Ethan Waddleton
It wasn’t that long ago that Ethan Waddleton was ripping it up in Dubai, making dream teams and living the best sevens life. Now, he’s in Ipswich, more than a few country miles from the first-class rugby life and dreaming of the day when he can get ‘beasted’ at Lensbury once again.
When playing on the World Sevens Series for England, Ethan is one of the most relentless and unyielding forces England Sevens have at their disposal. A defensive leader in the team, he spends most of his time hurtling up and down the pitch shouting defensive instructions at team-mates and diving into contact to try and win the ball, with every ruck being a furious contest in sevens. When released into open play, he’s there to provide the link between the team’s strike runners and the playmakers. His work is vital, but mostly unheralded. It takes place in the shadows of others.
Never has this been better illustrated than at the Dubai 7s in 2018. England are playing Australia under the desert lights when Ethan releases Norton, 70 metres from the try-line with just two Australians to beat. It’s the type of set-up from which Norton – the top try-scorer in World Series history with 354 so far – scores nine times out of ten.
That track record means veteran Australian commentator Greg Clarke knows he needs an extra breath as Norton sizes up the first defender, before roaring ‘DAN THE MAAAN’ with perfect timing as Norton uses the five-metre channel as his personal overtaking lane.
A try is sure to follow but what Clarke hasn’t reckoned on – what no-one has reckoned on – is that Norton will be halted by covering Aussie sweeper John Porch, who wraps up Norton with a perfectly-timed hit to the chest. But Norton has his wits about him and slips the ball to Waddleton who ensures England bag the five points.
Keeping the show on the road, that’s the type of player Ethan Waddleton is.
So effective was he in Dubai that year, that Waddleton was chosen in the tournament Dream Team alongside team-mates Dan Norton and Tom Mitchell. Not bad company to keep.
It’s moments such as this which Waddleton keeps thinking back to while talking to the Rugby Journal about life in 2020. “I didn’t appreciate it enough,” Ethan tells us. “I’m looking back now thinking ‘fuck me, I had it so good.’ I got to go to these amazing places, especially Dubai where you’re treated like a bit of a rock star.” I do have a lot of them moments. I just look at the old kit and I’m like ‘oh God, we did alright in this stuff’.”
“At that Dubai tournament, I made the Dream Team and I didn’t really savour it until I came home. I remember not going out for a beer afterwards because I had a knock on the leg.”
The comedown from the cancellation of the 2019/20 Sevens World Series, followed by the cancellation of his England Sevens contract in July, has hit Ethan – as it has all his colleagues – like a power punch to the solar plexus.
And Ethan had an additional challenge to face: to recover from knee surgery without any contact time with England’s physios, who were either furloughed themselves or unable to physically work because of the lockdown. So, he resorted to phone calls and trying to remember what physios had done to his problematic knee in the past.
It hasn’t been easy and he describes himself now – more than six months after the operation – as only just entering the ‘fit’ category, and still a while away from ‘fully fit’.
All of which makes Ethan sanguine about his chances of following England colleagues Dan Norton, Will Muir and Ben Harris in picking up a short-term fifteen contract. “It’s hard for some Premiership players to find their next job, let alone a sevens player,” he admits. “It’s a tough time and I totally see it from their perspective. Why would a team want to waste their time on a player who would still need three weeks to get up to scratch even once I’m fully fit? They could take on any other person who is ready to go.”
Geography has dealt Ethan a bad hand in this regard, with Ipswich being a two-hour drive from the nearest Championship club Bedford, making even casual training with a second-tier team extremely difficult.
Relative rugby isolation in Suffolk has even led to Ethan reminiscing about previous beastings in training. “Playing is the highlight and that’s what we’re all about but it’s the training that I miss now. Being in a fitness session at the Lensbury [England Sevens’ training headquarters], looking along the line at the boys and thinking ‘fucking hell here we go again’. I really miss those moments because you are in it together. We spend a hell of a lot of time together on the travelling circus. We’re away for two weeks in every month during the season, in each others’ pockets, playing cards, going to the beach on the down days. Even the travelling, it’s not fun sitting in a seat for 14 hours on a flight but you get up and have a laugh with your mates, because they are your mates.”
