The Only Way I Know
The Autobiography andy farrell with Gavin Mairs
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To my wife, Colleen, and to our children, Owen, Elleshia, Gracie and Gabriel: you mean the world to me.
1. The Coin
I found the two-pence coin on the floor behind the old wall bars of the school basketball court. Moments later I would be wishing I had left it where I found it.
I had barely given it a thought before I decided to roll it across the varnished wooden floor towards my teammate Lee Penny. He would go on to play rugby league for Warrington and Scotland, but you wouldn’t have guessed it that day. He was just an over-excited kid, like the rest of us. We wished we were running around outside on the pitch, not stuck in an old gym because our playing fields – on Bankes Avenue in Orrell, on the outskirts of Wigan – were frozen.
The coin rolled in an arc towards the feet of our coach, Haydn Walker. Even before it began to wobble, he knew the culprit. He had been trying to bring a rabble of noisy tenand eleven-year-olds to order and talk through the training session that lay ahead of us.
I guess I knew I would get myself in trouble, just not how deep. It was not like I had been the only one messing around. It was my first full season playing for the Orrell St James junior rugby league club. I may have been a chubby ten-yearold kid with everything still to learn, but I was confident enough in my ability to expect I would be playing in the team every weekend. Perhaps that is why Haydn singled me out. We were still rugby league infants, taking our first baby steps in a hard-man’s world.
Haydn was not some over-eager parent coaching an
age-group side. Orrell St James were just establishing a junior section at the time, so we were one of the new sides coming through. Even back then it was clear that Haydn had a burning desire to build a club where boys could expand their rugby skills and knowledge.
Haydn always kept up to date with what the senior Wigan team were doing and became part of their academy set-up. While other teams in our age group would be playing games in their training sessions and messing around, we would be doing drills the whole time to hone our skills.
We may have only been Under-11s, but we acted as though we were a professional outfit. That attitude was reflected in our results. Our training session in the basketball court was preparation for meeting Leigh Rangers in the cup final of the North West Counties League the following weekend. Paul Rowley, who went on to play for Halifax, Huddersfield and England, and is now head coach of Salford, was in the Leigh team we were facing.
There was tremendous rivalry with local clubs like Blackbrook, Thatto Heath and Leigh. If you are not from the north-west of England, it is hard to describe how territorial it is. Let’s just say it was a big enough decision for my parents to move from Delph Street, off Park Road in the middle of town, where my older sister Catherine was born, to what would be our family home in Goose Green, a fifteen-minute drive from the town centre. Shaun Edwards, my future Wigan teammate, had been a neighbour about six doors down on the opposite side of the street from their first home. Yet moving was the best decision they made. The house was a tight fit at the start but would be extended over the years. Mum and Dad still live there today, in the same house, and I love going back.
You can only imagine what it was like when you went out
of town. There would have been pure hatred between Wigan and Warrington. We were just trying to get one up on each other. It was pride, really. The rivalry was fierce, and it mattered. Boy, did it matter.
Haydn’s commitment to our team exceeded convention too. In order to ensure that he had the right boys in his team, he had bought a clapped-out minibus and every Tuesday and Thursday he would drive around Wigan, battling through traffic on a two-hour journey to pick us all up so that no one would miss training, and then another two-hour journey afterwards to drop us all home.
I didn’t know any different, so I just thought it was normal. It was only when I became a parent that I looked back and realized it was anything but. Haydn was a guy who cared passionately about giving everyone the opportunity to train and play because he knew that not everyone’s mum and dad had a car or the time to take their kids to training or matches.
Yes, I knew that I was at the right club, and I loved the trips in the minibus almost as much as the rugby sessions. It was about four miles from our house to the club. I would usually be among the last to get picked up and one of the first to be dropped off afterwards. The banter on the bus was such that I would often ask Haydn if there was any chance he could drop me off last instead so I could enjoy it a bit longer. Those sessions were what I lived for.
And it was now all about to come to a shuddering halt. Silence swiftly replaced the chatter as Haydn’s stare fixed first on the coin and then firmly on me. What on earth had I been thinking?
* * *
My first passion had been football, not rugby. Manchester City, to be precise. My dad used to take me to the Platt Lane
Stand at Maine Road whenever they played at home, and sometimes to away matches too. Trevor Francis and Kevin Bond were the first posters on the wall of my bedroom in our small three-bedroom house on Freshfield Road in Goose Green.
We were lucky enough to have a corner plot. Our street was off the main road and led onto a cul-de-sac so there was very little passing traffic. For me, it was the best street ever to grow up in. There were about ten other kids living nearby and every afternoon we would meet up after school to play games.
When I was around ten, there were three or four lads who were a few years older than me, and another who was older still. We were a tight group. Somebody would always be knocking on your door to ask if you were coming out, or I would look through the window and see people out playing and dash outside. It was like having a gang of older brothers. We share a WhatsApp group to this day.
