The day we meet, George Ford is in the papers. It’s not what he did, but what he didn’t do. The previous weekend England lost against Wales in Cardiff. Owen Farrell – Ford’s friend, teammate and captain – had a poor sort of match by his own standards, especially in the final 20 minutes when England slipped from 13-9 up to 13-21 down. Ford watched it all unfold from the bench. It was the first time since Eddie Jones took over that Ford has been an unused substitute, and it happened in a match when England really needed him. “George Ford could have made all the difference,” Nick Evans wrote in this paper.
Ford leans back when I show him Evans’s article, and laughs in a way that suggests he doesn’t quite know what to say. It’s not just Evans, I tell him, in The Times another fine old fly-half, Stuart Barnes, also argued “England needed George Ford”. Ford thinks for a moment. “When you’re on the bench the one thing you’ve got to do is make sure you’re ready for an opportunity whenever it comes along, and if it doesn’t come along, that decision’s not my decision,” he says. “So you just have to back it and respect it whatever happens. But obviously it’s frustrating being part of a team that lost.”
Ford is only 25 but has more Test match caps at fly-half than anyone else playing in England now. With 53, he is third on their all-time list, behind Jonny Wilkinson and Rob Andrew. Most of those came in 2016 and 2017 when he was an ever‑present part of the team that won 24 Tests out of 25. England were using two player-makers then – Ford at fly-half, Farrell at inside centre. But after their form slumped in 2018, Ford was dropped and Farrell was switched across. Farrell is arguably England’s most influential player right now, which means that for the time being it’s not really clear where Ford fits in.
It feels like there’s a lot to talk about here, but Ford weighs his answers as carefully as he does his passes. Maybe he doesn’t want to risk upsetting Jones, or maybe this is just another of umpteen commercial junkets, but he will not be drawn into talking about whether he wants to start England’s next match against Italy (“again them decisions are not our decisions, the coaches are the ones that make them calls), why England moved away from using two playmakers at 10 and 12 (“I think people get too caught up with that”), or whether he wants them to switch back to that strategy (“I’m not even going to go down that avenue really”).
The funny part is that Ford really does open up when he is talking about how important it is to express himself. Ford has been in fine form for Leicester this year, and he thinks it is partly down to the work he’s been doing with the mind coach Don MacPherson. “He’s been unbelievable for me,” Ford says.
Ford is a natural ballplayer, has been since he was a teen, and he has been spending a lot of time honing those instinctive skills. After all, they are what got him into the England team to begin with, in 2014. MacPherson has been making Ford focus on being “the best version of myself”. I ask what that version looks like. “At my best I feel alert, I feel buzzing, I feel like I’m flying around the field, and I’m a threat with the ball in hand, but at the same time, I’m calm and controlled, which you need to be as a 10, and I’m making good decisions.”
This, he says, more than anything else, is what he wants to be known for. “The thing that makes a good fly-half stand out is their decision‑making in the moment. If you’ve got the ability to break the line, if you’ve got a good passing game, if you’ve got a good kicking game, you can dip into any of them three things in the moment.” The art is in knowing which skill to use when.
Ford does not think that comes with coaching – in fact, he says, coaching can sometimes get in the way of it. “As you get more experienced you learn more about the game, you speak to coaches about structures and systems and, before you know it, you become too engrossed with staying in the structure, staying in the system. You think you’ve got to kick the ball at this time and you have to kick it into that space and, before you know it, you’re not making any decisions yourself. It’s very easy to get swayed in that direction. And then you lose that instinctiveness that made you the player you are in the first place.”
Ford’s work with MacPherson, he says, is all about sharpening those instincts by doing visualisation work in the days before the match. “I’ll be honest with you, sometimes you do things in a game that you’ve never even thought about, but your instinct takes over. You can prepare as much as you want during the week, thinking ‘I’m going to kick into that space here’, or ‘I’m going to run into that space there’, but sometimes instinct just takes over.” So, while he is “very keen to make sure I respect the coaches’ strategies, tactics, and gameplans”, he is more worried “that I keep what makes me unique”.
The best piece of advice he ever got, he says, was “be yourself”, because “it’s very easy to come into a team environment, and everybody is telling you that you need to do different things, you need to be this sort of person, or you need to be this sort of player, but the reason you get here is because you are who you are. So enjoy it as much as you can, and be yourself.” Unless, of course, you’re talking on the record.
Quilter is a principal partner of England Rugby. Find out more at www.quilter.com
