MY LIFEIN RUGBY
THE FORMER WEST HARTLEPOOL PLAYER, CAPTAIN AND COACH, WHO ALSO REPRESENTED DURHAM, THE NORTH AND BRITISH POLICE
I’M Hartlepool born and bred and grew up on a council estate three-quarters of a mile from West’s old ground, Brierton Lane. We had a strong colts team, and about three or four of us school mates went up into the first team together and had the time of our lives. It was a great place to be, like a family, yet we used to play in the Premiership. I know you’d see lads in Richmond and they’d go to The Sun for a beer and have a night together, but you never got the impression they were mates like we were. They wouldn’t ring each other the next day after the game to see if they were going up the club for a pint. That’s what we did, every Sunday we’d all be at the club cracking on about the day before.
In the early years we had very little outside help – until a local scrap metal merchant got three players over from New Zealand: the Whetton twins, Gary and Alan, and a really good fly-half called David Stead. Gary was already an All Black and Alan was on the fringes. It was massive for us and the touch paper as to what was to come really: West Hartlepool becoming a powerhouse of northern rugby.
After Steady left, I got into the first team on a regular basis and we won the Northern Merit table. However, when the leagues started in 1987 they put us in Division 3. We won Division 3, won Division 2, and then won Division 1. Because rugby in the North East had become so big there would be a fair bit of coverage on a local TV sports magazine show called The Back Page. Me mam used to record them all and there was this particular game I always remember. We were first and Newcastle were second and both of us were beating everyone and there must have been about 7-8,000 people at the game. We won and we had something like three games to go and we only needed a point, so we were up.
The first game we ever had in Courage League One [now the Premiership], we were playing Wasps at home. We thought we were going to win because we had that winning mentality from the promotion years but we were well beaten (6-19). It was a rude awakening really, we realised how far away we were to where we needed to be. A couple of weeks later we had Harlequins up here, superstars like Will Carling came to our little ground to play against John Stabler and his mates. I kicked three penalties in that game but I missed plenty more as the season went on.
I must’ve missed a dozen kicks at goal in a 5-6 defeat at home to Rugby Lions the week before we went down to Gloucester and won. Talking career highlights, that has to be right up there as one of the best. Nobody won down there in those days, not even the best teams and we certainly weren’t one of those. In the first couple of minutes at Gloucester, I got the ball from a lineout and drilled it down the left-hand touchline into the corner. The ball ran and ran and ran. Their full-back at the time was a guy called Tim Smith, who was a good player, and he casually picked the ball up. Our flanker, a guy called Alan Brown, who was 6’2 and ran like the wind, chased Smith down and knocked him over, before picking up the loose ball and scoring in the corner. It left me with a touchline conversion, from the right, which was the wrong side for a right-footed kicker, and it was right in front of the Shed. They were giving me this and giving me that, and I turned around and said, ‘give us a minute lads, I’ll just knock this over and I’ll come and have a chat with you’. Luckily, I nailed it and we beat them. We stopped the night in Gloucester and I think we were still drunk the Sunday night we got home.
“Every Sunday we’d be down the club, cracking on about the day before”
As well as playing for West, I played for Durham and the North and toured New Zealand with the British Police. That was a long trip. The coach was a guy called Jeff Young, an ex-British & Irish Lions hooker, and the tour was the baby of the manager, Colonel Mike Stancombe, an Army guy. Steve Johnson, who played for Leicester for years, had connections with Adidas and they were going to give us a load of new gear but Stankers insisted we wore these crappy tracksuits he’d fetched for us. We were being put up in crappy dorms on this naval base, but after a mutiny we got to share the officers’ quarters with the management team. The highlight of the tour was beating Waikato just after they had put 50 points on Wales, who were touring at the same time as us. I’d had a few too many sherbets in the lead up to the game and I confronted Jeff in the toilets of this bar. I was annoyed that there was only me and one other guy who hadn’t had a game up to that point. I woke up the next morning with a sick feeling in my stomach, thinking ‘what have I said’? Sure enough, he reads the team out and I am playing full-back. Tackling wasn’t my strong point, so I thought he’d picked me there to teach me a lesson. But as it turns out, I had the game of my life. When Mike Brewer came in to coach West in the Allied Dunbar Premiership, he wanted a full-time team. They sold the ground to fund that in the second season and I wasn’t kept on. He got me in and said, ‘I keep hearing from everyone about you but the truth is you’re too old.’ I said, ‘I’m the same age as you (33) but I don’t have a problem with that’, so I left. A lot of other local lads left, too. I dropped down the leagues to join Redcar as player-coach, and I took three or four lads in pivotal positions to go with me to add to a couple of good players they had already. It was just a case of organising them really. We won back-to-back promotions.
But then it went tits up at West. They didn’t have a ground, they didn’t have a coach, they didn’t have any players, they didn’t have any money, and they asked me to come back. It was my club at the end of the day so I said yes. I had no idea it was as bad as it was, though. At this point, the club was about to start the season in Premiership 2 having been relegated the season before. At the first training session in July, I had four players and we were meant to be kicking off the league season against Moseley in August. It was soul destroying. The next session we had three – the only plus side was that they were different from the previous week, so I figured I had seven players in total. Brett Cullinan, a great lad, a Kiwi who was in the Premiership squad, stayed loyal because he’d married a local girl but other than that, we just had university kids.
They were good kids, but not good enough for playing in the second best league in the country. I don’t know how we did it but we got a side for the first game at Moseley and we only lost 19-0 – it felt like a win. It was the hardest time of my life, but the best time of my life – we even won a game that season, Orrell away. Relegation followed and all the players left and so we had none again. This time we got a nucleus of lads, about nine or 10 of them, and each season we’d add to them. They were always playing three leagues higher than they should’ve been. We’d go down to London, get whacked, and 20 minutes afterwards they’d be laughing and joking in the bar. They didn’t really understand this level of rugby, and it’s a good job, that’s why they stayed at it.
Success on the field in them days was getting through the week and getting through to the end of the season. I see some of them now, and they say, ‘they were the best days of their life and I can’t thank you enough’ even though they were getting paggered every week. We had a laugh but mentally, it was exhausting. It would have been easier to have said ‘no thanks’ when the club approached me about coming back. But the club would have gone to the wall and I couldn’t have let that happen.
