My Life in Rugby: Pete Richards – former England scrum-half

Warren Gatland is famous for polishing rough diamonds. He took a risk on me and I look at that as the turning point in my career.
It was 2003 and I was playing in the second team at Bristol, we smashed Wasps by about 50 points and Warren signed me.
At Wasps we won the league twice and the Heineken Cup so my career was transformed in one evening, going to the best team in England and having a tremendous amount of success.
That first two years for the club were probably the best we had. I’ll always thank Shaun Edwards and Warren Gatland for how they progressed my career.
Before that I found myself at Treviso, I think it was very much a life lesson more than a rugby lesson. I was struggling with the element of professionalism in rugby. I was enjoying the social side too much and struggling to cope with how to balance the two.
My struggles with professionalism cost me with England early on.
Rugby turned professional a week after my last A Level in 1995 and I turned up at Irish where Clive Woodward was the coach.
Within four weeks of the season starting, I was in the first team.
Then, on my first England tour in 1998 to Australia and New Zealand I was a bit of a naughty boy. I went on tour again, but success probably came too quickly to me and I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have done.
Clive was in charge of England and my antics upset him. I had to wait for my first cap some eight years later in 2006, having joined Gloucester.
I spent a lot of time in the wilderness. It was my own doing but eventually in the summer of 2006 I got capped against Australia in Sydney’s Olympic Stadium. My brother, father and uncle flew down to see it – a special moment.
A year later I played in every game at the 2007 World Cup. I’d had a tremendous rugby journey. Growing up dreaming of being in a World Cup final and realising that dream is something I’ll never forget.
I started playing at Havant RC as a four-year-old and soon moved to Farnham – the question I get asked most is probably what was it like to play with Jonny Wilkinson?
His father coached us and we had a lovely little team in the Surrey league. I went to Wandsworth College near Basingstoke and teamed up with a couple of old friends who went there, because it was local to Farnham were my parents lived. Again I was with Jonny Wilkinson.
In my second year at Sixth Form he was in his lower sixth and we played together for a year and we got all the way to the semi-final of the Daily Mail Cup, despite being a tiny school, where we lost to Mike Tindall’s QEGS of Wakefield.
I played for England Schools and got into London Irish. The Farnham RC chairman was an Irishman and he helped me get a trial at the club.
Now I’m back as academy coach. After a mixed bag of development, I can allow the kids to learn from my mistakes, having had the best and the worst of it as a professional.