The ‘old married couple' at the heart of Northampton's excitement machine

Telegraph

22-05-2025

'We're like an old married couple,' Phil Dowson, Northampton's director of rugby, says of his partnership with Sam Vesty, the club's head coach, who sits beside him at the top of the stand at Franklin's Gardens. 'Sometimes I p--- him off and sometimes he p----- me off, but that only lasts about five minutes and then we get on with it.'
This relationship is at the heart of Northampton's rise to the Premiership title last season and now to the precipice of European glory, all with one of the Premiership's smaller budgets. Beating Bordeaux in the Investec Champions Cup final at the Principality Stadium on Saturday having already beaten Leinster in Dublin and the Bulls in Pretoria would rank as one of English rugby's greatest coaching achievements.
Part of what makes their dynamic so fascinating is that they would appear, at first glance, to be peas from very different pods: Dowson as the pragmatic, hard-bitten former Newcastle flanker and Vesty, the free-thinking, flair-loving ex-fly-half. But as Dowson points out, appearances can be deceptive. 'You don't see many tens with cauliflower ears,' Dowson says. 'He came out of the school of hard knocks with Leicester and you have to be tough to come out of that environment. Honestly, Sam is one of the most competitive, tenacious people I have ever met.'
Dowson too never subscribed to the stick-it-up-your-jumper philosophy as a player and is something of an aesthete off it. 'The most excited I have seen him in the last year was talking to a curator from the V&A exhibition,' Vesty says. As well as a shared interest in art, the pair, both 43, play cricket and football together – where a misplaced pass can occasionally fracture the relationship – and are even part of the same book club having just completed Orbital, which won the 2024 Booker Prize.
They first crossed paths in an Under-16s game between the North and Midlands, although neither could recall their first impressions of each other. Generally they stayed on opposing sides – Vesty for Leicester and Dowson with Newcastle and Northampton – but they did appear in the same England A side together. In total, Dowson won seven senior caps and Vesty two. 'We were both pretty average, but average players make the best coaches,' says Vesty who briefly coached Dowson at Worcester Warriors.
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They were brought back together by Chris Boyd when the New Zealander was appointed as Northampton's director of rugby in 2018. Dowson was already in the building as an assistant forwards coach but Boyd quickly decided to promote him while appointing Vesty as attack coach. 'The first thing Boydy did was sit us down in a room together and ask us with this group of players, 'what's the best way to get to where we want to go?'' Dowson says. 'We hammered it out, how are we going to play, what's our ethos, what does that look like. That has evolved over time but we have always had that alignment.'
For all their similarities, which includes a natural inquisitiveness allied with a ferocious competitiveness, it is their differences which makes them work so effectively together. Vesty focuses on the detail of everything that takes place on the grass, whether in training or in matches; Dowson's remit is the bigger picture or as Vesty puts it pithily, 'I get to do all the good stuff that I want to and you get to do all the s--- stuff.'
Dowson reluctantly concurs. 'My job is to clear the runway and to make it as easy as possible for Sam to get the guys on the grass. The fewer distractions that Sam and the other coaches have the better. That means focusing on the environment, the culture, admin, talking to the board, doing the media.'
What Vesty does on the grass is a prime reason the club boast four British and Irish Lions – Alex Mitchell, Fin Smith, Tommy Freeman and Henry Pollock – and in the view of Boyd, speaking from New Zealand, Vesty should also have been on the plane to Australia. 'They should have taken Sam as attack coach for the Lions, 100 per cent,' Boyd says. 'His technical knowledge of being able to see things before they happen is second to none. Sam would be sitting next to me in the coaches' box and before we had even started the strike move he would say 'f--- this is not going to work, Ollie is too wide or Fraser is too tight'.
'My observation is that some of the best tactical and technical rugby coaches are a bit out there. They are a bit on the edge. Sam is certainly one of those. He's fascinating to watch on a bus trip to Exeter because he'll do the crossword for 30 minutes, he'll get bored with that and then listen to some music and then after 15 minutes he'll get his laptop out to look at how a team defends a certain play and then he'll go back to a Sudoku. He is just that type of individual.'
'Sam is a rugby coach. That's who he is'
Yet in their time together at the club, it was always Dowson whom Boyd viewed as the club's next director of rugby, eventually stepping up to that role in 2022. If Vesty could see the molecular detail of a lineout strike move then Dowson could adopt the bird's eye view necessary to run a sprawling organisation. 'Sam Vesty is a rugby coach,' Boyd says. 'That's who he is. Dows is a businessman. If I had read an article tomorrow to say he was now the CEO of a FTSE 100 company that would not surprise me. Rugby just happens to be that vehicle for him at the moment.' It just so happens that Dowson runs NDi, a printing business in his spare time.
The pair would not be drawn on whether their ambitions extend beyond Northampton and into the Test arena. 'The joy of sport is that there's always something else,' Dowson said. 'There's always something next. Can you do it again? Can you do it again with this group?'
Regardless of the result on Saturday, their resume with Saints should put them at the top of any international coaching shortlist, not only for reaching finals but doing so with a young English core playing a brand of rugby based around speed and skill rather than brute force. Yet this is not the achievement they are proudest of in their time together at Northampton.
'It's seeing these guys mature and become people you are really proud of and having a massive impact around them and on people who watch us,' Vesty says. This is quickly echoed by Dowson highlighting the examples of Angus Scott-Young, the Australian back-rower, who runs an art class for the local community, or Tom James, the scrum-half, who regularly visits HMP Highpoint Prison in Suffolk through Northampton's foundation to help mentor young prisoners and prepare them for life on the outside.
'I think I am most proud of how much our guys do for charities outside of the club,' Dowson says. 'Highpoint is a good two-hour drive away and Tom does that all on his own time. There's loads of stuff that goes on under the radar. We try to encourage them to do that but it's off their own back. Success can look like anything you want it to. It can be a trophy, it can be a Lions call-up, but it can also be something else entirely.'