Memories, good and painful

He was among the masses of Leeds United fans in City Square celebrating the last champions of the old First Division in 1992, but Danny McGuire was destined to represent Leeds at rugby league, not football. Rugby gave him another chance to fulfil a fan’s dream and play at his beloved Elland Road, but his first experience of stepping onto the hallowed pitch proved an anti-climax.

Crucially, McGuire’s debut in LS11 wasn’t made in a Leeds shirt. A month after scoring the winning try in the 2004 Grand Final, securing Leeds Rhinos’ first title in over three decades, McGuire was part of the Great Britain side that reached the Tri Nations final, facing Australia at Elland Road. For once, there were hopes Great Britain could finally beat their traditional conquerors in a decider; GB had already beaten Australia once in the group stage, finishing top after also beating New Zealand twice. Left on the bench for their loss in the opening match, McGuire started all three victories, but was back on the bench for the big night in Beeston. By the time he was on the pitch, Great Britain were already well on their way to conceding six first half tries — earning a good old fashioned Elland Road half-time booing off — as Australia inflicted the Lions’ heaviest home defeat, winning 44-4.

“If you hang around and think about Saturday too much, you could get suicidal,” Great Britain captain Andy Farrell said in the wake of the defeat. McGuire didn’t have to wait long to rectify any regrets from playing against the best Australia had to offer. Three months after the Tri Nations final, Leeds were competing in the 2005 World Club Challenge against NRL champions Canterbury Bulldogs in front of a sold-out crowd of over 37,000 at Elland Road. This time McGuire was able to enjoy himself, starting for a team of players and coaches who trusted his talents. In a reverse of the international final, the English side showed their class in the opening forty minutes as Leeds were leading 26-6 at half-time.

McGuire broke the first half open, taking Barrie McDermott’s offload inside his own half and accelerating clear with a trademark step and body swerve. This was still Danny McGuire Mk I, the electric tryscorer kicking up dust as Canterbury players were chasing back from every angle to stop him and Leeds teammates were trying to catch up in support. After making a similar break in the Tri Nations final, McGuire had sensibly passed inside to his supporter winger, only to see his Great Britain teammate tackled short of the line. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again in a Leeds shirt, daring to back himself and scorching past two last defenders to score in front of the Cheese Wedge, only millimetres to spare before his feet grazed the touchline. McGuire was nodding his head, confirming his own genius, as the referee signalled for the video referee to check whether the try should be awarded. In commentary, Phil Clarke, a former Wigan player who fulfils Don Goodman’s role as Sky Sports’ favoured Leeds hater when it comes to rugby league, was begging for the video ref to replay the try “a hundred times”. For McGuire, he told me, the try is his equivalent of Rod Wallace dancing down the left touchline against Tottenham, “when he took them all on and banged it into the corner.”

“I played football, but I was never going to go down the football route,” McGuire says, in a meeting room overlooking the pitch at Hull KR’s Craven Park Stadium, where he now works as assistant coach to Tony Smith, the man who unlocked his potential while in charge of Leeds. “I was always into rugby and cricket. I suppose you give up that ambition of ever playing at Elland Road and scoring the winner in a game against Man U, you give that pipe dream up when you don’t play football, so for me to get the chance to play there in a massive game, in a packed house as well, was really special. Throughout my career, that’s probably one of the best memories.”

“McAllister, Strachan, Chapman, Speed. They were a real generational team, weren’t they?”

Growing up in East Leeds, McGuire was surrounded by Leeds United fans, idolising Howard Wilkinson’s title winners. “I mean, all my family and literally everybody friend-wise are all Leeds fans,” he says. “Maybe not on Service Crew status, but we’re passionate about it. My dad taught me all of the songs — some that we can’t sing and some that we can. I loved that team, people like McAllister, Strachan, Chapman, Speed. They were a real generational team, weren’t they? All the names we’re speaking about were all world class players. Then the Viduka era and the Champions League was a good time. I used to go quite a lot to watch those games. It was a great time to be a Leeds United fan, exciting. We paid for it afterwards, though.”

While Leeds United were paying for living the dream, McGuire was part of a Leeds Rhinos team enjoying the opposite trajectory. They had already tried Peter Ridsdale’s tactic of lavishing big names with even bigger salaries in the 1990s. Much like United, that iteration of Leeds RL failed to win anything of note and nearly went out of business, prompting a change of approach. Instead, the Rhinos put their faith in a group of young, local players, and were rewarded with a period of unprecedented success now considered to represent the club’s ‘Golden Generation’.

I think myself incredibly fortunate to have been a season ticket holder at Headingley at the time. I’d been brought up with my dad telling me stories about following Don Revie’s Leeds. Players like Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer and Paul Madeley (his personal favourite) became mythical heroes, existing in my imagination as eternal statues as much as footballers. United’s plight as they dropped into sixteen years of Football League wilderness helped give me the perspective to understand that watching McGuire and co from the South Stand terraces was a sporting privilege. United’s demise gave the entire city an appreciation of what was happening north of the River Aire. Night games at Headingley became hot, stuffy and atmospheric as fans more accustomed to Elland Road came to watch a team of local lads not just winning, but winning in thrilling style.

