The panic attack ex-England star suffered before facing Springboks and his week in hospital fighting sepsis
Mike Brown scores for England versus South Africa in 2018 despite having a poor preparation for the game due to coach Eddie Jones, inset
Former England full-back Mike Brown has revealed the panic attack he suffered at the team hotel in Johannesburg the night before the 2018 Test versus the Springboks.
The 40-year-old, who retired from playing earlier this year, has founded his MB15 high performance consultancy and become sporting director at Esher RFC since finishing at Leicester last May.
He recently appeared on The Business End with ex-London Irish duo Liam Mooney and Justin Fitzpatrick, reflecting at length on a stellar career that involved playing 72 Tests for England.
Towards the end of that fabulous run, though, Brown became overwhelmed by feeling he didn’t have any psychological safety as part of the Eddie Jones set-up. Instead of feeling he could contribute a full part and be himself, he instead withdrew from non-rugby team activities and spent his free time alone in his bedroom.
“I didn’t want to hang around with people…”
This stressful situation eventually culminated in an awkward pre-match night in South Africa, where he wound up walking the corridors of the team hotel with his laundry bag after 4am. Somehow, despite this disrupted preparation, he still managed to score after just three minutes that day after getting selected to start on the wing, an unfamiliar role that added to his sense of dread leading into the match.
It’s a situation he has never spoken about until now. “It had a big impact on me in my last one or two years with England,” he revealed.
“We talk around creating that psychological safety environment where you feel comfortable to express yourself, be yourself, speak up if you feel like that, being able to make mistakes as long as it is aligned to where we are trying to get to in terms of rugby but then knowing you have support around developing if you make a mistake – I didn’t feel there was any of that on my last one, maybe two years with England.
“Off the back of that, I then just started to withdraw from the environment and spent too much time in my hotel room between training sessions and meetings. I didn’t want to hang around with people.
“It had a more negative impact on me because people have certain perceptions of you, and it was around the time when selection wasn’t going my way, so everyone just assumes you are sulking.
“But I just didn’t feel comfortable in there, and then it just feeds into your personal life where you are at home worrying about what people were thinking about you, how certain things were being perceived, how you are performing, making errors.
“Getting certain messages from the head coach at certain times doesn’t help and being a bit of an over-thinker, a bit of a worrier, that is all going in your head. Going through a tough time with selection adds to it. It all comes mashing together, one big clusterfuck around how your head is and your performance. It was an incredibly tough time.”
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Brown then drilled down into the specifics and lifted the lid on his troubled June 2018 preparation for one of his last Test matches with England. “I don’t think I have ever spoken about this. I remember the first Test; I’d been moved to wing because he [Jones] was trying out Elliot Daly and had tried out a few other people in terms of full-back.
“I managed to get on the tour, but then he wanted me to play wing. When we first met up for the tour, he sold it as this positive thing, and I was really excited to try out a real challenge. I can understand why he was trying out Elliot Daly as well; he was trying to play a certain way in terms of attack. That is absolutely fine.
“But then it just turned into this real negative thing. The media jumped on it when selection was confirmed for that first Test. As much as I was trying to hide away from it, people still messaged you, and you were getting asked certain questions in the media which were all negative, and I was really struggling at this time anyway in the environment. So, it was all coming together in the wrong way.
“I remember the night before that first Test, I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know if it was a full panic attack, but it was as close as I imagine one being where I was so anxious, couldn’t sleep, was panicking about things, was so homesick, getting really emotional about not being at home and my son had been born not long before that.
“Missing home, not wanting to be there, which again I had this battle in my head about how come I didn’t want to be there with England? It’s everything I’d ever wanted to do. I was so patriotic, I loved it, it was everything I worked for, having watched England since the age of five, so why am I feeling like this? How selfish and unthankful am I in this moment?
“So I couldn’t sleep and got up at 4am and had my washing; I’d forgotten to put it out to be picked up earlier, so I was weirdly panicking about that. I picked up my wash bag and started walking to the team room in the hotel. It was nearly 5am at this point and I bumped into the S&C guy, Tom Tombleson. He was doing a gym session earlier as all those S&C guys do, getting ready for the day.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Brownie, what are you doing? It’s near 5am with your laundry and we are about to play South Africa in a Test match that day.’ Everyone would be sleeping and staying in bed until 10, 11am. I didn’t really know what to say and said, ‘I’m doing my laundry.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Go back to bed, mate.’
“I was so nervous, emotional, upset and anxious, all of that stuff. I just think it was from the environment the head coach and leaders created for me, this is just my perception, in that moment, as well as all the other selection stuff, communications the head coach had given me.
“It was just not a nice time at all. There was stuff in the media and then getting peppered about a position I didn’t really want to play in and didn’t choose myself to play there. But I actually managed to play really well, I don’t know how.
“It’s all a bit of a blur, but I managed to pull a performance from somewhere, but I just remember after being absolutely drained, exhausted and going back to my room and spending the whole time there. Not a good time to be honest.”
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Brown added that no one reached out in the England camp to check on him. “The way I was as a person, I was quite quiet and reserved anyway, people saw me as quite intense.
“Because I wasn’t a happy-go-lucky bounce into a room person, it was always here’s Mike in a mood, grumpy or whatever, as usual, so no one would have picked up on it, and I didn’t openly talk about it. My natural thing was to withdraw and spend even more time on my own and keep my head down and try avoiding Eddie Jones as much as possible.”
Resilience – bouncing back from difficult moments – was a pattern in Brown’s long career, and it also included getting back on the pitch at Harlequins four weeks after getting rushed to hospital with sepsis.
“I had this pain in my chest; I thought I had pulled my pec in a big pre-season weights session, but then I started to feel really ill, and no one could work out what the hell was wrong with me.
“I went to this doctor and he first took a scan on my pec to see what I had done to that; that was getting more swollen and redder, and I also had to see a GP about why I was feeling really ill. No one could work out what was wrong.
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“My wife was driving me to physio for my pec and I got this call from the club physio telling me to get to Guildford Hospital immediately. On the A3, we turned around and sped off to A&E, dumped the car and she basically carried me in.
“They lay me down and before they explained anything, they got this massive needle out, boom, straight into my chest, suck out this infection that is in there, take it away to get tested.
“Next minute, I’m in this hospital bed with a drip until they work out what it is. I spent a week in there and lost six, seven kgs. They were lucky you had the scan because, genuinely, not long after that, it would have been crisis time.
“Then I get a message from John Kingston, head coach at the time. I just heard you are not that well. Don’t worry about the pre-season game this weekend, maybe we will get you in in a week’s time. I messaged back, going, ‘I don’t think so, John, I have got sepsis and I’m currently lying in a hospital bed.’
“Four weeks later, I managed to get on the pitch, which was some achievement, still four, five kgs down, kit baggy on me. So, little things like that you go through so much in your career; it took a lot of resilience.
“But I feel proud that I always managed to bounce back from these things and just get through the other side. There was other stuff around my exit from Quins, another really tough time. Then my exit from Newcastle.
“I’m thinking why is it always me. But there were so many learning things to take from it and I do think resilience is learned. I learned to be resilient through my career, for sure.”