by Sixty minutes until kick -off in the third test and he is busy at Harpenden RFC. Derek Wallace, the director of the clubhouse, has little time to make a handshake. He is in the cooking kitchen of white pudding slices which he brought from the county mayo in particular.
Wallace is a buffer hand at the grill, and the complete English of Harpenden is perhaps the only one in the country which comes with a side of the dauphoise potatoes. He doesn’t know how many fans they will have. It was much over a hundred for the first test, and twice as much for the second. He fears that it is only what they took care of the third. Anyway, the boy behind the bar is packed in stores for more beans cooked in the oven.
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Outside, young children all play on the big artificial ground, which is the pride and joy of the club. “Come here most of the mornings in winter,” said Wallace, “and Owen Farrell is there with his dog, practicing his goal to kick.”
No one pays him mind. Farrell lives nearby and played in age notes at Harpenden during his adolescence. The first thing you see when you cross the door is an overview of him raising the Tom Richards Cup after the third Lions test against Australia in 2013, and one of the shirts he wore in this series is on the wall.
Harpenden is a suburban city, 35 minutes from London by train. These are all old trees, cut hedges and small brick cottages with bancal wooden beams. Almost everyone is an outside owner. In the midst of all the coming and future, the foundations for the last decade of English rugby have been established here.
Farrell was the first lion of the club and Maro Itoje, a few years to a few years, was their second. Last week, the Lions’ match captains in the middle of the week were both men from Harpenden RFC. “Not bad for a small club,” said Stu Mitchell, a Scottish who trained here. Farrell and Itoje were both students from St George’s, the local boarding school, as well as some other club internationals, George Ford and Jack Singleton.
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For decades, Harpenden was a small club, better known for having organized the annual national Rugby Sevens competition. They had never had an international player, although VIV Jenkins, who played for Wales, and turned with the Lions in 1938, was the club president for a certain time after living in the city during his second life as a sports journalist.
Things started to change in the professional era when many players and Saracens staff started to move into the region. Vunipolas are still nearby and often go to use the soil with their children, and Charlie Hodgson and Nick Lloyd are both in coach staff.
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The team of under 16 Ford and Farrell played in the local legend. “They destroyed everyone,” said Robert Jones, another of the former club coaches. Not that Farrell and Ford, whose fathers both worked for the Saracens at the time, required a lot of help.
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Itoje was different. He had never really played when he presented himself for the first time. Rugby is compulsory in St George’s, but basketball was its sport. “The truth is that he was hopeless at the beginning because he could not pass the head not being able to pass the ball forward.” But Mitchell saw him hit a ruck and quickly realized that he had to persuade him to join the club.
“I was myself a blind flank,” he said, “and my favorite player was Richard Hill. He used to reach a bucket of snakes and find the ball. I saw Maro doing the same thing in a school game and I thought: “Well, there is only one other player I have ever seen doing this before”. “
Itoje was tall, they first made him get off the bus if he saw the opposition looked, but he was shy with, gently spoken and impeccably polished. He presented himself at the family barbecues with additional chicken. When Mitchell told him that he didn’t need to bring his own food, Itoje explained that it was after eating.
The test match in Sydney drifts. Itoje left with a head injury and the lions are missing his leadership. Farrell is on the midfielder, it’s a tight and angry match in terrible weather. You might think that it would be for him.
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“People still ask me if I have sent Owen,” explains Paul Nolan, who has been arbitrating to the club since the 80s and remembers how the Farrell family used to look at the sidelines. “And the answer is no, because I was too afraid of his mother.”
Nolan cannot remain to swear in the field. “People say,” Why would an Irishman are worried about a bad language? “Well, it’s a Sunday morning and it’s my church. On the screen, Farrell cursed a blue sequence in one of the Australians. Nolan Glousse.” I was looking at him not long ago, and his father turned to me and said to me: “He didn’t change, right?”
The artificial field was a RFU reward for the work that the club has made to pass them, which annoyed their endless local rivals. Long before the end of the test, the children are back on it, more interested in winning their five sides than watching the lions lose. I am told that they have hundreds here on Sunday in season, all dreaming of wearing this famous red jersey.