“We benefited from Leeds United struggling,” McGuire says. “Leeds United will always have a hardcore following. I reckon we’re loyal people, Leeds people, we support through thick and thin. But I think with the upturn in the Rhinos’ success and our team coming through, we became as popular as football players in Leeds. The rugby players were possibly more well known than some of the footballers. I probably couldn’t tell you many of the players now that played in League One. Jamie Peacock, myself, Kev Sinfield, Rob Burrow, people like that all became obviously quite well known within the city. Our success was magnified because Leeds were struggling a little bit.”

“There aren’t many times you get to hear Marching On Together sung at Old Trafford.”

There was some irony in how the city of Leeds was kept on the sporting map during United’s collapse by the Rhinos’ performances in Grand Finals held at the home of LUFC’s fiercest rivals, Old Trafford.

“I’ll always say it’s a great place to play. I’m not the biggest Man U fan, as you can imagine, but it is a good venue, especially for rugby league. Walking out of that tunnel and the fireworks going off — the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just thinking about it now. We ended up winning eight out of the nine times I played there, so it’s a fairly lucky ground for me.”

McGuire’s first visit to Old Trafford ended with him scoring the winning try, his 39th in thirty games of his breakout campaign. Unable to stop himself, the euphoria of ending Leeds’ 32 year wait for a title propelled him into a celebration more like a football match, sprinting off to the corner with his arm raised like Alan Shearer, once again leaving his teammates racing to catch up.

“You get caught up in the moment sometimes. You do things and you’re like, ‘What am I doing?!’ I was just trying to run off and then everybody piled on. It was special just to be part of that team and do what we did that year. It was an unbelievable season, really.”

As became a theme throughout McGuire’s Leeds career, the Rhinos went to Old Trafford in October 2004 being written off by some sections of the press. They had dominated the regular rounds of the Super League season, finishing top of the table by a record margin, but lost at home in the play-offs to their fiercest rivals Bradford Bulls. They took their second chance of reaching the final by thrashing Wigan 40-12, but despite their relative youth — McGuire was 21, Burrow was 22, and Sinfield, the captain, was 24 — the Rhinos were bundled in with the previous 32 years of underachievement, consigned to being ‘big game bottlers’. A rematch with Bradford in the Grand Final, won 16-8, was the start of the club comprehensively ridding themselves of that tag.

“We’re really lucky because we had a really supportive coach in Tony Smith, who obviously I’m working with now, who demanded high standards from all the players. I think his philosophies and his way he went about things really suited a younger player: working hard, making sure standards didn’t drop, and expressing yourselves. We’d been building a team for a while. We’d won the academy competition a few times. We’d also come through into the first team together, and you could just sense it was going to happen. I think us coming through and Tony coming in married up really well. We had some good experienced players — Keith Senior, Barrie McDermott, Willie Poching, Dave Furner — that gelled all the younger players together. And yeah, we just were lucky. We all felt comfortable around each other. Sometimes when you’re in those moments you’ve got to take advantage of it.”

That last sentence makes it all sound so effortless. McGuire knew better than most how to take advantage of those moments. As well as leading the way as the most prolific tryscorer in Super League history, his eight tries in nine Grand Finals make him the top tryscorer in domestic rugby league’s biggest game, getting decisive tries in five of Leeds’ eight victories, as well as their only one in their 2005 defeat. Alongside Sinfield and Burrow, Leeds have an iconic trio of playmakers who are the only players to each be named man of the match in a Grand Final twice.

“I got the drop goal and started celebrating — I’d actually punctured a lung”

The most satisfying aspect of the Rhinos’ success was how hard they had to work and the setbacks they had to overcome. Leeds’ record in the Challenge Cup is the contrast that shows how remarkable their success in the Grand Final was. Between 2000 and 2012, they lost all six of their Challenge Cup final appearances. Even McGuire’s efforts couldn’t shake off Wembley’s hex on Leeds. He was in the stands at the old stadium, watching Aston Villa beat United 3-0 in the 1996 League Cup final, and was part of the Rhinos squad that lost in three consecutive years at Wembley, albeit missing the last of the trilogy through injury.

“I’m going to be honest, I was over the Challenge Cup,” he says. “I just thought, ‘Because we’re not going to win it, if we’re out of it we can concentrate on winning the Grand Final again.’ I can’t put my finger on it. There were a couple of times that we didn’t prep well. Again, I hate making excuses, but for the final against Wigan [in 2011] we turned up about forty minutes before kick-off and it was rushed. We got stuck in traffic and that was a nightmare from start to finish. But I think we were beaten by the better team all the other times. Warrington were good, they found a way to win Challenge Cups — obviously Tony [Smith] was coach and they found a niche of how to play in those conditions, and they were just better than us on those days. The one in 2005 [losing to Hull FC by a point], we should have never lost that game. But I think some of those moments inspire you to perform further down the line. Without the losses you probably don’t get the satisfaction of the wins.”

