Adam Radwan

He’s not as fast as his dad, but Adam Radwan, the half-Egyptian wing from a village near Sheepwash, was quick enough to score three tries on his England debut. Luckily, he’s got a cap to prove it, otherwise he’d never believe it happened.

Adam Radwan still seems to be in a state of shock, of sorts. He only became a Newcastle regular in their Championship season and, the following campaign, his first in the Premiership as a genuine first teamer, he’s found himself called up by England. “I wouldn’t say I was too nervous, I was just excited,” he says. “I spoke to Wils [Mark Wilson] quite a lot about what to expect. 

“Wils’ best bit of advice was to go in and be excited, don’t be nervous, don’t hold back, just give it a crack. 

“You have to remember they have picked you for doing what you’ve been doing all season, so in my head it was just ‘keep on doing what I’ve been doing really’.”

Even now, as he recounts the previous weeks with England, the excitement is still bubbling away. “The weirdest bit,” he continues, “was when we’d been there a few weeks, and you had the guys from the [Premiership] final come in. 

“Yeah,” he begins, in a way that suggests he’s picturing it all again, “and so Sladey came in, and you’re like...” he pauses, taking his own recall in, “I’ve like grown up the last few years watching him play – I think he’s unbelievable – and it’s quite weird to then be training with him. 

“I mean, it was only four years ago that I wasn’t even playing for Newcastle and I was watching him play for Exeter and, all of a sudden, I’m training with him,” he repeats, still not quite able to believe what’s happened. “He was dead nice, dead easy to get along with,” he surmises. “I was only training with him for a couple of weeks, but he’s such a clever rugby player that you pick up loads training with and against him.”

Others stood out too, including Marcus Smith – “Class,” he says – and Freddie Stewart. “He’s really good, really young, but he’s got an old head, and he’s massive – I was calling him ‘Crouchie’, because he’s massive, so big, I did a lot of aerial stuff with him, because he’s so good in the air.

“There wasn’t anyone I didn’t get along with, even the guys that had been there before,” says Adam, continuing his run-through of what were undoubtedly the best weeks of his rugby life. “It was my first experience of doing it, but I felt really comfortable around the lads, really relaxed, and everyone got on really well.”

And there were also the trimmings of elite rugby. “The food was unbelievable,” he says, “so I was stuffing my face at every opportunity. Every meal there was a live station where the chefs were cooking specifically for you; there were options for people looking to gain weight; options for people needing to lose weight; vegetarian options – everything. And it was restaurant quality every day.”

Similarly, at training Adam did his best to maximise England Rugby’s entire equipment inventory. “There were so many different bits of equipment, things that I’ve not used before,” he says. “There were loads of weird rugby balls, square rugby balls, just loads of kit, and I was trying to use as much of it as I could, just to see what I thought, what worked for me, what didn’t.”

It wasn’t only the equipment that was next level. “The training was a massive step up,” he admits. “But the way they see it is, train really, really hard but when you recover that’s also done to the same level, with all the equipment they have. That means you can maintain that training load.”

His ‘100 per cent at all times’ ethos, was all tempered with the fact he knew his time with England could come to an end at any moment. “You knew there was a point every week where the squad kind of got rejigged.

“Week one, rejigged, week, two, rejigged, then it stayed the same,” he explains, “but every time you didn’t know if it was going to be your last week, so every day you gave it 100 per cent because you never knew how long you would be there. 

“I just wanted to make sure, whether I was there for one week or four, I’d made the most of it.” 

Did he think he’d make it to a Test cap? “Everyone there was unbelievable,” he says, “all the wingers were so good, so I didn’t know. I thought I was capable of getting a cap, and I knew if I trained well I’d get a cap, but it still feels weird that I’ve got one. 

“I can’t get my head around it,” he adds, “and how it’s happened, the last four years have just zoomed by.

“We got on the bus on the morning of the Canada game – and it’s a twenty-minute drive to Twickenham – and I remember thinking ‘how has this happened? How am I on my way to play for England?’.”

Adam Radwan was released by Newcastle four years ago. “I remember the meeting,” says Adam. “It was with two academy coaches, Mark Laycock and James Ponton; they said they felt I wasn’t quite ready.

“I couldn’t agree more,” he says. “At the time it was tough to take but I also knew that them saying that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be a professional rugby player, because I still believed that I was going to be. 

