Blake Ferguson: from Japan troubles to loving Lancashire life inside turbulent year

Blake Ferguson cannot help but burst into laughter when asked if he thought his career would play out this way. The former Kangaroos winger’s rugby league journey has taken a unique and sometimes controversial trajectory but even by those standards, as he adjusts to life as a player in England’s second division – where the majority of the clubs are part-time and some crowds barely reach 1,000 – it is perhaps unsurprising when Ferguson affords himself a moment to reflect on how he has reached this point.

“I wouldn’t have thought I’d be here, that’s for sure,” Ferguson admits. After all, it was only this time last year Ferguson was a regular in a Parramatta Eels side that reached the NRL finals, but a lot has happened since then. That includes an ill-fated stint in Japanese rugby union club NEC Green Rockets, which ended with the 32-year-old spending a month in jail in Japan after being arrested for alleged possession of cocaine, before being released.

Ferguson is loth to discuss the finer points of that saga too much, but after eventually returning to Australia earlier this year and failing to secure an NRL contract, he had, by his own admission, decided he was “semi-retired”. “I wasn’t really bothered about getting a full-time playing contract and I was actually getting ready to start looking for an actual job,” he says. “But then the call came in.. and here we are.”

That call Ferguson refers to was from Championship club Leigh Centurions, who made him an offer to return to playing on a short-term contract, nestled away from the Sydney spotlight in a Lancashire town where the population barely exceeds 40,000 people. “I was transitioning into a different part of life and looking forward to it, but the opportunity to keep