THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT.  BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX:  01.10.16 – Ep 1. Sue Day – rugby legend talks leadership and performance

HOST:  TAMMY PARLOUR

TP: Welcome to A Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful; how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

[Music]

So I’m sat here with a rugby legend, Sue Day is a former England and Wasp rugby player from 1996 to 2012. As an England player, Sue has an enviable playing CV having 59 caps and scored 61 tries for her country. She was part of numerous grand slam winning England sides including leading the team as Captain to a Six Nations Clean Sweep in 2007, and she’s played in three World Cups. In 2013, Sue became the first female President of Wasps Football Club in their 146th year history. She’s a regular ruby commentator for broadcaster such as Sky Sports and also a chartered accountant. She worked part-time for KPMG throughout her England career and is now a fulltime Partner in KPMG Corporation Finance and also a founding trustee of the Women’s Sport Trust Charity.

Welcome, Sue, and it sounds like you’re a bit of a low achiever.

[Laughter]

When you look back at your career, what are you most proud of? What things stand out for you?

SD: That’s such a difficult question to answer, you talked about three World Cups and grand slams and things like that and I suppose the answer to that question ought to be things like the 2007 grand slam that I captained, and I am really proud of that. But, actually, the things that I really aim for, the things that are my number pinnacle in my career that I wanted to win were World Cups and I never quite won one of those, so I always find it hard to list victories and tournaments as my biggest achievements. Actually, it’s probably more things like genuinely giving everything to be the best I can possibly be. I know I didn’t win the World Cups I wanted to win, but I do know that I gave it everything I possibly could to do that. I know that I looked at every aspect of the training I was doing of sports side given nutrition and all those things and put in place everything I could to the best I could be, so that’s side of it. And probably the second answer is I had a couple of really bad injuries, one in particular where it kind of looked like leg fell off, and coming back from those, I got told very near the start of my rugby career that I would never play rugby again.

TP: Gosh, yeah.

SD: And I’m not sure whether it was delusion or single-mindedness, but one or the other [laughs]. I came back from that and then one dozens more caps for England and played for many many more years. So I think it’s those things, all that stuff that you can completely control and you do and you put in place everything you can that I’m probably most proud of.

TP: You said that about the World Cups, if you had won the World Cup, is it the longing for something that you didn’t get or is it the actual…what is it about the World Cup?

SD: I’m not sure. I genuinely don’t know the answer to that question. And do you mean would I have answered winning the World Cup if you?

TP: Yes, absolutely, or it would it have been something else?

SD: [Laughs] I possibly would of and possibly that would have been the easy way out of answering the question. Of course, I would have been proud of winning the World Cup, that’s what I was ostensibly aiming for in every four year cycle.

TP: Yes.

SD: And it is difficult to feel proud of the silver medals that are sitting in my sock drawer. Funnily enough a friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day, she’d had her shirt framed and her medal framed from the 2006 World Cup when we won the silver medal, so it had taken her 10 years to put that somewhere…

TP: That long to…yes.

SD: …that she was proud of.

TP: And where’s yours?

SD: It’s in the loft.

[Laughter]

Given me another decade and…when you aim so high for something and you’re throwing everything at it and you don’t quite achieve it, it’s really hard to look at that and be…I am proud of it, of course I am, but I don’t think I can look at it every day – yet. [laughs].

TP: You’ve played for England and Wasp for 16 years, was there always joy in rugby or did that the joy and the motivation did that change over time?

SD: It definitely changes over time. I sort of plot of little graph – I would being a person who works in finance – when you first start, you’ve got this real naiveté and innocence of youth – and by youth, I mean used to playing high level rugby so you don’t know about the pressures, you don’t know about the expectations, you don’t know about all the people who are going to be giving you feedback or whatever it might be, then you sort of become middle aged in your rugby career and you start to feel those pressures the weight of expectation.

TP: And how long does that take before that kind of…? Or how long did it take until it kicked in for you?