The travelling may be long but there is an undeniable glamour to the Sevens World Series. It consists of ten tournaments held between December and May in uber-glamorous locations around the world: Hong Kong, Cape Town, Dubai, Sydney, Singapore, Hamilton, Vancouver, LA, Paris and London. Teams and tournament staff commonly stay in the same hotel, creating that ‘travelling circus’ feel on, and off, the pitch.
Playing rugby in such an environment – combined with those brutal training sessions in Teddington – has been Waddleton’s life for the last five years, having been continuously contracted by the RFU since leaving school.
Ethan, 23, went to St Joseph’s College in Ipswich, where his initial ambitions upon leaving were to pick up a senior contract at Saracens, having been part of their academy. “I loved it at Saracens and I think they liked me there,” he says. “At the end of the season me and my dad went to speak with them about contracts and they said ‘sorry, we’re not going to offer you one, but how would you feel about sevens?’
“I had always liked sevens and was suited to it as well, possibly more than fifteens,” he admits. “I left that meeting without knowing what was going to happen but then I got a text message from Simon Amor [England Sevens head coach] saying ‘we’d love to get you down to this sevens academy that we’re starting.’
“I was like ‘sick, cool’ and I started playing in all these invitational tournaments with Samurai and we won a few. I wasn’t really thinking of sevens as a proper option, but I went down to training with England and they said they’d like to offer me a year’s contract and after that I got a two-year renewal and then another two years and that’s brought me to now.”
The present may be wildly unchartered territory but Ethan is grateful that his setting is at least familiar: Ipswich, Suffolk, where his parents live and where learned to play the game.
Initially more of a footballer and cricketer, it wasn’t until he enrolled at St Joseph’s College that rugby really took over, with his development accelerated by also playing at Colchester Rugby Club on Sundays.
It was his performances at school however that really caught the eye. As a utility forward and latterly a centre, he was part of one the most successful vintages St Jo’s has ever had.
Playing in the same side as England and Northampton flanker Lewis Ludlum, St Jo’s won the U16s Rosslyn Park Sevens, before winning their own tournament – the prestigious St Joseph’s Festival – as an U18 group.
The St Joseph’s Festival attracts the best rugby schools in the country to Ipswich for a two-day fifteen-a-side tournament. Competition is always fierce and the toll on the body from playing repeated, albeit shortened, games of fifteen is notorious. In 2016, even a Marcus Smith-inspired Brighton College couldn’t lift the title which demands an A-Level in mental toughness.
Ethan has always had an inkling that he would return to fifteen one day but his sevens adventure has so far had him hooked. “Me and [England team-mate] Harry Glover saw how epic it was in 2016 with the boys going away to the Olympics and then coming back with a silver medal as Team GB,” he says. “That is what I’m striving for, what so many of us are striving for. I’m not going to take myself out of the picture just because I am hating the whole situation we’re in.
“It is a bit of bloody mindedness because there are other things sevens players could do.
“If nothing materialises for us and we’re properly up shit’s creek, my back-up, back-up plan is to go to New Zealand for a year out and play fifteen there. It sounds horrible to call that a back-up plan because it’s still an amazing thing to do but it’s also not what we thought we were fighting for.”
Whilst there still remains a seismic amount of uncertainty around Tokyo next summer, it’s how Ethan and his team-mates negotiate the next 8 months leading up to it that is most troubling.
With RFU contracts gone, and no UK Sport funding available, their fate is at the whim of the rugby universe.
The RFU’s annual budget to run the women’s and men’s sevens programmes is understood to be £2 million and whilst crowdfunding campaigns have been launched by players, they have only raised a fraction of the funding the players previously received.
Whilst the potential remains for a sponsor to come on board and re-ignite the sevens programme, the longer the stasis continues of not knowing what the future holds, the more unnerving life becomes. “I’m looking to go wherever I can get rugby even if I’m at a Championship club where I don’t get paid and I’m sleeping on a sofa and employed for two days a week but they pay my expenses – that is something I’d be up for.”
Ethan’s horizons for 2020 may have lowered considerably but his hunger to hunt down his Olympic dream remains as fierce as ever. And if he gets to Tokyo in 2021, there’ll be no repeat of Dubai in 2018. He’ll be cherishing every last drop of it.
Story by Jack Zorab
Pictures by Oli Hillyer-Riley