{"id":796250,"date":"2026-03-01T05:28:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T05:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/796250\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T05:28:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T05:28:14","slug":"playing-for-england-u21s-was-a-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/796250\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing for England U21s was a dream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>MY LIFE IN RUGBY<br \/>MATT RILEY FORMER SALE SHARKS AND SEDGLEY PARK CENTRE <\/p>\n<p>IF YOU\u2019D told me growing up in Widnes that I\u2019d end up playing 457 games for one club, I\u2019d have laughed. Not because I didn\u2019t love sport, but because rugby union isn\u2019t even the main game up here. Widnes is rugby league country. That\u2019s what I started with at six years old at my local club, Halton Hornets. I played league until I was 15, when our team folded. I had a choice: join another league side or try rugby union with some mates from school. My dad had played union at Wi&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MY LIFE IN RUGBYMATT RILEY FORMER SALE SHARKS AND SEDGLEY PARK CENTRE IF YOU\u2019D told me growing up&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":796251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5008],"tags":[748,9030,144601,45651,393,4884,65302,231182,704,6875,11653,2384,16,7913,15],"class_list":["post-796250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-england","tag-britain","tag-championship","tag-chris-robshaw","tag-danny-care","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-james-haskell","tag-mike-brown","tag-new-zealand","tag-premiership","tag-premium","tag-sale-sharks","tag-uk","tag-ulster","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/796251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}