SD: I’m not sure, it’s easy to say looking back and I didn’t know these parts of my career were happening as they happened, but when you look back on it and you can see it. And I particularly saw it as I near the end of my career I felt that weight lifting, because I knew that didn’t have much longer left; I knew that I’d given it everything I possibly could; I knew that I nothing to lose anymore and you suddenly play with this weight having shifted off your shoulders? So, for me, there’s something really important in helping players throughout their career to not feel that weight that’s weighing down on them.

I think you asked about joy, the joy never went, I always loved playing, there was always something amazing about running onto the pitch and big games for Wasps or for England or whoever it might be the sense of anticipation and preparation and playing with your best friends and all of that, I never lost the joy but sometimes it was harder than others.

TP: And particularly rugby, because when you were at uni you played cricket and hockey I think as well?

SD: Yeah.

TP: So did rugby have a special pull to you or did you somehow just find yourself in rugby?

SD: Well the reason I ended up playing rugby and not the other two is because I’m better at it [laughs].

TP: Right [laughs]. Well that helps doesn’t it?

SD: It’s pretty simple, yeah. I played hockey and netball actually way before I ever played rugby, and that was simply because I never got the chance to play a rugby, that’s an issue that so many girls face. There are all sorts of things they’d love to do as kids, or don’t even know they’d love to because they never get the chance to do them.

TP: Never get the opportunity, yeah.

SD: And so I didn’t play rugby until I went to university, and weirdly, I did French and Spanish at University I went to Barcelona for my year abroad teaching, and the only hockey club was far too expensive I couldn’t afford to join, and a friend of mine up the road played rugby so I started playing rugby and picked up a rugby ball and there was just me and the ball and it was just simple I just and to run and get out of the way of people and hit people and put the ball down over the line…

TP: Yeah it sounds brilliant laughs].

SD: …it’s so much easier, it’s so much easier than hockey, so that was it I was just better at it, that’s what the pull towards rugby was. I could talk about the camaraderie and putting your body on the line and all that, but that’s true of hockey and cricket and all those other team sports as well, there is something amazing team sport.

TP: And you went onto be Captain as well?

SD: Yes.

TP: How did that happen and tell me a little bit about some of the highs and lows of being a Captain?

SD: I didn’t become Captain until relatively late, and there were a couple of times in my career it might have happened but I had so many injuries through my career those things tended to coincide and it never quite happened. So it actually happened when I was probably getting over the hump of that feeling the pressure on my shoulders thing that I talked about, and it simply happened – well I remember the moment it happened, it was such a proud moment for me, the coach called me up and said, “Did I want to go for a cup of coffee?” Or “Would I come for a cup of coffee” to talk things through and we were sat down in a café not far from my home and he asked me, and I will always remember that it’s a picture ingrained on my brain because it was such a proud moment. But I loved being Captain, partly I think because I felt like I had quite a lot to give, certainly by the time I did it I had a huge amount of experience to share with the team. I loved it because – actually, if I’m…I can get really nervous as an individual playing because…it’s a good thing for me, I know that I perform when I nervous but I don’t necessarily particularly like the feeling.

TP: Yes.

SD: And as Captain, I would be thinking about everybody else more than myself and, in some ways, that took the pressure of my own game because I didn’t think about it so much and just got on and played. I particularly loved captaining the Seven side in 2009, because there was me, [s.l. Jo Yatt 9:23] one of the senior players and then a bunch of really quite young players, and it just felt like I could contribute a huge amount to that group because they had still so much to learn.

TP: What did you see was your role sort of on and off the pitch as Captain?

SD: Yeah, well on both actually I felt like my role, especially with that young group of players was to help keep a calm positive atmosphere, so there were some players in that group who hadn’t played much international rugby before would be quite nervous, just helping them to feel that it was a really positive experience that they could feel confident, just helping to engender that…yeah, that feeling of confidence and calmness was a really important part of it. And then helping to make big decisions at the right time, particularly on the pitch – in fact, not helping to making them, because again that takes the pressure off the youngsters on the team. And set the right example, very important to set the right example. You could see all the right things, if you don’t do the right things you might as well not bother.

TP: And what are the right things, what is setting the right example?

SD: The simple things like turning up on time for training, or rather slightly early, turning up in training in the right kit; making sure you do all the training sessions, so setting the right example even when people can’t see you’re right. So if there are all these training sessions you’re supposed to do, you do them [laughs].