The problem with being the youngest in the group was that every night I would be the first to be called in by my mum. It would do my head in. I would trudge back with a burning sense of injustice and watch the others all still playing around under the lamppost from my bedroom window.
I used to share a room with my brothers Chris and Phil, twins just under five years younger than me. I was in a single bed and they were in bunk beds. The room seemed spacious at the time, but when I go back now, I shudder to think how we all squeezed in. It was usually chaos in there. Like most big brothers, I would tease my younger siblings, and they would taunt me back. There were constant fights. I don’t think we got much sleep.
For me, it was an idyllic childhood. Wigan is a former
mining town and near to our house was a vast stretch of ground layered with stones that we called ‘the tips’. There was a lake too. We used to spend hours each day of the summer playing there. One year we decided to construct a BMX track using the stones. It became so popular that people came from all over town to ride on it. During the winter we would skate on the lake when it froze over.
After part of that land was sold, JCB diggers arrived and a new housing estate was built. The banter we had on the building site was brilliant, jumping out of windows and landing in sandpits. Mum and Dad were not strict parents and I am very lucky to have grown up in that era when children had so much more freedom. Kids today seem to spend their free time on their phones or gaming, but we were always outside, always active. I wouldn’t say we were feral, but we were gone first thing in the morning and back last thing at night. All we needed were our bikes.
My wife Colleen pointed out recently that you never see dogs roaming the streets any more. When we were kids, it was a common sight to see dogs on the loose around town. Colleen remembers one day seeing her two dogs running around the school playing field after jumping the fence. Our dog Shandy, an English springer spaniel, would also like to roam. When we saw her out, we would shout, ‘Shandy, go home!’ She would scurry off looking guilty and we would carry on with what we were doing. She was a lovely dog. We would later have two boxers as well, Fergie and Holly, and all three were a big part of our family life.
Messing around with older lads gave me the same kind of street toughness that they had. Rugby league was not played at my primary school, St Paul’s in Goose Green. We mostly played football in the winter and cricket in the summer,
or British Bulldog, where one team had to stop the other crossing the road by tackling them. Then one year the council put gravel down on the tarmac after it was resurfaced, and we were gutted. The gravel cut us to pieces. Still, we played on.
Playing football for the age-group Wigan town sides, physically at least, was easy in comparison, but I was hardly a superstar at football. I was happy to be the workhorse in the middle of the field, trying to galvanize the team. I had a decent left foot, and taking corners and free-kicks definitely contributed to my skills later as a goal-kicker in rugby league. Some kids become obsessed with goal-kicking because they think they can do it. Others tend to shy away from it because it seems too difficult. I was firmly in the former camp. I knew straight away I could strike a ball.
I was intrigued by rugby league because I was aware of how important it was to my dad, but he never really pushed me to play it. As a teenager he had played for Wigan Colts, an Under-19s side. He later became a baker, and had to rise at 2.30 a.m. every day. On Saturday mornings he would go straight from work to the rugby club and have a sleep on the bench before the game. He was associated with the St Patrick’s Club, a famous amateur club that has produced some of the biggest names to come out of Wigan.
Rugby league was cut-throat in those days. Dad had been a decent boxer at school, but when he broke his jaw playing rugby he lost his nerve, and with it his dream of playing ‘for the town’, as we say in Wigan.
His passion for the game did not die, however. Whenever we drove from our house in Goose Green to my grandma’s house about three miles away in Aspull, a village on the outskirts of Wigan, he made a point of always driving past Central Park,
Wigan’s stadium. ‘In two minutes, Andrew, we will be going past heaven,’ he would say, every time we approached the stadium.
The first game I went to was Wigan against Widnes in the Challenge Cup final at Wembley in May 1984. It felt like the whole town had been transported to London. I didn’t know it then, but Keiron O’Loughlin, who was playing for Widnes that day and scored a try, would later be my father-in-law. I also didn’t know that Colleen was somewhere in the crowd, as a Wiganer supporting Widnes and her dad. Two other Wigan lads, Joe Lydon and Andy Gregory, were also in their side, Joe scoring two tries in a 19–6 victory for Widnes. The defeat was tough to take, but what an occasion! It was one of those childhood moments that stay with you.
* * *
When the Graeme West rugby league summer camp at Robin Park was advertised in the local newspaper the summer after that final at Wembley, Dad wondered if I might like to go. I was nine years old.
West, a giant New Zealander, was a Wigan club legend and his camp was in high demand. But I was not sure if I wanted to go. I was shy and none of my friends were going as they all played football. In the end I went along, probably to keep Mum and Dad happy. I made sure I wore a football top, though, a baggy Blackpool shirt.
