It was the photo that Rob Fidler always wanted.

It was taken by The Local Answer in mid-April and shows him leaving a rugby field with his son Ben after the two of them had played 80 minutes of rugby together.

“I’ve been hanging on for dear life to have a couple games with him,” laughed the one-time Gloucester second row who is now 43.

“I’ve watched him play a lot and I’ve coached him a bit as well but I always wanted to play with him. This was the first time.”

The opportunity came in an end-of-season Cheltenham Combination Minor Cup – a game that Old Patesians 4ths won against Gloucestershire Police to book their place in the final.

Young Ben, a pupil at Balcarras Sixth Form, turned 17 in February which meant he was eligible for senior rugby. And like his dad he plays in the second row.

He can also play at six – he plays for Old Pats Colts – so how good is he?

“He’s getting there,” said his dad. “It was a nice little day against the Police, it was good fun.”

So how did Fidler and Fidler work together on the pitch?

“He was running and I was walking,” laughed Fidler senior. “I don’t jump at the lineout either, so we just lifted him. I was shouting the orders and he was carrying them out!”

That’s just as it should be, of course, and Ben couldn’t have a better teacher than his dad who played top-level club rugby for well over 10 years and also won two caps for England.

There was always a good chance that Rob Fidler was going to be a mighty fine rugby player of course because his dad John was a colossus in Gloucester’s second row from the early 70s through to the mid-80s, a period when he also played four times for England.

“Nothing is ever guaranteed but obviously rugby is in the family,” said Fidler. “But if the path wasn’t paved, the old chap would have paved it for me!”

Rob Fidler started playing rugby when he was at Whitefriars. He also played for Cheltenham’s juniors and his rugby education continued apace at Cheltenham College where he played alongside his good friend Tom Beim.

“I was always a second row,” said Fidler. “I was an occasional back row if needs be but there was too much running at six!

“I wasn’t dull enough to play in the front row but I wasn’t bright enough to play in the back row! I was stuck in the middle – the engine room of the pack – working hard.”

Although clearly a very good schoolboy rugby player – he represented England Schools 18 Group and England Colts – there weren’t the full-time playing opportunities in rugby back in the early 90s that there are today so on leaving school, Fidler headed north to Loughborough University to further his education.

However, the mid-90s was a time of big change in rugby – the 1995 World Cup in South Africa was the catalyst for that – and it wasn’t long before opportunities to play full-time were being dangled in front of a good number of players.

By now Fidler, who had been a fixture in Gloucester United’s side, had already made his debut in the Cherry and Whites’ first team so he was one of the first names on Gloucester’s wish-list.

“It just sort of happened,” he said. “One minute the game wasn’t professional and the next minute it was. The clubs needed players and for me it was a case of right place, right time.”

But while Fidler was delighted to be given the chance to become a professional rugby player, not everyone in his immediate family was so supportive of the idea.

“It was a little bit to my mum’s dismay,” chuckled Fidler, “because I gave up university to turn professional. I turned my back on education to become a rugby player.”

Fidler was part of a core of young rugby players who were at Gloucester at this time – the others included Phil Greening, Mark Mapletoft, Scott Benton and Chris Catling.

“For the first three or four years after the game turned professional, a lot of the older players still had full-time jobs,” explained Fidler. “They were getting paid to play but they were still working because the money wasn’t big enough for them to give up their jobs.”

But for the early 20-somethings like Fidler, there were no concerns about paying mortgages and the like at this stage of their lives and he enjoyed “the advantage of training full-time”.

Fidler soon established himself as a first-team regular alongside another top second row name from the past, Dave Sims.

“I seemed to slip into a cosy partnership with Dave,” chuckled Fidler. “I did all the work and he took all the glory!”

Fidler’s hard work didn’t go unnoticed by important people in the world of England rugby, however, and after winning caps at under-21 level, he was soon being selected for England A before getting a call-up to the full England squad.

That was for the so-called Tour of Hell in the summer of 1998 – a tour that saw England play four Tests against the might of Australia, New Zealand, twice, and South Africa.

Fidler was still a few months short of his 24th birthday when he headed to the southern hemisphere and although England lost all four Tests, Fidler still has many good memories, not least because he played against both New Zealand and South Africa.

“I enjoyed all the representative stuff,” he said. “The England tour wasn’t the easiest to go on but as a young man I just wanted to represent my country and I enjoyed every minute of it.

“The results weren’t in our favour but the England coaching staff and management learned an awful lot on that tour about what needed to be done to compete with the big teams.

“I look back now and think I was one of the foot soldiers who helped put the foundations in place that led to England winning the World Cup in 2003. I helped England get there in a funny way.”

And he wasn’t the only Gloucester player on that tour – Sims, Benton, Phil Vickery, Tony Windo and Beim were also on that tour.

“We did as well as we could,” said Fidler, “but if anyone said now that they were planning a tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, they’d be laughed at.

“We spent more time in planes and buses than we did training and playing.”