Failing to win the Challenge Cup would have left the Golden Generation’s long list of honours looking somewhat incomplete. In 2014, they finally became the first Leeds team to win at the new Wembley, edging out Castleford 23-10. The game contains two more of the great McGuire celebrations. First, after leaping above full-back Luke Dorn to claim Burrow’s kick and score in front of the Leeds end, jumping to his feet to embrace his partner in crime.

“We’d spoken about that all week to be honest, kicking above Dorn and challenging. You talk tactics, and nine times out of ten you don’t put it into practice. You think, ‘We’ll do this,’ but then the game just flows and you forget to do things. When those things that you’ve practised and spoken about come off, you get more of a satisfaction in it. That was pretty special.”

The second celebration came as Castleford threatened a comeback in the second half. McGuire nervelessly kicked a drop-goal to confirm Leeds’ win, turning and uppercutting the air, knowing the game was won. Seven years later, he recreates the celebration perfectly in front of me, even if the memory does make him wince. As Mick Jones found out when dislocating his elbow in the 1972 FA Cup final, winning with Leeds at Wembley comes at a cost.

“I’d hurt my ribs,” McGuire says. “I got tackled and landed on somebody’s knee and hurt my ribs and I was just trying to see the game through. But then I got the drop goal and started celebrating. Afterwards I was in pain like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ I’d actually punctured a lung and had to go to hospital after the game. I didn’t play for a few weeks after that. It was a painful memory, but a good memory.”

Winning at Wembley no longer felt so daunting for Leeds, and Hull KR were eviscerated 50-0 on the way to completing a historic clean sweep of domestic trophies with the treble of 2015. “We went again the year after, thinking, ‘We know what to do now. Let’s go do it again.’ We managed to back it up, so two Challenge Cup medals, but it should have been more.”

“We became as popular as football players in Leeds”

Castleford were also the opponents for McGuire’s last trip to Old Trafford for a Grand Final. The Tigers were heavy favourites to beat Leeds in the 2017 decider having thrashed the Rhinos 66-10 at the start of the season, part of a sequence of eight consecutive wins over Leeds. Castleford finished top of Super League by a record margin but lacked Leeds’ experience of winning at Old Trafford. Jamie Jones-Buchanan often compared Leeds to meerkats when they could smell autumn in the air, awakening the muscle memory of winning the biggest prize on inevitably dark, rainy nights in Manchester. McGuire knew exactly how to win a game of that magnitude, while Castleford were trying to work it out on the job. Named man of the match, McGuire scored two tries, kicked two drop-goals, controlled the game, and even pulled off a try-saving tackle when the match was still in the balance. Fittingly his second try, the 267th and last he scored in a Leeds shirt, was created by a kick from Burrow, who was also playing his last game for the club.

“My favourite final is the last one, my last game for Leeds,” McGuire says. “Just because of what happened. It was nice to show people what I still had.” The enjoyment his team took from upsetting the odds was seen in a video of the squad drinking in Leeds, belting out a rendition of Castleford’s victory song ‘Sweet Caroline’, complete with winger Ryan Hall flicking the Vs to the doubters in any and every direction. “It wasn’t the best decision, but I think when you’ve been drinking for two days celebrating, things like that happen! It was a little bit tongue in cheek. Cas had a great year and I suppose it was a little bit of rubbing it back. I’m living in Woodlesford and am right on the cusp of having Cas fans all around me. I get a little bit of stick but it’s all fun and games.”

Singing Sweet Caroline was reserved for boozing back in Leeds. At Old Trafford, nothing sounded sweeter than hearing Marching On Together sung in celebration.

“Some of the best memories are when we’ve won, and going to the big stand at the back. All the fans are there singing and you’re lifting the trophy up, showing it to the fans. Some of those memories are the best. There aren’t many times you get to hear Marching On Together sung at Old Trafford.”

After seeing out his playing career with two seasons at Hull KR, McGuire joined their coaching staff. The Rhinos are now his competition, but his support for United remains unconditional. “I’m influencing my little lad now. He’s Leeds United mad. The good thing now is that, even though he likes the bigger players like Messi and Ronaldo, since Ronaldo went to Man U he’s got rid of all his shirts. He’s learning pretty fast!”

Like so many of us, McGuire’s passion for Leeds United has been rekindled since Marcelo Bielsa took over the club. Eager to see as much of this Leeds team as possible and enjoy the resurgent atmosphere, he was back at Old Trafford on the opening day of the season. Leeds may have been embarrassed 5-1 in the football, but McGuire has ensured there will always be an essence of Leeds glory in one section of Old Trafford.

“I always have a look for where I scored. I scored all my tries, apart from one, at one end. All within about thirty square metres to that one side of the posts. I have a look and the memories start to flood back. Even watching a Man U game on telly, they come out of the tunnel and you hear the roar. That’s something you can never replicate and you miss when you finish playing, the anticipation of a big game. I had a good look when I went back in the early part of the season. I was looking for my area where I scored. It brings back good memories.” ⬢