TP: Yes.

SD: People might be able to see you doing them but you know you’ve set the right example and I think you exude the right example, if that makes sense?

TP: Mmhm.

SD: So all of those and all those little things really add up to the right atmosphere around a squad.

TP: What gets in the way of actually I suppose both leading a successful team and performing as an individual as well, are there things that…?

SD: Fear gets in the way, so if you’re worrying more about losing than you are concentrating and getting excited about winning and that can get in the way. Belief [laughs], which is a slightly different thing, so if you don’t believe that you’re going to win a tournament or a game more than likely you won’t win it; you’ve got to go into every contact, every single things that happens in that match believing you’re going to come out on top. I remember – I won’t be too specific about the match because I don’t want to give anything away – but I remember after a very very important game a player coming up to me afterwards and saying, “Ah, we could have actually won that,” and I was mad because I thought…

TP: Now you’re saying that! [Laughs]

SD: …you needed to say that before we took the pitch not after we came off it, and that’s for me why training your mind/your brain is as important as training your body to play high level sport.

TP: Sport psychology is getting a lot more press now than it ever did sort of, I don’t know, 20 years ago or 30 years ago when it started playing sport, was sport psychology a big part of what you guys focussed on?

SD: Yeah, so in the early days, there wasn’t a sport psych when I first very joined, but actually to be fair to the brilliant woman called Carol Isherwood who really got international women’s rugby in England professionalised got sport psych on board really quickly – a fantastic woman. A lady called Kirsten Barnes who rode for Canada was our first sports psych, so it has always been part of the set-up. There have been various times where for reasons of funding I think more than anything it sort of disappeared in and out? I would always argue very strongly for it to remain in and there have to be other places that you can cut corners if you need to save money, but you can’t be the complete player if you don’t have your brain trained as well as your body.

TP: Mmm. Going back to your career, you’ve retired from international duty, but you haven’t really gone far from the presence of wasps, regular commentator for Fifteens and Sevens on Sky and other broadcasters. How did that unfold, was that planned to go down that route or…? You’re shaking your head, how did that happen?

SD: [Laughs] No, neither of those things was planned albeit I’m incredibly grateful that they happened. I didn’t want to let go of rugby completely that’s true. I certainly needed a rest from it when I stopped, so I’d played international rugby for many years when I played international Sevens at the end I was doing that as juggling fulltime work at KPMG and that was really difficult – talking about fitting in all those training sessions, fitting them in before work and after work and Sevens is so intense, that was a hard period and so when that stopped I needed a break and took a bit of time off, but always wanted to come back into rugby. And I did some coaching initially – I knew I could never be a club coach because it’s really relentless and if you’re trying to hold down a fulltime job and be a club coach on the side and you want to do it properly you’ve got to be there twice a week and at weekends and you’ve got to be giving people really regular feedback, you’ve got 30 odd people in that squad that adds up to [laughs]…

TP: A lot of time [laughs].

SD: …it’s a job that’s impossible to do.

TP: Yes.

SD: And, of course, I’d been pretty much neglecting my career throughout most of my rugby playing days so I kind of needed to focus on that a bit. So I tried a bit of coaching with the England set-up as well, I enjoyed it but it wasn’t quite for me?

TP: Yeah.

SD: And then the opportunity to commentate just came along, it was lucky that the Fifteens World Cup was held in England in 2010 so Sky did a brilliant job of covering that and just gave it so much coverage and wanted to have female co-commentators who’d played the game, and so they tested a few of us out and I was one of the lucky ones who got to actually commentate on the matches and it’s just the commentating just went from there.

TP: Which we’re thrilled about because you’re a fantastic commentator.

SD: Thank you [laughs].

TP: So luck?

SD: Yes. Yeah, completely.

TP: Thinking about women’s rugby as a whole, what do you think will enable women’s rugby to developer over the next few years?

