Fearnley was a long serving member of the NSWRFL's Eastern Suburbs team, playing 144 matches for them at a bleak period in that club's existence in two stints 1954-55 and 1957-64. Injury kept him out of the 1960 grand final, one of the few successful years the Roosters enjoyed in that period. The front rower however was selected to represent his state, New South Wales that season.
It was during his 1985 tenure as Australian coach that four players - all Queenslanders in Chris Close, Mark Murray, Greg Dowling and Greg Conescu - were controversially sacked in favour of New South Wales players, despite Australia having won the first two Tests of the three match series. Fearnley also had a frosty relationship with Australian captain Wally Lewis, with Lewis claiming to close friend and fellow Maroon Paul Vautin that Fearnley seemed to be conferring on team selections with vice-captain Wayne Pearce rather than Lewis himself. Lewis claimed he had found the pair privately talking over selection of the Test team in Fearnley's hotel room, though this is disputed by Pearce who claimed he was there for different reasons. Dropping the four Queenslanders backfired on Fearnley as New Zealand defeated Australia 18-0 in the final Test of the series at Carlaw Park in Auckland. It was the first time since the final Test of the 1956 Kangaroo Tour that Australia had been held scoreless in a Test match. Queensland Rugby League Chairman, SenatorRon McAuliffe, publicly condemned the dropping of the four Queensland players from a winning Test side, saying "Its a football assassination and beyond all reasoning. And there can be no reasonable excuse for it". The NZ tour took place while the 1985 State of Origin series was still in progress. NSW had won the series for the first time, taking the first two games before the Australian team was chosen for the NZ tour. Fearnley would later claim that the Queensland players in the team were unhappy that they'd just lost the Origin series, though he later admitted he didn't handle the situation as well as he could have. In Origin game three that year played at Lang Park, one of the sacked players, Maroons prop Greg Dowling, aimed a tirade of abuse at Fearnley from the sidelines after a Queensland try. The Maroons went on to win the dead rubber game 20-6. NSW captain Steve Mortimer, who announced his representative retirement following the Blues win in game II at the Sydney Cricket Ground, later regretted his decision. After clearly out-playing Maroons half Mark Murray, he was in line for a test recall against the Kiwis and as team vice-captain he felt he could have used his personal friendship with both Fearnley and Lewis to ease tensions on the tour. Because of the controversy surrounding the NZ tour the Australian Rugby League instituted a new rule for national coaching which prevents any current serving State of Origin coach, being the national coach. Following his retirement as a coach, Fearnley wrote an article for Rugby League Week that was highly critical of Wally Lewis' captaincy. This gained him a rebuke from ARL officials.
