Maggie Alphonsi considers the racism which still stalks English rugby and then, calmly and thoughtfully, she explains when she feels it bearing down on her most. “It’s when I’ve talked about wanting to be the president of the RFU, and the reason I’ve been singled out is because of my skin colour,” she says. “My gender has been less of an issue even if people still go: ‘As a woman, what do you know about rugby?’ or: ‘You’re just ticking the boxes, woke this, woke that.’ But my skin colour seems to matter more because I get tweets which say: ‘This country is only 3% black people so why don’t you go back to where you came from?’”
Alphonsi comes from Edmonton, in north London, and she smiles patiently at the prejudice and stupidity that motivate her to seek radical change in the game she loves. She won the Pat Marshall award for world rugby personality of the year ahead of Richie McCaw in 2011, helped England to become world champions in 2014 and, as a brilliant and intensely physical flanker, changed the way in which women’s rugby is played in this country. Alphonsi is now on the Rugby Football Union council and she will again be a pundit on ITV when the men’s World Cup begins next week. Her experience and knowledge of rugby is profound and yet, as a black woman, she still endures a stream of abuse.
“I’ve got lots of screenshots of negative tweets and that’s why I don’t stop,” she says of her undented desire to introduce English rugby to a wider demographic. “If anything it strengthens my momentum to keep going, because it’s not about me – it’s about the next generation.”
Sitting alongside a rugby pitch in High Wycombe, Alphonsi talks with a generosity and warmth of spirit that would shame any of her racist and misogynistic trolls if they were ever fortunate enough to spend an hour in her sparkling company. “I’d love to not talk about it,” she says of racism and sexism. “But how do we get to that stage where it’s not even an issue?”
Alphonsi understands discrimination in a deeply personal way. “I’d grown up in a single-parent family on a football‑obsessed council estate,” she writes in her moving and important new book. “I’d been born with a club foot and walked with a limp. I was a girl. I was black. There simply weren’t many people like me who played rugby.”
She is also a gay woman and a mother to two young children, and Alphonsi’s passionate desire to transform rugby burns brightly. “We have an untapped population. There has been criticism of diversity in women’s football but they have tapped into an environment where people think: ‘I could play that. My kids could represent my country at football.’ How can we unlock that in rugby? How can we reach people who have been ignored by rugby so that they now go: ‘This sport represents me.’”
Rugby has always been admirable in the way it suits an array of body shapes and diverse characters. “It’s one of our unique selling points,” Alphonsi agrees. “We offer a place for you whatever your size or shape. But how do we say to people from very different backgrounds to the usual ones in rugby that ‘there is a place for you in our sport’? That’s the next step and we are moving in the right direction. Some really good people are trying to create that change. But it’s making sure the leadership, from the [RFU] council to rugby committees across the country are willing to open up rugby to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.”
Alphonsi grew up on a racially mixed council estate and she was so comfortable in her own skin that she only really understood that she was black when she was nine years old. In April 1993 Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager from south-east London, was murdered by a group of white men. “Until then, I didn’t appreciate that my colour would lead to people hating you in a way that could cost you your life,” Alphonsi says. “I was very young and naive and I wasn’t exposed to [racism] until then. But the Stephen Lawrence case was visible. It was in the news. My mum spoke about it, people I hung around with who were of different colours spoke about it. It’s also a story that stayed alive for years because the people [who killed Lawrence] didn’t get prosecuted. It has a resonating impact on me to this day.”
As a teenager, with her Nigerian mother working two jobs to sustain them, Alphonsi lost her way. She liked fighting boys, as well as girls, and she was in minor trouble with the police. Her mother’s disappointment encouraged her to change but it was only when she discovered rugby that Alphonsi found herself. She was lucky she was so fascinated by the black eye sported by her PE teacher.
“Liza Burgess was the Welsh women’s captain, the first woman to be on the Welsh Rugby Union Board, a hall-of-famer in world rugby,” Alphonsi says of the woman she once knew only as Miss Burgess. “When she was my teacher she was playing for Wales and Saracens. I was so intrigued by her black eye. It was after a Saracens match and I asked her about it and she told me about rugby – which was never a sport I had associated with women.
“She encouraged me to take up the sport by focusing on my strengths and saying they were suited to rugby. I wasn’t used to praise but she focused on the things that make me unique. It made me feel valued and appreciated. So I went down to my local rugby club, which was Saracens in Bramley Road [in Southgate]. The game gave me a freedom which I never found in any other sport.”
