Former England lock Dave Attwood has lifted the lid on how a joke about rugby league sparked a furious row with countryman Owen Farrell.
The pair were teammates under Stuart Lancaster and Eddie Jones, but saw their relationship deteriorate one night after an overseas post-match booze-up. Attwood, 35, claims Farrell hates him "with a passion" but has lauded the Saracens playmaker as the best fly-half in the world.
Asked about the players who wind him up the most on the RugbyPass Offload podcast, Attwood said: "On the pitch, I struggle a lot with Owen Farrell. We just don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.
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"He is the best 10 in the world, he is incredibly good, I have got enormous respect for him as a player but I get very frustrated with him watching him as a player, playing against him.
“He hates me with a passion. Despite my earthy roots, he thinks I am a posh c***. He hates that. I bagged rugby league once jovially. I was saying it to take the p**s kind of thing, ‘a bloody sport for the peasants’. He f***ing hated it and out in Italy or maybe France he fully lost the plot. He had a bit of a shout at me and went off to the toilet and I followed him.
“We all had a drink or two after the game but we didn’t need to get carried away with this. I was in the urinal behind the door and he was three or four down and as I got in his dad [Andy] walked in as well, he was coaching at the time.
"He was like, ‘I don’t want to f***ing hear it’ or something like that and as he walked out he went to open the door and slam it into the back of me. There was like a stop on the floor so it hit the stop and almost clocked him back…
“We never really addressed it after that. That was where it started and it was like a drunken little bit of argy that went too far. He is an incredibly competitive athlete and he is also very f***ing good, he has got high standards. He is a very competitive athlete and in order to be that good, you have to flirt on the wrong side of competitive.
“So whenever we play each other there is always some element in the game where one of us is running at the other one or we are trying to bang each other. There always seems to be an element of that to it. I am sure he is like, 'I don’t even know that Dave is playing'.”
Attwood’s England career ended with his final cap in November 2016, meaning his rivalry with Farrell has now been confined to matches at club level, with the 35-year-old forward making the Gallagher Premiership switch from Bristol back to former club Bath ahead of the 2022/23 season.
