Rocky Clark
Stephen Jones pays tribute to England’ s most-capped player, Rocky Clark, and gets the prop’ s thoughts on the current state of the women’s game
WORLD RUGBY unveiled a new international tournament for women last month. Called WXV, it will bring the top teams in the world together, in three divisions, in each season save for World Cup years.
It is a great boost for the elite end of the sport and also for the emerging nations, who have the incentive that there are 16 places available at the 2025 World Cup as the tournament expands from the usual 12. Yet if the tournament has an eye on the future then it is also a tribute to all those who put the women’s game where it is – so many heroines, almost always unpaid, almost always speaking beautifully on behalf of their sport, selfless and passionate.
And a tribute perhaps especially to the force of nature, indomitable athlete and indestructible prop that is Rochelle ‘Rocky’ Clark. She is the record holder, the most-capped England rugby player of all time of either sex. She wore the Red Rose an incredible 137 times – in any position that is sensational but in the front row it is almost beyond comprehension.
How long could she stay at the top? England captain Sarah Hunter started this year’s Women’s Six Nations on 123 caps. She would have been closer at the end of this calendar year had not the World Cup been postponed to 2022 and you hope she will feel able to carry on the extra year.
Jason Leonard, on 114, is the most-capped England men’s
player but the nearest active player in the men’s game is Ben Youngs, who played his 109th game for England against Ireland, at 31. If Youngs carries on until the next World Cup when he will be 34, if he avoids injury and if he is still the first choice in the intervening period, then he could eclipse Clark at France 2023. My own feeling is that all these heroes may, just, fail to catch Clark.
“It’s a really nice title to hold but it’s one that just came upon me,” Clark says. “It wasn’t something I was going for.
I just wanted to play every match, so it’s been nice to feel that all my hard work added up to something. I got the recognition, I enjoyed it so much, but it was never about just adding another cap.
“It was so much of my life and I made so many wonderful friends and amazing memories. It was brilliant to be able to play for England so many times, I’m very fortunate.” And all the greats who have become centurions have their own place in the pantheon, whatever happens.
Where is England’s record holder now? Out on the rugby pitch. At 39, she is still playing at the top level of the club game for the successful Saracens team in the Allianz Premier 15s – and is impressing with her try-scoring tally.
“I can’t remember them all but against Wasps I had the ball a metre out and saw that there was quite a small defender so I just used my bodyweight, picked up and drove over the line.”
Most props can recall all their career tries, so it is something to have scored in three successive games at 39 and forgotten some. But her achievement at still being so highly competitive this season is probably even better than that. I put it to her that because of the temporary law changes in the league due to Covid, there are dramatically fewer scrums – her natural habitat.
“It has been a bit of a transition but it is nice on a Monday not waking up feeling like you’ve had ten car crashes. It’s kind on the body in terms of the neck and upper body, but around the park it’s more running, so it’s more based on fitness.
“I’ve become obsessed with rowing and Wattbiking, so that has helped me to improve my fitness. What I found over my career is that you get used to any changes, you get hardened and you adapt. I think that adaptability is one of the reasons for my longevity.”
We spoke about her original transition from Test player and world champion to ex-England. These days the sport, and those responsible for medical and psychological care, recognise the problems an athlete can face. If you have played so much rugby and become so enveloped in your career, then transition must be very tough.
“I did find it very, very hard. Nothing prepares you for how hard it is. It takes
“It would have been lovely to be paid for 137 caps, not just ten, but it’s been a phenomenal journey”
at least a couple of years and a year or two ago when I retired from England I was probably at the lowest point, in a really down place, and 2019 was a really bad year in terms of my mental health.
“When you come out of the team you suddenly have no focus, you don’t feel you belong to anything and that is when the insecurity and the anxiety creeps in.”
Gradually, she has pieced together parts of a new career. She operates bootcamps – more recently online – does personal training and four days a week she coaches at Oaklands College, who are in partnership with Saracens, so she’s bringing through young players of potential. She is also player-coach at Sarries. She contemplates coaching abroad – what an attraction she would be for so many teams in WXV.
Yet you do feel that she is searching for something else, possibly to join the ranks of broadcast summarisers. Frankly, you sense that someone as honest and straight-talking as Clark would be excellent value. It can get a little jarring when summarisers of either sex simply agree with the commentator. Anyone who revels in the insight of David
Flatman on television on the play up front would spot a female equivalent here.
It is wonderful to hear that she is now feeling better, emerging from the kind of post-career trauma that has afflicted so many. You feel for the women’s players who have just left the game or are about to because it is clear that, despite the privations of the Covid era, elite players will be making a decent professional living shortly, then on into the future.
The sacrifices that the generations made since the first World Cup in 1991 (see P76-79) right up until the next one are phenomenal. Would she have liked to be coming up through the ranks now?
“I will always maintain I’m very happy to have lived through the transition towards professionalism. Obviously it would have been lovely to have been paid for all of my 137 caps, not just ten, but it has been a phenomenal career and journey, and one that I wouldn’t change. I wanted to win the World Cup; I did that. I got an MBE, I got 137 caps, I absolutely loved it, I made all the friends I made. I wouldn’t twist, I would stick.”
Everybody realises that, especially in England, there is a new generation who are going to elevate the game, and how profoundly you pray that their coaches will not instil the kind of cynicism that besets parts of the men’s game.
“There are people who are growing up now and they are going to go straight into professional rugby and they are never going to have had a job. I just think that’s mental compared to what I went through, but it is exciting.
“You see Ellie Kildunne and Megan Jones, how good they were when they came in. These kids have no fear, they’re exciting, electric, they’ve got views and ambitions and that’s wonderful to see. I have always gone on about youth and experience being the perfect blend, and I very much still think that. But you see these young players coming in and just going for it, like baby Nollies (Danielle Waterman) or baby Scarratts. So much potential, and with youth on their side.”
She believes that the great Sophie Hemming was the best prop she played against, and she chooses two games from the 137. “Probably one of my best games was the World Cup semi-final in 2014 against Ireland; all of us just played the perfect game in my opinion. And then another time was in New Zealand when we beat the Black Ferns in 2017 on a trip during the Lions tour.”
Correct. I was lucky enough to be at both those games, at Stade Jean Bouin in Paris and the Rotorua International Stadium in New Zealand. Clark was stupendous in both; in that semi-final in Paris, it was as if there were three of her, it seemed every carry was made by her.
The women’s game has come so far but, she believes, too slowly. She expresses regret that the World Cup has been postponed through Covid, finds it somehow predictable. “It is the same storyline, things are improving but not enough, it needs to be quicker and back up the steps forward that the game is taking. You see a lot of people jump on the bandwagon for International Women’s Day but what counts is when it’s done all the year round.”
Very few sportsmen or sportswomen have experienced the giddy feeling of being number one, of being above all others. Still fewer have carried that status with such modesty and heart and soul. Because in the end, it is not the cap statistics that have put her on top; it is the dedication, talent and indestructible business of being Rocky.