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Rugby journal

🏉📚 Quarterly print journal with exclusive interviews and epic rugby tales.

23/05/2025

Is this the most expensive rugby pitch in the world?

As Bordeaux prepare to face Saints in the Champions Cup, this is the story of a rugby pitch fit for the finer things in life...

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14/05/2025

🏉 After two years as part of the Leicester Tigers academy, Jamal Ford-Robinson headed back home to Cornwall. Hundreds of hours of training and a failed conversion from prop to ho**er later, it had become clear things weren’t working out, and it had taken a toll on the young prop.

“I got myself into a pretty bad headspace,” admits Jamal. “As you can expect, going there at sixteen, the best team in the country, your heart is set on it, and when you realise you’re a much smaller fish in the pond, that affected me quite badly. That led to me leaving halfway through the year.”

Rugby had started early for Jamal. “I’d always played for Penryn, played for school from five years old. It was a very typical story of needing an outlet for not being good at education. I’ve probably got some undiagnosed ADHD going on, I could never really concentrate but I’d always look forward to doing rugby.

“But I’d never watched much rugby growing up,” he adds. “We never had Sky Sports, so I didn’t have a poster of the England team, it was just something I enjoyed playing.”

With Exeter still in the Championship at the time, there was no clear route to top-flight rugby for young Cornish players like himself, his chance with Leicester coming thanks to the diligence of his mum. “Nowadays there’s a definitive pathway, but back then that wasn’t the case. When the junior academies started at sixteen, my mum acted as my agent – she’s not an agent, but she acted as one – and emailed all the directors of academies of the Premiership clubs singing my praises, saying ‘my son’s amazing’. I’m sure they must get hundreds of these emails all the time, but some of them took it seriously, namely Leicester.

The competition was immense, and as Jamal fell further behind in the pecking order, it was a setback that left its mark. “I didn’t know what I was going through at the time until I looked up what the definition of anxiety was a few years ago and I was like ‘oh, that’s what was happening’,” he says. “I’d wake up in the morning and I’d feel really violently sick. I’d come home a lot of the days and cry myself to sleep.”

📖 Read the full story at therugbyjournal.com, or via the link in bio.

13/05/2025

🏉 In the space of little more that two teenage years, he went from sitting on the bench with Jamie Vardy against Man United to making a European rugby debut in Spain, scoring a try, kicking goals, breaking legs and then losing his crutches to a drunk team doctor. Life have never been dull for Danny Care.

🎉👏 Congratulations to issue 16 cover star on a fantastic career. Head to therugbyjournal.com for the full feature.

08/05/2025

🌹The Leeds-born daughter of Hollywood’s ‘Jonah Lomu’, Maddie Feaunati follows in mighty Samoan footsteps, but in a debut year when the world took notice, the best is still to come from the Red Rose.

Read the full feature at therugbyjournal.com.

✍️ Scott Duke Giles
📸 .k.photo

07/05/2025

🏉🏟️ What does the perfect rugby stadium look like? In issue 29, we travelled to France, Ireland and England to find out.

Get your copy at therugbyjournal.com, or via the link in bio.

✍️ Scott Duke Giles
🎨 Eleanor Bradley

28/04/2025

🏉🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 At the end of last season, the Southern Knights trudged off at the Greenyards with the taste of defeat and the knowledge that this was the end, for the third time, of a professional side in the Borders. With Scotland’s rugby heartlands once again staring into the unknown, we headed to to find out what’s next.

📖 Read the FREE feature now via the link in bio.

24/04/2025

🏉🎨🏋️‍♀️ Mucky, prop-y, bashy, and artsy, discover Maud Muir’s origin story, in partnership with Vodafone, now via https://www.therugbyjournal.com/rugby-blog/origin-stories-1-maud-muir

15/04/2025

🏉🏆 In 1990, Debs, Sue, Mary and Alice decided that women should have their own Rugby World Cup. Against impossible odds, they delivered it in ten months. Netflix will tell you that dramatising rugby isn’t easy, but it turns out they just chose the wrong story.

Read our feature with Sue Dorrington only in issue 29, out now at therugbyjournal.com or via the link in bio

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10/04/2025

🏉 At thirteen, Londoner was introduced to rugby. By the time he reached 20 he was winning West Country derbies and waving goodbye to 68-cap England props.

📚 Available only in Rugby Journal 29, head to therugbyjournal.com to get your copy.

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08/04/2025

🏉 With the Paris Olympics on the horizon, Rugby Journal headed into camp with GB Sevens to chart the history of rugby’s shorter format, from Hong Kong three-peats to running shuttles in the local park. Read now for FREE at therugbyjournal.com.

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07/04/2025

🏉 From Fiji to England via Brunei, Bath and England winger .cokanasiga tells his story in the latest issue of Rugby Journal.

Head to therugbyjournal.com now to get your copy.

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