MARK JOHN CUETO MBE ( b 26 December 1979) is a former England winger and member of the England squad who retired last summer after an illustrious 15-year career which saw him win 55 caps for England, play in two World Cups, famously denied a try in the 2007 final against S Africa, figure for the Lions in New Zealand in 2005, win the 2006 Premiership with Sale Sharks, and who is still the league’s all-time top try scorer and was honored in the New Years Honours list for his services to rugby.

As well as one of the sport’s most deadly wingers with his record of 90 Premiership tries still standing tall, Cueto also established a deserved reputation for being one of rugby’s most popular players. And he believes the spirit and ethics engendered in the sport helped not just shape his star-studded career, but also served as a valuable template for life as a whole.

He is reported as saying that “he’d like think being made an MBE reflects on the sport in general, and that he must have played with close on 500 guys throughout his career and they were all top, top people, that he said sums the game up – the people who are in the sport. You can only survive if you are a good bloke – if you are not then you soon get found out.”

He owes his surname to a Spaniard great-grandfather Antonio, who sailed from Santander in the 1900s and settled in Maryport, Cumbria, where he set up a fish-and-chip shop. His Cumbrian home town of Workington is in an area more associated with rugby league than union. Although he played his first rugby game as an eight-year-old in Workington, and played after he moved with his parents to Wolverhampton, he did not grow up playing the game. When he was 10 years old, his parents moved again to Crewe, where he took up football instead of rugby, becoming a keen Manchester United fan.

He did not play rugby again until he was 17 with Alsager Comprehensive. His early clubs were Sandbach and Altrincham Kersal and then Cueto became a professional one-club man, grateful to Sale for being loyal to him. He discloses that he might have looked abroad at one point but did not want to jeopardise his England prospects. He played in two World Cups, and the sorry end to the 2011 tournament in New Zealand still baffles him. “We got such a bad press, a lot of it to do with the Mike Tindall incident, when he was pictured in that nightclub. Yet all he wanted to do was hold his hands up, but he was advised by the RFU to stay silent,” said Cueto. “The way it was dealt with was so incredibly wrong. It’s such a shame it ended that way.”

Mark now is working in an ambassadorial role for Sale, they could not have chosen a better man!