Yet almost from the first moment I got the ball in my hands, I knew this was the game for me. I was a big lad for my age, and I loved the physical contact, both in carrying the ball and making tackles. It was during the camp that I first met Haydn, who was in charge of our group. I started off as a prop forward, because of my size and the fact that I didn’t know the game, but the exhilaration of making line-breaks
and scoring tries quickly got me hooked. And once you get a bit of success, the hunger goes through the roof.
Haydn put up a reward of a Mars Bar for the player who won man-of-the-match or for anyone who made three tackles in a row. After our first game, I came away with two Mars Bars. Yes, this was the game for me.
At the end of the camp, Haydn invited me to join Orrell St James. It was then that my shyness returned. I had surprised myself by how much I had enjoyed the week, but I told Haydn no.
Haydn refused to give up. Later in the week he came by our house to ask Mum and Dad whether they could persuade me. Dad was excited that I had made an impression on one of the coaches, but in my mind, moving to Orrell St James was unthinkable. All my friends played football: why would I want to go there and play a new sport? But Haydn was persistent. He told my parents I had a special talent. Eventually, I said I would give it a go. It was not the first time I would wrench myself out of my comfort zone, and not the first time I would live to be thankful that I did.
The easy decision would have been to stay with my mates playing football. Had I done that, I suspect I would have continued to take the easy path through life. But I decided to commit to rugby league, and ever since then I have looked for challenges to broaden my experience.
We won a pre-season game by over fifty points, and I got a buzz from scoring tries and kicking conversions. Under Haydn’s guidance, we went on a winning streak that made us the envy of our rivals. But he kept challenging us to develop our skills further. One day he introduced a rule that anyone who scored more than three tries during a match would be substituted to give someone else a chance. I never wanted to
come off, so there were times when, if I made a break having already scored three, I would wait for the support to come and pass to make sure someone else scored.
I still played football, but when I was picked for the town’s Under-11s rugby league team by Mick Mullaney, who ran it, it was not long before I had to make a decision about which sport to commit to. The rugby and football sessions clashed on a Saturday and Orrell St James was on a Sunday. It was a no-brainer for me because I was enjoying rugby so much and making rapid progress through the ranks. I was quickly becoming aware that the sport was treated like a religion in Wigan. My dad’s passion was starting to make sense.
Then one day the frost came, and we had to train inside. And for some reason I rolled a coin at Haydn . . . * * *
‘Farrell, you are out of this session,’ he boomed. Suddenly Haydn had my attention as silence fell over the school’s basketball court. At first I thought he was joking. It was just a stupid coin. Ah, come on! I was not happy, but things were about to get worse.
After the session Haydn took me to one side.
‘Andy, you are not playing against Leigh in the cup final next Saturday,’ he told me.
On the journey home on the minibus that evening, everyone was silent. The others hadn’t seen me cry. I made sure of that. I don’t think I have cried since. That’s how much it meant to me.
I was the last stop that day. Haydn called into the house to tell my parents what had happened. My mum, being softer, probably thought Haydn had been a bit harsh, while my dad told me he had done the right thing.
I was devastated. I couldn’t believe the severity of the
punishment. Haydn had taken away everything that I looked forward to during the week. Even now I can remember the burning sense of injustice. And anger. Why me? Others were up to mischief too, but they didn’t seem to get punished. How could he do this to me?
In my eyes Haydn was now the worst person in the world. I went to the game the following Saturday and stood on the sidelines, still seething. As if to rub it in, Haydn asked me to run onto the pitch with the sand to make a mound for the goal-kicker to kick from.
I supported my teammates as best as I could, trying to prove a point. But what I didn’t realize was that the point had already been made. I guess I must have played over 150 games for Orrell St James. I don’t remember them all, but I’ll never forget the one game that I missed.
As a coach I am all in favour of putting a bit of discipline into someone who is getting above their station and I now recognize that Haydn was trying to make a statement not just to me but to everyone else. A line had been drawn in the sand. He knew that making an example of one of the team’s better players would send a strong message to the others. He ran a tight ship. It was one reason people wanted to come to Orrell St James and why we won so many trophies.
I know now that it might seem like a trivial moment, a coach berating a petulant child at a training session, but it had a lasting impact on me. I knew that if I wanted to keep doing what I loved, I would have to act appropriately rather than messing around. From then on, discipline would become something I prided myself on. I vowed I would never again give anyone an excuse to drop me.
2. The Signature
You could always tell a scout by the way he dressed. The standard attire was a big puffer coat emblazoned with the name of the club they represented. Every time I ran out onto the pitch I looked to see if there were any of them on the sidelines. There would always be an extra buzz ahead of a match if you knew you were being scouted. Often there were as many as six of them patrolling the touchline on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and I was desperate to impress. Especially the ones from Wigan. Only the ones from Wigan, in fact. The truth is, even back then I only ever wanted to play for the town.
