A load of Pollock

[Banquo]

https://www.thetimes.com/sport/rugby-un ... -92cdt5rdh

The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, once wrote that sport depended upon “freedom of excess”. This, he argued, was its essence, its reason for being, the secret of its moral value.

Which is not to suggest that as Henry Pollock stood a couple of yards inside his own half, at the beginning of the second period at the AJ Bell Stadium on Friday night, he was considering the philosophical relevance of what he was about to do.

He stood alone because the second half had just begun. Northampton Saints, his team, had kicked off. Sale Sharks dealt competently with the restart and, in the usual way, set up the platform for the scrum half Gus Warr to make the clearance. Saints knew this was going to happen. It was why Pollock stood in the back field.


Warr’s kick is caught by the Saints full back James Ramm, who passes infield to Pollock. At the moment he takes the pass, the 20-year-old Pollock has 15 Sale players and more than 50 metres between him and the tryline. There is no coach in the world who would suggest to a back-row forward that, from this position, it is possible to score an individual try.

A curious thing happens as the ball comes to Pollock. Running on to the pass, with no one near him, he does a goose step, a joyful hop off his left foot that foretells what is about to happen. Scanning what’s in front of him, Pollock can see Sale’s Tom Curry coming from the left, Ben Bamber from the right. Between those two are his Saints team-mates Chunya Munga and Angus Scott-Young.

Instinctively, Pollock accelerates between Munga and Scott-Young, using them as cover. Sensing Curry is coming for him, he carries the ball in his right arm so he can fend with his left. Curry steps round Munga, then drives towards Pollock but is fended off. As he deals with Curry, Pollock can see Luke Cowan-Dickie in his path.

Here, perhaps, is the most remarkable moment. As Pollock’s arm hits Curry on the shoulder, he uses the impact to swerve right and outside Cowan-Dickie. The left arm is now used to fend off Cowan-Dickie and now Pollock is away, thinking of a try. Curry and Cowan-Dickie look up from the ground to see him running at Warr, the last defender.

Three Sale players, Jean-Luc du Preez, Asher Opoku-Fordjour and Tom O’Flaherty, scent danger and scamper back. Pollock has Warr directly in front of him, 24 metres from the tryline. He chips over the scrum half’s head and surges past. He is now in a foot race with Du Preez, sprinting almost as fast as his chip kick moves through the air. The ball takes one bounce, a kindly one, and Pollock grabs it.

Poor Du Preez stretches out his left arm, catches Pollock by the collar but cannot stop him scoring. Then, as Pollock runs to celebrate, Du Preez grabs his jersey, as if he wants to tell him that tries like this are disrespectful and just too much. But what we’ve witnessed is De Coubertin’s notion of “freedom of excess”, sport allowing transcendental moments that elevate it above normal existence. Even in a game as brutal as rugby, there is the chance to create something incredible from nothing.


The question is not how could one as young as Pollock score so brilliant a try but how could anyone other than a very young man; impulsive, innocent and fearless, have scored it?

I first met Pollock at the England training camp in January. He was new to the squad, selected because of injuries to others and his undoubted potential. “One for the future,” as sport likes to say. He should have turned up and quietly gone about things, tip-toeing into the company of more senior players and then doing what was expected of him.

From the first morning, it was obvious that wasn’t Pollock. Tip-toeing is not his style. He wanted the others to know he was here and that he had come to impress them and the coaches. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Henry, Henry Pollock.” Friendly and confident, he chatted about his 11th-hour call-up to the squad.

Two nights before he’d been at home in Oxfordshire, watching Love Island with his older brother, Angus, when his phone rang. “Are you doing anything this week?” the England team manager Richard Hill asked. “Would you fancy a week in Girona?”

“That would be sick.”

This was 11pm. The next morning he was on his way to Heathrow to link up with the England squad. Now that he was here, he was determined to make the most of it.

Everyone in the squad knew who he was and from some of the non-Northampton players, there were reservations. Pollock was thought to be too sure of himself. The kind of kid that needed to be taken down a peg. Some would have seen the video of the then Saints captain Lewis Ludlam presenting Pollock with the player of the championship award for the 2024 Under-20 Six Nations.

“I won’t say too much H, you’ve got enough to say about yourself,” Ludlam said jokingly to a room full of Saints players, who all laughed knowingly. “But nah, brilliant achievement mate. You will always be a little twat but if you keep performing like you do, you get away with it.”

They have a sense of who Pollock is but without really knowing. Had they been at the Eton Dorney triathlon in 2016 or 2017, he isn’t really sure, they would better understand. His mum, Hester, was a triathlon coach and Henry was ten or 11 at the time. It was a huge event with hundreds of kids taking part. Swimming, which he wasn’t particularly good at, came first, and getting out of the water, he was a long way behind.


