A mini reunion of players from Worcester Warriors will take place on Saturday 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 vs 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 fixed-income 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 the Championship.
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 Alex Mitchell in 2017: Clegg has gone into legal work, and Butler has been a teaching assistant and worked for a bank in New Zealand, while playing fly-half for College Rifles RFC; Tom Howe went briefly to Saracens then to Dorking as part-time player-backs coach.
Kitchener, within a week of Worcester folding, had landed a three-month loan at Saracens. It was extended by a month, and he played six times from October to January – enough to earn a Premiership winner’s medal at the season’s end. But Kitchener had gone from Saracens by then; there was no offer to remain. And he was gone from rugby too.
He is now working as a data analyst predicting electricity consumption for YES Energy in Waterloo in London, and flat-sharing with a mate in Finsbury Park.
As he takes a walk round Finsbury Park in his lunch hour, he reflects on the gilded rugby world of everything taken care of on a daily basis: “I am not missing it hugely,” he says. “I was never one of these people who loved rugby with a massive passion and that it was the only thing I ever wanted to do.”
Kitchener’s elder brother, Graham, was at Worcester, too. A veteran of England’s A team, and Leicester Tigers for eight years, he was 33 and contemplating possibly his last season. On the Wednesday the axe fell, his agent told him Wasps were interested.
“I went there and trained for a week,” Graham tells i, “and then that weekend Wasps’ game was off, and at the start of the following week, I was sat in pretty much the same [redundancy] meeting. After that there were a few offers – a couple from France, one from Australia. But my wife is settled with a job, our son was one and a half, so it would have been a big upheaval or me not seeing them for a long period.
“And all of the while, you’re out of a job. Some people’s situations were worse, so I wouldn’t want to labour it, but I wasn’t earning any money for my family and all these thoughts are rattling round and in January I bit the bullet and said ‘right it is off to the next stage’.”
A friend in the rugby network provided the link to a job in financial advice for Furnley House in Leicester; part office-based, part on the road.
Graham feels most regret for the “middle group”, including his brother Andrew: “Those mid-20s lads who should be in the prime of their career.
“They were on half decent wages, then looking for other clubs who are financially squeezed, and are they going to go for someone in the mid-20s, or for the cheaper alternative? Someone like my brother would have had another six, seven, eight years, all being well.”
When Owlett was at Worcester, he was the club’s rep on the Rugby Players’ Association, sitting in meetings more fraught than he could have expected. It is only recently that compensation payments averaging a few thousand pounds per player, on top of statutory redundancy, have been paid out, with the RPA’s help.
Andrew Kitchener’s wages dropped in his new career, naturally as he is starting out, but he is cracking on. “I still watch some rugby,” he says, “and it is interesting, but also a bit depressing.
“Initially it was the Premiership trying to keep pace with higher paying leagues, without those broadcast contracts or other things to get the money in, and you are just going to lose money on an annual basis and that’s not sustainable. Game-wide, it’s not in the best position and that’s a shame because rugby as a spectacle is still pretty good.”
Worcester’s former Warriors: Where are they now?
Moved to top level
Forwards
Joe Batley, 27, to Bristol Bears
Tom Dodd, 26, to Coventry then Edinburgh
Hame Faiva, 30, to Hurricanes (NZ) then Bath
Kyle Hatherell, 29, to La Rochelle (Fra) then Leicester Tigers
Ted Hill, 25, to Bath
Curtis Langdon, 26, to Montpellier (Fra) then Northampton Saints
Fergus Lee-Warner, 30, to Bath then Waratahs (Aus)
Santiago Medrano, 27, to Western Force (Aus) then Lyon (Fra) then Western Force (Aus)
Murray McCallum, 28, to Edinburgh (Sco) then Newcastle Falcons
Cameron Neild, 29, to Glasgow (Sco) then Edinburgh (Sco) then Sale Sharks then Newcastle Falcons
Rory Sutherland, 31, to Ulster (Ire) then Oyonnax (Fra)
Finn Theobald-Thomas, 20, to Gloucester then Leicester Tigers
Jay Tyack, 27, to Bristol Bears.
Backs
Seb Atkinson, 21, to Gloucester
Alex Hearle, 25, to Gloucester
Noah Heward, 23, to Bristol Bears
Ollie Lawrence, 24, to Bath
Jamie Shillcock, 26, to Bath to Mitsubishi Dynoboars (Jap) then Leicester Tigers
Gareth Simpson, 26, to Saracens then Western Force (Aus) then Saracens
Fin Smith, 21, to Northampton Saints
Duhan van der Merwe, 28, to Edinburgh (Sco)
Francois Venter, 33, to Sharks (SA)
Owen Williams, 32, to Ospreys (Wal).
Below top level or not playing
Forwards
Beck Cutting, 25, to Ampthill and recruitment
Jack Forsythe, 22, to Exeter University
Renato Gommarioli, 29, to Bordeaux-Bègles (Fra) then Fiamme Oro (Ita)
Lewis Holsey, 23, to Bedford Blues then Birmingham Moseley
Andrew Kitchener, 27, to Saracens then data analyst
Graham Kitchener, 34, to financial adviser
Matt Kvesic, 32, to Zebre (Ita) then Coventry
Theo Mayell, 20, to RGC (Wal) then Loughborough University
Morgan Monks, 23 to Malvern RFC as player-coach
Valeriy Morozov, 29, to Bath then Krasny Yar Krasnoyarsk (Rus)
Kai Owen, 25, to Doncaster Knights then Nottingham
Jack Owlett, 29, to Esher then Blackheath and fixed income broker.
Backs
Ashley Beck, 34, to Merthyr (Wal) then coaching
Will Butler, 26, to Hartpury then College Rifles (NZ) and banking operations
Will Chudley, 36, to Coventry and financial advisor
Harri Doel, 23, to Llandovery (Wal)
Tom Howe, 28, to Saracens then Dorking as player-backs coach
Perry Humphreys, 29, to Old Glory DC (USA)
Jack Johnson, 25, to Hartpury
Tom Miles, 21, to Gloucester academy and Loughborough University
Oli Morris, 24, to Munster (Ire) then Ampthill
Billy Searle, 28, to Bath then Toulouse (Fra) then Biarritz (Fra)
Tobi Wilson, 20, to Coventry
Ollie Wynn, 22, to Chester then RGC (Wal) then Caldy.