Rob Burrow: The start of a dynasty

Back in 2004, the Leeds Rhinos dynasty that emerged over the ensuing 15 years was in its infancy, with coach Tony Smith steering a young, hungry side. 

Here, we share an extract from Rob Burrow's book ‘Too Many Reasons to Live’ as we look ahead to the 25th Super League Grand Final next month, with the two-time Harry Sunderland trophy winner reflecting on the events that started a Leeds legacy.

AS soon as Tony Smith turned up, I could tell he was the right man for the job.

He was obsessed with the fundamentals, like no coach I’d had before. He literally spent the first couple of weeks teaching us how to catch and pass.

Once he was satisfied we’d grasped the basics, he then started tuning our skills, as individuals and as a team. He taught us tactics and technical details I didn’t even know existed. 

At the end of his first season in charge we won our first League Leaders’ Shield since 1972, finishing the regular season nine points clear of Bradford. We’d lost only two of our twenty-eight games, which was something to be proud of, but nobody really remembers who finishes top of the table, it’s all about winning the Grand Final. 

When we lost to Bradford Bulls in the qualifying semi, suddenly the media were calling us chokers. Iestyn Harris was great that day for the Bulls, as was Robbie Paul, who had been written off as past it by some in the media.

And while the Bulls could now put their feet up for a couple of weeks before the Grand Final, we had to play Wigan in the final eliminator six days later.

Andrew Dunemann was injured, so Tony decided to have a reshuffle, moving Kev (Sinfield) to stand-off and Maggsy (Danny McGuire) to scrum-half, with me on the bench. 

And we absolutely spanked them. Marcus Bai scored a hat-trick in a 40–12 win and the feeling was that losing to the Bulls had maybe done us a favour. It had got rid of any complacency, kept us sharp and battle-ready and turned us into underdogs for the Grand Final, which relieved some of the pressure. 

But I still felt uneasy in the lead-up to that game. The Bulls were used to playing in Grand Finals, but we weren’t. And it didn’t seem right to me, walking the league by nine points but now having to beat the Bulls at Old Trafford to prove we were the best team. It made me nervous, as if an injustice was inevitable.

Before the game, Dave Furner, who was making his final appearance for the club, slipped in the dressing room and hurt his knee. Dave being Dave, he had it injected, strapped it up and carried on as normal, and his attitude summed up the team that day. 

We liked to entertain, but it wasn’t that kind of game. The atmosphere was unbelievable, but it ended up being an arm-wrestle rather than the free-flowing spectacle the fans might have expected. It was tailor-made for warriors like Dave, rather than us fancy Dans in the backs.

We’d learned lessons from the qualifying defeat, and didn’t panic when Lesley Vainikolo, Bradford’s eighteen stone winger, scored after just seven minutes. Instead, Kev made Vainikolo’s life hell for the rest of the first half. As instructed, Kev repeatedly kicked the ball behind him, and every time he picked it up, Chev Walker and Mark Calderwood were all over him like a rash. 

Good job they were, because - as well as being built like a tank - Vainikolo could run the 100 metres in eleven seconds. By half-time, Vainikolo was absolutely knackered.

A try from Matty Diskin and three goals from Kev gave us a 10–4 interval lead, before Shontayne Hape scored a bit of a soft try for Bradford. The result was up in the air until five minutes from the end, when Robbie Paul inexplicably dropped the ball on his own twenty-metre line. 

From the resulting scrum, Keith got held up just short of the try-line but managed to offload to Maggsy, who burrowed over to seal the deal. 

That’s about the only thing I remember about that game; the rest of it is a blur. But everyone remembers what they saw when the final hooter went: Franny Cummins storming onto the pitch in his suit, fists pumping, jumping up and down like a lunatic. 

Franny had had a few injuries and didn’t make the squad, but he was as thrilled as the rest of us. That showed what kind of team we’d become. 

To witness those delirious Rhinos fans, who had been starved of success for thirty-two years, was just beautiful. I think most of them were in a state of shock. And very relieved. 

Relief was my overriding emotion as well. When you play for a club that is expected to win things but never does, the monkey on your back is more of a gorilla. 

As for the Bradford fans, they weren’t singing ‘What a waste of money!’ any more, like they had before. Not least because half our team cost nothing.

One of the beauties of rugby league is that the blokes on the pitch aren’t much different to the fans in the stands. They hail from the same towns and cities. They go to the same schools. 

In many cases, they know the players personally. Their dads know our dads, their mums know our mums, their kids know our kids. That means that when we win things, it’s that much more personal than if we were from all four corners of the globe, like in football. 

Some of those fans would have been watching us busting a gut in a Leeds shirt every week since we were kids. I can only imagine how sweet it was for them.

I savoured those great moments. Kev lifting the trophy. Singing along to Green Day’s ‘Time of Your Life’ on the coach back to Leeds. The hugs, the smiles, the joyous conversations, the shared realisation that all those savage training sessions, all that yomping in Roundhay Park, all that shared pain and sacrifice had been worth it. 

I wish they hadn’t flashed by so quickly, but at least I’ve got them banked. Because while Motor Neurone Disease can do its worst to my body, it can never rob me of those memories. 

They sometimes seem like fragments of another person’s life. But they are concrete evi-dence of the lucky life I’ve lived.

‘Too Many Reasons to Live’, the autobiography of Rob Burrow, is published by Macmillan and available through all good book outlets now.