He did well on the bike, even better on his run and he enjoyed overtaking fellow competitors. At the finish, he had no idea where he’d placed because there were kids all over the course. Afterwards, when the results went up, he started the search for his name at the bottom and slowly lifted his eyes upwards.

Eventually, he found his name. Top 15. It was an intensely joyful moment and he rushed off to find Hester and his dad, John. They didn’t believe he’d finished so high up and he dragged them to the board and said, “Look, there’s my name, see, I told you.” This yearning to be someone, it was there at the beginning and it has endured.

John has been successful in business, doing well enough to send the three children to the best schools. His game has always been golf; Angus, his older son, is a scratch player. Zoe, the next in line, has taken after her mum and has competed for Britain in the 400m hurdles. That left Henry, the rugby player, who more than anything wanted to impress his dad.

Dad, he says, understands him and he is, by nature, caring. His dad also has a better work ethic than anyone he’s ever met. Being driven to Buckingham rugby club as a kid, being able to attend Stowe School with all its amazing facilities, going to their place in Menorca every summer, all of this didn’t happen by chance. Henry got that.

So when he shows up in Girona, the newest kid on the England block, he can’t just do as he’s expected to do. On the training ground, he is one of the group providing opposition to the first XV. The opposition exists to help the team prepare for the opening game in the Six Nations. They are expected to compete without disrupting training.

It’s a fine balance and one that Pollock doesn’t really strike. In one drill, he holds a tackle bag as Ollie Chessum attempts to power past him. Pollock is allowed to stop Chessum but has to keep the tackle bag between him and the ball carrier. Somehow he doesn’t just stop Chessum but strips the ball from him in the tackle. Word of what happens spreads like wildfire through the group.

He knows they’re not pleased. He carries on.

The coaches pull him to one side, telling him that if he’s too competitive it can disrupt what they are trying to get from the session. George Ford, his forever partner in the opposition XV, whispers that he should keep doing what he’s doing. Pollock doesn’t need much encouragement.

We agreed that we would talk after the Six Nations and last week, on his day off, we met at the Hilton Hotel outside Northampton.

“You didn’t exactly go into your shell in Girona?” I say.

“One hundred per cent not,” he replies. “That’s not the way I do things. Definitely not. The biggest thing for me was going in there and not looking out of place, not shying away from the challenge. I knew I wouldn’t, but I wanted to keep thinking about not doing that. I wanted to impress the coaches, I wanted to show them I am ready for the next step and hopefully I did that.”


“Not every one of your team-mates was impressed?”

“Of course there would have been a view that this kid shouldn’t be coming in and doing that. I guess I just wanted to be myself. What really helped was having all the Saints boys there as well, having Fin [Smith], [Tommy] Freeman, Alex Mitchell, Sleights [Ollie Sleightholme], Fraser Dingwall. Having all them there was so nice for me.

“It gave me a sense of being at Northampton and that gave me confidence in sessions. Fin was talking to me loads and he and Freeman helped me to learn plays and little things like that.”

How does a 20-year-old, at his first training camp, deal with the disapproval of some of his new team-mates, who found ways of letting him know they weren’t impressed? “I liked it,” he says. “I felt they were only doing it because I was doing something right. I was annoying them in a good way. I relished them getting angry with me, or them losing their heads. This little kid was trying to take their position.

“I want to get to where they are. I am there to try to show the coaches that I am better than whoever is front of me. I think it’s only a good thing. They get angry with you only if you are doing something right.”

After a week or so in Girona, Steve Borthwick pulled him aside at the Camiral Hotel and told him he would be leaving the senior squad to join up with the under-20 side for the game against Ireland in Cork. Though he tried not to show it, he was deeply disappointed. The head coach also told him he would play for England Under-20 against France.

Pollock messaged Fin Smith. “I’m off mate,” he wrote. The England fly half was playing padel tennis but soon he and Freeman came to see Pollock. “They were gutted. They said, ‘Go to Cork and just play well, and we’ll see you soon. This is not the end of it.’

“I was definitely disappointed. I wanted to be there. I thought I was ready for it. Fin and Freeman were great, they said they’d call me loads, ‘We’ll keep you in contact.’ And I was like, ‘Good luck for your game in Dublin,’ and they’re saying ‘Good luck for your game. Just be the best player, that’s all you can do.’ They’re really good friends of mine. They knew I was ready for the next step but it just couldn’t happen at that time.”


