Shaun Edwards has always been the hottest of rugby properties. The Wigan-born defence coach of France started life in the other code, sparking a battle for his services as a teenager between the then powerhouse Widnes and his home-town club.
A letter from his father asking him which he’d rather achieve, playing a Challenge Cup final at Wembley in front of 15,000 Widnesians or 35,000 Wiganers making up his mind.
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“I got £10,000 up front which was a lot of money in those days, especially as I was only 17,” he explains.
“The press said I got £35,000 up front, but they forgot to mention I had to play in the first team for five years, go on a Great Britain tour and get in the team to get the full money. The other players around the league were saying, ‘who’s this kid who got £35,000 up front?’ – they weren’t too pleased about it were they?”
It manifested itself in a way that could only happen in league, especially 1980s league.
“After 10 games playing at stand-off, I’d dislocated my shoulder, had three teeth knocked out, broke my nose and had about 25 stitches in various head wounds,” he says. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d made the right bloody career choice, here!”
Despite the rocky start, in his first season, he appeared in a losing Challenge Cup final, before rectifying the situation a year later, still only an 18-year-old. Wigan won 28-24 against Hull FC, remarkably their first win since 1965.
And the silverware kept coming. Nine Challenge Cups, eight Championships, three World Club Challenges and five County Cups. He scored 274 tries in 467 games for Wigan.
“I think it was when I was rated No.1 in the world in my position,” he says. “I only did it once, I got rated No.2 as a stand-off in 1989 I think it was, and then in 1994 we beat Brisbane away and I was rated No.1 as a scrum-half. It’s something I look back on with a lot of pride.”
He also, he adds explaining this passion for defence, held the record number of tackles for a scrum-half. Something perhaps of even more pride than anything else.
Today, he’s arguably the most sought-after defence coach in world rugby. When his time at Wales came to an end after four Six Nations titles, including three Grand Slams, it was his home-town club of Wigan that called first – and seemed to be his next step – before the offer of a four-and-a-half year deal with France ensured he stayed with our code.
“I’ve got two little girls to look after and a son at university, I’ve got responsibilities,” he said at the time.
But that coaching journey – that also saw him help English club side Wasps to double European titles – began in league, as the youngest level-two qualified coach in the sport, aged 16.
“I always wanted to be a coach,” he says. “I’d always be writing things down, everything from moves to sayings that coaches said.”
And, even back then, he looked beyond his sport. “I’d always be reading about great boxers,” he continues, “I like boxing, I like MMA too – not so much then – but Wigan’s a big wrestling town. A lot of good wrestlers come from there, my best mate Paul Stridgeon [British & Irish Lions fitness coach], he’s a wrestler and he’s from Wigan.”
Judo was another sport he’s followed. “You can get good judo throws that help small people flip people over and stuff like that. Alan Langer who was a scrum-half at Brisbane Broncos was brilliant at flicking people over because he’d done some judo.”
Arguably the most influential of all though, was much closer to home, mum Phyllis.
“I remember my mum saying to me – and she’s a bright person is my mum – that I needed to be studying rugby union as well as rugby league, because it’s going to become very big. She was very smart like that.”
In his first year with France, they won eight from 10 games, and in this year’s Six Nations, they finished second, losing out on the last day after falling to an 85th-minute defeat to Scotland. That they’d already inflicted the only defeat on champions Wales [32-30] shows how far they’ve come with Edwards on board.
Ask most players who’ve played under him, either for Wasps and Wales and similar themes emerge, he takes responsibility.
“He’s had an immediate impact with France, wonderful coach, wonderful bloke, probably the most influential coach in my career,” former Wales centre Jamie Roberts told RugbyPass.
“You really feel like he’s on the pitch with you, he’s that sort of coach. He always used to tell us, ‘lads, if you miss a tackle I miss a tackle’. If we conceded a try off set piece, he would blame himself, because he hadn’t prepped us well enough.”
Alex King, the former England fly-half who played for him at Wasps, praised Edwards’ “work ethic and desire to make us the best defensive team in Europe”, while fellow Wasp and former Melbourne Rebel, Danny Cipriani, cites the impact of Edwards and the support he gave to him and still does on a regular basis.
“There were always people in my life that treated me as a person in my own right, people like Shaun Edwards ... who are not only top quality, world-class coaches but great people – I still speak to them now every couple of weeks.”
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That ability to connect with players as people, and make them feel as if he’s standing alongside them in the defence line, is combined with a will to win that he was born with, but only came to fruition with hard work.
In France he’s found a side with all the attributes that could make them the perfect conduits for his defence ideology, commenting they’ve got an “immense amount of speed, some of the forwards are nearly as fast as the backs”.
“As a fit, young man, if I couldn’t fly up and stop that supply to outside, I’d throw my boots into the river,” Edwards says.
And he always wanted to see sides defend like that, making that first move to do exactly that alongside Warren Gatland at Wasps.
“That was the style of defence we wanted to bring in and now everyone defends like that. I always remember watching Jonah Lomu [destroying defences] and wondering why everyone was doing an ‘up and out’ defence against this guy, why don’t they do an umbrella defence and cut the supply off. We used to blitz hard at Wigan,” he says.
“Me and Mike Ford or me and Andy Gregory, it was our job to fly up in the middle of the pitch and cut that supply off to the forwards – I couldn’t understand why sides weren’t doing that [to Lomu].”
So, when France come flying out of the traps in this series in Australia, you’ll know who to thank, the great man himself.