Alphonsi was a natural and, when she eventually switched from centre to openside flanker at the outset of her England career, she found her defining position. “The chaos and freedom of being a No 7 suits my personality,” she says with a grin.
But Alphonsi learned that opportunities for men and women in rugby were rooted in inequality. When England won the men’s World Cup in 2003, and their players enjoyed huge financial bonuses, her £18,000 lottery funding was in the midst of being cut. She travelled to her first World Cup, in Canada in 2006, with the expectation of gleaming stadiums and vast crowds. The opposite was true. “The games were on a playing field and the spectators were mainly parents of the players or people just walking their dog. It didn’t sour the experience of a World Cup, but it’s not what I thought it would be.”
At the 2010 World Cup, held in England, Alphonsi remembers being in a launderette with Anna Richards, the New Zealand fly-half who is a “legend” of the women’s game, and Australia’s Debby Hodgkinson, one of her “most fearsome back-row opponents”. All three women waited for their World Cup kit to be washed.
Four years later, when Alphonsi and England finally won the World Cup, they did not receive any bonus payments from the RFU. Their only financial reward came from an anonymous donor who wanted to thank them for all they had done for English rugby. While Clive Woodward was awarded a knighthood for coaching England’s 2003 World Cup winners, Alphonsi’s coaches, Gary Street and Graham Smith, were laid off within six months of them helping England to become world champions.
Alphonsi had to supplement her modest income as a professional rugby player by working for the RFU as a club coach officer, developing a talent pathway for girls and women in and around London. Alphonsi’s office was “a rickety Portakabin in a corner of the north car park at Twickenham with all the gravel and dust that kicked up in your face. The stadium towered over us and those Portakabins represented the women’s game in England.”
Even in 2016, after she became “the first former England women’s player and the only person of colour to become an elected national member of the RFU council”, Alphonsi saw women were not expected to feature in positions of power in English rugby. Every council member wears an RFU blazer. As they did not consider the need for female jackets, Alphonsi was sent a men’s blazer that “hung on me like a tent”.
The current mess of English rugby is exemplified by the crisis surrounding the men’s national team as they limp towards the World Cup having lost five of their past six games with two of their key players, Owen Farrell and Billy Vunipola, banned from the vital opening match against Argentina because of ill‑discipline. In her book, Alphonsi remembers the moment when, as a 26-year-old, she brought down Farrell with a hard but fair tackle when he was the 18-year-old star of the Saracens academy. Reflecting on his latest suspension for a high tackle, Alphonsi smiles: “Come to my tackle school, I’ll show you how it’s done.”
There is no malice in her joke – just frustration that England’s men are in such an abject state. She points out that the muddled thinking is obvious in the selection of Vunipola as the only No 8 in the squad even though he has often been injured. “People say I’m banging on about it or that it’s boring but England are reliant on one No 8 who’s now not available for the first game.”
Alphonsi has the clarity of thinking and impassioned purpose that English rugby needs so desperately. She did not succeed in her attempt to become RFU president but is she willing to try again for election in a few years? “It is still a goal. Even if it doesn’t happen, hopefully I’ve paved the way for others to come through. It’s great we’ve got Debbie Griffin taking over as the RFU’s female president in 2025 when we host the women’s World Cup. But how do we take another step forward and get more diversity in that presidential role?”
She mentors Zainab Alema, a black Muslim mother of three who quit her nursing job “to pursue her dream – she wants to become the first Muslim woman to play rugby for England. I’m like: ‘Oh my God, you aim high, and you go for it.’ Zainab’s come into my life over the last two seasons. She said she was inspired by me as a person of colour playing the sport. She’s a person of colour, her faith is Muslim and she wears a hijab. She is a prop and we mentor each other. I hope she makes it because it’s a similar situation to mine where people didn’t believe in me. But I believe in her 110% because when someone backs you that’s the right energy you need.”
Alphonsi gazes at the empty rugby field and then she nods and smiles again. “This is what I’m most passionate about. How can we improve and open up our game so that people in rugby are treated fairly? I want to keep doing it because I really believe in good governance, change and ensuring that we can influence the game in the most positive ways.”
Winning the Fight by Maggie Alphonsi is published by Polaris
