Wales and Wasps coach Shaun Edwards offers some colourful observations in an interview with The Independent
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Wales and Wasps coach Shaun Edwards is the one facing the questions in The Independent.
"This appetite for learning was not quite so prodigious at St John Fisher high school, Wigan, not that it mattered much in a boy who captained English schools in both codes of rugby, and broke all schoolboy records by signing for Wigan on his 17th birthday for £35,000. "History was the only subject I took much notice of at school," he recalls, "and funnily enough it's my son's best subject too."
"His son James, by the M People singer Heather Small, is on a rugby scholarship at Harrow. I confess to being slightly startled when he tells me this; the tough-as-nails Wiganer, so in touch with his working-class roots that during the 1984 miners' strike he taped over the British Coal logo on his shirt, with a son at the school of Lord Byron and, for that matter, Margaret Thatcher's son Mark. Yet the incongruity of it gives Edwards nothing but pleasure. "My father and mother came down to watch James play, and as my father said, the facilities there are like heaven for a young man, heaven on earth."
"Indeed, and yet his own stellar playing career was forged in the narrow terraced streets of Wigan. Does he worry that, however heavenly the facilities at Harrow, James might be missing something less tangible but more valuable in his sporting education? "Well, I had it tougher in some ways but it's a daunting thing leaving home at 13, you know. In fact, I remember Fraser Waters telling me he left home at eight. So they have it tougher in different ways. When I moved out of my mum's house, I moved about 60 yards down the street." How old was he? "Twenty-two," he says, with a bellow of laughter."
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