The World Class Start programme, run by the Amateur Rowing Association and Sport England, is identifying individuals who have the physical potential to make it, even though they might have no rowing experience”Those athletes have a few years to learn the sport,” said Sophie Mackley, editor of Rowing & Regatta. “They’ve had advantages that none of the rest of us have enjoyed They’re at it full time. We’re fitting it in around everything else.”Yet for many rowing observers, the enduring fascination of Sir Steve’s project is the discovery of whether a team really can reach the standards of the Henley finals, where Sir Steve last competed against Matthew Pinsent, the man who would join his Olympic boat, 16 years ago. “You do get the odd comment from people who think we have been given too much. We just ignore that and try to get on with winning,” said Mr McMurray.”There are two sides to the Liverpool story,” said the Nottingham University cox Dan Prior, who has also coxed for St Paul’s School and Henley Rowing Club. “It’s absolutely fantastic to see rowing opened up more and it’s important to see the sport to lose its elitist image.”But one of the beauties of rowing is that it is an amateur sport in which you only get new equipment from time to time and, when you do, it’s a luxury. There is a feeling that Liverpool have had a leg up, with the top end of new equipment to help them.”Other university rowers feel more strongly about it “These boys have just not been popular,” said one.

When they competed at the opening event of the regatta season, in April, the commentator instructed spectators through the public address system to move three cars which were causing an obstruction “otherwise the management – or the Liverpool boys – will move them for you”.When Newcastle – managed by the Italian national coach Angelo Savarino – raced off against Liverpool in a 2km final at the same event, few of the neutrals were supporting Liverpool. He attended a small comprehensive at Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, leaving when he was 16 with one CSE, in woodwork, but his rowing ability was spotted by the school’s English teacher.”In the days when only those with money went to university it was a toff’s sport but now that more people are getting there because of their nous, the backgrounds of rowers has changed,” Sir Steve said.Yet some of the old prejudices have been unmistakable since his team joined the rowing circuit. Sir Steve insisted he was an “affable and polite 17-year-old who is always eager to lend him a hand.” But it was all to no avail. Hornby was sentenced to 10 months in jail and left the group.Sir Steve’s easy manner with his young charges, whom he has seen once a week and accompanied on a training trip to Seville in Spain in the spring, demonstrates how far removed he is from rowing’s gentrified image. A few months into the project, one of the rowers, Michael Hornby, 17, (still a part of the group when the 30 were whittled down to 20) found himself in court charged with assault relating to a street fight two years previously. Hornby was a popular member of the team, who had helped rescue a fellow team member when their four-man boat capsized and the man became trapped underwater. But tough.”A quiet word with Jamie Oliver, who tried a culinary equivalent of this kind of project by training a group of aspiring chefs to run his Fifteen restaurant for the Channel 4 show Jamie’s Kitchen, would have told Sir Steve that the ensuing months would not be an entirely smooth ride.They were not.

With some experience of “messing about on a rowing machine in the gym” Michael Bomba, 19, who put his job as an apprentice joiner on hold, was comfortably the best qualified of the initial 30.Those men were just the kind of ordinary individuals that Sir Steve set out to find out after he was approached by a TV production company, Outline Productions, to lead the project for an ITV documentary to be filmed in the autumn “The catchment area was limited to Liverpool only,” he said “Not Manchester, not Cheshire and definitely not Henley The idea was not make it hard Not a boot camp. “He wants to pursue the sport when Henley has finished and he could certainly be an international lightweight stroke.”Other members of the original 30 abandoned equally modest lives to join the frantic, full-time pursuit of a place at Henley. Ryan Jones, 20, a former solder from Liverpool’s Clubmoor district, was nominated by his father. “I wasn’t happy [with my dad] because it’s not my sort of sport I didn’t even like boats,” he said.

“He’s got it,” Sir Steve said yesterday, after an exacting row in the wind along an 8km stretch of Thames at Henley. They have since been taught the sport from scratch at the Liverpool Victoria rowing club, across the Mersey in Wirral, where Sir Steve has seen Mr McMurray emerge as a rower of international pedigree. He was one of the 30 men, initially selected from the 250 who turned up for trials at Liverpool Town Hall. I couldn’t have given a toss about a few blokes rowing a boat. But it has become my life and I would like to carry on with it after Henley. I’ve had to give things up and think like an athlete but that’s become one of the best bits of the experience.”He clearly had something that the five-times Olympic gold medallist thought he could work with.

Life had settled into a pattern of work, five-a-side football and watching Liverpool FC play until Sir Steve appeared on the Anfield pitch before a home match last November and appealed for volunteers to join what has since become known in national rowing circles as “Sir Steve Redgrave’s Liverpool 8.”"I’d never been in a boat or on a rowing machine,” said McMurray “I didn’t even watch the Boat Race. Liverpool will be on tenterhooks tomorrow when its first – and only – elite rowers compete to qualify for the Henley finals. Only one of the eight-men in the city’s boat had set their backsides on a rowing machine – let alone a vessel – before they were handpicked by Sir Steve Redgrave, for a project to see if a bunch of rookies could reach the regatta finals’ exacting standards inside seven months.
Mr McMurray, 24, from Liverpool’s down-at-heel Kensington district, will be at stroke position for tomorrow’s time trials – and a more unlikely contender for Henley’s world of flashing oars and picnic hampers it would be hard to find.By his own admission, he enjoyed school (St Margaret’s, in Anfield) “a bit too much” before leaving with minimal qualifications to take up his joiner’s job, working mainly for his father. In a city better known for its ferries than its rowing, it would take a brave man to head into town wearing a lurid stripy blazer and clutching a jug of Pimm’s. Luke McMurray, a joiner who has had a hand in many of Liverpool’s swanky new apartments, is typical of many whose experiences of the sport in the past have been limited to “watching Steve Redgrave at the Olympics”

This year is different, though.