This article, in which European Rugby League Chairman Dean Andrew shares an insight into his life in Rugby League, originally appeared in FORTY20 MAGAZINE Issue 159 – MY LIFE IN LEAGUE - and is reproduced with kind permission.
 

I had some grief in my time as RFL president and afterwards, when chairing some panels for the governing body, about my allegiance to Hull FC. 

Initially, when Leigh got their accelerated promotion into Super League because of Toronto’s demise, I led the group that decided on filling the gap left by them, deciding on Newcastle.

I did a lot of deep diving into the teams that were in League 1 at the time and aspired to take the step up. I got to see the game warts and all – and just how hard people work to keep their clubs alive. 

Then I was asked if I would chair the panel awarding elite academy licenses, with Dave Rotherham, Alison O’Brien, Tony Sutton of the RFL and Duncan Truswell head of talent identification at Sport England.

In the event, we didn’t award Elite licenses to Hull KR and Castleford straight away. It’s fair to say, that they were livid with the decision. 

They had the ingredients to be good but needed a mechanism to pull it all together beyond the men’s game day thirteen.

Their initial barbed response was because the Hull KR hierarchy thought the decision had been taken because Tony and I had protected Hull FC, but that is not in the slightest bit true. Especially as Duncan fed to us that the process had been the best and fairest of any sport he had witnessed. 

Subsequently, Rovers embraced the idea and the principles for sustainability behind it, put a lot of the necessary in place and look at them now!

It is true that I was a Threepenny Stander and I support the black and white’s when playing Rovers because that’s the side of the city I grew up in. 

I left home to join the Air Force when I was 17, and soon realized that outside the Kingston goldfish bowl, no one gives two hoots about the intense rivalry. 

The majority of people don’t know the difference between FC and the Robins, we’re all just Codheads! But I love my home town and I always support the city’s teams against anyone else, and that includes Rovers. 

My mum is from Hessle Road, dad Drypool in East Hull. Dad changed allegiance from Rovers so he could get on with my mum’s brothers. 

I grew up around mum’s Graves’ family – centered on Hessle Road, the fishing industry and Boulevard. But am very close to the Andrews in East Hull who are red and white through and through. I still get ribbed by my cousins when we meet up.

Hessle is just in the East Riding and the schools there only played rugby union, a game I can’t get my head around, never have.

So I played schoolboy soccer and was a runner, first and foremost, doing cross-country in the winter and athletics at the Costello Stadium which was down the road, where I trained with Anthony Sullivan. I knew Clive and Ros really well. 

I played league on the wing for Sydney Smith’s youth club from ages of 12-16 which was effectively West Hull’s junior side and Wests are my still Conference team. I watch them whenever I can.

But I was always going to join the RAF because my dad and uncles had been in it. But you couldn’t play rugby league when you were a cadet – which I tried to change – but came up against the establishment, and getting it recognized was extremely difficult. 

When I joined the Air Force I gave up any playing aspirations, and I was never particularly good, anyway, to train as aircrew for three years, qualified on Tornadoes came across to Germany and flew them for the best part of 25 years. 

I was based at RAF Brüggen and was cycling past on my way back to the squadron from the Tornado Simulator and recognized a 13 a-side game on one of the rugby pitches. 

I leant my push bike against one of the posts on the adjoining pitch which is when I met Damian Clayton. The sport was not officially allowed in the Services, so it was being played with local permission from the station commander.

Damian had just substituted himself and we talked about our respective love of league and he told me he needed an officer to head the organization because without one RL was fighting a losing battle against union.

I agreed to do it because everything surrounding the military has to have an OIC to be responsible for logistics, to write the reports, carry the can – and that’s how it all started. 

Damian and I pushed rugby league as hard as we could to get it formally acknowledged. We got my Squadron Boss Stu Peach involved, now Lord Peach, who is still interested in the game.

That RL is now the team sport of choice across UK Defence is down to the tenacity of Damian and his Army counterpart, another RL legend, Martin Coyd. 

It’s fair to say that RAF Brüggen became spiritual home of RAF RL because people were hearing you could play league there.

Brüggen and its sister RAF base at Laarbruch were playing Army sides all over Northern Germany in Detmold, Sennelager, Bielefeld and even Bergen Höhne.

When guys got posted back to England they started teams there and that’s how the growth of the Armed Forces games spiralled.

Even then I was one of just a few officers involved so it wasn’t really a surprise when I got a call, just as I was about to be promoted to squadron leader, from the two-star general running RAF Sport who asked me to become chairman of RAF RL because the previous incumbent, Wing Commander Nick Mawson had collapsed and died.

The chairs of all the other RAF sports had way more rank – so it was all a bit daunting.

I was on a three-year exchange tour with the German Air Force at the time and I flew a German Tornado into RAF Cranwell in 1999 for a night stop so I could watch the Air Force v Navy Game. 

I realised very early that if we wanted to persuade the most senior and influential to endorse the sport, it had to be done right. 

There was a level of expectation about how they needed to be hosted and what the event looked like. 

I needed to professionalise our approach and The Air Force, Navy and particularly the Army, led by current armed forces RL CEO, Colonel Dave Groce, have bought in. 

