Leeds Rhinos wheelchair star Ryan Richardson eyeing double glory

Homegrown hero Ryan Richardson has been one of the stars of Leeds Rhinos’ Wheelchair Rugby League side in recent years, and he has his sights set on international glory.

Twenty-two-year-old Richardson, from Leeds, was a key player as Rhinos sprung a surprise in the Grand Final against overwhelming favourites Halifax in September, to win the club’s first title.

For a club that is only six years old, it was quite an achievement.

Rhinos have been making year-on-year improvements since they were formed in 2012, and now they can rightly class themselves among the best in the country.

And for the humble Richardson, it has been a team effort all the way.

He says: “If I had to pin something down I’d probably put it down to how well we bond as a team, how we push each other to get through that next stage of where we need to be.

“We know each other’s own strengths and weaknesses and we work towards that to get the outcome that we’ve got.”

Halifax were back-to-back champions, and had inflicted Grand Final heartache on Leeds the year before.

But the Rhinos raced into an early lead and held it for the duration of the whole match, eventually triumphing 54-44 at Gillingham’s Medway Park to claim a satisfying piece of revenge.

“It’s been a massive boost for us,” Richardson says.

“For them having gone two years practically undefeated, in the Grand Final; to do that was the ultimate goal for us, to win that final.

“And now hopefully going forward we’ll be able to retain it and put up a really decent fight against them.”

The message from Leeds is one of consolidation and progress, rather than one of enjoying their success for too long.

Their on-field celebrations were as rowdy as they come but as the saying goes, winning it once was the easy part – doing it again is the real test, and Richardson is ready for it.

“I don’t think we take any game lightly, as a club,” he says.

“We always look at how we can win and how we can develop, and we always try and take out of a game everything we can to help us progress to the next game.

“So I don’t think we’ll look at it any differently, if anything we’ll continue to improve to try and make that scoreline bigger.” Richardson is one of the able-bodied members of the Rhinos side, with wheelchair rugby league open to disabled and able-bodied sportsmen and women alike.

He is indebted to brother Owen for his route into a sport it is unlikely he would have considered as a youngster.

“I actually got into it through my brother,” Richardson remembers.

“He’s disabled and he started doing the wheelchair basketball side of things.

“I used to go and watch over him, just in case anything happened or anything like that, and then from there, the head of the place said ‘why don’t you start doing rugby?’ and at the time I just did it to keep fit and as something to do.

“But from there it’s really taken me forward and made me want to drive to get me to where I am now.

“I didn’t realise I would get this far into it, to be honest. I’ve always been passionate about sport and I thought I would give it a go, it’s something different.

“I’ve always liked rugby so I thought I would give it a go and see where it takes me.”

And from this inauspicious beginning, Richardson has forged himself an unexpected path as an international sportsman.

In his third season as an England player, Richardson has had a taste of the highs and lows that international sport has to offer.

Last year looked to be the glorious culmination of an unlikely rise as England appeared set to win the wheelchair rugby league World Cup final against a France side they had beaten in 2015’s European final.

But, having led by two points with two minutes to play, they were beaten by a late French try.

It is a measure of how far Richardson has come that this disappointment was even an experience; only two years previous, he went to an England trial with little real hope of making the team.

“During my first season I picked things up pretty quickly and from there they announced that they were having trials,” he says.

“A few of my teammates were saying ‘why don’t you go and try out?’ so I thought I’ll go and try it, see what the level is that I need to get to and even if I didn’t get picked then I’d still know what areas I needed to develop and work from there.

“Since then it’s just brought me on massively, being in that sort of environment.

“It was really just the inexperience of that exposure to that intensity, that style of play.

“During my time at Rhinos, the first season for me was just trying to get settled in, trying to learn how the game plays.

“It’s completely different to rugby league, there are so many adaptations you have to look into.”

His transition into the England set-up was eased by a posse of familiar faces.

Rhinos were the best-represented team in England’s World Cup squad with Jodie Boyd-Ward, Tom Halliwell, Nathan Collins and club captain James Simpson comprising almost half of the 12-player squad. “I think it was [a help] because I do gel well with the England lot,” Richardson adds. “But I feel with the Leeds Rhinos’ players it’s a different connection.

“When I used to have those people there to be able to push me forward, I was able to grow in that environment while also being able to gel well with the other players.

“At the time they had known them a lot longer than me, so they could introduce me and get me settled into that environment. I definitely think we can go on to win something.

“We took a lot from that World Cup defeat.

“We’ve got a long time now until 2021 to look at all of the little finer details that we need to iron out, so that when we go into 2021 we’ve had that big push from ourselves to get to where we need to be.”

The 2021 World Cup is on home turf and will be played as part of the Rugby League World Cup main event for the first time, a significant boost for the sport’s profile.

By then, Richardson hopes he will have made a habit of lifting trophies.