Peacock and Sinfield: Rugby’s unlikely heroes

WHATEVER twists and turns unfold beneath the floodlights, the game of rugby league knows it is about to witness the end of an era. Tonight, two of the greatest players in the sport’s history will take their final bow at the ground where they have celebrated such glittering success.

Kevin Sinfield and Jamie Peacock both leave the Leeds Rhinos at the end of this season. At Headingley Stadium this evening, in front of their adoring fans, they are likely to have a major say in whether the party carries on for one more game. Victory over St Helens would bring yet another Super League Grand Final – and the chance to go out with a bang.

For the last decade or so, the duo have been synonymous with success, helping the Rhinos to a staggering haul of silverware. Six Super League titles, two Challenge Cups and a brace of World Club Challenge triumphs – the sport’s unofficial world championships – tell the tale of a decade’s dominance.

A golden era in the club’s long and proud history, it makes the Rhinos one of the most successful teams in British sport. If it wasn’t a comparison so liable to stick in the throat this side of the Pennines, it would be tempting to dub them the Manchester United of rugby league. Fittingly, Wayne Rooney is a Rhinos fan.

But there the comparisons with the round-ball game just about end. Sinfield and Peacock are people’s heroes in a sport where cash isn’t king. While Rooney earns an estimated £250,000 a week, Super League’s annual salary cap stands at £1.85m – and that’s per squad, not per player. It takes Rooney less than two months to pocket the Rhinos’ entire season’s budget.

This year Leeds are chasing the treble, having lifted the Challenge Cup for the second consecutive year and taken the League Leaders’ Shield for topping the Super League table at end of the regular season. But if they do finish their Rhinos careers on a high, don’t expect to catch the pair crowing about it or spot them tumbling out of the nearest nightclub. League’s lower profile brings with it a welcome degree of anonymity beyond the local hotbeds, but they aren’t the sort to let things go to their heads.

Sinfield grew up in a terraced house in Oldham (making him an adopted Yorkshireman) with Che Guevara slogans put on the wall by his trade union activist parents Ray and Beryl. So strong were their socialist beliefs that when Kevin was little more than a toddler they took a trip to Cuba to admire first-hand Fidel Castro’s post-revolutionary state.

“Dad was an electrician and we came from a very working class house,” Sinfield has said. “He did a lot of overtime when we were kids just to put food on the table, I’m not saying we were on the breadline, but we weren’t very well off.

“But they always had a lot of spirit and leadership and that’s been a big inspiration to me. They gave us a lot of discipline and always insisted we be honest. It’s their values and morals which have moulded me into what I am today.”

Signing for Leeds Rhinos at the age of 13, he shone with a determination and discipline far beyond his years. While his mates were out swigging cans of beer on street corners he kept a clear head for the game that meant so much to him. Offered a full time contract at 16, he took a big risk. Having earned nine GCSEs, all at grades A or B, he stayed on to do his A levels so he had something to fall back on. With Sinfield, the stereotype of the kunckle-headed rugby player is simply a non-starter. Even as captain of the Rhinos he studied at what was then Leeds Met University for a sports science degree.

It was Daryl Powell, then in charge of Leeds and now Castleford Tigers’ coach, who made the decision to appoint him as captain ahead of the 2002 season having already spotted his innate qualities.

“We roomed together when he had just broken into the first team,” he recalls. “He was 17 and I was 34 – so I was twice his age. He always was a mature young fella and you could see he was going to do well in the game.

“He has outstripped what everybody thought he would achieve. He has been a phenomenal professional player for a number of years, a role model, and you have to admire everything he has done in the game.”

The self-discipline that drove Sinfield to greatness didn’t come as easily to his close teammate Jamie Peacock. A former roofer and fond of a pint, he would spend entire weekends drinking, sometimes on 20-hour benders, while he was trying to establish his rugby career. Some of it, he willingly concedes, contributed to his mixed fortunes on the pitch.

He also made for an unconventional star-in-the making, as Bradford Bulls coach James Lowes, who played alongside Peacock at first club Bradford, recalls.

“My hat always goes off to JP, because when he turned up at Bradford he was gangly, uncoordinated, blind as a bat,” he says. “Brian McDermott [Bradford player and now Leeds coach] used to call him one of the Thunderbirds.

“It just goes to show what you can do if you believe in yourself and people around you believe in you.”

A big influence was his late father, Darryl, who encouraged him to trust his raw talent even when he began to doubt it. A born motivational speaker, England’s rugby union players cite Peacock as the most inspirational speaker to have paid them a visit. He told them of the moment he almost blew his career before it had even started.

As a car-less 18-year-old off for his first trial with Bradford he caught the bus. But as it got nearer to the ground he “bottled it” and didn’t get off. He phoned his dad, who in turn called Bradford coach Brian Noble.

“Dad said he believed in me and that Brian Noble believed in me,” he has recalled. He got back on the bus and the rest is history.

“His dad was a great pusher for him,” says Lowes. “He was given the opportunity, but he had to wait a long time for it. A lot of people wrote him off, but he has been fantastic and it’s a credit to himself and his family that he believed in himself at that time.”

The rollercoaster years now firmly behind him, Peacock has been a major figure in the Rhinos’ success since his move to Leeds, the club he supported as a boy growing up in Bramley. His determination to give his all shows in the five-mile run he does every Christmas Day and, in his final season, the sign he’s put up at home asking: ‘How do you want to be remembered?’

“He has certainly been the most influential signing the club has ever made,” says Leeds’ chief executive, Gary Hetherington. “When we signed him, at 27, we thought he would play out the rest of his career at Leeds – we couldn’t have imagined it would be 10 years.”

Aside from their success – and a matching pair of MBEs for services to their sport – Sinfield and Peacock share something else in common. Off the field, family instinctively comes first.

Peacock credits wife Faye and children Lewis, Lilly and Freya for keeping his feet on the ground. “The one thing I have learnt,” he has said, “is that there’s so much more to life than rugby. You’re not discovering a cure for cancer.”

In the same vein, after leading the Rhinos to victory in the 2012 Grand Final, Sinfield chose to spend time with wife Jayne and sons Jack and Sam rather than hit the beers.

Impeccable role models, their names and faces may not be well-known beyond League’s northern enclaves, but they are among Britain’s sporting giants. If the pair’s pasts are littered with glory, their futures are less certain. But whatever happens tonight, their places in Rhinos folklore – and the annals of the game they have served with such distinction – are assured.

The pair in their own words...

“There are times, on the inside, when I feel exactly like that shy 10-year-old kid in those terrible NHS glasses.” Jamie Peacock.

“Even when all my mates were out on street corners on a Friday and Saturday night with cans of beer I didn’t touch it because I always played at weekends.” Kevin Sinfield.

“You see the good side of me when I play. The other five days out of seven you don’t see me shuffling round the house, in a bad mood, because I’m in pain.” Jamie Peacock.

“I’ve not had any underwear in the post, but I once had a bloke write to me asking for my jockstrap. I haven’t a clue why.” Kevin Sinfield.