Sam Warburton was supposed to conduct this interview with his former Wales and British & Irish Lions colleague, George North, but a family illness meant yours truly was asked to stand in at late notice. “Yeah, Sam just messaged me to say he couldn’t be bothered to do the interview,” says North with a laugh to break the ice.
And he is joking because they are the closest of pals — “One of the best friends I have made through rugby,” Warburton wrote in The Times when North retired from international rugby last year.
In that wonderful Wales squad that won so much — North was involved in two grand slams, four Six Nations titles and reaching two World Cup semi-finals — there was a gang of four that always stuck together: North, Warburton, Dan Lydiate and Scott Williams.
“Well, Sam hangs on to me, Scott and Dan,” North says. “The four of us are still very close now. I speak to them all very regularly; Sam is a nightmare because you ring him, he doesn’t answer and then he rings you back at a stupid time.”
North, far right, celebrates a triple crown at Twickenham in 2012 on Wales’ way to an 11th grand slam with, from left: Jonathan Davies, Scott Williams, Phillips and Cuthbert
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This is classic North: playful, jocular and engaging, but this was not always the North we saw in public during his stellar 121-cap career for Wales (plus three for the Lions). He had some tough times, notably during his battles with concussion but also with social media as it became more influential and rabid. North, that most physically gifted of wings who scored two tries on his debut against South Africa aged 18, retreated within himself a little.
“If you speak to the players I went shoulder to shoulder with day to day, I hope they describe me as happy-go-lucky, positive in everything I do, that I work myself to the bone, but I’m doing it with a smile on my face,” he says. “I would hope they say I was the consistent joker, smiler and energiser.
“As a person, I think I lost a bit in that era where poor Cuthie [Alex Cuthbert] and [Rhys] Priestland just got cut to shreds [on social media] and out of self-preservation I think I closed the book a bit, as you do because you’re trying to support your friends but you’re very aware that you don’t want those shots to be fired at you either.”
North has embraced life with Provence, in the second tier of French rugby, having called time on his international career
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But towards the end of his career, North was back to his usual absorbing best. He is in top form in his autobiography, No Other Place, which was written with the journalist and podcaster Tom Fordyce and is to be published next week.
“It’s an honest slice of me, pretty much,” he says of the book. “I didn’t want it to be a slagging match. I wanted it to be a deep dive into my own sacrifices and what I had to do, and also some of the decisions I made along the way that didn’t make sense to people.”
So how did he find that often cathartic task of writing a book? “I didn’t want to do it initially,” he says. “But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like the right time. It’s quite a surreal process. You kind of forget what you achieved sometimes, don’t you?
“When you’re in it and you’re amongst it, you don’t really think about it. So it was nice to take a step away. It was actually like, ‘Wow! I was very fortunate to come through with an amazing group of guys, coaches and staff at the time,’ and the experiences and the knowledge I picked up off them was incredible. And I guess now at the ripe old age of 33 I really can fully appreciate it.”
It truly was a golden generation for Wales, but, interestingly, at the end of his tome, North, while emphasising that he is not usually one for regrets, does confess that he wishes he had enjoyed it all a little more.
“I got caught between two eras of rugby,” he says. “I missed the end of the old school, with characters like Mike Phillips and Andy Powell. But I didn’t quite hit the full-on academy era. There was a group of young guys like Sam, Lyds, Scott Williams, Toby [Faletau] and Lloyd Williams, we kind of ended up in that weird sort of middle ground between old-school rugby and new professionalism.
“With that mixture, I was never really allowed to get above my station with the old school. But then I also was very conscious that, with this new level of professionalism and this new era of rugby, it wasn’t about necessarily celebrating, it’s about the next job. Can you recover? Can you focus? Can you prepare as best you can for the next game or the next training day? With that cocktail of the two eras, I kind of missed the opportunity to really celebrate certain parts of my career.”
North finds himself in the wars during the 2011 World Cup bronze final against Australia, which his side lost narrowly
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But it was a damned good Wales side. “I think you could argue we were probably one of the most dominant forces in world rugby between 2011 and 2015,” he says. “We had a small blip but between about 2018 and 2020, you could argue that we were still very dominant. It’s incredible, considering the size of Wales, what we did.
“When you consider how the regions were performing, whenever it came to the internationals we seemed to get it right and click and punch well above our weight. I was very fortunate that I was in that from a young age and I managed to keep myself injury-free for a lot of it.”
Which brings us on to the topic of concussion, something I know North has always been reluctant to talk about but has bravely tackled in the book, particularly the period when he took four blows to the head between November 2014 and March 2015 and then stepped away from rugby for six months.
“I decided to confront it and put out my opinion in black and white on concussion because over the years whatever anyone said or was writing, it was out of my control,” he says. “It was a tough part of my life and it really affected me and my mental health. It was just a horrible time.
North suffers one of the concussions that had become a recurrent theme during his career while playing for former club Northampton in March 2015
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“Any time anyone in the world got concussed in rugby, it’d be my name getting dragged through it — and it was just brutal. It went from the extreme of doctors writing about it that I’ve never met before and never examined me, right through to going shopping in Tesco and you’ve got people telling me what I should do. It got full on.
“I was the guinea pig unfortunately. I’m happy to carry some of that burden because obviously it’s got the game in a lot safer place and the awareness and understanding is growing day by day. But also that cross [to bear] sometimes is hard to control because it’s like everyone tarnishes me with it.
“So I wanted to address it because I wanted to show people that there was more to it than just what other people were saying. I wanted to give my opinion on it.
“I wanted it to be quite short and direct because that’s how I dealt with it. I dealt with it with pure information with the best doctors. I spoke to them regularly, I still speak to them regularly, and I want them to tell me as straightforward as yes or no — is there any issue that you can see currently? Any degenerative issues yes or no?
“As soon as there’s a pause where he doesn’t give a yes or a no, or he’s trying to think about how to soften the blow, then that’s the day I walk away. It was important that I addressed it and I think if I didn’t address it then there’d be more questions asked.”
Life is good for North and his family out in France, where he is playing in Pro D2 for Provence. “It’s hot! As a North Walian it’s flippin’ hot!” he says. “No, it’s brilliant. I arrived here with my achilles injury [suffered in his final game for Wales, against Italy last year] so it took me a while to understand how I fit in the system, what their system is and what their understanding of rugby is, but I feel like towards the end of last season I was getting back to a little bit of myself.”
There were some headlines recently about North saying that the Pro D2 clubs in the French second tier would be competitive against the Welsh regions, but as North says: “There may have been a little bit of a translation issue there. What I was trying to say was that in blocks where Provence are playing our best rugby there’ll be spells where we could compete for sure, not just with the regions, but I also said with some of the UK teams.”
Hopefully nothing has been lost in translation here, and maybe Warburton dodged a bullet, given a broadcast interview he once did with his great mate that did not go quite as he hoped gets a mention in the book. “When he did that he was box-fresh into his new role,” North says. “He texted me saying I look forward to catching up later and I just replied saying ‘no comment’. And then I think he started off with some howling cheesy line and to be fair I prepared it anyway, so that whatever came out of his mouth the first question was always going to be shut down.”
It was a tough school that Wales team, with some tough coaches in Warren Gatland, Shaun Edwards and Rob Howley. As North says at the end of his book: “We were the ones, thanks to Gats and Shaun and Howlers, with a bit of a bastard in us for ever more.”
No Other Place by George North with Tom Fordyce and published by Harper Collins is available on Thursday ,September 11