Sixty minutes until kick-off in the third Test and it’s getting busy at Harpenden RFC. Derek Wallace, the clubhouse manager, hardly has time for a handshake. He’s in the kitchen cooking slices of white pudding he’s brought over from County Mayo especially.
Wallace is a dab hand at the grill, and Harpenden’s full English is maybe the only one in the country that comes with a side of dauphinoise potatoes. He’s not sure how many fans they’ll have in. It was well over a hundred for the first Test, and twice as many for the second. He’s worried it’ll be more than they’ve catered for the third. Anyhow, the lad behind the bar is packed off to the shops for more baked beans.
Outside, the younger kids are all out playing on the big artificial pitch, which is the club’s pride and joy. “Come down here most mornings in winter,” Wallace says, “and Owen Farrell’s out there with his dog, practising his goal kicking.”
No one pays him any mind. Farrell lives nearby and played through the age grades at Harpenden during his teenage years. The first thing you see when you walk in the door is a big picture of him lifting the Tom Richards Cup after the Lions’ third Test against Australia in 2013, and one of the shirts he wore in that series is up on the wall.
Harpenden is a commuter town, 35 minutes from London by train. It’s all ancient trees, trimmed hedgerows and little brick cottages with wonky wooden beams. Almost everyone’s an out-of-towner. In the middle of all the coming and going, the foundations of the last decade of English rugby were laid down here.
Farrell was the club’s first Lion and Maro Itoje, just a few years below him, was their second. Last week, the Lions’ midweek and Test match captains were both Harpenden RFC men. “Not bad for a wee club,” says Stu Mitchell, a Scot who used to coach here. Farrell and Itoje were both students at St George’s, the local state boarding school, along with a couple of the club’s other internationals, George Ford and Jack Singleton.
For decades Harpenden was a small club, best known for hosting the annual national pub rugby sevens competition. They had never had an international player, although Viv Jenkins, who played for Wales, and toured with the Lions in 1938, was the club’s president for a time after he settled in the town during his second life as a sports journalist.
Things started to change in the professional era when a lot of Saracens players and staff started to move into the area. The Vunipolas are still nearby and often come down to use the ground with their children, and Charlie Hodgson and Nick Lloyd are both on the coaching staff.
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The under-16s team Ford and Farrell played in has gone down in local legend. “They annihilated everyone,” says Robert Jones, another of the club’s old coaches. Not that Farrell and Ford, whose fathers were both working for Saracens at the time, needed much help.
Itoje was different. He had never really played much when he first turned up. Rugby is compulsory at St George’s, but basketball was his sport. “Truth is he was hopeless at first because he couldn’t get his head around not being able to pass the ball forwards.” But Mitchell saw him hit one ruck and quickly realised he needed to persuade him to join the club.
“I was a blindside flanker myself,” he says, “and my favourite player was Richard Hill. He used to reach into a bucket of snakes and come up with the ball. I saw Maro do that same thing in a school game and I thought: ‘Well, there’s only one other player I’ve ever seen do that before’.”
Itoje was big, they used to make him get off the bus first if he saw the opposition were watching, but he was shy with it, softly spoken and impeccably polite. He used to turn up to the family BBQs with extra chicken. When Mitchell told him he didn’t need to bring his own food, Itoje explained it was for after he had eaten.
The Test match in Sydney is drifting. Itoje has gone off with a head injury and the Lions are missing his leadership. Farrell’s on in the midfield, it’s a tight and hot-tempered match in terrible weather. You’d think it would be made for him.
“People always ask me if I ever sent Owen off,” says Paul Nolan, who has been refereeing at the club since the 80s and remembers how the Farrell family used to watch on the sidelines. “And the answer’s no, because I was too scared of his mum.”
Nolan can’t abide swearing on the pitch. “People say: ‘Why would an Irishman worry about bad language?’ Well, it’s a Sunday morning and this is my church.” Up on the screen, Farrell is cursing a blue streak at one of the Aussies. Nolan chuckles. “I was down at Saracens watching him not long ago, and his dad turned to me and said: ‘He’s not changed, has he?’”
The artificial pitch was a reward from the RFU for the work the club did in bringing them through, which annoyed their local rivals no end. Long before the end of the Test, the kids are back out on it, more interested in winning their five-a-side than watching the Lions lose. I’m told they have hundreds of them down here on Sundays in season, all dreaming of wearing that famous red jersey.
