Sporting Dinner

Thu, Jul 11th 2019 at 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm

The first Fundraiser of the Year Held at Kings School Gloucester.


Sporting Dinner - Kings School Gloucester

We were delighted to welcome over four hundred guests for this year’s Sporting Dinner and to be entertained after the meal by our guest speakers; Maggie Alphonsi, a key member of the England Women’s Rugby team and World Cup winner in 2014; and James Haskell, the former England international back.
Maggie and James were interviewed by our MC, David Kurk.  David is a former Premiership match official and his knowledge of rugby added greatly to the conversations.
Maggie was first up and started by telling us about her early days in South London. 
She was first called up to the England squad at the age of 19 and managed to score a try on her debut.  She went on to represent her country 74 times, scoring 28 tries and was part of the team that won the Women’s Six Nations Championship on seven consecutive occasions.

The culmination of her career was participating in – and winning – the World Cup in 2014. 
She told us that the team cut themselves off from the world before the match and it was not until they turned their phones back on afterwards and the floods of messages, tweets, emails etc poured in, that they had any sense of the following and excitement their victory had created back home.

Maggie retired shortly after the World Cup and has forged a successful new career in the media as a commentator and newspaper columnist.
James Haskell then took the stage and started by telling us about his early days at Wasps.  His hero at the time was the Shed’s favourite villain – Lawrence Dallaglio – and James regaled us with some stories about him.  This led him on to tease us about the barracking that Wasps used to received from the Shed – always the same but always funny.
He did feel that he was very lucky to have been a part of the Wasps setup and, consequently, to have been in a team that won two Heineken Cups and two Premiership titles.  However, at the age of 24, having failed to agree a new contract with the club, he decided to move on and joined Stade Français.

After a couple of years in Paris, James wanted to find new challenges and moved to Japan and then on to New Zealand for a couple of seasons before returning to Wasps for a further five-year stint.  He played for Northampton last year before finally announcing his retirement a couple of months ago.

Both James and Maggie were very entertaining and gave us a valuable insight into the world of professional rugby.  We thank both them and David for joining us

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