truly remarkable. The level of emotion was equal to that at Cardiff and the passion I felt was close to how I felt in Cardiff.
“I knew we were expected to lose and when we were 12-3 down at half time I said ‘I don’t want us to be known as the England team who went down fighting.’ The press boys had already written the piece and were on the red wine: brave England, the Pumas over powered a weakened England side. I told the boys that’s not us. We had really good players, proud people like Charlie Hodgson, as good a fly half as I ever played with. It was relentless but we stuck at it, never gave up. Instead of being under pressure in the second half we put them under pressure in the tackle area, the scrum, in the lineout, the lineout drive, the basic things, simple high energy, upbeat rugby: move on, next tackle, play the numbers, back on your feet, more of us on their feet than them. We actually shook them up, with four minutes to go, Stimpson booted a 50 yard penalty, leaving them needing two scores.
“At the whistle it was pretty amazing, I remember feeling so elated, so happy for everyone. It was a proper tough Test match, where you are not welcome, not wanted, not expected to win but stand up to the pressure. We were all jumping around, we’d beaten Argentina in Argentina. I remember thinking it was a real achievement and there was almost a sense of respect from the crowd. I remember Gus Pichot saying ‘well done, you deserve this.’ I remember sharing a glass of wine or two with Flats, Thomo, Mark Regan, it’s a lovely memory.
Flying home as a winning England captain was a real feather in the cap and I’m smiling talking about it now. With all that’s going on in the world those are moments that can never be taken away. It was a very special time. I had just started dating Kate and said sorry I’m off to Argentina. What a year, England captain, beating Argentina, meeting Kate and 18 years later, with two kids, it’s still pretty amazing!”
Last - March 15 2008 at Twickenham Stadium England 33 – 10 Ireland
“I’d been around a while, through different times and different coaches and Brian (Ashton) was someone I had so much time and respect for. As a bloke he was an inspiration to me. I was under no illusion about how much pressure everyone was under, myself included, and that’s never a nice environment to be in. Ireland were looking good and yes we were under pressure, you knew when Rob Andrew said someone wasn’t losing their job, they were likely to lose their job, just by the fact he’d been asked to answer that question. It was about the hangover from 2003 and how things had gone since then. People were getting a bit frustrated, it was a tough time but that was a great day.
“I remember getting a phone call from Brian before the previous match against Scotland saying Danny (Cipriani) had been out at a club in Mayfair and asking me my thoughts around the team and standards. He’s been named in the squad, which would have been his first start for England, but the conclusion was he’d have to be dropped. I remember Cips saying he wasn’t drinking, he’d just been dropping tickets off for mates but I thought ‘Come on, what does that really look like?’ Shaun Edwards from Wasps phoned me up and gave me a rollicking. You find out who your mates are when you’re captain. It’s always amazing and brilliant when things are going well but wait until they’re not! There you are getting scrutinised, having to answer difficult questions, be part of making difficult decisions when you’re captain. It’s part of the job.
“And that was a difficult time, we’d just lost the Calcutta Cup and the media coverage wasn’t the greatest. And then we were almost perfection, everything went the way we wanted it to, we achieved everything we set out to. I remember we kept our discipline well. Paul Sackey was fantastic, he’s a brilliant rugby player, a great character, tough under pressure, I loved playing alongside him.
“We were leading at half time and in the second half we just outplayed them, our game was almost perfect. Sackey took a bang to the head stopping Tommy Bowe scoring and Mathew Tait came off the bench to score before Paul reappeared bandaged up. Jamie Noon had a massive game and broke through Ireland’s tacklers to score with 11 minutes on the clock. Danny’s (Cipriani) kicking game was brilliant all match.
I remember coming off the field, the fans cheering, and thinking we performed brilliantly, that our performance had answered all the questions. It was a magical day, Kate was there in the stands. You never know what’s around the corner and I didn’t know it would be my last game as captain but it’s good to remember playing at Twickenham, walking off the pitch as the winning England captain. That’s a very special thing.
“I have given most things away to people or charities. I don’t want a shrine to myself at home but I’m an emotional old soul, I feel and care very deeply about rugby and I’ve loved reminiscing about those matches as England captain.”
