‘It’s always the players,” Anthony Watson says with a weary shrug as he identifies the group which he believes shoulders the worst of English rugby’s problems. “I’m hoping that a few changes to personnel across the game might make things different going forward. But it always seems to be the players on the receiving end of bad news, especially over the last 24 months where a salary cap got enforced within two weeks with no feedback from us. Then there were the agent fees, now covered by the players, which was again enforced with no feedback from us. We weren’t informed of these decisions.”
Watson is discussing the wider issues which besiege rugby – from experienced professionals suddenly being without a contract to brain damage and enduring racism – and it feels important to see them through the prism of his personal experiences. He has played 51 times for England, including the 2019 World Cup final, as well as five Tests for the British & Irish Lions, but last season an unexpected phone call from Stuart Hooper, Bath’s director of rugby, shocked him.
