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The physio room brawl that ended England player's Harlequins career
By Ian Cameron
More often than not, when fights break out amongst teammates behind the scenes at their clubs, it’s the training pitch or nights out where you’d expect sparks to fly.
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Punch-ups between Danny Cipriani and Josh Lewsey obviously spring to mind, as does Paul O’Connell very nearly killing Ryan Caldwell in an Ireland training session in 2007.
But it’s not always on the paddock that players have been known to throw down, as one story from former Harlequins fullback Mike Brown proves.
Brown told the Offload Podcast that a fight between former England players, Marland Yarde and Paul Doran Jones, circa 2015 ultimately saw the latter leaving the club as a result of injury.
The pair brawled in a physio room after an untoward comment about Yarde’s then-girlfriend. Brown takes up the story: “That’s probably the best fight I’ve seen. Bloody hell. So Marland Yarde and Paul Doran Jones are in the physio room, both on physio beds.
“They kind of going at each other about some stuff. Doran Jones then says something about Marland Yarde’s girlfriend. Then Marland Yarde jumped off and Dozer’s [Doran Jones] got his head in the physio bed, the hole in the bed, and he just comes up and just uppercuts him through the hole in the thing and they just start going off.
“There’s medical equipment flying everywhere. There’s a poor masseuse lady stuck in the middle of it as well,” said Brown.
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The fight proved to be the end of the former England prop’s time at the Harlequins.
“Doran Jones tore his calf. He’d just come back from a calf injury. Tore his calf and that was the end of him. I think that was him done at Quins.”
Doran Jones finished up at Harlequins in 2015 and went on to sign at Gloucester, while Yarde spent another two years at the club before leaving for Sale Sharks in 2017.
