Most athletic player? The toughest? Secrets of man who kept England fit for a decade

Maybe it’s because the Olympic Games have just been and gone but, after 17 days discovering the world’s best in pretty much every discipline going, there are some medals we can distribute here too for England’s rugby union players.
In the past decade, who would win the gold medal for the best athlete to have played rugby for the England men’s team? Answer: Jonny May.
If it was a decathlon, a test of all-round athletic ability? Winner: George Ford, with Elliot Daly and Henry Slade on the podium.
And the toughest England player over that period? Gold to Tom Youngs, and podium places for Courtney Lawes and Tom Curry.
Now, clearly, there are no definitives here. The England players do not do decathlons and neither is there an official toughness test. The most informed answers to all the above and more, though, come from the man who has been working with England for the past decade.
This is Tom Tombleson, a rather massive man with long hair that he tucks behind his ears; he looks like an ironman triathlete lost in a folk festival, but his full-time job for ten years has been either head or assistant head of strength and conditioning (S&C) for England and, in some respects, you could say that, over that time, Tombleson has known the players as well as anyone.
If, then, you are wondering: “What are England rugby players actually like, who are these men representing my/their country?”, Tombleson’s answers are as well informed as any.
Given that his decade of employment has just come to an end, by mutual agreement, you may have thought that he could reveal who were the bad eggs and the cocky tossers, but actually all he wants to do is applaud the players. I suspect he has been applauding England players for ten years. In that time, we — those of us outside the dressing room — have assessed and judged these players; we’ve marked their every game out of ten; we’ve celebrated their highs and we’ve murdered them for their lows.
But I now feel that what we’ve been missing is an understanding of exactly how elite they are. This isn’t PR, because Tombleson doesn’t represent the RFU any more, but I’ve never heard anyone explain like this how special these players are and, as he puts it, how fortunate England are to have had them.
He certainly has a decent frame of reference. He played Championship-level rugby and was capped in the England sevens team. He then worked in S&C for the Waratahs in Australia for six years. He was recruited to England by Stuart Lancaster, starting with the autumn internationals in 2014, and what struck him when he first met the players was “their single-mindedness”, the extent to which “they really do give a shit”.
Aussie players might also care “but you don’t necessarily see it”, he says — they’ll do their training and then maybe go to the beach. “But the English guys just go home and do something else to improve their game.”
Yet it is more than their diligence that has impressed him. It’s been standing on training pitches around the world for ten years and every day having a metaphorical jaw-drop moment, seeing athletes do stuff that he barely understands because they are so far beyond his own capabilities. “You’re just thinking, ‘You’re so much better than me,’ ” he says. “And you admire them.”
He hates it when the players get booed. He’s in plenty of WhatsApp groups with mates from outside the RFU where castigating the team sometimes becomes commonplace. Thus, when I asked if he’d have a coffee and a chat, he said: “If I can just let people know that these guys are so much better than people think they are, then that’d be great.”
I ask him: which players have come into camp for the first time and just made you go “Wow”? He doesn’t pause for thought here: Henry Arundell (the 21-year-old winger who plays in France and is therefore at present ineligible for England), on the Australia tour in 2022. “He did some freakish things. Even senior players were like, ‘Did you see that?’ ”
Then he follows with Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, the young Exeter Chiefs star, then Ollie Sleightholme, then Tommy Freeman, then Ollie Lawrence. Then Ben Earl: “We’ve never had a No8 like Ben Earl before.”
Yet these are all new-generation players? Yes, he says, “You’ve got a new type of cattle coming through the door.” He describes what he is leaving behind as “a generation that is immensely physically talented” and “proper top of the top grade, top percentile athletes” and “raw athleticism that perhaps England haven’t had access to before”.
Still, though, he says, no one quite touches May as an athlete and he explains his assessment: it’s not just pure athleticism, it’s adapting your physical skills to the requirements of a team and then doing it repeatedly. “He could run like a shooting dog; over and over and over,” he says.
The best athlete he ever saw on any rugby field, though? That was Israel Folau (“an athlete from another planet”).
It seems that maybe the quality Tombleson has most admired, particularly among the England players, is resilience — “the ones that just kept on turning up”. He mentions here Anthony Watson: two achilles ruptures and an anterior cruciate ligament, and still back in the England squad. “You’re talking about some serious stones in a guy like that.”
And Jack Nowell: “Every time he got back on the field, you’re like, ‘Jack. How have you managed it?’ ” And “the guys that play in pain or that are a bit insecure about their bodies, yet still just brush it off”, which is his reference to Curry and Lawes, “probably the most impressive of the lot in that”.
He was also amazed by the selflessness he witnessed. I asked Tombleson: who could walk into the gym or on to the training pitch and give everyone a lift? His answers: Watson and Ford. “The young guys come in and Anthony puts an arm around them and helps them develop. George is unbelievably selfless with people like Marcus and Fin [the two Smiths, who are his rivals for the No10 jersey].”
He mentions Manu Tuilagi, who was in the squad for this year’s Six Nations but struggled to get in the team ahead of Lawrence: “All he did was just train the house down and help Ollie.”
He says that he sometimes used to stand back and watch this and admire, and ask if he would ever have had it in him to be that kind of a team-mate himself. “Bloody good blokes,” he says. “Seriously good lads. Remarkable, really.”
In a sport where modesty is the expected code of conduct, you just don’t hear this kind of thing. Tombleson uses the word “love”. He used to love them. And he’s so straight up; I’m not sure he could fake it. Maybe he should do the next decade in the PR department instead.
Would anyone not want to be in a squad like this? It sounds such an elite, supportive, essentially decent, progressive group to be among, and that is not a sentiment that changes when you read the comments under his Instagram and LinkedIn posts announcing his departure.
“What a man,” Watson and Danny Care said.
Arundell, Ben Youngs, Luther Burrell and Joe Cokanasiga all went with goat emojis. “One of the absolute best,” Youngs added.
“The way you used to flick your hair behind your ears before demonstrating a drill,” said Ben Te’o, who is now coaching NRL in Australia, “it was just magic.”
“True legend and always there for me,” Marcus Smith said.
“Loved working with you,” Mike Brown said.
The feeling is clearly mutual.