“I was seventeen or eighteen,” he says. “I’d only spent a year with Newcastle, and I was aware that I hadn’t been there long, and it wasn’t one of them things where it was be-all and end-all, it wasn’t then or never.”

He had the pace then, but that wasn’t enough. “I was extremely raw,” he admits. “I was a good athlete, but certain things were not good enough: my skills levels were pretty poor, my game understanding was poor – I hadn’t been playing that long, and I knew it was going to be a tight call. 

“One of the best things for my career was getting let go,” continues Adam, “it made me work extremely hard because I’d seen what it was like to be on the other side, I’d known how it felt to be released and have the rug pulled from under you. My biggest motivation was never feeling that again. It was a blessing in disguise.”

He’s philosophical about it now, but did he feel that at the time? “No, I didn’t, I was gutted,” he admits. “I was just so gutted. But it didn’t take long for me to move, I didn’t feel sorry for myself, it only took a couple of days to dust myself down and realise it was going to take a little bit longer [to become professional], but I was going to do it. 

“My coach at college Chris Hyndman – he played for Northampton – was also my coach at Billingham, where I’d played before, and I did extra skills, extra gym stuff with him, he didn’t let me lose sight of what I wanted to achieve.”

So focused was Adam on getting back on the professional path, he did a third year of college. “I still wanted to chase rugby, ” he says. “I’d gone to Hartlepool College purely for the rugby, originally I was doing A-levels, but I realised after two days that meant I wasn’t going to be able to make the most of the rugby programme, so I switched to a BTech – that was me putting all my eggs in one basket; luckily it has paid off.”

Rugby had started for him by chance. Staying at a friend’s house, aged twelve, his parents couldn’t pick him up the next morning, so he went along with his friend to rugby at Middlesbrough RUFC instead. “It was a game, we played against West Hartlepool and I played number eight,” he says. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I enjoyed it and said ‘I’ll definitely come back’.

“The next week, I played on the wing, scored seven tries and never moved from the wing again.”

Adam had later moved to Billingham at sixteen to play a higher level and then on to Newcastle, albeit briefly in the first instance.

The advice from Newcastle had been to bridge the gap between Billingham – National Three North – and the Premiership, with a stint at National One Darlington Mowden Park. “They said they were going to keep tabs on me,” he says, “but I owe Mowden a lot.

“I’m quite good at knowing when I’ve played good and bad, and for quite a few weeks I played bad at Mowden but they stuck with me, they kept putting me out there. 

“I think when I signed for them they were third, but by Christmas they were like third from bottom, but then one day it clicked. 

“I knew it would,” he says. “I felt that morning [of the game] that it was going to be different, and I scored a hat-trick, I finished that season with sixteen tries from sixteen games.”

By this time Newcastle had already signed him for the following season, and he even made his debut in the LV Cup against Saracens.  

When he returned on a one-year deal, he took the same attitude he had with England. “It was ‘give it 100 per cent’, because one year isn’t long,” he says. “Especially when you think about how soon people start looking for their next contract.”

Continuing to play for DMP, he took Newcastle game time whenever he could – in the Challenge Cup, Anglo-Welsh Cup – as the side challenged at top end of the table. Appearances were limited, but the competition was fierce. “In my first few years, there were just so many good wingers,” says Adam.  “Sinoti Sinoti, Niki Goneva, Alex Tati, DTH van der Merwe was there for a bit, Zach Kibirige, Chris Harris played a bit on the wing – so many good wingers, I didn’t get a look, but I knew I had to bide my time...”

Even though he was an academy player, at Newcastle there’s no separation. “It’s massively inclusive,” he says. “I wasn’t first-team on paper, I was still in the academy, but everyone trains together, so everyone is very tight. I felt very much part of the team that finished top four and the team that went down…

“It was tough,” he says of relegation, “really tough. A lot of guys had to leave, they couldn’t have a year in the Championship. Guys like Chris, Zach, Simon Hammersley, Mark Wilson, them boys couldn’t have a year in Champ, so it was tough for them, it was a club they’d grown up with.

“But you don’t have time to mope around, you’ve got to get back up.”

And the changes in personnel gave Adam his first run of games. “I knew that I had to play well,” he says. “I played the first few games, there were some good tries, but there were things I just wasn’t doing well, and I got dropped.

