‘You have to be a superhero to be playing at 35 these days’
Dylan Hartley, forced to retire through injury at 33, says Eddie Jones must take England to next World Cup
CHIEF SPORTS FEATURE WRITER
In sport, the deepest consolation of any decision to retire comes from the fact that it is reversible. This strikes Dylan Hartley with some force as he realises that, despite calling time on his rugby career aged 33, he need not be washed up just yet. “Imagine that, Ry,” he says, calling across the room to his agent, Ryan Shahin. “Get me a contract at the end of the year.
“Pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. Yeah, put me on the phone to France. They’ll have me. A concussed player on one leg. They don’t do medical checks over there, do they? They just sign players – they don’t even know who they are half the time.”
I think he is joking. But Hartley’s dial seems always to be set somewhere between bonhomie and belligerence, and one never knows which way the balance will tip. For the most part, he is calm, waxing lyrical on everything from rugby’s battle against head injuries to the lengths to which Eddie Jones would go to make him a better England captain. There is still a glimmer, though, of the hostility opposing front-rowers would recognise, when I press for his views on Saracens’ salary-cap breaches. “Does it matter?” he glowers. “We’ve got to move on.”
It is two weeks since Hartley announced, with disarming finality, that he was departing the game for good. A combination of chronic knee pain, which months of rehab could not mitigate, and the agony of being only an observer of England’s World Cup campaign, rather than the leader, convinced him that his playing pomp had run its course. If you are expecting him to emote about the torment of that call, forget it. They breed them tough in Rotorua, in New Zealand, where Hartley grew up on the family farm before moving to England at 15, and he regards his exit with a certain fatalism.
“I always envisaged I would play until 35,” he says. “When I started, it was normal for 35-year-olds to be playing the game. Nowadays, you have to be some kind of superhero to do so. Brad Thorn and Schalk Brits managed it. So did Paul O’Connell, although towards the end he was just bouncing from one injury to the next. It’s a young man’s game now.
“It’s not like you can keep doing it until you’re 60. I just didn’t get to where I wanted. I fell short by 18 months. Mentally, that made it easier, although it’s still difficult to sit with your boss, pour your heart out and admit, ‘I can’t really keep doing this. I’m done’. But since I shared it with people, it has been quite uplifting.”
Hartley, perhaps unexpectedly for a player so polarising, has received a mailbag heavy with eulogies. James Haskell, his former Northampton team-mate, argued that nobody could have galvanised England from the shambles of the 2015 World Cup like Hartley, while even referee Nigel Owens chimed in, describing him as a “true gentleman off the field”. Note the words “off the field”. On it, he could display his combative streak to excess, pockmarking a decade of elite rugby with 60 weeks of suspensions.
Jones evidently loved him. There was no secret to why this marriage of coach and captain worked so well: both were cut from the same rough cloth, as brawling hookers with the same dry humour and the same penchant for challenging authority. The moment Hartley stepped aside, his Australian mentor declared that he had been a “tough, enduring character for us”. Was he touched by the message? “No,” he grins. “The media man probably wrote it for Eddie. The texts that I shared with him were different.”
For much of the last World Cup cycle, Jones devoted great effort to shaping Hartley as his on-pitch general. “Eddie was constantly sending me things to read: books, articles, PDFs,” he says. “He really invested in me.” Such nurturing was intended to culminate, naturally, in lifting the Webb Ellis Cup in Japan. Hartley, alas, knew as early as June that his infernal knee would sideline him from the tournament. He watched the ensuing drama not with bitterness, but with a satisfaction that, despite the wrench of a final defeat by South Africa, England’s turnaround under Jones was essentially complete.
“England had just beaten the All Blacks, but guess what? Sport happens, and there’s another team that’s bigger and nastier on the day,” he says. “You can get all technical about it, but South Africa earned it through sheer bloody-mindedness. They played the perfect game.”
Hartley’s debt of gratitude to Jones is profound, given how England’s vastly improved standards and discipline enabled him to prosper. “Eddie made us uncomfortable, by showing us what high-performance sport looked like,” he says. “We were coasting along before that.” As such, he is unswerving in his conviction that Jones should stay at the helm beyond 2021, when the head coach’s contract is due to expire, to lead the country at the next World Cup in France.
“Why change? He took the team from eighth in the world to first. He promised at the outset, ‘We’ll be the No1 team’. We delivered, and he put us in a position to win the World Cup. He did his job. He can’t coach the team any differently in the week of a final. All of his work was done in the 3¾ years building up to it. Come the tournament, the players were running themselves. What’s Eddie going to say? He will have told them, ‘You’re ready’.”
As for Hartley, he is ready to embark on the next phase of his life. He is yet to work out what form it will take, beyond the almost obligatory stints on the after-dinner circuit, but for now he is content merely to be pain-free, with his knee having severely impaired his quality of living. “My four-year-old daughter beat me in a race to our truck the other day,” he laughs, ruefully. “Even going upstairs was a struggle. I was a little bit miserable. I just wanted a normal leg for civilian purposes.”
Through years of attrition in the scrum, Hartley has acquired more than his share of war wounds, including several alarming concussions. In 2018, he missed England’s tour of South Africa due to a head injury, and two years earlier had found himself so dazed during a Grand Slam-sealing victory over France in Paris that he could not even remember the trophy presentation.
Against that backdrop, he has recently become an advocate for N-Pro headguards, a type of protection capable of reducing impacts by up to 75 per cent.
“We can’t change the game,” he says. “Rugby is only going one way: it is faster, more physical, and the athletes are getting bigger. In the US, the NFL got caught out with concussions, but we want to be the sport that ensures safety from the grass roots to the professional ranks. We have to keep reducing the risk.” He does not want to use the expression explicitly, but Hartley is making a classic case for damage limitation. And yet many neurological experts believe that rugby cannot solve its concussion crisis without fundamental changes.
As he prepares for photographs, I finish by asking Hartley what he considers his proudest achievement in an England shirt. “Playing for 10 years,” he replies. “Getting there was easy, sustaining it was b----- difficult. Not many people do it.”
Increasingly, his is a savage trade. In time, Hartley could well discover that another of his finest feats lay in knowing, for the sake of his own preservation, when to walk away.
‘You can get all technical about it, but South Africa were bigger and nastier on the day’
The N-Pro is the first headguard to be approved for global trial by World Rugby with the aim of reducing head injuries. Visit www.n-pro.com