Rugby League: Sharkey scrums down in a tough proving ground

Rising from tea-maker to director, Wigan's wonder woman has made it in the man's world of rugby league.

ACCORDING TO remarks attributed to a senior figure within the BBC last week, women do not much care for rugby league. That will come as news to the high female proportion of the crowd at grounds like Leeds and Wigan - and even more so to the increasing numbers of women in positions of power and influence within the game.

When Wigan play at Headingley tonight, for instance, the longest-serving member of their team, on or off the field, will not be some craggy-featured prop or an aged retainer who has scrabbled away beneath the stand, man and boy, in some capacity since Billy Boston was a lad.

It will be Mary Sharkey, who arrived at Central Park as the office junior in 1981 and who was confirmed last week as the club's first woman director.

"I was straight out of school and looking for a full-time job, when a friend of mine who was working for Maurice Lindsay in his own business told me that there might be something going at Wigan," she recalls. She arrived for the interview and Lindsay admits to having completely forgetting about her, leaving her in a corridor for an hour and 40 minutes.

"I was immediately impressed by her stickability and she got the job," says Lindsay, who was then the club's vice-chairman. It was not quite the dream appointment that it would be for many of the young girls who will be on the terraces tonight, because the then Mary Charnock was not exactly a devoted Wigan fan. "I didn't go to the games, although if you live in Wigan you follow the rugby team."

Her initial contribution to the club's well-being consisted of the usual range of junior secretarial duties, "including making the tea". It was in 1984, when Wigan went back to Wembley for the first time in 14 years, that the pace of the job changed.

"Even though we lost, it was from that point that things got busier and the club started to grow. But I'd rather be busy." That was just as well, because the club in those days could be a frantic place to work. "Her great quality was her unflappability," says Lindsay. "That and a good sense of humour."

Some of the pranks played on Lindsay in those days are the stuff of Wigan legend and run counter to the subsequent image of him as an impossible taskmaster. There was the time he was dispatched to the bank manager to ask for another loan, with something very embarrassing slipped surreptitiously into the top of his briefcase, not to mention the unsolved case of the lipstick-smeared underpants that arrived for him in the post.

In many ways, those heady days when the club was just beginning to take off remain her favourite times at Central Park. "There was a really good atmosphere around the club, with players like Danny Campbell here and Graeme West and Howie Tamati coming in. They were a good set of players."

Of all the players who have come and gone since, Mary can find little bad to say. "You have to know who you can laugh and joke with and who you can't, but I've never really had a bad word with any of them." And this, remember, is at a club that once housed the competitive egos of Ellery Hanley, Andy Gregory and Shaun Edwards.

Lindsay is full of admiration for the way she has managed the role of "an attractive female next door to a dressing-room full of hot-blooded young men. She has very cleverly kept them at a distance."

That distance is magnified by her seniority in the administration of the club. In succession, she has become club secretary, football manager and, as ratified by last week's AGM, director. There have been strong women behind the scenes at Central Park in the past, but none who have achieved what she has.

"I'm so proud of her," says Lindsay, whose track record of encouraging female talent within the game is good, from Emma Rosewarne at the Rugby League to Sally Bolton at Super League. "They just need to be given an opportunity," he says.

Mary has other role models to which she can refer. Kath Hetherington, the co-founder of the Sheffield Eagles and now the Gateshead Thunder and one of the most redoubtable people in the game, helped her through her first meeting of the Rugby League Council, while Denise Cackett, the Castleford secretary, is a close friend with whom she frequently compares notes.

"We ring each other if we need to discuss anything, but there are a lot more women involved in rugby league than people seem to realise," she says.

The game would like there to be more women. The League now supports a development officer for the women's game, while Super League's advertising for the new season is unashamedly aimed at the female market, with beefcake on posters and a cinema campaign screened alongside the movie You've Got Mail.

Not inappropriate, perhaps, for someone who started her working life at Central Park opening the post. Tonight she will be in the directors' box, as unflappable as she was when the final demands came in. "I don't get nervous at matches," she says. "I leave that to the coaches and players."