The Big Interview: Andrew Sheridan

Four years before, when he played for Bristol Shoguns, he signed up for an apprenticeship in plumbing, did a year, but could not transfer it to Manchester when he signed for the Sharks. After the bricklaying he will finish the plumbing and would then like to do a course in plastering. If rugby leaves him with a body still capable of doing physical work, he will put all of this to use.

This desire to prepare for his life beyond rugby, and the choices he has made, say much about Sheridan and his resolutely unpretentious nature. He plays the guitar, but does not blow his own trumpet; rugby is his occupation, not saving lives; and he is a prop, for goodness sake. At the age of 26, he has played just four times for England and has yet to play a game in the Six Nations.

And yet there is more to this man than the modest stats of his career so far, so much more to him than might be imagined from his understated manner. In his brief international career he has suggested that he may already be the world’s best loosehead prop forward. That’s his rugby side. And if the plumbing, bricklaying and plastering give you a sense of where he has come and where he wants to go, the easy assumption isn’t valid.

He went to one of south London’s more prestigious public schools, Dulwich College. Although best known there for his prowess on the rugby pitch, he was also useful in the classroom and got As in his history and religious education A-levels. He read history at Royal Holloway, part of London University, and despite sailing through his first-year exams, he deferred to concentrate on a career in professional rugby.

I mention the number of England players from the 2003 World Cup team that I have interviewed and how they all had a good story to tell and were adept at telling it. How Steve Thompson survived a difficult background, how Ben Cohen had coped with the murder of his father, how Lawrence Dallaglio’s young life had been shattered by the death of his sister, how Phil Vickery had emerged from a farm in Cornwall and how Josh Lewsey joined the army to find his true self. “Richard Hill, ” I conclude, “was the only one that was difficult. A brilliant player who made his life sound ordinary and uninteresting.” “I bet you,” says Sheridan, “that I displace Richard on your list.”

ANDREW SHERIDAN was born in 1979, younger brother of Robert and second son of Dan and Liz Sheridan, who lived in Bromley, about 12 miles southeast of London. That same year, Dan’s father Richard passed away, so the new arrival would never get to know his paternal grandfather, but would hear plenty about him.

Richard Sheridan was born in 1902. At 6ft 3in and 15st, he was a big man for his time. He was also an unusually talented athlete. “He boxed for the army, I think, also played hockey for the army, and he did nearly every athletic event,” says Sheridan. “He ran the 100, the 220, the 440 and I think he might have done the 880.

“I have seen old photos of him doing the shot put and the high jump. By all accounts he was a tough, athletic and aggressive man. Whether I inherited some genes from him, I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know in the sense that he cannot prove it, but from the moment he started sport Sheridan showed something like the same range of athletic talent that had defined his grandfather’s prowess as a sportsman. As a young student at Dulwich, he was a respectable member of the cross-country team, and at the age of 14, he could run the 800m in 2min 20sec.

Endurance came with dynamic power, for he was also good at the shot put and discus, but it was at rugby that he began to excel, first with the Old Elthamians mini-rugby sides and then at Dulwich. His size, strength and dynamism counted for much in those days as it made him so hard to bring down. Perhaps he was fortunate, too, in that he happened to enter Dulwich at a time when a lot of fine rugby players showed up.

They made up a team that for years remained unbeaten and most victories came with murderous scorelines: 52-0, 37-0, 48-0, 92-0. “We had a good team,” says Sheridan. “Everyone was competitive, driving to be better players even at a young age, and that continued right through our time at the school. We used to boost each other. There was a real competitive element. Our training sessions were very hard, and as well as the three rugby sessions each week, lots of players were doing extra weights sessions, extra running, always trying to improve.”

You ask about anything the side won and he recalls the Daily Mail Cup, an Under-15 competition open to all schools in England. “It wasn’t just a public schools competition; we played a comprehensive school in the quarters and went on to win the final at Twickenham.”

Whom did you beat in the final? “Bristol Grammar School. They had a good side. We won 37-0.”

During the years at Dulwich there weren’t many 15-14 victories? “No, I don’t remember any really close games for our team.”

He tells this in an offhand way, as you might describe the performance of the most unremarkable team, and never mentions his own role. He doesn’t mention the try he scored in that Twickenham final, nor that as a back-five forward he got 22 tries in his final year and got close to setting a Dulwich record for tries scored in one season.

Instead he talks of the unsung heroes in the team, the guys who never got the recognition they deserved, and of Lorenzo Nargi, his best friend back then and still his best friend. “Lorenzo was a very good player who ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament at the age of 14 or 15. He now runs his own restaurant in Crystal Palace, the best Italian restaurant in south London.”

