Shaun Edwards: 'Everything I do is to make my mother and father proud'

Two thoughtful Lancastrians will look at the Six Nations table tomorrow morning, but only one will feel satisfied with what he sees. While Brian Ashton's England languish in fourth place, the part-time, assistant coach of Wales, Shaun Edwards, knows that his boys will go top if they beat Italy in Cardiff and France get pricked by a red rose in Paris.

For Edwards, though, beating Italy is a dangerous assumption In an outstanding career as a rugby league player and a rugby union coach, the man from Wigan has always considered complacency to be his mortal enemy. At the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel this week, the Welsh players have been prepared by Edwards and head coach Warren Gatland with the kind of fierce intensity that had even the mighty flanker Martyn Williams, not exactly 'Powder-Puff from Pontypridd', joking that if he'd known how tough the new regime was going to be, he might never have emerged from international retirement.

Edwards does not smile when, in the hotel's lobby following another uncompromising coaching session, I mention this crack. To him, there is nothing unusual about his training methods. “We try to enact as close as possible what's going to happen in the game, it's that simple,” he says. “Me and Warren, that's how we like to work. Get them operating under duress. I'd have thought most coaches do the same. And I have to say that Gavin Henson, as the defensive captain, is doing a great job. We talk to each other about little alterations, and he's superb.”

It doubtless helps that Henson plays for Ospreys, where they employ the so-called blitz defence system to which Edwards - who introduced it at Wasps, where he is head coach - is committed. Edwards concedes that he imported his defensive strategies from rugby league, but thinks too much is made of league's influence on union.

“Defence is nothing new in rugby union. When I took this job I made a point of speaking to some of the players from the great Welsh sides of the 1970s, and to the coach, Mr (Clive) Rowlands. You look back and you only remember the tries, don't you? But they all talked about the importance of defence. Every time they were top of the defensive charts, or narrowly second, they won the championship. When they were third, they never won nothing. Mr Rowlands said he always knew they'd score a try or two, so if they could stop the opposition scoring, they'd win.”

I ask whether he also talked to the colossus of the Welsh defence 30 years ago, JPR Williams? “No. I talked to Gareth Edwards and John Taylor, and I tried to contact Mr Williams, but I couldn't get hold of him.”

The 'mister' is revealing. Belying his iron-hard appearance, and the teeth conspicuous by their absence, and the reputation as the most demanding of taskmasters, there is an air of old-fashioned courtesy about Edwards, which has a lot to do with his strict working-class upbringing. “Everything I do, really, is to try and make my mother and father proud of me,” he says. “I don't think there's anything wrong with that, even when you're 41.”

In some ways, the defining moment of his life occurred some years before he was born, in 1963, when his father, Jack, a professional rugby league player with Warrington, suffered a crippling, career-terminating spinal injury in a match. He was 24 years old. “And he's never worked since,” Edwards says. “He's had four spinal operations and the last one was to prevent him being in a wheelchair.”

Did the club look after him? A small, rueful smile. “He got a benefit, which he got £500 from, and that was not a small amount in them days. I believe the club put £50 to it.” I utter a word not unknown in rugby circles. “Yeah, it's a brutal sport, mate.”

Sustaining a life-changing injury did not stop Jack Edwards from encouraging his son to take up the game. At five young Shaun was cuddling a rugby ball in bed rather than a teddy-bear; by his teens he was the talk of Wigan, the captain of England schoolboys not only in rugby league, but also in union.

“I got a lot of my motivation from my father. He pushed me very hard, and he was very stern, but from a loving perspective, because he knew what was needed to become a professional sportsman. Because of him I've always tried to be as good as I can be. I got huge publicity as a schoolboy in the Wigan area, but it was always my father's opinion I was most concerned about. If he thought I'd played OK, I was happy.”

And the physical risks involved were never mentioned? “They never deterred him, no. My brother, who's no longer with us, became a professional rugby player too.”

In 2003 his brother, Billie-Joe, 16 years younger and on the books at Wigan Warriors, died in a car crash. A family already touched by tragedy felt its full devastating impact, but just as his father's spinal injury had been a form of motivation, so Edwards has tried to gain spiritual strength from his brother's death.

“I speak to him and ask for his help,” he says with a broad, mostly toothless smile. “And when I'm in Wigan I always go and spend some time with him. My mum spends hours there. It's one of the most pristinely-kept graves you could ever see. Whether he's around or not I don't know, but lots of people live in hope that there's something after death, don't they? I felt that particularly when we played England, on his 25th birthday. I I said to him 'I could do with a bit of help today, pal'.”

For all his spirituality, however, Edwards does not ascribe the famous Welsh victory at Twickenham three weeks ago to assistance from beyond his brother's grave. He knows that it was earthly powers, first and foremost, that prevailed 26-19. And he denies that he was additionally motivated by the opposition being the land of (open italics) his (close italics) fathers.

