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Sharpie's been to the moon and back
- Iain Payten
- From: The Sunday Telegraph
- November 07, 2010 12:01AM
Frequent flyer ... Wallabies mainstay Nathan Sharpe. Picture: Stu Forster Source: The Daily Telegraph
NATHAN Sharpe knows where to get the best coffee in Cardiff. It's a small joint hidden down a laneway.
It doesn't stop there. Sharpe can tell you about the best bookshop in Dublin, the sights in Cape Town and the train stop in Hong Kong to find a good strip of restaurants.
Pick a city around the world where they play rugby and the Wallabies second-rower will have the good oil on most things.
"I've been considering a book recently, maybe the Lonely Footballer's Travel Guide or something," Sharpe says with a laugh.
Sharpe has more kilometres on the clock than most. After making his debut for Queensland in 1999, the 32-year-old has clocked up in the vicinity of one million kilometres playing Super and Test rugby.
Even Sharpe has lost count after moving to Perth, but a rough calculation of his travel time for Reds, Western Force and Wallabies games alone puts new meaning to the term frequent flyer.
Sharpe has travelled something like the equivalent of one return trip to the Moon and is halfway through another. And the excitement of touring is still there.
"It's always special to represent your country," Sharpe said. "The only hard thing I find about travel is being away from my two boys [Franklin, 2, and Cooper, 4].
"That's the difficult part as they get older, you are away for six or seven weeks and you miss a lot of their development because they are so young.
"You go away on a trip like this and you get home and they've changed so much."
Sharpe is close to certain this will be his fourth and last spring tour for the Wallabies.
"You never say never, but past 2011 I don't think I will look to represent," he said.
"I am only looking to play for Australia in 2011 and past there I have no real plans.
"I am really enjoying it and my body feels good and all the rest of it, but I have been lucky enough to have represented my country for a long time now and I have had some brilliant times, and hopefully we can lift the World Cup next year with the Wallabies.
"But there comes a time when young guys need to step in and be given a go."
Though Sharpe appears to be only getting better with age and could likely hold a place in the Wallabies for several more years, he sight of Generation Next emerging at a rapid pace leaves the 89-Test veteran content Australian rugby is in good hands.
Nurturing the burgeoning young talent in Australia is something Sharpe is passionate about, and it is likely to see him continue captaining the Force in 2012.
"There are parts of what I have been through that can help those guys," Sharpe says. "I think there's an important role for that in Australian rugby."
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/spo...-1225948811628
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