In a colourless hospital room in Woking, an unabating game of charades continues, except it is not a game. Gary Street is trying to convey a message and this is initially amusing but, because he is incapable of speech, the longer it takes Helen, his wife, to guess what he is trying to say, the greater his frustration grows and very quickly this is not actually humorous at all but just a tiny window into the aching trauma that they have been living with.
He has only two words he can say easily: “yes” and “no”. He can also do low numbers but struggles beyond “three” and “four”. Mostly his language is “dada, dadada” but very occasionally “f***’s sake!” spills out. The aphasia in his brain means that he cannot find words he is looking for, but some just pop up automatically. There was one fellow hospital patient who wanted the heating in a roasting hot room turned up. “F***’s sake!” said Street, more than once.
On this occasion, though, his communication fails and eventually his head drops because he knows she won’t guess. “Don’t worry,” she says gently. These two are very affectionate together. He cannot hold her hand because his hands do not work any more either, so they continually just rest one wrist upon the other.
And yet this is good. This is real progress. Street underwent a planned heart bypass operation in August but complications led to a blood clot on the brain and a stroke so massive that when Helen saw the stroke specialist, he started talking about “dead brain tissue”. For weeks thereafter as Street lay motionless in intensive care, his right side and his vocal cords paralysed, she had no idea what kind of a husband she would be getting back. So, yes, this is good.
Yet this does not feel good for anyone. It certainly does not feel right that for many people reading this, they will be learning about Gary Street because of this stroke rather than his career in rugby.
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There are only two people this century who have coached England rugby teams to World Cup victory. One of those is Clive Woodward, the other is Street. Woodward, of course, was knighted. Simon Middleton, who succeeded Street as England Women’s coach, led them to defeat in two World Cup finals and he was made an MBE. Street’s team won the World Cup in 2014 and not only was he not honoured thereafter but neither did he keep his job.
Helen says that the honours do not matter to him, “but it bothers me!”
“It annoys the hell out of me too,” Andy Francis, who is one of his best mates, and who has visited him once a week since the stroke, says. Francis is sitting in on our interview, occasionally chipping in, either when he feels Helen is being too modest or when he sees an opportunity to make a joke at Street’s expense.
It is at Francis’s insistence that we appreciate the great irony here. “Gaz”, he says, is one of life’s great talkers, one of its great comedians, a mickey-taker to his core whose party trick was to balance a bar stool on his chin. He was the kind of scrum half for whom the word “gobby” was invented, the kind who would lob a grenade into an argument and then walk away. At school and thereafter, Francis was often the No 8 who would have to clear up the mess.
The first time Helen saw him was when he was coaching Birmingham University women’s team against the Brunel side she was playing for. The referee sent him off for being too gobby on the touchline. He then continued from a whole pitch’s distance away and was red-carded again.
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So there is some ironic laughter to be had from the fact that, for now — and no one knows for how long — he cannot answer back.
For instance, when I ask which of the two was the better player, Helen, who has nine caps from the Noughties under her maiden name, Flippance, is only too happy to answer. “Me,” she says conclusively. “Skillwise, definitely you,” she says looking at him. “In terms of aggression, dedication, fitness — me.”
Francis joins in. “I’m gonna sum it up in one question,” he says, directing it at Street. “Could you tackle?”
Again, only too happy, Helen answers for him. “You didn’t really do contact, did you? I played it as a collision sport, you played it as an evasion sport.” And through all this, Street can only frown or raise an eyebrow in objection.
Yet where Francis cannot see the funny side is in what he calls “the complete blackout” after the 2014 World Cup win. When Street first coached a women’s team — that Birmingham University team, in 1992, when women’s rugby was barely on the radar — he got plenty of predictable stick from his old mates. “But for us who’ve known him from the start,” Francis says, “to have seen him stick with it and go through and win the World Cup is incredible. But then no accolades, no honours, no one talks about it, it’s like it’s been eradicated from history. It’s unbelievable.”
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If this sounds anything like the emotional belly-aching of his nearest and dearest, here are some comments from that 2014 team. “Unsung hero,” Katy Daley-McLean said. “More than an unsung hero,” Nolli Waterman said. “So very popular with the players,” Rachael Burford said.
These are all golden generation players with 80-plus caps to their name who had all been coached by him when he was running the first England women’s academy.