He smiles, hoping that this favourable mention for his mate’s restaurant will be published, before pulling the blanket of understatement over him again. Others weren’t so reserved in their accounts of how the teenage Sheridan played the game. In the Dulwich school annual’s various reports of the Daily Mail Cup victory, one gets a sense of his impact. “Sheridan was a colossus,” said one witness. “Where does one begin with Andrew Sheridan?” asked another. “At one and the same time he is highly skilled and possesses quite awesome strength.”

Peter Allen, rugby master at the time, wrote: “Never before have I seen one player inject so much fear into the opposition and dominate so many games with a combination of size, speed and strength.”

Ian Martin succeeded Allen as rugby master. “Even at the age of 13, Andy had this driving ambition that he wanted to be an England international. He was the most focused boy I have known,” he says.

Sheridan understands that people love sport, for he shares that passion, but he also knows it is one aspect of life, and far from the most important. His father wanted to be a professional footballer, but realised he wasn’t good enough and concentrated on his academic career, becoming the first member of his family to go to university. He is now a regulator for the London Stock Exchange. Was this less than a life in sport? Of course not. It allowed Dan Sheridan to realise the ambition of sending his boys to a good school.

“My parents’ idea in chucking a lot of money into our education was that we would become well-rounded individuals,” says Sheridan. “I was always conscious that you get kids who are fantastic at sport in school and teachers who say, ‘He is going to be the next whoever’. Then their development slows down and they aren’t going to be next whoever. So you had to concentrate on the academic side as well.”

The status that came with his prowess on the sporting field was treated with suspicion: “I never saw rugby as something that gave you status. Just because you play at a high level, just because you are deemed to be good at it, it is still just a game of rugby. You haven’t invented a cure for cancer or something. It is a sport; it doesn’t mean you are any better as a person or an individual than anyone else.

“I don’t think it is anything to start swaggering about or to tell anyone how great you are. That’s the way I tried to conduct myself and the way I still try to conduct myself.”

But the respect came from fellow students, the knowing looks, the wink-and-elbow language of recognition: “You were part of a good team and you were recognised. But so was the class boffin: he was just as useful because he was the guy from whom you copied your homework.”

He speaks of his brother Robert, who is three years older and never gave more than a second thought to sport. In that respect, they were opposites. Once when Andrew played for England Schools at Twickenham, Robert went along to watch. Fearing that he would be bored, he brought along a good book. Andrew chuckles at the thought of his brother stealing furtive glances at the rugby before getting back to the book. “He’s a barrister down in Exeter now, doing well too.”

Which probably means he is better at charging than his 19st, prop forward brother? “Collecting their fees can be quite a problem for the legal profession,” says Sheridan. “They don’t get paid quickly and some of the time they end up with outstanding fees involving thousands of pounds. Robert has talked about hiring me to do his debt collection. It has been a standing joke between us for some time.

“Whatever you do, it is nice to do it to the best of your ability. My brother, he wanted to be a good barrister. I’m a rugby player and I want to be as good as I can be. When I am laying bricks, I will want to do that as well as I can.”

SOMEONE once said you could tell a man’s character by his preference in the Seb Coe/Steve Ovett debate of the early 1980s. So too you get a sense of Sheridan by his taste in heroes. Ben Johnson, athletics’ tainted champion, was his first and greatest sporting hero. He was eight when the Canadian was disqualified after winning the 100m at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

“I was very upset when that happened. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe he had done what they said he had done, but I still liked him. I liked his personality. In his rivalry with Carl Lewis, I was firmly in his camp. I didn’t like Lewis, who was this fantastically talented athlete, the natural successor to Jesse Owens, but I preferred Johnson, who was inarticulate.

“Johnson struck me as someone who had — what’s the word, the opposite to arrogance — humility. Later, when I saw the videos of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, I realised I would have been on Frazier’s side. I preferred my heroes to be guys who kept their mouths shut and were the opposite to the flash guys.”

Sheridan is witty, intelligent, charming in an understated way, but, for all that, he is chary of words. He chooses them with care, draws them from a well that he fears will run dry and desperately seeks to present himself as an ordinary bloke doing an ordinary job. At one point in the interview you wonder what it was like to move from Bristol to Manchester.

“When you are doing rugby, it is the same routine. You are training, you are playing, you are trying to win matches. Much the same wherever you are. I have thoroughly enjoyed the move up here, in my third year now; it is a great club to be at and it is obviously that much easier when you are winning matches.”

