The issue of the welfare of top England players has been raised again, with star wing Tommy Freeman telling The i Paper he suffered mental “overload” after this year’s Six Nations and “dreaded coming in” to his club, Northampton Saints.
Freeman, who has exceeded the recommended limit of 30 matches in each of the past two seasons, is set to be his usual high-quality self in Northampton’s Premiership semi-final against Leicester Tigers on Friday evening.
With 16 Prem tries this season, seven caps for England to take him onto 27, and a British & Irish Lions tour in which he started all three Tests last summer, he already has much to be proud of. He is also one of four nominees as Premiership player of the season, to be awarded on Wednesday evening.
But those facts and stats also point to a workload that counterproductively wore the 25-year-old down.
And while Freeman says he has no problem with “the environment” of either his club or his country, his frank and honest comments will reignite the debate over whether rugby’s best-known players need more rest and recuperation.
‘It all comes crashing down at some point’
“Post-Six Nations was when I was struggling the most,” Freeman tells The i Paper in an exclusive, sit-down interview. “I think mentally I dreaded coming in [to Northampton] at times.
“Nothing from an environment point of view… just for myself, feeling tired. It sounds very bad, but I just found it a struggle to find a bit of motivation, to find the worth of doing it.”
In the first week of May, with Northampton on a week off due to not making the Champions Cup semi-finals, Freeman unusually ducked out of a trip to Portugal with team-mates and played golf in Scotland with an old schoolfriend instead. It was straight after Freeman had scored three tries in a big win over Bath; ostensibly on top of his game.
“I just said ‘I can’t go’,” he recalls. “I’d love to have gone. It was just the fact that I felt like if I get away from everything, that would give me a good reset.
“I think mentally I’ve been overloaded with so much over the last few years, and playing a lot and being fatigued, it all kind of comes crashing down at some point, doesn’t it?
Freeman continued: “Also, after the Six Nations, there was frustration out of that as well.
“It wasn’t as successful [for England, who lost four matches], and when there’s higher pressure games and you’re not being as successful, then you’re going to feel that pressure. You question yourself, you question your parts in the team, and how you can be better. It was getting to the point where I wasn’t enjoying parts of it; but in my head, I’m battling with that because [I say]: ‘Hang on, I do love rugby, and my body feels fine’.”
Freeman with England and Northampton teammate Fin Smith after the 2026 Six Nations loss to France (Photo: Adam Davy/PA)Freeman confided in Fin Smith and George Furbank, his friends and Northampton and England team-mates, who reassured him the feelings were normal. He has trust in his medics and coaches, too.
The challenge of harmonising club and country
One simple factor for the likes of Freeman is that England’s demands are different to Northampton’s, including peaking at different times.
England have matches in November, February and March, and July, and their head coach Steve Borthwick is under pressure to win the lot.
When Freeman played against Fiji at Twickenham in November, in a match England won by 20 points, he injured a hamstring, missing the next six weeks. Did he really need to play that game?
It is a challenge to manage everything harmoniously.
An elite 25 players including Freeman and Northampton teammate Alex Mitchell are on ‘enhanced EPS’ deals with England, worth a reported £160,000 a year. These players have their medical and injury management ultimately decided by Borthwick. They also have individual development programmes (IDPs) that are mainly rugby-based.
As for the 30-match limit, it always suffers from the impossibility of predicting how deep a club side will go into competitions.
Freeman played 35 times, including 32 starts, in season 2023-24 (27 with Northampton, scoring 14 tries; eight for England, with two tries). In 2024-25, he made 34 appearances: 19 for Northampton (16 tries), nine for England (five tries) and six for the British & Irish Lions. This season he has notched 24 appearances and could reach 29 – despite the time off due to his injury.
“There is a lot of rugby,” says Freeman, “and the better you do as a team and a club, the more games you’re going to play. Finals and semi-finals, those are the games you want to play.”
