BY JOHN DAVIDSON
Player manager Steve Gillis has revealed the funny tale of how former NSW and Kangaroos forward Bryan Fletcher ended up signing for Wigan Warriors.
Fletcher left South Sydney in 2006 to join Wigan in Super League.
The back-rower had two seasons with the Warriors before finally hanging up his boots. Today he is a well-known NRL media figure on Fox Sports.
Fletcher’s agent, Gillis, has spoken about how he delicately engineered the move to the UK nearly two decades ago.
“He was at Souths and coming towards the end, and my goal was to get him to England,” Gillis said on his podcast Chiming In.
“I wanted him to go to one of the big clubs because there was really no point to go to the poorer clubs, because a), there was a chance you weren’t going to get paid, and b), they rarely won anything.
“I was desperate to get him to Wigan because they were one of the big dogs at the time. So I was ringing Maurice Lindsay constantly saying ‘You should be taking Fletch, you should be taking Fletch’. I couldn’t get him on the hook.
“He said ‘No, not at the moment’ and all this sort of stuff. I had to get the deal done, I knew he was going to get a lot of money if I could land him at Wigan. So Steve Simms at the time was running Salford. He rang me and said I’ve got to come out to Australia for two weeks for a family thing, would you have time for a catch up.
“I said ‘Would I what, I need you’. He said ‘What for?’ and I said ‘I’m trying to get Fletch to Wigan”. I said ‘Can you come out and say you’re interested in him?’. At the time Salford were struggling but they had plans to build this big casino in the ground and they were talking about becoming the big dogs in English rugby league.
“So I met with Steve and Fletch, we went down to Darling Harbour, at the Meat and Wine Company, and I got an outside table. I rang [journalist Phil] Rothfield and said ‘Listen Buzz I’ve got a secret meeting with Fletch and Steve Sivmms who’s come over to talk to us about getting him to Salford. They’re building this big casino, they’re going to become big players in England’.
“I said ‘Would you be interested in it?. He said ‘Would I what’. So I said send a photographer, so they papped us across the thing. The next day on the back page of the paper [The Daily Telegraph] there’s me, Fletch and Steve Simms and the headline was ‘Salford chase Aussie star’.
“That night Maurice Lindsay rings and he says ‘I want to sign Bryan Fletcher’ and I said ‘I thought you might’. He said ‘What do we have to do’ and we did the deal with him in 24 hours off the back of that story.
“Steve was a good sport, he didn’t mind running second.”