The product on the field has always been outstanding, and unlike other Armed Forces sports it was never clear – often until the final minutes of the final game who would be inter-service champions from one season to the next. 

It embodied all the qualities they were looking for and it became the sport of choice of senior officers who wanted to be associated with the excitement. 

We made sure that “if we got our shit in a sock” as Damian used to say, we’d invite the top brass across all three services, they would get business done on the side line and the events got really popular. 

It taught me that, no matter how good the product, you have to have an idea of how to sell it properly. Unfortunately, the broader sport still doesn’t do that. 

For me, it was always a completely different attitude, that the hosting had to be as good as it could be and the product would look after itself – that’s why we put a Harrier jet over the top just as we were about to kick off at RAF Cranwell once (flown by Lee Gordon who quickly changed and played in the second row). 

I never accepted that it was just the 80 minutes that matters, unfortunately, I think I am still in the minority and the old school attitude is still out there. It continues to hold us back in so many cases. 

I went to Las Vegas this year to lobby Pete V’landys and Andrew Abdo. The Aussies get it. Kris Radlinski, who I met during the academy process and I think is best in class across the RFL clubs as CEO, gets it as well. 

We gradually introduced women’s matches, flew Paul Sculthorpe in one of my Tornadoes to boost the profile of the international game, had the Navy host the Challenge Cup draw on board HMS Victory. We tried to leverage what we could for rugby league.

Ralph Rimmer was a huge supporter of Service RL. I often chatted to me at games and he asked if I could give the England team chat about leadership under pressure.

Not long after, I had a moment of epiphany. The armed forces representative at the RFL at the time was Andy Harland, a great guy, and I happened to meet him one day at Castleford Lock Lane where he was helping Cas schools host some kids from France.

I pitched up and all the fields were being used with hundreds of kids running around and it blew me away.

I went into the clubhouse and met a mum who was making the food, she told me it was all healthy stuff, not pie and chips.

She added that if they could get kids into the sport early enough then they wouldn’t become obese and a later burden on the health service.

The professional game wasn’t the be-all and end-all, it’s there for kids to aspire to and dream to be – and that’s why players should remember that they’re role models.

I drove away realizing what sport for all truly meant, and that health and fitness and investment in the next generation was what it was all about.

That’s driven me on since and immediately after that, Ralph rang and told me he was trying to shake things up and would I be the RFL president, the first who wasn’t next in line by rotation of the clubs.

I’d sat on the Rugby League Council as the Forces rep and met all sorts of different characters who weren’t interested in the sport for the same reasons I am, which is giving people opportunities, rather than where the next tranche of money was coming to them from.

For me, there has always been a fine line between tradition and dogma which can hold us back. I’m from dockers stock in Hull so I know all about what that means and stands for, but we also have to help ourselves.

I took the president’s role at the end of 2015, my dad had just passed away and I was coming back from Germany to run the UK intelligence air network at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, in charge of about 3,000 around the world.

Returning to the UK meant I could accept the chains of office and I gave it a shot, three weekends a month watching rugby league and going back home to Germany and Andrea and the kids on the fourth, for which she deserves an enormous amount of credit.

Thursday and Friday night I went to Super League games, Saturday community and Sunday the Championship or League 1 in my regalia, and I got to take mum with me to them all.

Rugby League was fantastic to me at that time and to top it all, Hull won at Wembley which was all my dad used to dream about and I got to go on the pitch to shake the hands of the team. 

Two days before, I’d been asked to give them a pep talk! It still makes the hairs on the back of neck tingle. Just a shame my dad didn’t live to see it.

At the end of the first year of the presidency, Ian Lenegan asked the RL Council why I had to give it up as I’d been so high profile around all the grounds and representing the sport in my uniform, he proposed I stayed on, everyone agreed, and Hull retained the cup!

Having people in the role from outside the clubs then became the norm, with Adam Hills set to be the latest incumbent.

I stood back after that, being asked to run NATO air in Afghanistan in all its aspects and, after a year, coming towards the end, an artery snapped in the back of my neck which controls vision, I’m living off three with some impairment to my sight.

I’ve tried to use any influence I’ve ever had for the good of the game, never money, hence why I came back to try and make a difference to European Rugby League, which I now chair. I felt like I owed something to the sport, and this was a role where I could give back.

 It’s tough because, unlike UEFA, there isn’t cash to give to the nations, and the responsibility covers those in the Americas and Africa too. 

We need to peel everything back and make it television ready in terms of hosting and organization, I’m trying to raise the level across the board and not just the product on the pitch.

Now I’m on the IRL board too and we are looking to move the international game forward. I believe the Aussies will help us, I know them and their culture really well, I worked with them in Afghanistan where they were my bodyguard team.

They work hard at being good and that’s why Vegas will be a success and springboard for the international game.

They know having strong northern hemisphere nations is in their interests, they are trying to make the game relevant globally, and we need to professionalize what we’ve got.

Success will follow after we have those foundations in place, and I’m determined to see it done.

I still live in Germany, near Mönchengladbach, right on the Dutch border in a strip of woods that is about sixty miles long, out of which the Royal Air Force built three airbases in the 1950s. 

I love riding my bike around there, I’m out every day thinking and planning on how to keep making a difference and drive standards forward.

Dean Andrew