SIX OF THE BEST

MANOR PARK have played a blinder by Nutting out So many teams in one massive weekend

- Bobby Bridge

WITH TEARS stinging the corner of his eyes as he strained to hold back his emotions, Ian King shares the poignant secret he’d guarded tightly all afternoon. The 57-year-old hadn’t pulled on his boots since losing his stepson Jamie Styles, a fellow Manor Park RFC player, in a traffic collision aged just 28, in 2017.

He is standing just a few metres away from the framed shirt in which Jamie is immortalised in this tiny sporting pavilion in Nuneaton, in the Midlands.

“I’ve worn his kit today,” King says, looking down at his mud-stained shorts, socks and both heavily strapped knees. “I didn’t think I could play again after Jamie passed away, it didn’t feel right. But today was the day to do it.

“When I went on the pitch, I said, ‘This is for Jamie’ and the weight I’d carried around just lifted right off my shoulders.”

It’s a sombre way to kick open the door on a remarkable afternoon for a tumbling procession of stories at this most humble of grass-roots rugby clubs.

On Saturday 23 March, exactly four years to the day since the United Kingdom was plunged into a lockdown during the global Covid pandemic, Manor Park celebrated arguably the greatest day in their 64-year history.

They have no youth section and only one sloping pitch with a ‘bomb hole corner’ that is occasionally used by the RAF for Chinook landing practice. They operate out of a cricket pavilion they don’t own, with its leaky roof and a troublesome boiler, and whose overall facilities were once referred to as “proper council” by a sour representative from a losing opponent. Yet today Manor Park RFC manages to, inexplicably, field six senior teams on one glorious but windswept spring afternoon.