Borthwick played it sensibly. After the under-20 games against Ireland and France, both resulting in England victories, Pollock was reintroduced into the senior group and got his chance off the bench against Wales. It was appropriate that Ford, his quiet mentor within the squad, should have set up his two tries at the Principality Stadium.

“I remember standing out wide and thinking, ‘The winger is quite tight here,’ and I was putting my hand up, thinking, ‘If I get the ball here, I could be in.’ A couple of phases passed later, Fordy threw such a nice pass and he got me into space and luckily enough I got around the winger and scored.”

“I ran back thinking, ‘This is cool.’ The stadium had erupted. And then I was lucky enough to get another one. Just a couple of phases in their half and Fordy’s saying, ‘Inside, inside me.’ I was like, ‘OK, I am going to be inside you,’ just thinking I would be clearing out a ruck. Then he caught a pass, stepped off his left, created a little two-on-one and a hole opened up for me.

“I was just lucky that he told me to be there. That is his experience, he sees things before they happen. He’s an amazing player. We had some great link-ups in training and he has been great with me. He’s an amazing person, definitely a role model. Seeing and calling that move, making the pass, that’s like his trademark, what he does.

“He has something that not all players have, that ability to see something that will work.”

And he, the kid, was very lucky to have a player as wise as Ford, 32, looking out for him in Cardiff. You could also say he was amazingly lucky on his first start for England Under-20 against Italy in Treviso last year. That evening he scored three of England’s five tries. But this is the kid who played his first game for Northampton Saints in the Premiership Cup against London Irish as a 17-year-old beginning his second year of A-levels at Stowe School.

There will of course be injuries and the wear and tear of endless collisions, oppositions who will pay greater attention to what he can do. His pace, his strength, his ball handling, his natural ability to bend away from the tackle and accelerate into the clear, his ability to pass and offload, his bravery in the tackle; all of these things say that he should have a good future.

For the moment, it’s enough to enjoy what he’s doing and to allow him to be the person he is. He tells a story about a former Saints team-mate for whom he has the highest regard. “One day in training, I got the ball kicked across to me out wide. I caught it and I am in my own 22 and I remember seeing Ding [Dingwall] in front of me. I got round him, towards the touchline and then I’m looking inside and seeing Courtney [Lawes] and in an instinctive moment I put my left hand out and handed him off.

“I spun round and carried on running, passed it inside and we scored. As we ran through I could hear Courtney shouting, ‘If you want me to go full contact, I will go full contact.’ There were a few expletives in there. I looked around and I was like, ‘Oh God,’ thinking I was in real trouble. Back in the huddle and all the boys were like, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, that was really good.’ I was thinking, ‘I’m not sure it was.’

“For a split second I thought, ‘Courtney’s going to come down here and I’m getting filled in.’ He looked pretty angry. I mean, for him, it was a Tuesday session, there would have been a game on Saturday and it wasn’t meant to be full contact. The thing is when you’re young, coming into the group, once you do something that earns a senior player’s respect, that helps you. And for me, this little kid, this little rascal has just come and handed him off, that’s not what you’re meant to do.


“After that Courtney kind of took me under his wing and was really good to me.”

At the end of the game against Sale on Friday, the former England players Ben Kay and Chris Ashton, now working for TNT Sports, were asked to describe Pollock in one word. “Unique,” Ashton said. “Box-office,” Kay said. A little earlier Ugo Monye said he believed Pollock should now be part of the British & Irish Lions conversation.

I asked Pollock about that, inviting him to dismiss the talk as completely ridiculous. He wasn’t prepared to go quite that far. “I don’t know, to be honest,” he says. “I am definitely not thinking that far ahead. It’s always been a dream, from being a little boy, to go on a Lions tour. If it happened at some point, it would be amazing. All I can do in the meantime is play really well at Saints.”

For a moment, he’s become like a young politician. Nothing is being ruled in and nothing is being ruled out.

[Danno]

Good lord get his balls off your chin

(The journo, not you Banquo)

[Oakboy]

In that article, there is more confirmation of Ford's value as mentor/coach.

[Danno]

In that article, there is more confirmation of Ford's value as mentor/coach.

He's going to be an incredible coach

[fivepointer]

No lack of self confidence. But he has the game to back up the bravado.

[Oakboy]

In that article, there is more confirmation of Ford's value as mentor/coach.

He's going to be an incredible coach

Do you know if he has the necessary paperwork?

[Danno]

In that article, there is more confirmation of Ford's value as mentor/coach.

He's going to be an incredible coach

Do you know if he has the necessary paperwork?

I'll forge it if necessary

[Oakboy]

He's going to be an incredible coach

Do you know if he has the necessary paperwork?

I'll forge it if necessary