Wigan is a working-class town of 330,000 people located between Liverpool and Manchester. It first made its name in textiles, coal and industry. But it is rugby league that has long been the town’s DNA . Plenty of sportswriters have tried to get to the bottom of the phenomenon, but to me there is no secret. It is founded in the tightness of the community. We look after our own and are proud of each other, no matter what they are doing.
As a boy I loved the sense of belonging and was a real homebird. People might have seen a different side to me on the pitch, but away from it I could be painfully shy at times and didn’t like to travel. I was the type of kid who, if I went away for the weekend with a friend, would soon be on the phone to my mum asking her to come and pick me up, even if we had only gone thirty-odd miles up the road to Blackpool.
In rugby union in England, you might have a school producing brilliant teams in one part of the country, but their main competition is hundreds of miles away. In Wigan, we were surrounded by fierce competition, so many clubs, so many rivals. I live in Dublin now, and I see something similar in the rivalry between the schools in rugby union and the burning desire to play for Leinster and Ireland. I recognize the pressure.
That pressure was incredible, even at age-group level in Wigan. I felt it the first time I pulled on the treasured cherryand-white shirt when I represented the town Under-11 side. The jerseys were handed out on match days, and even though we had to return them after the game to get washed, I remember thinking, Wow, this is what it is about!
It’s what drove me on. I couldn’t bear the thought of not being selected the following year. That shirt represents all of us. If you are lucky enough to pull it on, you know the weight of responsibility that comes with it. You know about the people who have gone before you and are under immense pressure to do well.
That pride seeped through to my desire to play for Lancashire and pull on their famous red jersey with a white ‘V’. But at time it felt like the trials for the town team were harder than the county ones. You were up against players from St James, St Pat’s, St William’s and St Jude’s amateur clubs, and some great players missed out.
When I was growing up, the focal point of the town was Central Park. The stadium was located right in the middle of town, which meant that fans could travel by bus or walk to the game and have a beer or two.
It was there that my deep bond with the Wigan senior team was cemented, the night of 7 October 1987. I still
remember it like yesterday. Manly Warringah Sea Eagles had come to town for the inaugural World Club Challenge match. There had been an unofficial game between the domestic champions of England and Australia in 1976 involving St Helens and Eastern Suburbs at the Sydney Cricket Ground. After Wigan had won the RFL Championship and John Player Special Trophy in the 1986/87 season, the club chairman Maurice Lindsay resurrected the concept by inviting Manly to play in a winner- takes- all game in Wigan.
Australia has dominated rugby league for as long as I can remember, so to have the opportunity to watch their champion club side go head-to-head with ours was beyond my wildest dreams. To make sure of a good vantage point, I went straight to the stadium as soon as school finished at 3.30. There was terracing in the stadium in those days, and I remember running down to the front and jumping up to sit on the wall, where I stayed, swinging my legs, until the kickoff at 7.45. What else would I be doing?
It was the only way I was guaranteed to see the action. The official capacity of the ground was around 35,000 but afterwards it was said that over 50,000 made it in.
Before the kick-off, fireworks lit up the sky over the old stadium, but it was the pyrotechnics on the pitch that I found utterly compelling. The Wigan team that night boasted eleven Great Britain internationals and one New Zealander, and we won 8–2 in a ferocious contest with an atmosphere that you would not believe. I knew then that I could never play for another rugby league club in England. No way. I just hoped they would have me.
I am as passionate now about coaching the Ireland rugby union side as I was playing for Wigan, but that passion
was forged in the town. Whatever I do outside Wigan, it is because of what the place means to me.
* * *
The town Under-11 side had fixtures almost every weekend against sixteen other towns across the north. The home games were at Robin Park, an athletics stadium with a rugby field in the middle of it.
The inter-town games led to selection for the Lancashire Under-11s to face Yorkshire. My birthday is in May, so I spent most of my age-grade career playing with boys who were older than me. I was always driven by a desire to keep up. I wanted to prove to other people that I could do what they expected of me. And to keep testing myself against the best.
Iain McCorquodale, the Lancashire coach, sensed that in me early on, and used it to fast-track my development. After a couple of training sessions, he named the squad to face Yorkshire. I hadn’t made the cut. It was my first setback, and I could not hide my disappointment as I trudged from the changing rooms back to Dad’s car.
Suddenly Iain was on my shoulder. ‘Andrew, what’s up, you look a little bit disappointed?’ he asked me. Back then it was always Andrew. It’s funny, I’ve been called Andy for years, but even now my close family and friends still call me Andrew. Colleen sometimes calls me Drew.
‘I know I could have done better,’ I replied. ‘OK then, come with me, let’s go back to the gym.’
When we got to the gym, Iain proceeded to throw down some mats on the floor and called in two county players who were a couple of years older than me. ‘OK , let’s see how you go now.’
It was a tackling drill, and I took out all my frustration at
being left out of the squad on those two lads. After ten minutes, Iain stopped the session. ‘That’s enough. Andrew, you are in the team to play against Yorkshire.’ Wow! I couldn’t believe it.