The relaxed manner is but one expression of who he is. He is also ambitious, intensely so and sure about where he wants to go. From an early age, he believed in the value of relentless weights training and few doubt that he is the strongest player in world rugby. His natural strength has been nurtured and developed through countless gym sessions, and if he is allowed to use his power to its maximum, he will destroy the other team’s scrum.

“Weight training was something I have always enjoyed. Something I got a high from doing. There is definitely something addictive about it. That’s partly down to the improvement you can see, but it’s also to do with how you feel afterwards.

“They talk about endorphins or something being released — not that you can go and pick up your car after a hard session, but you do feel good. I liked the feeling of being able to shift a weight that to the average person seems very heavy. It’s whatever works for you. Some people get that feeling from having a cigarette; others will have a large scotch.”

During his years at Bristol he spent a lot of time in the gym, training himself to lift massive weights. He set himself a target of bench-pressing 500lb (35Åst), and did exercises to increase his chances of achieving that target. “The weightlifting wasn’t directly related to rugby, but if I reach a goal like that, I am going to be more confident. As it turned out, I fell about 20lb short, one of those goals that I didn’t reach.”

What he doesn’t say is that as a powerlifter, he wasn’t far off international class.

For a long time it didn’t seem to do much for his rugby. Through his debut year at Richmond and the subsequent years at Bristol, he was a great forward but not lithe enough to be international second row, nor quick enough to be an international backrow. He travelled to South Africa with the England squad in the summer of 2000, but that was more or less it — the strongest man was nowhere the best man.

That changed four years ago when he decided to move from No 6 to No 1. At the time it was feared that he was too tall and that he was moving to a very specialised position far too late in his career. At the age of his conversion to prop, Jason Leonard had played a World Cup final in that position.

“I remember the first game I played at prop for Bristol, it was against Newport and a prop called Rod Snow. After the first half I sat in the dressing room and I couldn’t get my chin off my neck. My neck muscles weren’t used to it, and that’s where the pressure goes. After that I went back to playing No 6 and No 8 and it was the following season that I made the permanent move to prop.”

The transition was far from straightforward. Good performances were followed by bad ones as different opponents found ways of exposing his technical weaknesses. Peter Thorburn, the Bristol coach, believed he would one day make it as a prop and persevered through the difficult times. By the time Bristol were relegated and he was transferred to Sale, prop forward was his position and he was ready to climb the front-row rankings.

“Phil Keith-Roach, the England scrummaging coach, helped me to make the change and you learn as you go along, especially from those opponents who make you struggle. And there were guys like Jason Leonard, who was always open to helping. I have spoken to him a few times since I moved to prop and you couldn’t meet a nicer bloke.

“There is no secret to the way I try to scrummage, I don’t try to be underhand about it. I try to get into my strongest possible position to use my strength. Sometimes I am able to, sometimes the other scrum and the other prop are able to put me into a position that I can’t use my strength to the maximum.”

That will be one of the challenges taken on by Wales at Twickenham on Saturday, and it is by no means the least. The Six Nations champions will know that unless they control Sheridan, their scrum will be fragmented and driven backwards. Sheridan knows how he must be against the Welsh: “I play my best when I am right on the edge, bordering on spilling over with aggression.

“But I see myself as a reasonably pleasant individual, and I have to get myself into that state when I can maximise my power and explode. I mustn’t be nervous about the possibility of making mistakes, but most of all, I must get to that state where I am right

on the edge. I don’t get to that point as much as I would like to.”

HE OFFERS this opinion almost gently and comes across as the pleasant man he imagines himself to be. It is a good moment to ask about his guitar and his enthusiasm for writing songs. “I do play, though not at a very high level. My dad plays the guitar; he’s quite a competent guitarist. I just know the basic chords and use it to relax.”

And the songwriting? “I do like writing songs, yes. I am always trying to work away at writing one and I’m producing more and more of them. I enjoy it.

“I think if I had to do it for a living, it would be incredibly frustrating. But when it is a hobby, I can strum away, thinking of a tune, and when it gets a bit difficult and the next line won’t come, I just put the guitar in the corner and put on the television or read a newspaper.”

When he writes a song that he likes, for whom would he perform it? “For Siwan, definitely. Outside of that, my parents and my best friend, Lorenzo. I would play it for Lorenzo because he plays a bit himself and he is my best friend. But I am not a public performer.”

Not even for his England teammates? “When there’s a little session and a few of the guys are playing, they’ll say, ‘Give us a song’, and to get them off my back, I will give them a quick rendition of Country Roads. It’ll be just to get them off my back.”

Your own songs, they’re private, off limits? “Very definitely.”