The former Ireland flanker tells JOHNNY WATTERSONhe declined Clive Woodward's offer to play for England

ALMOST 12 years ago, long before anyone in Ireland knew who he was, Simon Easterby returned to the house in Wales he shared with a New Zealand player called Matt Cardey. Cardey played fullback with Llanelli and mumbled that someone had called when he was out, that a guy called Clive had left a message.

“Clive” was Clive Woodward, the England national coach at the time. He had been watching Easterby play with Llanelli in the Heineken Cup pool games and he wanted him to join his squad. Coach and player caught up later that day and Easterby asked Woodward if he knew he had already played for the Ireland under-21s and the A team against Canada in Ravenhill. Woodward explained it wouldn’t preclude him from joining England.

To sweeten the deal the coach was also throwing in a tour to South Africa that summer and he wanted the flanker to go with him as part of the England squad. What Woodward also knew was that if the flanker said yes to the offer and was capped there was no way back to Ireland.

Easterby didn’t ask for a few days to think it over, didn’t ask about Woodward’s plans, where he saw him playing and what role he would have. He didn’t succumb to the inferred flattery or the lure of what might have been a lucrative offer from the richest rugby country in the world.

Nor did he hedge his bets or run through the options in his head. His mother was Irish so there was no passport problem. His father was English so that was squared and in a few more years he would have qualified for Wales through residency. There were options. Easterby said: “No thank you, Mr Woodward, I’m going to stick with Ireland.”

England would win the World Cup a few years later with the holy trinity of Lawrence Dallaglio, Neil Back and Richard Hill in the backrow. At that stage Ireland hadn’t knocked on his door and wouldn’t for another three years.

“Yes, it was a huge decision,” he says. “It was but . . . I grew up in the English school system, I suppose, playing for my county in the north of England. I always spent as much time in Ireland on holidays as I did in Yorkshire. I’d always had that feeling and understanding of what it meant to be Irish.

“The decision to commit to Ireland, when I turned Clive down not having had a cap for Ireland was risky for me. He was offering me the chance to go to South Africa that year with England. But in my own head I’d made that commitment. I’d played for the under-21s and got a cap for the As. I’d committed myself well and truly to Ireland. I just didn’t see myself wanting to play for anyone else. It was quite an interesting conversation. Out of the blue. Some might think Ireland was my second choice but it wasn’t.”

Easterby’s Irishness is a central part of his just-published biography, Easter’s Rising. While he comes at the end of a string of players who didn’t have the Irish stamp of voice or background, questions about how Irish he actually was always appeared to be hanging there. Easterby, the English-born Irish player. Easterby, the Wales-based Irishman. Easterby, who lives in Llanelli. The accents of Kevin Maggs, Simon Mason, Justin Bishop, Rob Henderson and Simon Geoghegan marked them out as players raised far from Dublin, Limerick, Cork or Belfast, and Easterby too, with his English upbringing was a curiosity.

That he spent his summers around Stradbrook Road, Blackrock and the Forty Foot, eating Teddy’s ice cream and playing the part of a middle-class south Dublin kid was lost in his Catholic Ampleforth education and Yorkshire family farm full of racehorses. His schooling was also particularly English. Will Carling also went to Ampleforth, as did Dallaglio. Easterby’s older brother Guy played on the same school team as the World Cup winner.

There were never any overt challenges to the purity of his Irish blood but he was aware some other players were sharp to a side of him that was traditionally English. Some of that awareness also came from his decision to turn down offers to play with the Irish provinces and that he had never lived in Ireland. Despite pressure from the IRFU, he played with Llanelli for his entire career. “I was encouraged to play in Ireland but not to the point where they said if you don’t move you won’t get picked,” he says.

He remembers one occasion when he just came into the Irish set-up sitting down with Paul O’Connell for a social pint. “Back then Paulie was fairly fiery, as he is now. He was just digging a bit and finding out. It was a social chat and he was asking about my background, interested in what I was doing. The question was why I chose Ireland. It was 2002 and I had not spoken to anyone about Clive Woodward.

“It was never a question of Paulie questioning my loyalty. I think he thought ‘why is this lad from Yorkshire deciding to play with Ireland?’ I said, ‘Look, I did have an opportunity to play for England. I turned it down.’ He fully understood my reasons were genuine. He was interested on why I chose Ireland over England.

“In the press I always felt there was a little bit of . . . not questioning but a bit of an undertone. I felt there was a big push for the provincial players. That’s where I felt there was a little bit of, not negativity, but maybe question marks over my position on the international team.”

Now part of the coaching staff at Scarlets, Easterby ambitiously looks forward to Munster’s visit next week to Parc y Scarlets. Not quite formidably old school as Stradey Park once was, he sees the Carmarthenshire ground as a place Munster could stumble. Both teams are unbeaten after two pool matches, with Munster “not at their best but they’re winning games”. Despite being immersed in all things Welsh, the new names emerging from Munster are on the tip of his tongue.

“That’s my job. What Munster is doing is selecting not on reputation but on form,” he says. “We haven’t beaten them since 2007 when they came to Stradey. There’s not always the thrills and spills that you see in other teams but they are very, very effective. They recruit particularly well. They find out about players’ backgrounds, their personality. It’s the player and the person they pick. It’s a mindset.”

Easterby’s commitment now with wife Sara, the daughter of former Welsh international and Lion Elgan Rees, two Welsh-speaking children, Soffia and Ffredi, is unquestioned. He has 65 Irish caps and two Lions caps. Life is good for the blindside, who said, “no thank you Mr Woodward”.