Mark Regan was severely deaf from childhood, and few knew

...Regan was definitely a rock, whose hard edges rubbed up more than one coach the wrong way. Yet there was a good reason why Regan acted that way. Early in his childhood, Regan contracted a bad case of measles which damaged his eardrums. He was diagnosed with a severe hearing loss.

Today he sports a discreet hearing aid but as a child in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Bristol, the alternative was clamping breeze blocks to your ears, which were a magnet for bullying. So he and his family said nothing to his teachers. “I struggled through school, ended up at the back of the class and thinking I am not as intelligent as the other kids,” Regan says. “If you can’t hear, you can’t learn properly. I was very frustrated. I was very lucky that I found rugby and rugby found me.”

...Over the years, he had subconsciously learnt to lip-read but still he kept his condition a secret, which hindered his progress. “It made me frustrated when I couldn’t hear Clive [Woodward] talking,” Regan says. “You can say ‘excuse me’ once but after that it becomes embarrassing.”

As a hooker, Regan’s deafness presented a particular challenge when a line-out call was changed. “You are standing there at Twickenham in front of thousands of people and you can’t ask them to repeat it because you’ll get a free-kick so you have to adapt,” Regan says. “A good hooker has that intuition and you can visualise where it is going to go by where they have placed their feet. Sometimes it was a guess.”

...Today, players are far more prepared to be vulnerable and acknowledge their weaknesses so I ask if he has any regrets that he kept his deafness hidden from his coaches. His answer is an emphatic no. “Would you be selected to play for England if they knew you had a disability?” Regan says. “I was determined to never let anyone see Mark Regan as a weak link. I am Mark Regan, the guy who was a nightmare to play against.”