April 12, 2009, is a date etched into my memory. Ten years on from the Bloodgate scandal and still it lingers. To recap, the Harlequins physio Steph Brennan had bought fake blood capsules from a joke shop. On the orders of the director of rugby, Dean Richards, a capsule was given to Tom Williams while we were 6-5 down against Leinster in the European Cup quarter-final so that we could get Nick Evans, who had gone off with an injury, back on to the pitch.
The Leinster physios knew straight away, the commentators knew straight away. The people who didn’t know what was going on were the other players on the pitch. I knew we had done it before but I didn’t know what was happening at the time. That is not me trying to extricate myself, I was as culpable as anyone and ultimately, not only were we cheats, we were a laughing stock because we couldn’t even do it properly – from Tom’s mouth overflowing with fake blood to the wink.
Even before the end of match – which Leinster hung on to win – Tom and Wendy Chapman, the club doctor, were in the physio room. The Leinster physios and the tournament organiser – ERC as they were known then – were banging on the door because they wanted to see the “cut”. I can only imagine what it was like being in that situation, under so much pressure with chaos unfolding around you. My understanding is that Tom was pleading with Wendy to cut his lip in order to prove it was a blood injury, she refused but Tom in a panic was threatening to do it himself. Eventually, after going back and forth, Wendy agreed, because she feared Tom – in his frantic state – could do himself long-term damage. In a no-win situation, Wendy took the decision to make a surgical incision she felt was safer.
By her professional standards, she fell short and people can debate whether it was the right or wrong thing forever but they cannot put themselves in that position. She was suspended, she split up with her husband and she was diagnosed with cancer. I don’t know how much those things correlate but a lot of bad things happened to her and I feel incredibly sorry because she had nothing to do with the blood capsule and she had nothing do with it being given to or used by Tom. It was a situation she was dragged into.
In the aftermath, ERC gave Tom a one-year ban and the club was hit with a fine. I know Tom had conversations with Harlequins and they made him an offer of compensation. It was an unconditional offer because anything else would have been blackmail. The offer was to swallow the ban from ERC and be looked after by the club financially.
Tom then met with a number of senior players including myself. We very much left the decision up to Tom and I remember him leaving the meeting saying he was going to accept the offer and take the ban. His name was tarnished no matter what he decided to do but at the same time everyone knew, without the facts coming out at that point, it wasn’t Tom who orchestrated everything and the club was really to blame.
But the next day having already accepted Harlequins’ offer, he went to ERC and came away with a ban reduced to four months after revealing everything. He said Steph gave him the capsule on Dean’s orders, Wendy had cut his lip and that he had also had private meetings with Quins where they have offered him compensation. We were disappointed – not because he told the truth but because it seemed he wanted the best of both worlds: to take the money and to blab.
I spoke to Tom recently and he said part of the reason for taking the capsule in the first place was that we had a win-at-all-costs mentality. I disagree. We weren’t in cup finals every week, we didn’t win anything, we weren’t a Premiership giant. He said it was part of the culture but in any environment if there is a certain way the team operate and you’re not happy with it, you have to say so. His objection with the culture only seems to be once he was caught. I’m just as guilty, because I had accepted that was how we operated, we had normalised it. Maybe that’s a reflection on me but I’m happy to be judged on that.
And I’m not subscribing to the idea Tom was young and naive and he did whatever he could to impress Dean at the age of 25 and with 100 games under his belt. If Dean had asked me to do it that day I’m pretty certain I would have. But if I was in that situation I can promise you I would own it and I wouldn’t be blaming naivety or wanting to impress the boss.
The collateral damage was brutal. Wendy was suspended, Steph had just got a job with England, his dream job, but that was gone, and Dean was banned after resigning. With Dean I feel it was fair, he had masterminded the whole thing, but I look at what happened to Wendy and Steph – he lost his licence and was only able to work in a couple of countries in Europe until he won an appeal two years later – and it is heartbreaking. I compare the lives of Steph and Wendy to Tom, who was banned for four months but has been employed by Harlequins for the last 10 years. I’m not saying I wished Tom had suffered more – why should he have suffered at all? – but there are other parties involved on that day who I feel desperately sad for. Everyone sympathised with Tom on the day but I’m just not sure about some of his actions thereafter.
People will read this and say it’s really harsh but I need to be honest. For the senior players, considering the conversations we had, we were expecting things to pan out a different way and when they didn’t there was frustration. The dynamic changed when Tom came back after his ban. You had a guy who was broken, he wanted to leave the club but no one wanted him. That’s tough to take and it took him a long while to figure out if he wanted to play rugby again.
Ultimately, he was part of the Harlequins rehabilitation story. He scored a try in the Premiership final in 2012 when we won the title – our third major trophy in three years after the incident. I’m glad that things have worked out for him because in life you want to know you can get a second chance.
Together we showed a tremendous amount of character to change the perception of the club in the years afterwards and Conor O’Shea takes huge credit. There could not have been a better guy to come in. He allowed us to enjoy our rugby again, he gave us peace and took the shackles and emotional burden off us. He helped us bring pride back into one of the most famous jerseys in the world, even though that stain will always be there.
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It remains the bleakest moment in my career. At the time, my first emotion was: “What have we done?” For months afterwards people in the street would say: “Oh, you play for Harlequins – the Bloodgate team.” From then on, everyone knew us as cheats.
And they were right. We still see cheating in rugby – sometimes with props coming off and then on again, some things with HIAs being faked – but what we did cuts so much deeper, because it was premeditated. What we did had been so commonplace – we were not the only club doing it – and that is one of the worst aspects. Whether it be with a capsule or a “bloody towel” already in the physio’s bag, it was all designed to manipulate substitutions. I know of another incident that season where the club in question got away with it. If there was any positive to come out of what happened to Harlequins, it was that it stopped this particular practice across the board in the Premiership.