“No, I was excited because it was my first involvement in a test match in rugby union at full international level, and I was motivated by my usual fear of failure. That's what drove me as a player, fear of being embarrassed by an opponent, and as a coach it's the same thing. If you don't do your homework you'll get caught short.”

Edwards claims not to subscribe to the idea, which seems to gain momentum with each round of matches, that the Rugby Football Union were plain bonkers not to offer him a senior coaching role in the England set-up, thus enabling him to team up with his old Wasps mentor Gatland at the other end of the M4.

“I understand exactly why it didn't happen. England had just got to a World Cup final, so why would they need me? There are no hard feelings, I'm just glad to be involved in international rugby, and really glad to be working with Warren again. I wouldn't have come to Wales if Warren hadn't been here.”

Nonetheless, he has identified Wales as “a giant Wigan”, an irresistible image, by which he means a strong working-class ethos as well as a passion for rugby, albeit a different code. “There's that feeling for the game here that I've known all my life. Rugby is the number one sport, whereas in most of the country it would be second or third or even fourth.”

Despite his credentials as a youngster in the 15-man game, and a nice letter from Waterloo RFC, Edwards was never in doubt as to where his playing loyalties lay. As a stand-off or scrum-half of rare tenacity he played 452 times for Wigan, including all eight of their consecutive Challenge Cup wins, but towards the end of his playing career he declined an offer to become head coach at his father's old club, Warrington, in favour of switching codes and moving to Wasps.

“I'd have made more money from Warrington, who were offering a two-year deal, but I wanted to live in London to be near my son (by the M People singer Heather Small). Also, I wanted to have a crack at union and I had a soft spot for Wasps. I'd played against them in the 1996 Twickenham Sevens, and I remember Lawrence [Dallaglio] screaming 'let's smash these rugby league so-and-sos!' I thought, 'I like this guy', so I adopted Wasps as my team, if you like. Just as you have an NFL team you like, which in my case is the (Dallas) Cowboys, Wasps were the rugby union team I followed. I was delighted to join them on the coaching side, although I had a lot to learn.”

And a lot to give, I venture. 'Yeah, but as I said earlier, I think that's overplayed. There maybe is more emphasis on the defensive side of things in rugby league, but I remember Laurence introducing me to a man who'd been coach at Toulouse in the 1980s, Gilles someone, I can't remember his name now.” There is a fleeting silence, during which he looks genuinely perturbed at this memory lapse. “It's very rude of me not being able to remember a great man's name. Anyway, like those old Wales players he said that at Toulouse in the '80s they concentrated mainly on defence and turning over ball. And I'm a great believer that you can prepare for the future by learning from the past.”

His interest in the past does not just extend to rugby history, either. Edwards is a student of the First World War, and often stops by the war memorial near his home in west London for a spot of contemplation. I ask whether he has read Sebastian Faulks's powerful novel, Birdsong? “I haven't, no. I've read about it, but I think I'd find it too harrowing. What them lads went through... I've a fear of what happened in the trenches, to be honest.”

A voracious reader, he currently has two books on the go. One of them is about Kabbalah, the mystical form of Judaism. The other is Roberto Duran's autobiography. Edwards is forever studying other sports to gain further insight into his own, using wrestling drills and NFL techniques to build up his players' strength and conditioning. It is a tireless quest, and with Gatland similarly engaged, it is already bearing fruit. But tomorrow, the focus shifts to the Millennium Stadium.

“If we can win against Italy then we will virtually guarantee third position at least,” he says. “And for last year's wooden spoonists, whose World Cup didn't go great, that will be a success.” But not one, I fancy, that will satisfy Edwards in the least.

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Shaun Edwards, though a proud Englishman, lost no sleep after being one of the architects of the first Welsh victory at Twickenham for 20 years, even though the England team comprised several players he coaches at Wasps.

"I'm a competitive person, and I was completely focused on my team winning, though it did feel a bit strange coaching against people like Paul Sackey, James Haskell, Vicks, Shawsy and that, who are good mates. The other guys on the England team I’m used to opposing."

He denies that his knowledge of the Wasps players gave Wales any particular advantage. "It's been overplayed, all that. There's that much analysis done nowadays, everyone knows Sackey's got a great right sidestep, that Simon Shaw's superb in the mauling game, that Haskell's a dynamic runner. Maybe in yesteryear it would have made a difference, but we've got three full-time analysts with Wales now. They didn't need my input.”

Edwards adds that he tries to teach his players to be disciplined in their dealings with the referee. "The referee has a huge impact on the game, so there must be no backchatting, no giving away avoidable penalties. I respect football, I think it’s a game of great vision and technique, but the way players speak to the referees is scandalous. I just can't believe how the referees stand for it. To me it's beyond all reasoning, and actually I blame the referees more than the players, that they allow players to speak to them like that."