Kevin Sinfield: The Extra Mile – A story of commitment and dedication – TotalRL.com | Rugby League Express

Kevin Sinfield: The Extra Mile
Century Publishing
Hardback 308pp
RRP: £20.00
ISBN: 9781529903058

Most autobiographies of Rugby League players are written chronologically, beginning with childhood memories before going on to cover a playing career in relative detail, perhaps then with a few reflections on the player’s career and a list of the best players the writer has played with and against.

In the vast majority of cases, a player has little to say about his post-playing career, usually because it’s of little interest to the reader to know what happened after he retired.

But Kevin Sinfield is an exception.

His playing career was outstanding.

He made his professional debut for Leeds at 16 years of age, he became the club captain at the age of 22 and he held that position for thirteen seasons until he retired triumphant after leading the Rhinos to Grand Final glory in 2015 at the age of 35.

During that time he made 521 appearances for the Rhinos, scoring 3,967 points. He led the team to seven Grand Final victories, two Challenge Cup wins and three World Club Challenge wins. He holds the Super League record for the most appearances and points.

He is the third highest points scorer in the history of Rugby League (behind only Neil Fox and Jim Sullivan).

While playing for Leeds, he won the Lance Todd Trophy in 2005, the Harry Sunderland Trophy in 2009 and 2012 and he won the Golden Boot, awarded to the best player in the world, in 2012.

He played 15 times for Great Britain, 15 times for England and three times for Lancashire.

He was awarded the MBE in 2014 and the OBE in 2021.

It was a wonderful playing career and since his retirement he has dabbled with playing rugby union with Yorkshire Carnegie for a season, worked as a director of rugby for both the RFL and Leeds Rhinos, coached Leicester Tigers as their defence coach and, currently, he has become an assistant coach for the England Rugby Union team.

His rise as a coach, albeit in rugby union, has been probably even more impressive than his playing career.

But I suspect that it’s neither his playing career nor his coaching career for which he will be mainly remembered.

Since his former team-mate Rob Burrow announced to the world in December 2019 that he was suffering from motor neurone disease (MND), Sinfield has set himself a series of increasingly difficult physical challenges to raise money for his stricken friend.

In 2020 he ran seven marathons in seven days (the Seven in Seven Challenge), which raised £2.7 million.

In 2021 he completed the Extra Mile Challenge, running the 101 miles from Leicester’s Welford Road ground to Headingley, which raised more than £2 million.

In 2022 he completed the Ultra 7 in 7 Challenge, running from Murrayfield to Old Trafford in seven stages, arriving at half-time of the World Cup Final and raising more than £2.5 million.

How can anyone be so committed and single minded?

This book goes some way to answering that question.

In the book’s foreword, Rob Burrow asks: “What sort of friend would put his life at risk for me, forgoing sleep, spending time apart from his family and risking permanent injury or worse?”

Rob goes some way to answering that question.

“In our playing days, Kevin was the ultimate captain who led from the front. Cool, calm and collected. In the team, we all wanted to stay close to him. We all wanted to be around Kevin and be as professional as he was.”

The poet William Wordsworth, in his poem ‘The Rainbow’, was the first to use the phrase ‘The Child is father of the Man’.

And Sinfield perhaps reveals the wisdom of that line in his reflections on his early life as a young Rugby League player.

He played his early rugby at Waterhead in Oldham and took to the game instantly.

Sinfield reflects on leadership and relates back to a game for Lancashire against Yorkshire when he was in the Under-9s and was on the bench, playing for five minutes at the end of the game. He found the experience immensely frustrating.

“I say to myself, ‘I’ll never come up here and be on the bench again.’ The following year I was made captain.”

At the trial the following year, Sinfield discovered his leadership qualities in encouraging his team-mates to play well and was made captain and that was the first step of the ladder on his course to greatness.

“Pretty much every time I played from the age of ten, I ran out as captain,” he adds.

Kevin signed for Leeds at the age of 13 and he would make his debut three years later.

He suffered a massive setback in 2000, however, and he relates his disappointment at being dropped by coach Dean Lance for the Challenge Cup Final after he had been the man of the match in the semi-final.

Seventeen years later, in his final year, he would suffer a similar fate when Brian McDermott, who Sinfield rates as his best coach, dropped him for a period from the Leeds team. It’s easy to tell that Sinfield still struggles to come to terms with that decision, which with hindsight was far more devastating for him than being dropped for the Challenge Cup Final.

In fact the book skates over his playing career, with the majority of the 24 chapters relating the story of his interaction with Rob Burrow, with an account of the gruelling nature of the challenges he took on to raise money for MND research.

“If you’re doing something for someone else, it’s far greater than doing something for yourself,” he says.

And that is clearly his personal motto.

Kevin Sinfield is a man I already admired greatly, but after reading this book, in which he was helped by Daily Telegraph sports journalist Paul Hayward, my admiration of him is off the scale.