Rotherham were the fancy dress champs MY
JOHN HAYES’ last appearance for Munster was my first game, and there was a great buzz around the place before kick-off. It was against Connacht on Boxing Day in 2011 and there were over 20,000 people packed into Thomond Park. It was a nervous Christmas dinner the day before, I can tell you that! It went as well as I could have hoped, scoring our first try, and we got a win. I think my mates were even happier than me because I found out later that they’d put money on me to be the first tryscorer.
I’d played with some good players in my youth, at the very first World Rugby U20 Championship in Wales in 2008, for example, but at that time nobody would have guessed that Sean Maitland, the man marking me in our game against New Zealand, would go on to be a Scotland and Lions international! So to suddenly find myself catching passes from Ronan O’Gara and Doug Howlett in training was pinch-yourself stuff. It was incredible to be playing with so many superstars in front of so many people.
I didn’t get the run of games I needed to kick on after the Connacht game. With the team fighting to make the top four, the coaches were understandably reluctant to give the young fellas too much in the way of game time and went for tried and tested players instead.
Just when things were starting to pick up again and I was playing some good rugby for the A-team, I had seven months out with a herniated disc and that set me back again. I knew I had to move on to try and further my career. A mate from Munster, Sean Dougall, had been at Rotherham the year before and told me it was a great place to put yourself in the shop window because they had a great track record in lads moving on.
Like with Munster, my first game with Rotherham was a win but I got subbed off five minutes before halftime. Just as I was about to chip the ball over Olly Robinson’s head, he chopped me and my standing leg went from underneath me and I was thrown up in the air and landed on my shoulder. I popped the ACL joint and that was it for five or six games. But I came back firing once I was fit again and had a good run of games after that. I picked up a few injuries when I was at Doncaster but that was the biggest that I had in my seven seasons in the Championship. So I feel quite blessed.
Rotherham was great on and off the field. We were professional players, but it had a real club feel about it. You’d be meeting fans, everyone mixing together, and we enjoyed the success we had as one. We made two semi-finals against Bristol and gave them a good rattle. One year, Jamie Broadley got a try with about 15 minutes left on the clock and that left us only one score behind on aggregate. We were all thinking this could lead to some awkward conversations because most of us had holidays booked and making the final would have meant extending the season by another two weeks. It was great to run Bristol that close. We achieved a lot more than many people expected us to do. We did Roth proud that day and in the other semi, and we did the Champ proud.
When Lee Blackett left, Mark Jones came in and we made a good start to the season. But we probably weren’t battlehardened enough for winter rugby, and we lost something like eight games in a row. Doncaster were a top-four team at the time and going well so it seemed like a good opportunity when the chance to join them came. Clive Griffiths always used to joke that he’d dug a tunnel under the M18 because he’d signed so many of Rotherham’s best players.
Doncaster had a very settled team that was going well and coupled with some injuries, I didn’t get to play as much as I’d have liked that season. Ian Costello, who I knew from Munster, was at Nottingham and moving there gave me the new lease of life I needed. Everything was very well run and the link with Nottingham Trent University meant we always had good numbers in training which allowed us to train 15 v 15 the whole time. The intensity we trained at, with the university lads coming in, meant we punched above our weight. It was great to sign off with the Supporters’ Player of the Season award.
For the majority of my seven years in the Championship, the league was thriving – not financially, because it was always on the brink – but the fact that it was very competitive, and there were good crowds and there were good battles at the top and down at the bottom. Lots of guys were getting picked up by Premiership clubs, and it was a proven breeding ground for guys to move on to the next level or you could grind out a career like I did. The financial aspect isn’t great but if you are a senior player and you pick up a few gigs on the side, you can build a great lifestyle around that.
In the latter stages of my career I became a bit of a playmaker, I like to think I read the game quite well and I tried to use my strengths to make sure I was playing every week. The fact I played a long time in the Championship helped because I knew a lot of the players and the teams, and that helped keep me one step ahead of the opposition every now and again.
I had some incredible days on and off the pitch in the Champ with a top bunch of lads who will be lifelong friends. What struck me was how serious the social side was taken. You had to buy into it because if you didn’t take part, it was frowned upon. The amount of effort that went into costumes etc was unbelievable. One that sticks in my mind was a really wild one in Sheffield when I was still at Rotherham. There were 40 lads in this student pub beer garden all dressed as WWE wrestlers and throwing each other across tables and against walls. That was the most elaborate fancy dress social, everyone bought into it.
With Covid and everything else, I recently made the decision to retire from professional rugby. I felt it was the right time to branch out. I’m now two months into a job with a company called LandTech, but I’m still involved with rugby as player-coach at Dronfield RFC. We were promoted to Midlands 1 before rugby came to a stop and we’re all looking forward to the time we can get out on the pitch again.
“40 lads all dressed as WWE wrestlers were throwing each other across tables”