I was fortunate that there were so many people willing to help with my development at that time, and it felt like my life was changing quickly. I started to slim down as my junior career progressed through to the Under-13s. Haydn started to see me as a ball-playing type and I moved to second row and then loose forward, the equivalent of No. 8 in rugby union. It was the position I would play for the vast majority of my rugby league career, and it suited me to be the link between forwards and backs.
What I loved was the challenge of unlocking a game. Even now, I wouldn’t have a clue about my scoring record. If you spoke to Martin Offiah, the Wigan and Great Britain winger, he could tell you every try that he scored, no matter who it was against, or if it was in a cup final or at the start of a season. It means so much to him because that is what his job was, to score tries. He was a speedster like Jason Robinson. That was their thing.
It wasn’t mine. I loved goal-kicking, but it never bothered me how many points I scored. I wanted to be the player who unlocked the game when the contest was still on the line, and that didn’t always mean scoring a try.
One of the hardest things to do in rugby league is to keep running into defensive brick walls again and again, just to set the tone of a game. The first twenty minutes are always the most brutal. I wanted to be the player who made the break to turn a game or found a way to put a teammate in space. Could I be the player to unlock the game?
* * *
The competition in the representative sides was fierce. There were at least half a dozen players who were tipped to make it. You would hear stories of players who did not make the town or the Lancashire team and then gave up playing. Others stuck with it and worked hard even if they had been overlooked at first and developed later to enjoy successful careers. Kris Radlinski, a future teammate of mine in the senior Wigan squad, who is now the club’s chief executive, never made it as a regular for the town team as a boy, but became one of the best players to have ever played for the club.
They were the days before academies had been established and clubs were starting to spend considerable sums to secure young talent. One club had signed five junior players from one of the successful sides, but none of the players came through, so much more ‘due diligence’ was now being carried out. Scouts would watch players they were interested in for a number of games. There were constant rumours about who might have signed for whom. Often, I found myself in the centre of it all. At one game away at Leigh, who were our biggest rivals at the time, one of the parents came over and started shouting abuse at me. Thankfully, Dad was there, but it wasn’t pleasant to hear.
It was crazy, looking back, and I can understand why some people must worry about the impact of the pressure and expectation on such young shoulders. For many people rugby, like football, was an escape route. The financial rewards on offer were life-changing for working-class families who were struggling to make ends meet.
It was different for me. We weren’t from a privileged background, but I never felt under any pressure from my mum and dad. The pushing came from me. I couldn’t imagine
wanting to do anything else. As my commitment to rugby league intensified, it was matched by the support from my family. I was in a hurry, desperate to keep getting better. I was always thinking about the game. (I still am.) Every day had to count, and the next game could never come quickly enough.
I grew up in awe of my parents. Mum worked full-time managing children’s nurseries, and Dad always left for the bakery every morning hours before we had even stirred. Every school morning, my grandparents on my mum’s side of the family, George and Annie Heyes, were up at about 5 a.m. to catch a bus from Aspull, first to Wigan town centre and then on to us in Goose Green, so that my mum could get off to work. Every morning, it was they who woke us up. It’s what family means. I guess we took it for granted at the time, but not now. I used to love going up to their house at the weekend as well. There was always fizzy pop and a packet of crisps for us. Whenever my sister Cath or I got into trouble with Mum or Dad, they were always on our side too. When the twins arrived, Mum took time off work. It became incredibly hard for her, handling four unruly kids in the morning. Then, when she had to go back to her job, Grandma and Grandad took over.
I would have been grumpy enough in the morning and they were kind, good-hearted people. Being kids, we would try to take as many liberties as we could. It must have been bloody hard work for them, but they were a big part of our lives. Having two babies in the house was a big change for Cath and me, but an exciting one. It was a happy home. The twins grew up to love their rugby too; both made the Wigan academy, and both would later sign for Oldham in
the first division. Chris made the decision fairly early on that he did not want to pursue the game as a professional. It was a good decision for him. He joined the police and has moved up through the ranks. Phil was more stubborn and clung tightly to his dream of being a professional, playing late into his twenties. He now has a successful career as an electrician.
My involvement with Orrell St James encouraged Dad to take up coaching, and he started running the Under-9s side. He reckons he only got to see about fifty of my games during my entire time at the club. Like Haydn, he ran a shuttle, picking up and dropping off kids, and it led to my first encounter with my future wife. One of the players in my dad’s team was Colleen’s younger brother Kevin, who would, years later, sign for St Helens. When we dropped him off, my dad asked their dad, Keiron O’Loughlin, if we could go inside to see the shirt he had worn for Widnes in their Challenge Cup final victory over Wigan at Wembley.
