Freddie Burns brushes off ‘what ifs’ as his ‘world tour’ continues and reveals why he is ‘immensely envious’ of Owen Farrell and George Ford

Alex Spink 29 Aug 2025 3:10 PM

Freddie Burns on playing in Romania for Dinamo Bucuresti.

August in Europe and Freddie Burns is beside a pool, feet dangling in the water, hot sun on his back. He insists he is out of his comfort zone, though it is not immediately apparent.

The former England fly-half is in Romania, where on Saturday his Dinamo Bucuresti team face CSM Baia Mare for a place in the final of Liga Nationala.

Nearly 2,000 miles to the north and west lies Leicester, where Burns is loved for the drop goal which so dramatically won the 2022 Premiership final. Some 8,000 miles to the east is Nagoya where this year he won every award going in Japan’s second division.

Well travelled

“The world tour continues,” Burns quips as he explains his move to a rugby backwater where attendances are modest and the training ground, he whispers, makes him think of Chernobyl.

“The question I keep getting is ‘why’ and, yeah, I do fully believe I could still contribute to a team in any of the top leagues,” he says. “But I don’t want to just exist somewhere as a squad player, to just rinse and repeat. I’ve done Newcastle away on a Friday night and all that.

“I want something to really excite me. I’d rather be here and part of something, able to drive standards and help develop rugby in Romania than go back and do what I’ve been fortunate enough to do for many years.”

What the ex-Gloucester, Leicester and Bath fly-half has found has come as a culture shock. “The facilities are a bit spit and sawdust and my first game away from home there was probably 500 watching,” he says.

“They were quite aggressive, too, booing and shouting stuff at me. When there’s only a few hundred watching that feels a lot more intense. You turn around at a bloke yelling and he’s staring you straight in the eye and you’re thinking, ‘he’s going to knock me out here’.”

As of last week, Burns is combining playing with coaching, following the abrupt departure of Dinamo’s attack coach to take up an opportunity elsewhere.

At 35 years of age, he knows he is “not a million miles away from having to hang up the boots” yet claims physically he is in perhaps the best shape he has ever been.

“To be able to say I’ve played in England, New Zealand, Japan and Romania, that’s pretty special,” he adds. And it is. Yet let’s be honest, five England caps is a meagre return for a player who kicked the All Blacks to defeat on his debut in the year of the London 2012 Olympics.

Burns was 22 then and appeared to have the world at his feet. That day at Twickenham Owen Farrell was winning his 12th cap. George Ford was still a year away from his first. Thirteen years on both are centurions, Farrell with 112, Ford 102.

“Of course, I have moments I sit and go over the what ifs,” Burns admits. “Moments when I think I could have had a few more caps. But the only person I blame for that is myself. I should have been playing that well that no coach could ignore me.

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“I look at Owen and George with immense envy that they were able to go on and achieve what I wanted to on the international stage.

“Do I sometimes feel I wasn’t necessarily backed in the same way? Yes. I don’t think I ever really went to a club and was told, ‘Listen, you’re our 10’. I always felt I was fighting to start and be in the side rather than, ‘this is your team’.

“But that’s just the way it went. That’s not me complaining or wanting sympathy. Because of that I got to experience playing in Japan and all these different places. So I feel more fortunate than I do regretful.”

Burns continues: “It would be nice to be sitting on a couple more England caps but, without trying to sound too philosophical, the bad times led me into experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

“I’ve got to the stage now, in both my life and my career, where I want to be thankful for the five I got rather than worry about the ones I didn’t.”

This has been quite a year for the Bath-born playmaker. With him at the helm Shokki Shuttles won Japan League One division two. He was the league’s most valuable player, players’ player of the year, top points scorer and leading try scorer.

He then received a call from Carl Hogg, his academy coach at Gloucester many moons ago. The former Scotland back-row is Dinamo’s director of rugby and pitched to him the idea of giving Romania a go.

“I was like, ‘Wow, new city, new group of boys to try and earn the respect off’,” Burns recalls. “I thought, ‘Why not’.”

So it is that while clubs in Britain, Ireland and France slowly emerge from the summer recess ahead of the season start next month, Burns is already at the business end of another campaign.

“I’m bent over the laptop, reviewing games, trying to work out where we can get better,” he says. “Arranging meetings, planning training sessions. It’s definitely challenging me.

“We played on Saturday and whereas I used to just worry about my job and then try to help out where I can, I felt a whole different responsibility if a backs move didn’t work or tactically something was wrong.”

Leicester leaders

Burns credits his time at Leicester for revitalising his career. He says it was there he learned the true meaning of appetite and hunger, working alongside so many leaders.

“We had Julian Montoya, Ellis Genge, Dan Cole, Jasper Wiese, Hanro Liebenberg, Ben Youngs, George Ford, Wiggy [Richard Wigglesworth],” he adds, reeling off the names.

“Working with guys with so much experience and observing how they view the game, shaped me massively into the player I’ve become. I’m now trying to instil those traits in players in other countries.”

Just this week he was on the phone to Wigglesworth, picking the brains of the now England and Lions coach.

“I’m not 100% sure coaching is something I want to do when I hang up the boots, but who knows,” Burns says. “A year ago I didn’t see myself here either.”