ONCE WERE WARRIORS
Hugh Godwin charts the challenges faced by former Worcester players, united by the common experience of redundancy
Amini reunion of players from Worcester Warriors will take place this afternoon. Old bonds remade, jokes retold, the odd beer taken. Andrew Kitchener, Justin Clegg, Joe Morris and Kyle Hatherell will make their separate ways from around England to gather at Ashton Gate, where five fellow ex-Warriors in Noah Heward, Joe Batley, Jay Tyack, James Williams and Gareth Simpson will be involved in the Bristol v Saracens match. “On a social side we’re keeping in touch and trying to do stuff because we really did get on as a group,” Kitchener tells i. “At Worcester we never had the most star-studded team. But we all got on well and that helped us punch above our weight occasionally.”
Kitchener, a former England Under-20 international second row, played more than 80 times for Worcester across seven seasons. The last of those seasons was truncated to a savagely upsetting few weeks of just four matches in the late summer of 2022. A saga of mixed messages and dark rumblings about the activities of the club’s owners Jason Whittingham and Colin Goldring ended with the company paying the players being placed into administration, and the entire squad and staff were made redundant. Kitchener was 26.
“The hardest bit was that I’d been at Worcester since I was 14,” Kitchener recalls. “I’d built good friendships with a lot of the players, and for that to disappear almost overnight, and all go our separate ways… Those bonds that you build, and the aspect of playing with your mates, not just other rugby players – I realised afterwards that was something I really enjoyed. Losing that was a shame, really.” Worcester’s stadium, Sixways, has sat mostly idle since the last Warriors men’s match, an emotionally charged 39-5 win over Newcastle on 24 September 2022. You won’t find it in the Premiership’s online records – it has been expunged. And this piece isn’t about raking over the coals of what went wrong, or the so-far unsuccessful attempts to refloat the club. It is about the impact on players when rugby’s numbers don’t add up.
Financial troubles would take out Wasps, London Irish and Jersey, too, but Worcester were the first to go. “There was a disbelief it could go that far,” says Jack Owlett, a 27-year-old tighthead prop at the time. “And then it did.”
For the in-demand types of the current and future internationals, and others who were attractive to rival teams, it was relatively straightforward: agree a new deal and move on. Fin Smith, the fly-half, went to Northampton and subsequently England; Duhan van der Merwe, the Scotland and Lions wing, returned to Edinburgh; Batley and Heward moved to Bristol, Ted Hill and Ollie Lawrence to Bath, Curtis Langdon to Montpellier then Northampton, Seb Atkinson and Alex Hearle to Gloucester, Francois Venter to the Sharks in his native
South Africa, and Owen Williams to Ospreys in his native Wales.
The full-back Jamie Shillcock took a circuitous route to Bath then Mitsubishi Dynoboars in Japan, then Leicester Tigers.
Owlett had a pregnant wife who had just moved her solicitor’s job to the Midlands to suit his rugby. He slept on his brother-in-law’s sofa in London for six weeks, to be on hand for networking and sniffs of jobs. In a sign of the realism that has crept into English rugby in recent times, he had completed a degree in business and management at Exeter University, and gained life experience as a special constable in three police forces, while playing for Exeter, Cornish Pirates, Wasps and Worcester. He is now a fixedincome broker for BGC Partners in London’s Canary Wharf, and plays part-time for Blackheath in National One, the third division. His daughter, Sienna, is a year old. “I had offers to go to France or Italy for six months,” Owlett says, “but for me, at that time, rugby was the riskier opportunity.”
The extent of the displacement is clear when i tracks the movements of all 47 players at the time of administration.
Perry Humphreys is with Old Glory DC in the USA; he’d had 26 tries in 110 appearances for Worcester when they gave him a new contract in June 2022, one of seven players to extend after the club won the Premiership Cup away to London Irish the previous month. A fellow back-three man, the 22-year-old Harri Doel, had the briefest of outings for Scarlets and Ospreys, then went semi-pro with Llandovery, while working for the family firm in Llangadog.
Ollie Wynn was 20 when Worcester went under. He told how he was made homeless when the house used by academy players was repossessed due to unpaid mortgage payments shocked the rugby public. From playing in Worcester’s Premiership Cup match at Gloucester in September 2022 – defending their title, the players assumed – Wynn dropped three levels to Chester and did a course as a bricklayer. He then played for RGC in North Wales and most recently was with Caldy in National One.
Back-rowers Jack Forsythe and Theo Mayell are at university, and both played in the Exeter v Loughborough BUCS final last month. Lock-flanker Clegg and centre Will Butler were England Under-20 world championship finalists alongside Ben Earl and