Richard Agar: Eager for a new challenge as battered Hull seek salvation in cup

The Super League strugglers have appointed a coach with a fine pedigree but little front-line experience. He tells Dave Hadfield about taking over at the sharp end for a vital tie

Richard Agar's first game officially in charge of Hull is in a competition that runs in his blood. One of his earliest rugby memories is of his father, Allan Agar, playing in the Hull Kingston Rovers team that beat Hull in the Challenge Cup final in 1980.

Three years later, Agar Snr coached Featherstone Rovers to one of the biggest upsets in Wembley history, when they consigned Hull to another final defeat. The Agar family owe Hull a little payback in the Challenge Cup.

"I've memories of my dad playing at Wembley and then coaching Featherstone, who were our local team," said Agar, for whom an away quarter-final against Bradford tomorrow will be the first match since his full-time appointment this week as Hull's coach. "They were languishing near the foot of the old Division One and were supposed to have no chance. It was a difficult time for the family as well, because my mother had just been diagnosed with cancer.

"That's what I say when people query my experience as a player. I've had some experience of life."

When Agar decided to accept Hull's offer of a two-and-a-half-year contract to take over from the sacked Peter Sharp, he phoned his dad to tell him, rather than to ask his advice.

"I'm very much my own man," he said. "It was more as a courtesy than anything." The one opinion he did seek was Sharp's. "He encouraged me to take it, but that's the mark of the man. He's a great bloke and a great coach."

Agar's playing career was spent as a skilled part-time professional with Featherstone, Dewsbury and Widnes. He coached another lower-division club, York, before being headhunted by Hull and spending four years as the club's No 2, initially to John Kear – with whom he shared a Challenge Cup triumph in 2005, beating Leeds in the final – and then to Sharp, after he ruled himself out of the succession in the belief that he was not yet ready.

Those cynics who dismiss his appointment to the top job as a cheap option do not faze him.

"There's more than one template," he said. "Some of the best coaches there have been hardly played the game and some of the best players make the worst coaches. I spent my career in the lower divisions, but part of that was out of choice. I was a half-back and a thinking type of player. I had my chances, but I had a good job with Yorkshire Electricity and I already had it in mind that if I was going to take a risk on a full-time career in sport, it would be as a coach.

"I don't think anyone would say that because I didn't play much at the top level, I'm not knowledgeable about the game."

The other thing his background has given him is an appreciation of the ups and downs of a coach's life. He saw his dad, a scrum-half and one of the crafty old foxes of the game, carried around Wembley in triumph. He saw him become, in 1983, the only coach to be named as Man of Steel. He also saw him jeered at and abused when results went the other way.

"I've seen the good times and the bad times and I'm going into it with my eyes wide open," Agar said. "So are Hull. I've been here four years, been to a Challenge Cup final and a Grand Final [in 2006], and they've had plenty of time to assess me."

At 36, Agar is young enough to relate to his senior players, but old enough to be a father figure to a crop of young prospects he has helped bring through the ranks. If that is a feather in his cap in the eyes of most Hull fans, then there is the risk of him being tainted by association with a first-team squad currently running next to last in Super League and almost out of contention for the play-offs.

Like Sharp, he points to this season's cruel injury toll, but he knows that he will have to freshen up the players he does have to work with if Hull are to salvage their season with success in the Challenge Cup.

"Peter and I have a lot of ideas and principles in common," he said, "but we are different people and we'll have different ways of going about things."

Hull are lucky still to be in the cup, after fielding the ineligible Jamie Thackray in the previous two rounds. Having got away with that mistake, they could be starting to feel that the trophy might have their name on it.

Those who fear that Agar might still be a little short of front-line experience at this level should note that he has been here before. He coached the York side that played Huddersfield at this stage five years ago. "So it's not quite virgin territory for me," he said. The City Knights lost 50-12. "But I've got a slightly different team to work with this time. I'm ready for the challenge. I feel in my own mind that I'm a lot further on than I was when it was last on offer. You can only say no so often before people stop asking you."