The funeral of former England and Wales rugby league coach and renowned broadcaster John Kear has taken place.<\/p>\n
Friends, relatives and former players gathered in Penistone, South Yorkshire, earlier for the service at St John’s Church.<\/p>\n
Castleford-born Kear, who died on 1 June, earned widespread recognition during his career, including masterminding Sheffield Eagles’ shock 1998 Challenge Cup final victory over Wigan.<\/p>\n
Former Eagles player Mark Aston, who was part of the title-winning side, said: “Everything about John was just perfect, his smile, his knowledge of rugby league, you can see that by the tributes put out there for John.”<\/p>\n
He described Kear as a father figure to his players.<\/p>\n
“We talk about what he did on the field, but there were things off the field that he did, and how close everybody was to him,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When times were tough he was still positive, that’s how he was as a coach… he made people believe in the game, he made people believe in what they were doing.”<\/p>\n
He described him as a “top man” who would be “well and truly missed”.<\/p>\n
Tim Adams, former chairman of Sheffield Eagles, said Kear was an “inspiration for us all”.<\/p>\n
“We were good friends. He was an extraordinary bloke, very meticulous, his planning was unbelievable.<\/p>\n
“He was a wonderful motivator of people, he didn’t only motivate the players… but he also motivated the people in the club, the staff, the board of directors.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The funeral of former England and Wales rugby league coach and renowned broadcaster John Kear has taken place.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-647404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}