“It was Hartpury at home, I didn’t play that well, but scored a decent try, I got dropped for the Cornish Pirates away game, which I was gutted about. 

“Dean said, ‘there’s more to do than score tries’, and that was a massive kick up the backside.

“The big thing Dean said to me was, ‘you need to treat this like the Premiership’, we didn’t see ourselves as a Championship team or Championship players, we had to be Premiership players in a Premiership team playing in the Championship. 

“I also think I was trying too hard,” says Adam, going back to his earlier starts. “I was forcing things because it was my first opportunity to play regularly and I was trying to do something, trying to score, every time I got the ball. It was just ‘relax, you’ll know when the opportunity comes’. I didn’t get dropped after that.”

That experience also brought together the current squad. “The impact of going down together and going back up together was massive, it’s made us a very close team, a very tight group. 

“To go through that makes you tough to play against,” he continues. “We’re up here in the north, the nearest team is in Manchester, so people have to come a long way to play us, and it’s a fight. We took the attitude of ‘let’s make it as hard as we can to play us, make it so they don’t even want to get on the bus to come here – let’s be really hard, gritty, horrible northerners’…”

Horrible northerners is not something you associate with the chocolate -box village of Osmotherley, on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors. It’s where hikers congregate to refuel for yomps across the countryside and where day-trippers stop off, perhaps en route to the nearby Sheepwash, a picnic spot just outside of the village where drovers once watered their flock. 

This is home for Adam. He was born in the local post office, once run by his Egyptian father and Yorkshire mother. “They’ve moved down the road now,” he says, “but I probably lived there [the village] most my life, I really like it, it’s class, it’s dead busy in the summer.

“There’s three pubs, a little village shop that does ice cream, a coffee shop,” continues Adam, listing the key facilities of Osmotherley: population, 668. “All my friends have left now but our families are still there, and we all get back together in the summer and at Christmas and do a little pub crawl.”

His parents, Jane and Belal, no longer run the post office. “My mum’s always worked in healthcare, she does midwifery stuff,” he explains. “Dad always had a few restaurants, but now he’s a translator, for the police and all sorts really.”

That he’s half Egyptian hasn’t escaped public attention, it was something Eddie Jones chatted to him about, and was soon picked up by the press. “I mean I’m half Egyptian, but I’m also very English,” says Adam, whose full name is Adam Belal A. Radwan. “It’s only come about recently [the talk of Egyptian heritage], because I don’t think people knew about my background.”

He admits he’s not that genned up on the land of his father. “He’s from Port Said, near the Suez Canal, and we used to go there for a week and then go on to somewhere else a bit more touristy,” he says.

Like the pyramids? “Only once,” he says. “The way I describe seeing the pyramids is imagine being in the middle of London, then turning around and there’s some pyramids on the outskirts of the city; it’s a bit weird.

“It’s good,” he acknowledges, “but once you’ve done the whole camel ride around the pyramids once, it’s probably enough.”

The Egyptian culture did permeate through to the Radwan Osmotherley household in one way though. “He [dad] cooks a lot of Egyptian-style food,” says Adam. “Marinated meats and that kind of thing, he’s does these home-made marinades and every time I go home, he sends me back with a big tub of marinated chicken or spices to put on my chicken – he loves cooking!”

That wasn’t all that his dad passed on. “My dad thinks he was quicker than me at my age,” explains Adam. “Which I don’t believe at all, but he reckons he was really quick. My mum was the total opposite, she’s done ultra-marathons, so she can run forever, but she’s so slow – I’m so glad I didn’t get those genes.”

On that Twickenham-bound bus, Adam may well have been glad he did inherit his mother’s determination – surely, an attribute of every long-distance runner – when he took to the field. “Everyone says, ‘make sure you enjoy this day because it’ll fly by’ and it absolutely did,” he says, of his England debut against Canada. “I remember looking at the clock and thirty-three minutes had gone and I was like, ‘how has that happened?’ The eighty minutes flew by, but I did enjoy it, every minute of it.”

Unusually for any international debutant, especially in England, it was the first time he’d worn his country’s shirt, at any level. “My biggest worry, right up to kick off, was that it would get cancelled,” he says. “I was meant to be playing against Scotland A and that got called off on the morning of the game, and that was gutting, because I never played age groups or anything, so it would have been my first opportunity to put on an England top.” But he did make it onto the pitch, and took no longer than fifteen minutes to score his first try. 

