It's like I'm watching the game with England playing and I can see me there - but I wasn't there, because it's not me. It's just bizarre. People talk about stories, and since the World Cup I've talked to the lads that were there, and you pick up stories, and then you can talk about it, but it's not me being there, it's not me doing it, because it's just gone. When we first started going full-time in the mid-1990s, training sessions could quickly turn into full contact. There was one session when the scrummaging hadn't gone quite right and they made us do a hundred live scrums. When it comes to it, we were like a bit of meat, really. The whole point of us doing this is to look after the young players coming through. I don't want rugby to stop. It's been able to give us so much, but we just want to make it safer. It can finish so quickly, and suddenly you've got your whole life in front of you. When you are there alone, the number of times you just think to yourself it's probably easier if you go, if I'm not here. You start to think, it's not right to put them through that. That's the difficult side to it.
Steve Thompson, 42, played in every England match when they won the 2003 Rugby World Cup and has recently been diagnosed with the early signs of dementia. Steve and seven other former players claim rugby has left them with permanent brain damage - and are in the process of starting a claim against the game's authorities for negligence.