They also point to the greater role that he had as one of the key players in the establishment of the women’s game. Waterman talks about his “influence” and how “winning in 2014 was the transformation point”. Burford says that he was “one of the biggest drivers of women’s rugby” and that “he saw the potential of the women’s game when it wasn’t anything”.
What none of them understand, though, is why, after victory in 2014, Street lost his job. There was some disagreement with the RFU over the direction of the women’s game; the RFU wanted to move its World Cup winners into the Olympic sevens squad and Street disagreed. But he has signed a non-disclosure agreement and Helen is not comfortable on the subject, which is understandable, as she works for the RFU, in the ticketing department. What she does say is that it is ten years on from Street’s redundancy and the modern version of the RFU “has been brilliant supporting me”.
What she also says is how hard it hit him being made redundant. “It was like grief,” she says. “It was a huge loss. You were depressed, weren’t you? It was really, really tough.”
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Yet what hurt as much was their expectation that he would quickly be walking into another top rugby job did not materialise. “That just didn’t happen,” she says. “It was quite obvious, it was: ‘You’ve done very well, but they were girls.’ Somebody actually said to me: ‘He’d do really well with a National 1 [third division] men’s club.’ I was so shocked.”
Yet eventually Street became head coach of the Harlequins women’s team, and then he moved more into the player development process. And then August struck and the world changed.
If it is not already clear, there are two unsung heroes in this. Over the course of her two pregnancies, Helen developed rheumatoid arthritis, which means that, at the age of 48, she has already had hip, knee and elbow replacements.
As she answers questions on this, Street chimes in with a groan that translates as a sarcastic “poor you”. “Yes,” she says to him. “It did all used to be about me, didn’t it?”
Yet if you ask anyone what Helen was like as a player, they will say she was mentally tough and exceptionally fearless, clearly qualities that have sustained her through the past six months. Tears are apparently never far from the surface, but they don’t stop her in her tracks.
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“This one here,” Andy says, nodding at Helen, “I don’t know how she does it, it’s just incredible.” Remember, these are people far more comfortable teasing each other than paying compliments, but Andy then looks Helen in the eye and continues: “I think you’re amazing. I don’t know how you keep it up.”
Her answer is that the situation does not allow her to stop. For months, Street’s progress was minimal. He watched some of the World Cup in the autumn but remembers nothing. Then he learnt to walk again (he is still wobbly). The next step is a weekend home, this weekend, before returning for good in a fortnight.
But then immediately new challenges arise, foremost of which was: if they lose hospital care, then they go to the back of an NHS waiting list and Street will not get speech therapy for nearly two years. Physio, and especially hand therapy, cannot wait and they have waiting lists that are months long.
Eventually, they decided to see if they could make it work to go private and if you really want to know how Street is regarded in the rugby community, here is your answer. They put up a GoFundMe page and watched, astonished, as the contributions poured in. They flew past their initial target. At the time of writing, they have gone past £58,000.
They also launched a silent auction and when you look at that, you see all these prizes offered by players from his old World Cup-winning team.
Yet progress is not linear and the excitement of the fundraising backfired. “You overdid it, didn’t you?” Helen says to her husband. Meaning? “He was pushing himself and pushing himself. Everything was happening.” She turns back to him: “And I think you thought, ‘You’re all doing all this for me and I’m going to work really hard for you.’ And you overdid it. Would that be fair?” He nods his agreement.
What this meant was that he could not take on the amount of oxygen required and he soon ended up back in A&E, and then intensive care. At least that episode is over. He is now progressing again.
There was one final thing that needed to be resolved from our interview that came by text from Helen a couple of hours later. That bit when Street was trying to explain something, that she couldn’t understand, that had made him so frustrated? He had tried again later and she finally got the message: that the 2014 World Cup should not be regarded as his own personal coaching triumph, do not forget his assistant coach, Graham Smith.
That’s another side of Street. He never sought the acclaim.
So I didn’t forget Smith: I rang him up where he was coaching in Estonia and he pretty quickly said that Street had been the best skills attacking coach in the country, that he “had changed women’s rugby for ever” and that, if they’d stayed in their jobs, England would not have just got to the next two World Cup finals — they would have won them.
• Fund-raising link: www.gofundme.com/f/help-streety-with-speech-and-physio-sessions
• Silent auction link: https://ww2.emma-live.com/StreetsAhead
