Jamie George means business on and off the field ahead of Six Nations as England star brings elite treatment to the masses

Exclusive: Saracens hooker is opening his own physiotherapy clinic with friend Rhys Carter, and he tells Jack de Menezes why he's taken a leaf out of Eddie Jones' book to aim for the very best

Jamie George is opening his own physiotherapy clinic to bring professional treatment to the public (Carter & George)

Seven defeats in a row, staring European elimination square in the face and on the verge of a crisis, Saracens endured something of a winter to forget. But something happened between the harrowing home defeat by Clermont Auvergne and the narrow away loss that fully exposed the problems that had arose this season.

Saracens had lost their identity, and there were few signs of it coming back. But a player-led lunch saw the reigning European champions rediscover the culture that the club have built over the last decade, and once the clear-to-air talks were done and dusted, Saracens felt like Saracens again.

Fast forward six weeks and Saracens have gone on a run of five matches unbeaten, seen off both Wasps and Leicester Tigers and put more than 50 points on Northampton Saints for the third time this season. But this isn’t really a surprise when you factor in that the club are like no other when it comes to off-the-pitch affairs.

Mid-season team-bonding trips have been well-documented, but it’s the player development area that is currently interesting England international Jamie George the most. You would forgive the 27-year-old for thinking only about rugby matters right now, having started all three British and Irish Lions Tests last summer and resuming his relentless bid to oust captain Dylan Hartley from Eddie Jones’ starting line-up ahead of his third Six Nations campaign.

But there is something else on his mind that is evidently exciting him just as much as talk of scrums and lineouts. It’s the Carter & George Practice, a state-of-the-art physiotherapy, wellbeing and rehabilitation clinic that aims to make the world class medical care that professional athletes receive available to the masses. Together with childhood best friend, Rhys Carter, George is plowing into the business world, and the two-time European champion doesn’t plan on this venture being any less successful than his rugby career.

George is likely to feature during the Six Nations for England after becoming a mainstay in the squad (Getty)

“What we effectively want to provide is a service that we as professional sportsmen get,” George tells The Independent. “The service that we get, the access that we have to physios and basically everything that we need, is brilliant, and that’s what we want to provide to the general public.”

George’s business partner is Rhys Carter, a former budding cricketer who decided that a degree in physiotherapy at Cardiff University was the path for him, while his friend headed off in the pursuit of a rugby career. The pair grew up together in Hertford, a stone’s throw from where the clinic is based in Hoddesdon, and together they plan on combining George’s sporting nous and ability to raise awareness with Carter’s knowledge and profession.

George has opened the clinic with childhood friend Rhys Carter (Carter & George) (Carter & George)

“What I feel like I can provide is the link between us and the professional game,” George continues. “There’s a lot of times when we’ve talked about it and discussed what we think about shockwave therapy for example. When I had plantar fasciitis, I used shockwave therapy and thought it was the best thing ever and it fixed me like that. Suddenly you’re thinking that isn’t available a lot, I can’t see many physios offering that, so that’s one thing that we’re going to make available to our clients.

“Rhys and I are constantly having these conversations and he’ll ask ‘what do you think about cryotherapy’ and I’ll say ‘I use it, we’ve got a cryotherapy chamber at Saracens’, so we’ve looked into it and we’re going to have a joint-specific cryo pod which is going to be fantastic for us because it’s not something that is available.”

Carter adds: “We’ll pretty much be the only ones with it.”

George is very much a spearhead of the ‘Saracens way’. Having been plucked from Hertford RFC to join the Saracens Academy, he was promoted to the first-team squad with Owen Farrell, Jackson Wray, George Kruis and Will Fraser, the famed ‘Class of 2008’. But that’s not all that ties the hooker to the club, as his father – a former teacher and rugby player that turned out for Northampton, London Welsh and the Barbarians – now works with the player development programme and his brother is a physio there who helps him scout out the newest forms of treatment and whether they should be included at Carter & George.

George's new business stems from Saracens' desire to help players off the field (Getty)

But there is something else at Saracens that led to George’s decision to enter the business world that many fans venturing to Allianz Park will have heard of: Wolf Pack Lager and Tiki Tonga Coffee.

“Saracens are very good at pushing you to do stuff outside of rugby, they value the importance of stuff outside of rugby and I looked at what the other guys had created,” George explains. “Chris Wyles and Alistair Hargreaves have created Wolf Pack Lager, that’s obviously kicked off and is a huge success now, they’ve just opened a bar. Brad Barritt has Tiki Tonga Coffee and that’s becoming really successful and you almost become a little bit jealous of what they’ve achieved and what they have.

“So I wanted to have something myself, and Rhys and I go way back a long way, we’ve been best friends since we were 13 and we used to go on holidays together and all sorts.

“I guess we got chatting a couple of years ago about combining the ideas and Rhys wanted his own physio practice and for things to be a little bit different, and not just a generic physio practice, for it to be interesting and that’s where we evolved the idea from. It created into something we’re going to be very proud of and the plans that came together were very much on the same wave length.”

The clinic will not only deal with sports injuries but aim to offer everything a patient will need that can normally involve multiple specialists and appointment after appointment. “We’re hoping to be top of the game with chronic pain, injury prevention, whatever it might be. It’s not just sports injuries, we’re looking at pre- and post-natal classes. Stuff like that allows us to branch out to a wider public, not just the sporting world.”

Injury prevention is one that particularly stands out, given that to-date, George’s injury record is rather impressive. He could easily have missed the Lions tour when he suffered a torn biceps tendon, only to discover that he had a rare condition that meant the muscle remained attached through a second head that enabled him to continue playing.

Beyond that, George has featured in every England international since the 2016 Six Nations barring last summer while he was away with the Lions, which for an international forward is certainly some doing. Part of passing that knowledge of injury prevention on to the public will be a major attraction of Carter & George, but while new opportunities are presenting themselves off the field, George issues a timely reminder that he is not done with his business on it just yet.

George is enjoying his increasing responsibility within the England squad (Carter & George) (Carter & George)

While he will likely have to wait for his chance to permanently oust Hartley from the starting England side given that Jones will stick with the Northampton Saint as captain for the Six Nations, George still has a role to play. Rarely does Hartley spend more than 50 minutes on the field, meaning George’s impact is needed when the going gets tough in the second half, but he is also enjoying the responsibility that comes with his growing experience in the England set-up – something that means he can lend a helping hand to new call-ups like Lewis Boyce and Alec Hepburn who will be packing down alongside him in training and, potentially, in Rome in little more than a weeks’ time.

I like it because I get to put my arm around people and enjoy meeting new people

Jamie George

“It’s always so exciting when new caps come in because they bring a fresh amount of energy, they’re very excited with the element of unknown for them,” he says. “I like it because I get to put my arm around people and enjoy meeting new people.

“I don’t know either of them [Boyce and Hepburn] off the pitch, but I’ve seen a lot of them and I’ve played a lot against Alec Hepburn. He’s part of an Exeter scrum that has been dominating everyone this season so why wouldn’t he be involved? I’m very excited to be learning from these guys, to be able to work with these people means you learn things and I found that out with Harry Williams this year, coming in with him, what a brilliant scrummager he is and one that I’ve learned a huge amount from so hopefully I can learn from those guys coming in.”

George evidently has his head screwed on, and it would be no surprise to see Carter & George take off and reach the aim of franchising in two-to-three years’ time. But for now, he has rugby business to attend to, and that will be the best treatment of all for Saracens and England supporters.