In Unbreakable, the compelling, disturbing and ultimately uplifting new documentary about the England squad that won the 2003 Rugby World Cup, Jonny Wilkinson’s story touches every nerve of elite sport.
At that tournament he fulfilled his destiny as an athlete, leading his team to the precipice of glory and then kicking the winning drop-goal: young, blonde, seemingly fearless, a character from the golden age of English comics, plucked from the pages of Victor, or Tiger.
In the documentary Phil Vickery is the on-screen narrator, making house calls to a handful of his old team-mates, some of whom talk freely about the troubles that have visited their lives: brain damage, loneliness, financial challenges, emotional upheaval.
“I have suffered mentally and physically,” says Vickery. “A lot of operations. Pain. I’ve gone through a divorce. Wrap a bit of bankruptcy in there as well. It’s been a bit of a f**king shit storm really.”
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But every time the documentary returns to Wilkinson, sitting on a wooden bench in a dressed down studio, he is straining every sinew to explain himself and the open-eyed madness of what they did.
“All these strong men who were trained for everything,” he said, “and have all this historical success, and they’re so well known, and they’ve got these big bodies that have been through so much – and they’re so fragile.”
One of the great themes of the programme is vulnerability. As rugby players, they did everything in their power to reject it or conceal it.
“You wanted to be able to cry but you couldn’t,” says Steve Thompson, the hooker on that England team. “You put a shield up.”
Vickery visits Lewis Moody and that subject comes up in their conversation too.
“As male rugby players, in our generation, with the language and the environment we grew up in, it was probably unlikely that we were going to share what we really thought in front of anyone,” says Moody.
“Not probably unlikely,” says Vickery. “It just didn’t happen. It was a no-no.”
The leaders in the group might have suspected that Wilkinson was suffering at the 2003 World Cup, but they had no idea of the scale of it, and there were no established channels for inquiry. There is footage of Wilkinson being interviewed at the team hotel in Australia, and being asked if he was enjoying the tournament, an innocuous question to which he delivered a stock answer. But as he spoke his face looked haunted. Every word was a fib.
“What I was suffering from was a disconnection from myself,” says Wilkinson. “Into that comes anxiety and the panic, then comes confusion, and then the depression.”
He was asked if he spoke to anybody in camp about how he was feeling?
“No,” he said. “You would need an evolved environment and one of enormous security.” It didn’t exist then. In how many dressing rooms does it exist now?
For all of them, though, weakness was the enemy within that needed to be routed at all costs. In their pomp, that team was the embodiment of unblinking ferocity.
“One of the biggest problems with mental health, particularly with blokes, particularly with alpha males” says Martin Johnson, “is we don’t actually talk about it. Whatever is going on inside my head, whatever fears, whatever apprehensions, I walked tall, looked you in the eye [and said] ‘I’m going to f**king hit you.’”
The word “macho” is only mentioned once in the programme, by the former England prop Trevor Woodward, but machismo and its pollutant side-effects are smeared all over the story. In rugby, it was essential. Nobody questioned it. Inconvenient feelings were held in solitary confinement.
Woodward talked about a gruelling scrum session two days after his first international cap against New Zealand in 2002. He said he suddenly felt like somebody had “stabbed me in the back”. The physio cleared him to continue with the session and he hit the scrum machine “10 or 12 more times”.
“I got back to my room,” said Woodward, “rolled out of bed on my hands and knees, got down to the medical room and was told I had a bulging disc that was pushing on a nerve ... [I remember] lying on the bathroom floor, bawling my eyes out, thinking ‘It’s over. Your world has fallen apart’.”
Less than three months after serious back surgery, Woodward returned to the England team. Feigning indestructibility was the only pose that mattered.
“The alpha [male] front that you have is part of your ingredient for success,” says Ben Cohen.
Vickery asks Moody how many times he had been “knocked out” in his career. “Probably most games, in fairness,” Moody answered. “It’s an awful thing to say, but it just became normal. Numerous times the medics tried to remove me from the field, but I refused to go.”
Vickery has been told by specialists that he probably has CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) which causes the death of nerve cells in the brain and is commonly linked to repeated head injuries.
Thompson has been diagnosed with early onset dementia and cannot remember anything about the 2003 World Cup. He has spoken before about his suicidal ideations, and he touches on it here too in a stark, moving conversation with Vickery in which both men break down.
Both Vickery and Thompson are part of the class action being taken against the RFU seeking damages for negligence.
In their lives after rugby there was a wide spectrum of experiences. Many of the 2003 squad were fine but none of them were set up for life. In interviews last week, Cohen said that he sold his World Cup medal during the pandemic just to make ends meet. He struggled to find another career.
What many of them needed over the years was to recover the camaraderie they had lost when sport had finished with them. The documentary opens with a video that Cohen put into the team’s WhatsApp group after a 20-year anniversary get-together, in 2023.
“On another note, and I’m going to put this out there,” says Cohen, pausing to check his emotions. “I have quite often needed someone to speak to. Someone who shared my journey, post-sport. F**king hard journey. Lonely.”
In footage from 2003 there is a large sign as you enter England’s changing room: Winning is why we are here, it reads. Like so many others, they fell for the oldest lie in sport: that winning will take care of everything.