My shyness gripped as I entered the house, and it seems that Colleen felt the same way, as she shot up the stairs upon my arrival. I didn’t think much of it, but she would remember the incident vividly. (She remembers everything. Her auntie used to live across the road from me and she reckons she used to see me acting feral, running around the streets.) I started to notice Colleen at matches, as she would sometimes come to watch Kevin play.
One day we were all at Central Park and I was watching some of my Orrell St James teammates play in a match against Colleen’s school in a final. She didn’t recognize me at first because by the age of thirteen I had shot up in height and lost the puppy fat. She asked one of her friends who I was, and it quickly became schoolkid gossip. She was asked
if she liked me and somehow it got back to me, and I was keen to see what she looked like.
I saw her again at a May Day event. She was looking after her little brother Sean, as her parents had taken her grandparents on a trip to Lourdes. When I got back home, I decided to ring her. I didn’t know what to say really, and Colleen said later I sounded really moody! It was not a great start to our relationship.
We agreed to go to the pictures the following weekend in town, but on the Saturday morning Colleen’s mum and dad asked if she could mind Sean again as they were going to buy a new car. Those were the days before mobile phones, and I had already left the house, so I knew nothing of this change of plan. I sat nervously at the cinema, waiting. And waiting. Back at Colleen’s house, her parents had returned late, and even though it was just a fifteen-minute walk into town, she begged her dad for a lift. She hadn’t told them she was meeting a boy as she was worried that her mum wouldn’t approve.
‘Why are you getting so worked up about meeting some friends?’ her mum asked.
When she arrived over an hour late, I was in a mood, but Colleen would later say that the fact that I had waited for her proved it was meant to be. She was right, of course. Our first date might not have got off to the best of starts, but we quickly became the best of friends. We never stopped talking. One day Colleen’s dad burst into their house after work and was steaming because he had been trying to ring home for over an hour, but we had been chatting on the phone. We were always in trouble for being on the phone too long and running up bills.
Colleen’s dad took a real interest in helping me develop as a player and became a massive influence on my career.
Perhaps he saw something in me. He had a makeshift gym in a shed out the back and players used to come to the house to do extra training. ‘That gym is my insurance policy,’ he would joke. ‘Time in the gym is money in the bank when it comes to looking after yourself.’
He took me under his wing. I was incredibly fortunate to have someone of his stature and experience in the game helping me out. Keiron had a brilliant attitude to conditioning. He had been influenced at Widnes by the late Vince Karalius, who was a coach far ahead of his time.
Keiron had been given an insight into what professional rugby would look like in the future, and now I was benefiting from his advice as a thirteen-year-old. It was like Christmas Day, every day.
I trained in the mornings before school and afterwards, and would run the two-mile track along the River Douglas up to Haigh Hall, a country house surrounded by woodland, where I would do hill sprints. Colleen’s family would have a big influence on what I ate, too. I didn’t have the healthiest diet at the time and preferred simple foods like beans on toast.
I can still remember the first time I went to Colleen’s house and her mum asked me if I wanted to stay for tea. I politely accepted but was a bit concerned at what was cooking on the Aga.
‘What’s that?’ I asked Colleen.
‘It’s chilli con carne, Andrew,’ she replied. I almost ran out of the house.
‘I can’t eat that!’ I had never even eaten rice or pasta before, let alone chilli con carne.
Her mum offered to make me sandwiches instead, but I tried the chilli and actually liked it! It was the first step towards improving my eating habits.
I played for Wigan every Saturday morning, and for my club on Sundays, while also playing rugby and football for my school during the week. The county games for Lancashire were predominantly against Yorkshire, with the home games played at Leigh, Wigan or Widnes, and away games at Wakefield, Hull or Leeds.
Haydn took Orrell St James on a tour of Australia along with some guest players from Leigh, and it was an eyeopening experience. We were away for six weeks and stayed in digs, only coming together for training. I loved the challenge of taking on the Aussies. We played a district side in Townsville on the Queensland coast. It was a ferocious game as they were a year ahead of us, but despite their physical edge and the heat and humidity, we won the match with a try in the final minute.
When I was fourteen, I was picked for the England Under16s schools side to play against France in Paris. When you played for England Schools, all the scouts would be there, from every club. It was what I had been working towards since I first broke into Haydn’s team.
It was the first time I can honestly say that I felt a sense of trepidation taking the field. Playing for the England Schools side had felt like a distant dream, and getting called up two years early left me wondering if I was ready for it. They matured early, the French, and some of their players had full-on beards, prompting suspicions that they were more like Under-18s. That was no use to us. I might have been scared but I drew confidence from the fact that in our pack we had some mature boys who were also big strong lads.
I played at centre on my debut and knew that I had a forward pack that would back me up. It made me feel bulletproof,
at least fleetingly. I was out of my comfort zone, way out of it, and I knew this was one of those moments that could make or break me.