SD: There’s a combination of things that need to coincide, and it’s a bit of a vicious circle or a few legs of the same stool. There needs to be more investment in it, so we need more funding or corporate sponsorship into the sport in order to be able to help it develop, in order to be able to help players to spend more time training, in order to be able to package up the product so that it’s more appealing. We need more media coverage, if people actually go and see it it’s a brilliant game to watch. The small amount of Sevens that we got to see over the Olympics the Women’s Sevens, I don’t think anybody would argue that was fantastically entertaining. There is more of that, there’s so much of it hiding away that people never get to see. So those two things are really important.

I think it’s really important in this country that we pull together a – product is not quite the right word, but a competition that really enables top level games to happen week in – week out and really create some momentum. I’m sure they’ll be closer links between women’s rugby and men’s teams for the benefit of both, so the package of men’s elite rugby and women’s elite rugby, youth, junior, minis, I can see helping to take the sport a long way across the board.

TP: What do you think our chances are of holding onto a title in 2017?

SD: Our changes are good, it’s really really hard to call because almost no team out there has played their full strength side in recent times. So, England haven’t played their strength side by some way because they’ve had people out playing Sevens; Canada will have some people coming back from playing Sevens, we simply don’t see New Zealand and Australia playing often enough really to know how good they are, but the last glimpse we saw of New Zealand looked pretty ominous for the rest of the world. So, of course, England have a good chance, they’ve got a great set of players, they’ve got a really coaching set-up, but it’s getting more and more and more competitive, which is great of course for the sport.

TP: So, I was going to say finally but it might not be finally.

[Laughter]

This podcast is about performance.

SD: Yeah.

TP: What would a good performance be for the England side at 2017 and what is a good performance for you nowadays?

SD: Well it’s for the England rugby team in 2017 it’s really hard to argue anything but winning the World Cup.

TP: Keeping the title, yeah.

SD: They won the last one. You can talk about putting your best performance out there on the table, all of those kind of things, but that team, that group of players and coaches and support staff, and indeed all of us sitting on the side lines having been there in the past, everyone’s going to be wanting and expecting a win.

TP: Yes. Personally, what success for you?

SD: [Laughs] That’s a…

TP: Seeing like I’ve warmed you up for that bit [laughs].

SD: An impossibly, an impossibly difficult question so I’ll cheat just by going back to my answer to in a rugby context and about what I was most proud of then. Success for me is taking whatever it is I’m doing and giving it my best shot. Sometimes you get there, sometimes you make it and sometimes you – in my current job, sometimes you go to that pitch and you win the job – sometimes you don’t, but if you don’t go for it, if you don’t throw everything at it you’ll never know what you could have achieved.

TP: So to end, I suppose, some quick fire questions.

SD: [Laughs].

TP: What did you eat for breakfast? [Pause] That shouldn’t be that hard [laughs].

SD: It’s a really long time ago, what did I have for breakfast? I had a banana and a croissant.

TP: Brilliant, okay. Favourite piece of sports kit?

SD: Oh, my running kit now because I run with the dog so it’s got to be the running kit.

TP: Sporting hero?

SD: Sporting hero is Tanni Grey-Thompson?

TP: And why?

SD: She was brilliant when she was on the pitch, she had so much success, and she was never afraid of everything and now that she’s retired she is not afraid to speak up for everything that she believes in and I really admire that.

TP: A useless piece of advice you’ve been given?

SD: [Laughs]. Things like don’t eat yellow snow.

TP: Oh [laughs] well that’s not necessarily a useful piece of advice?

SD: That’s true.

TP: It’s actually quite helpful.

SD: Maybe there’s no such thing as a useless piece of advice, you can always take something out of everything I’d like to think.

TP: I like that. Greatest passion outside of sport?

SD: Ah, I was about to answer advocating for women’s sport but that’s definitely sport isn’t it? My greatest passion outside of sport is fairness and equality and running the dog.

TP: And best performance enhancer? [Laughs].

SD: Belief.

TP: Belief, brilliant. Is there anything that you wished I’d asked you?

SD: [Laughs].

TP: Anything that you want to add at all?

SD: I don’t think so, thank you, I think you’ve pretty much got it covered.

TP: Brilliant, super. Thank you so much, Sue.

SD: Thank you.

TP: Brilliant.

[Music]

TP: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com

[Music]