It was a real honour to lead Cov to promotion

ROWING up in North Lincolnshire, Leicester Tigers were my club. I idolised the ‘ABC Club’ so to get a phone call from Richard Cock erill asking me to come down and have a trial, and to then be coached by him and Graham Rowntree after winning a two-year academy deal at Tigers was a really big thing for me. I thought they’d be very hard operators but they were very patient with us young lads and the technical detail was next level.

- PHIL BOULTON

At the time, I’d just left Worksop College Sixth Form and had been playing a bit of Champ rugby for Rotherham. A bunch of us U21s were thrust into the Titans’ first team the season after the club had nearly gone bust. There was me (18), Neil Briggs and Brendan Lynch making up the youngest front row in the club’s history.

Unfortunately, halfway through my Tigers contract, the RFU changed the age-group system and because my birthday is in December, and the U21s age group ran from January to January, I was kind of stuck in no-man’s land and I was loaned out to Nuneaton, where Darren Garforth was in charge, completing the ABC set. He left quite early on which was disappointing, but I had a good season nonetheless and played a lot of rugby which is exactly what I needed.

Whilst I never got to play for the Tigers’ first-team – other than against the Baa-baas – that period shaped me as a professional rugby player and I went back to Rotherham, who’d just pushed Leeds all the way for the title, all the better for it. But Andre Bester left in the summer and the squad wasn’t as settled as it had been. Phil Werahiko then departed as head coach before Christmas after a poor run of results and was replaced by Westy (Craig West), my old U21s coach, whose passion for the club shone through. Like a lot of Championship clubs, Rotherham didn’t have the greatest facilities but that never bothered me, it was the people that mattered, and there were a lot of very good people at Clifton Lane.