Call-up was a case of mistaken identity
TWICE in my career I was called up by Wales to attend a Six Nations training camp as injury cover but, on the second occasion, it was only because of mistaken identity – they’d rang up the wrong Powell! I must admit I was surprised to be told by Worcester’s team manager after a game against Sale that Wales had been on the phone and I was needed at the Vale of Glamorgan straight away, simply because I hadn’t been playing that well. And, when I did turn up, there didn’t appear to be any shortage of scrum-halves so I was wondering why exactly I was there. Nevertheless, I trained the next day and stayed for the whole week and it was only later on that I found out they’d actually wanted Andy Powell as back row injury cover!
It was kind of through my Welsh roots, I was born and raised there and went to Christ College in Brecon, that helped me to get a foot in the door of professional rugby. Mark Evans, the Sarries DoR, had gone to the same school as me, quite a few years before, and had heard good things.
He sent someone to watch me play and after finishing school I got a scholarship to go to West London Institute, once known as Borough Road, and was invited to take part in Sarries first-team training. That was 1997. So in the blink of an eye, I’d gone from the obscurity of mid-Wales to training alongside worldclass players like Michael Lynagh, Philippe Sella and Francois Pienaar, plus all the returning Lions from the triumphant tour of South Africa.
I met three of my best mates in my first year there – Flats (David Flatman), Danny Grewcock and a guy called David Thompson – and it was a good experience even if I didn’t play a huge amount of rugby as there were several good 9s ahead of me.
Once Mark left for Quins, he took me with him. I’d gone hoping for regular game time and the first season was brilliant. I played most weeks and we got to two finals, losing the Tetley’s Bitter Cup Final to Newcastle in the final seconds before beating Narbonne to win the European Challenge Cup.
After that, I was in and out of the team and realised that I needed to move to re-energise my career. Opportunities in the Premiership were few and far between and Worcester was the next best thing as they’d been knocking on the door for a while, had real ambition and John Brain and Andy Keast has assembled a good squad.
I felt there was a very good chance I’d only be out of the Premiership for one season and that was the case. We managed to win all 26 games scoring over 1,000 points in the process. It was a brilliant experience to watch the crowds at Sixways grow and finally help them achieve promotion.
With Worcester it was a very simple game plan, we had a good pack of forwards and it was all about getting field position rather than constructing multiphase attacks. After drifting along at Quins for the last couple of years, it was good to have people who pushed me.
To outsiders, John Brain may have appeared grumpy but once you got to know him, he was a very, very funny man and a really good forwards coach. Technically I don’t think you’d find many better than Andy Keast; his eye for detail was pretty remarkable. He really pushed my game forward. A lot of people struggled with his delivery and I think eventually he realised coaching in that environment wasn’t right for him and his personality. You also had our fitness coach, Phil ‘The Power’ Richards, a real psychopath, getting us to push cars up hills in Worcester.
That first season in the Premiership was amazing. Everyone expected us to go straight back down and it looked like they might be right when we lost our first four home games. I can absolve myself of any blame though because I didn’t make any of the matchday squads! A win against my old club Harlequins broke the cycle and gave us a lot more confidence and we managed to pick up some good results during the November internationals and the Six Nations when other teams had their stars away. Even so, it all came down to us beating Northampton on the final day to stay up, which we did. Ironically it was Quins who were relegated instead.
Unfortunately, we didn’t really kick on from there and the rest of my time at Worcester was spent at the wrong end of the table. We did, however, enjoy a good run in the Challenge Cup in 2008 and got to the final, which meant another outing against my old Sarries mates, Flats and Grewy. As usual, there were lots of shenanigans going on with me being on the receiving end of some unnecessary violence and being held down on the floor at every opportunity.
To be fair, that final was no different to any other game I played against them. One time, Danny stamped on me so badly my wife wouldn’t speak to him
“I later found out they wanted Andy Powell as back row injury cover”
for a couple of months because the bruising was very close to my private parts. I kind of felt I got Danny back, though, when I was best man at his wedding and read out a section of the News of the World kiss-and-tell story that came out when he was 21. I don’t think his new mother-in-law was best pleased!
At this stage I was increasingly thinking about life after rugby and entering into the business world but Mike Ruddock persuaded me to put those plans on hold for a year to become part of the coaching team. I did analysis and helped with team preparation for a year but didn’t particularly enjoy it and when an opportunity came up to go to Bath as a business development director, I decided to do that and step away from the playing side of rugby.
I was kind of thrown in at the deep end and found myself negotiating brewery deals and shirt sponsorship deals. I enjoyed it and it was a really exciting time to be at Bath because Bruce Craig had taken over.
Nowadays, I’m running my own business, Small World Group, but I’m still involved with Bath but only on matchdays, doing corporate hospitality Q&As. Occasionally I turn out in charity matches but I’m not so sure that’s a good idea anymore. For the last one, Gareth Steenson’s testimonial, I couldn’t believe it, 10,000 people turned up to see me embarrass myself !