We had a brilliant coach called Dennis McHugh, who was a hard taskmaster but knew how to get the best out of us.
‘We have got something for you,’ he said. ‘It is a drink with a secret ingredient that is going to make you play really well.’ I was intrigued. I took a sip but almost spat it out. The taste was putrid, but I drank it anyway, hoping in my innocence that it would work its magic. It turned out I had just drunk my first coffee. A double espresso, in fact. It may not have gone down well, but I was happy with my performance. From that moment on, before every game throughout my career, I would drink a double espresso.
* * *
People think of rugby league as a professional sport that broke away from rugby union, which remained amateur. But for most of its history rugby league was not what we would recognize today as a professional sport. Match fees were paid only to the top players at the top clubs to compensate for the work they missed. It did not become a full-time professional sport in England until the 1990s, when the Super League was established.
There was a distinction between ‘professional’ clubs, like Wigan, and ‘amateur’ clubs, like Orrell St James. The scouts who were coming to watch me were from the professional clubs. Officially you had to wait until your sixteenth birthday to sign for a club. But it was possible to make a ‘pre-contract’ deal at a younger age, and when I was fourteen, my parents decided that was the right thing to do. They felt that attaching me to a professional club would take the pressure off me and let me get on with playing.
If it had been left to me I would have signed for Wigan straight away, but Dad did a good job in talking to everyone. Salford made a strong bid for me. Iain McCorquodale, who in addition to his Lancashire role was also assistant coach at Salford, invited me down to the club.
Dad, who went on to become a scout for Wigan, St Helens, Leeds and Warrington, did a great job by making out that signing for Wigan wasn’t the be-all and end-all for me, even though it was. Back in the late eighties, some of the figures that were being paid to the top players were astronomical, so clubs were looking to sign juniors, as a cheaper investment in the future.
‘Dad, when are you going to let me sign?’ I asked him. ‘When they pay you what you are worth,’ he replied. He held his nerve, and we were extremely happy with what we got in the end. We signed a contract on 19 January 1990. I received a lump-sum payment of £25,000, which was a massive amount of money for a fourteen-year-old kid from Wigan. My parents wisely put it straight into an investment for me, having taken advice from a financial advisor. In the end, four of us from the Orrell St James side signed precontract agreements.
When I turned sixteen, I was invited into the Wigan boardroom to sign the proper contract. The boardroom was a sacred place in those days. The board ran the club back then, not the head coach. I wore a Benetton T-shirt, and a photo of me and my Orrell St James teammate Paul Stevens was published in the Lancashire Evening Post.
The report said, ‘Farrell is a 6ft 2ins 14 stone second row or loose forward and he has scored 168 tries in 172 appearances for St James and he has been described as the most explosive young talent since Shaun Edwards. His physique
and fitness are astonishing for a 16-year-old – what a prospect alongside or behind Denis Betts and Andy Platt in the pack! He has won every junior representative honour available and is the current captain of Wigan Under-16s town team.’
Dad made sure I couldn’t touch the money for a number of years, but I managed to buy Colleen some roses to celebrate. My biggest fear was always of not meeting people’s expectations of me. The word had already been out for a while that I had been offered a big signing-on fee by Wigan. But I had seen other outstanding young players fall by the wayside because of a lack of commitment or dedication. I knew I had everything to prove. I couldn’t wait to get started.
3. The Debut
Ellery Hanley was my childhood idol. He had signed for Wigan from Bradford Northern for a record transfer fee of £150,000 in 1985 and finished his career as a club legend. He captained Great Britain and won everything he could with Wigan, including four Challenge Cup winner’s medals and a World Club Challenge winner’s medal. I kept all sorts of videos of him scoring tries or of the work that he did during games.
Ellery would have been twenty-nine when I turned up for my first training session with Wigan as a fourteen-year-old. All I could do was pinch myself. I quickly discovered that he set the standards. He didn’t drink or smoke and was incredibly disciplined.
It is one of my regrets that I never got to play in the same team as Ellery, as he left the club to sign for Leeds not long after I joined. But training with him was a huge honour for me and it left a lasting mark. I got to see exactly how someone becomes the best player in the world. It is not just because of talent; it’s also about preparation, commitment and dedication. I saw several talented players in my peer group fall by the wayside, some because they thought they had already made it, others because they didn’t want it enough. Training with Ellery was a window to the world of excellence, even if only for a few months.
Maurice Lindsay, the chairman, told me when I signed for the club that Ellery trained on Christmas Day to gain an
edge on his rivals. No one else would be training then, Ellery reckoned. That was good enough for me. From then on, I would train every Christmas Day too. When I speak to players about training now as a coach, I often ask them what they are doing extra that no one else is doing. The answer tells me all I need to know about them. It is what the best players have always done.
Before pre-season training started, players got a four- or five-week break. But I would have no break. I was always desperate to put extra work in, not to try to outdo anyone but just to show my teammates that I was committed. The competition was fierce.