And while that tour was undoubtedly tough, things weren’t easy back home playing for Gloucester in Fidler’s early days.

“We had three years of scraping wins at home and never winning away,” he said.

That changed, however, around the end of the last century and the beginning of this.

Players such as New Zealand great Ian Jones arrived at the club, joining the likes of Terry Fanolua who was already on the way to becoming a legend at the club, and Vickery, who, said Fidler “was a real talisman. It was never a hardship to pack behind him.”

Fidler also loved playing alongside Jones. “He wasn’t your typical second row but what he brought to the game was 79 caps for New Zealand. He had a wealth of experience and a great knowledge of the game.”

Jones was with the club for only two years and had left before Gloucester finished top of the league in 2002/03, the season that they won the Pilkington Cup, beating Northampton 40-22 in front of a packed Twickenham.

Fidler, who lives in Cheltenham, played a full part in both those achievements, although he very nearly missed out on all the Pilkington Cup celebrations.

It’s a story that’s well-known on the after-dinner circuit but one that Fidler is happy to tell again.

“I’d played in the semi-final but when the team was picked for the final I wasn’t even in the 22,” he said. “I was massively disappointed, I always thought I was going to be involved.

“My wife Clare, being a very astute lady, said on the Friday before the game, ‘Get yourself down The Retreat, have a few beers and we’ll have a fish and chip supper’ just to take my mind off things.

‘A few beers’ was in fact “eight or nine pints” of one of Belgium’s strongest lagers so it’s not difficult to imagine the panic that set in in the Fidler household when Gloucester team manager Pete Glanville rang at 7am on Saturday morning to say that Mark Cornwell had been taken ill overnight and that a replacement was needed!

“I got to the team meeting and kept as far away from everyone as possible because I stank of booze,” laughed Fidler. “I thought I’d be on the bench and I still don’t know to this day why I started.”

But start he did in a game that, as Fidler says, was played “under a beating sun” before adding: “The best thing that happened was that I got sin-binned in the second half for killing the ball in front of the posts. It meant I could have a rest, I was knackered!”

That was a great day for Gloucester’s legion of fans – the competition still really mattered back then – but for Fidler, his time at Gloucester was coming to an end.

“I was out of contract but it was at the time that Ludovic Mercier left and Gloucester desperately needed a fly-half,” explained Fidler.

“They said they couldn’t do anything with me until they had sorted that out so I put the word out that I might be available.”

And clearly there was still plenty of respect for Fidler from within the game because he was soon meeting Jack Rowell, the one-time England coach and the man who did so much to shape Bath Rugby Club into one of the powers in the land.

“He drove up from Bath and I met him in the Queen’s Hotel,” said Fidler. “They said they were desperate to sign me. I gave it a couple of days but I didn’t hear anything from Gloucester so I signed for two years with Bath.”

Fidler actually spent five years at the club – although he continued to live in Cheltenham – and at 29 the move gave him a new lease of life.

“I definitely played some of my best rugby when I was at Bath, certainly in the first three years,” he said. “I’d been at Gloucester for a long time and I would have stayed but maybe I was getting a bit comfortable there.”

Fidler said he had few problems adapting to his new surroundings – “It was the same game but in a different city,” he said – and he enjoyed plenty of good times at his new club.

“I loved it at Bath,” he said. “There was good competition for places – Steve Borthwick and Danny Grewcock were the other second rows – but they were often involved with England so there were plenty of games.

“We were in the Heineken Cup for three or four years and we also reached the Premiership final and the Powergen Cup final.”

Fidler’s last season at the club was disrupted by a knee injury which required an operation. When he had recovered he spent a year with Cinderford before joining Old Pats as player/coach.

“I was with the Pats for three and a bit seasons,” he said. “I did the coaching with Dan Eddie but I still trotted out to play to keep myself busy at the weekend.

“It was good fun. It was nice to play at a still half decent level but not to feel overly stretched. We had a couple of seasons when we did quite well.”

By now Fidler had taken over his dad’s construction business and he can still remember when he decided that enough was enough as far as playing rugby week in, week out was concerned.

“It was a wet Thursday,” he said. “I’d been working all day in the rain and I came home and told Clare, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough, I’m going to pack in the rugby’.”

Except that he hasn’t, not quite, anyway. He still plays in the occasional charity games – “It’s always good to meet up with old faces,” he said – and of course end-of-season cup competitions.

He has a high regard for the Pats – “They’re a fantastic club,” he says – but these days his work comes first.

“I enjoy it,” he said. “It’s physical which after all the years of training is something I like. I definitely like to be outside, I couldn’t sit behind a desk all day.

“And you get a sense of achievement when you’ve just built something.”

It’s fair to say that the Fidler family have been achieving for many years now. And that’s the case very much these days as well because Rob Fidler, with his son Ben by his side, helped the Pats 4ths win the Cheltenham Combination’s Minor Cup when they beat Norton at the end of April.