The Iron Curtain: My Rugby Journey from League to Union

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Joe had already spoken to Sculthorpe and he wasn't interested," said Larder, "but Farrell surprised us, and Wigan surprised us, by saying it might be on." Wegrzyk was appointed by the RFU in 1992 and has run up a huge tally of matches as England’s top masseur. He is a veteran of Lions tours and this will be his third trip with the team. You did two and a half seasons, scoring in your last-ever game, at home to Featherstone in the 2004 play-offs.

I had always asked my players to look in the mirror and to analyse their own performances before coming into the review session, so I also looked at my own coaching performance. Having played professionally for Glasgow, Gavin moved into Technical Analysis upon retirement and has been working as the Video Analyst for Glasgow and the Scottish RFU since 2002. Alongside Tony, his experience will be vital to ensure that all aspects of a technical nature will be covered throughout the tour. He played rugby union as a centre for Broughton Park, playing regularly in the first team by the age of 16. He later played for Manchester and Sale, and became known as a particularly good sevens player. I didn’t feel John knew how to get the best out of me, and it showed in my performances. Sheffield were offered Simon Baldwin and Martin Pearson for me and Beans. Halifax had just come third so it was a great opportunity. I had a good year, scoring tries all over the place, but they had financial problems. Players were going on strike, and it ended up being a nightmare. I was on about 35 grand, and they wanted me to take a ten grand cut. I couldn’t afford that and went to Salford in 2000. Larder worked with Worcester Warriors as a defensive coach on a part-time basis in 2006-2007 [8] and returned to the club in 2011, [9] before leaving in May 2013.They are an exciting club with tremendous modern facilities and excellent potential. Last year under the guidance of Head Coach Richard Hill they developed a winning habit and secured promotion.” Martin Murphy, Mike Elliott and Phil Larder, for instance, amassed 1,236 games between them, each wearing Roughyeds colours for longer than 12 years and, between them, scoring 316 tries. Clive gave us all objectives," said Larder this week. "Ours included bringing a couple of rugby league players in. Joe went his way, I went mine, watching matches, looking at a lot of youngsters, but I'm not brilliant at looking at a 19- or 20-year-old and saying that in three years' time he's going to be the best in the world in another sport." When I walked into their review of the match against Australia, I looked at Martin Johnson. At 6ft 7in, he was much taller than anyone I’d coached before. Darren Garforth was 6ft wide and stubby. I’d never coached anyone like that before, either. Larder viewed the 2005 squad differently. "I said it was a group we had to inspire and get far, far more effort from them than we were getting at the moment," he said, and he told Robinson so. "I phoned my wife after that meeting saying I was on the point of resigning and I felt from that moment Andy Robinson had taken us down the wrong avenue. I had a chat with him and he asked me to stay on but I stayed really only out of loyalty. It might have worked with the previous players but not the ones we had."

Will Greenwood was the perfect type of player in this position, very helpful to Jonny Wilkinson’s decision-making but also with sublime handling skills.

The evidence of the (2015) World Cup is that the northern hemisphere teams, especially England, tended to play the old-fashioned way: the forwards were there to win the set-piece,” he says. That all changed when South Africa employed Jones on a consultancy basis in the run-up to the 2007 World Cup. Many credit the Wigan and Great Britain legend as an influence. “Guys like Shaun were trailblazers, and with them doing well it’s inspired a whole new generation to have a go,” Radford says.

Larder, part of Sir Clive Woodward's support staff when England lifted the Rugby World Cup in 2003, teams up with the Warriors for the second time having worked at Sixways during the 2006-07 season. Larder later coached Widnes from 1992 to 1993, Keighley from 1994 to 1996 and Sheffield Eagles in 1997. [5] He was assistant coach to Mal Reilly on the 1988 Great Britain Lions tour, when the Lions won the third test in Sydney, their first test win over Australia since the second test of the 1978 Kangaroo Tour, and remained Great Britain's assistant coach until the end of 1994. Eighteen years separate the appointments of Phil Larder and Paul Gustard as England defence coach but a strand exists between the two, because Gustard was a Leicester player during their glory years of 1999-2002 when Larder oversaw the meanest defence in the land.Right-centre Larder played in “only” 328 games, but how’s this for a scoring record — 111 tries, 475 goals,1,283 points. Larder began his playing career at centre for Manchester club side Broughton Park before signing for Sale. He then decided to transfer cross-code to rugby league, where he played for Oldham and later Whitehaven. The 42-year-old insisted: “I don’t think a comparison with Shaun Edwards is too fair on Shaun – I think he’s far ahead of where I’m at. He’s probably been doing it twenty years now along with someone like Andy Farrell, who has been doing it for a long, long time now. Even Brett Hodgson, after two fairly disastrous seasons in charge of Hull FC, was recently recruited by Eddie Jones as England’s new defence coach. Yet Sinfield, when asked about his own international ambitions, said: “I try and take it day by day by thinking about where I am now and how I can get better.