The system came under stress in mid-May, when England had a short training camp in the week of the European club finals that no English team qualified for. There was one full-on rugby session, in which Saints scrum-half Mitchell tore a hamstring that has ruled him out of the Prem play-offs and maybe the summer Tests, too.
Dowson’s showdown with England management
It led directly to a summit meeting between Phil Dowson, Northampton’s director of rugby, and Phil Morrow, the head of England’s strength and conditioning, plus other staff. Northampton have had a series of soft-tissue injuries, and Dowson and Morrow discussed if something extra needed to be done to prevent them.
Dowson tells The i Paper: “What we didn’t do with Phil [Morrow] is say: ‘This is bullshit, we need to find out what happened with Mitch’.
“We said: ‘This has happened again, what is going on? Is it us? Is it what’s happening at England? Is it somewhere in between? How can we stop haemorrhaging playing minutes for our group and make sure they’re in the best place possible?’ And Phil Morrow was good enough to come in and go: ‘Here’s what we think, here’s what we did, here’s what we do different in future’.”
Northampton Saints’ director of rugby, Phil Dowson, held an emergency summit with England staff last month due to player injuries (Photo: Joe Giddens/PA)Freeman says: “I completely get both sides. It was two days we were with England, and they want to get a lot out of us. Basically, learn as much as possible really quickly. And when you work hard for each other, there’s a bit of bonding in that.
“From a club point of view, you’re not going to be wanting your lads at week 42 [of the season] to be doing some extra fitness. That could be a pretty good week to get some load out of your legs and rest up.”
Next month, England are playing away to South Africa and Argentina, with Fiji at Everton FC in between. “There’s a lot of travelling,” Freeman says. “I’m sure there’ll be a strategy and a way of managing that.”
The England captain Maro Itoje was on Tuesday left out of the squad who are training this week, amid conjecture he may be given all or part of the summer off. Itoje told The i Paper in October there needed to be a “holistic, nuanced approach to solve the issue” of too much rugby, with clubs “squeezed and squeezed”.
Getting ready to go again (and again)
When July is over and the long season is finally finished, Freeman will take the mandatory five weeks’ rest. Last year he went to Florida and Majorca – and put on five kilos – but Dowson and his assistant, Sam Vesty, could tell he was not his “happy go lucky” self on his return, and gave him an extra week off.
This pre-season, Saints are flying to Sri Lanka as it all starts again, with a World Cup in Australia in September 2027 looming.
Is the figure of 30 matches per season definitively optimal, or does it exist in part simply to fit a programme of 40 possible matches for a successful player this season?
Dowson says: “It’s either the player gives, and he gets injured or he goes on a sabbatical, or the clubs give, and you don’t have one of your highest-paid and best players playing.
Or, England give and they don’t get their best player, and they also pay money to both club and player. That’s very difficult, because Steve [Borthwick] wants the best players to play, and the best players want to play for England, but they just can’t keep missing games for Northampton.
Dowson continued: “There is another nuance in this. Look at someone like Maro, like Tommy Freeman… it’s [about] how we make sure for not just this World Cup, but the next World Cup too, that they’re feeling fresh and are fit enough to go again.”
Freeman clearly agrees: “When you’re a young academy kid, you’re open to everything, you’re just taking everything as it comes, and you keep going.
Freeman, 25, has played ‘a lot of rugby’ for club and country in recent years (Photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)“And then you get on a Lions tour, and you strive for that, and the Six Nations and wanting to be a part of that squad, and it just all goes happy, happy, happy. And there’s so much [still] to achieve. I haven’t been to a World Cup, there’s still that next year. So, it’s not like there’s no drive.
Admitting there is “a bit of stigma” around not wanting to “show weakness”, he continued: “Also, being honest from our side as well, from the players, is really important.
“If you’re buggered, you’re buggered, it’s about being honest about that. It might not look like ‘oh right, we’re pulling you from the game’. It’s, ‘okay, let’s manage Tuesday, let’s manage Thursday, and see how you feel, and then go yay or nay’. So, they [the management] are pretty good. It’s all good now. I feel recharged.”
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