At a time when the game was still close – at 14-7 – he received the ball just inside the opponent’s half, burst through a trio of Canadian defenders and then arched his way to the line. 

“I just wanted to get the ball and have a crack and do something,” he says of his mindset. “I really enjoy playing and I enjoy trying to influence games and make things happen, I just wanted to do that, to make something happen or have a shot at it. I knew when I got that ball [for his first try] that either I was going to score or Dommers [Alex Dombrandt, who was running in support] was, because there was just too much space to defend us both. So, that one I knew as soon as I got the ball [I would score].”

His second try was a comparative stroll in from the 22, and for the third, England’s final in the 70-14 win, he collected Dan Robson’s box kick on his own 10-metre line amid a cluster of red shirts but none of them could get a hand on the Newcastle wing and he cleared the group and made it to the line. “People ask ‘what are you thinking when you get the ball?’,” says Adam, “and a lot of the time I don’t think, my body just does it. Whatever happens, it just takes over.

“That third try was the icing on the cake though,” he continues, “when I scored it, I was just like ’wow’, I was in shock. It didn’t sink in then, and it still hasn’t now.

“I think about it all the time, it’s something I’ll probably never stop thinking about.”

Adam talks about his England debut with a reverence that you hope every player shares, even those that don’t manage a hat-trick on their first outing, but he’s not intending on this being the story he forever dines out on. “It’s a massive motivation,” he says of his debut, “after the game it wasn’t like, ‘wow, I’ve done it, I’ve played for England’, it was, ‘I need to do this again’. 

“People asked me if it was a massive relief, but it wasn’t, it just made me really hungry to do it again. It’s something that I want to do for as long as I possibly can.

“After the game the coaches were like, ‘well done, but don’t go back to your club and forget what you’ve done’. Which I won’t, and I can’t forget there’s also guys with the Lions and guys like Jonny [May] getting a rest, so there’s a lot of wingers coming back.

“The big test is getting back into the side, but I’ve got to do it, I’ve had
a taste of it now.”

So too has his team-mate, and fellow hat-trick-scoring debutant Jamie Blamire. “Neither of us could believe that we both got hat-tricks,” says Adam of his fellow Falcon, who he first played with at under-18 level. “We stayed down after the game and watched the European [Championships] final and drove back together a couple of days later – I’d never been out in London until then and it’s mad, the cost of everything.”

You prefer Newcastle? “I like it up here,” he says. “I’m biased but I think Newcastle city is so under-rated, it’s got coast, it’s got class places to go out, good food places and it’s not as expensive, there’s places you can get three trebles for £7.50. 

“It gets a bad press, but I love it, I think Newcastle is the best city in England.” 

And now he has his own little slice of it, having just moved into a place with girlfriend Mollie. In the walk-in wardrobe they share, Adam might not have all the space, but he’s made room for his prized cap. “Every time I walk past it, it’s like, ‘wow, that’s mine’,” he says, bringing the cap out for the photoshoot. “Eddie gave it to Sladey who presented it to me – there was a screen there, so all my family had logged on to Zoom to watch it, my sisters on the other side of the world, everyone. There were tears.”

Yours? “My sisters’, but the most emotional bit for me was ringing my mum and grandparents from camp to tell them I was playing; that was a tough phone call. They’ve always followed me everywhere, even to sevens in Mauritius, but I don’t know how they managed it as they’re not good with public transport – they found their way there somehow though.”

After his best rugby summer, Adam is now back at Newcastle, looking to kick on from a solid return to the Premiership. “I love doing what I do,” he says. “When I say I’m going to work, I’m going to do something I love with a very good bunch of people, we have craic all the time, it’s like being back at school. 

“When you’re training, you’re training, but when you’re not, you’re messing around having a laugh. And you get to travel quite a bit – I’ve done some amazing things…”

This season will be different though: for starters, the opposition won’t be surprised when he does ‘amazing things’ on the pitch. “Maybe, but I think I quite like being under pressure,” he says. “The way I look at it, is that it’s a privilege to be under that pressure. 

“I absorb it, feed off it, get a buzz off it, I love playing in front of big crowds,” he says, adding, “the bigger the better. I think if you know how to deal with it, then it’s good thing.” 

Story by  Alex Mead

Pictures by Russ Williams

This extract was taken from issue 15 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.