It was no hardship because I loved rugby so much. It never felt like work to me as a player. It still doesn’t now that I am coaching. I loved training two or three times a day. People think it is a cliché, but I know it is true, because I played with players who hated it. They only played rugby because they were good at it. Some probably resented the amount of time and work it took to play at the top level.
I was fortunate in that, for me, it was a dream to get up and train. Even now I like to try to squeeze in half an hour of gym work most days because I like how it makes me feel. I never saw hard physical work, or working on the technical details of the game, as a burden. I couldn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat with individual brilliance the way someone like Jason Robinson could. I had to immerse myself in every part of the game and understand the workings of it, and make sure I was fit enough and strong enough to deliver what was expected of me.
My relentless approach would eventually catch up with me: my rugby union career finished at thirty-three not because of my age but because of what I had put my body through.
It was then that I regretted not taking more time off to give my body a chance to recover. But I didn’t because I loved it at the time.
Somewhere in there was a fear of failure, too. Big time. I felt it first when I played for Wigan Under-11s. You might think it was only junior rugby, so not a big deal, but to me it was the only thing that mattered, and I carried a fear that everything could be taken away from me. What would I do if I was dropped? I tried to protect myself psychologically by assuming the worst: telling myself that I would be dropped, or, when I became captain, that I was going to lose it to someone else at the start of the following season. Every year I said as much to Colleen. My glass was always half empty. She would tell me I was being stupid, but it was my way of making sure that I stayed hungry. Even after Ellery left, I was desperate to earn his respect. Later, when I played against him, I decided that if I got the ball, I would deliberately veer off in attack to make sure that I could run at him just so that he could tackle me. I thought I might start to earn respect from both him and my team. Respect from your peers was the only currency that mattered. It was a principle that would stay with me throughout my career.
When I first played against Jonathan Davies when he was at Warrington, I ran at him all afternoon. Towards the end of the game he turned to me and shouted, ‘Hey kid, would you fuck off and hit somebody else?’ I loved the comment because I had only run at him because he was a magical player, a man I had huge respect for. And I had caught his attention.
As there were no academies in those days, anyone who was on the books – around forty or fifty of us – trained with the first team. It was sink or swim.
The most obvious thing for a child entering this hardman’s world was the physicality. There is a major step-up in intensity from junior to adult football, too, but rugby is on a different level. At fourteen, I may have been a big lad for my age at six foot two and over fourteen stone, but I am not ashamed to say that at times I found those early sessions scary. The intensity was like nothing I had ever even imagined. I can only guess how my parents felt.
The likes of Andy Gregory, a born-and-bred Wiganer who had done it all in the game, would call anyone out who was even a few inches out of position. It was tough love, all right, but I didn’t mind getting stuck in when things boiled over at times.
What I soon learned was that the quickest way to earn the respect I craved was to bring maximum physicality to the basics of the game. It has been known for a player to make sixty tackles in a rugby league game. It sounds like a remarkable feat, given that the record total in rugby union Test matches is thirty-eight. But I would ask: why are the opposition allowing you to make sixty tackles? Is it because they’re not too bothered by them?
I would prefer to have a solid twenty-five tackles, all of them hard: that would probably save you making another thirty-odd because of the impact you had made. That is the mentality I learned from those very early sessions at Wigan. Make everything count. Do the unseen work that only your peers will appreciate. Make a line-break when the game is in the balance; don’t worry about scoring tries once the game is won.
John Monie, our head coach, used to say that there were
twenty ways to tackle someone, so just make it happen. Bring them down. Any way you could, it didn’t matter how. Get it done. I loved the challenge of trying to get it done.
* * *
By the time I started training with Wigan, I had switched from prop to loose forward. In rugby league, the loose forward wears the No. 13 shirt, but the closest equivalent in rugby union is No. 8. Some sides choose to effectively play a grafting forward, but more often it is an additional playmaker who can also perform forward duties. It is the position that best suited my skillset and athletic capabilities.
It takes a mix of talents to put together a rugby league team. You need players who can carry the ball hard to the defensive line, ball players at the line, players who score tries and players who set up tries. You need some players with a high work rate and others who have the ability to beat people two or three times a game and finish tries. I loved loose forward because it required a little bit of everything.
I was not quick or explosive enough to play in the backs, but as a forward I had a bit of subtlety about how I played rather than just crashing the ball up all the time. Later in my career I played some games at stand-off, even for Great Britain, not because of my flair but because I knew how to organize and navigate a game plan. To a rugby union fan, it might be strange to imagine a No. 8 switching to fly-half, but it is not that big a leap because of the number of touches rugby league players get in a game and in training.
As a fourteen-year-old my focus was straightforward: how to survive the Tuesday and Thursday night training sessions at Wigan, when the first team and the A team would all train together, along with a handful of fifteen- and