‘Gosh he seems full of himself’ was how my friend’s wife reacted when she came in to see Henry Pollock celebrating his stunning try against the Aussies at the weekend. And she was spot on too: 20-year-old Pollock, England rugby’s latest prodigy, whips up emotions, not least the desire from anyone who has played against him – and plenty who haven’t – to give him a good belting.
He’s swaggering, confident, brash, with rockstar charisma and a bleached blond mop, and he can wind up opponents until they need a bomb disposal expert to calm them down. Referees might soon want to tell him to rein it in. That’s youth for you: who gives a damn? Though you won’t catch many All Blacks goading opponents at the final whistle; you don’t often see the world’s best rugby players, like Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, the Springboks’ unfeasibly talented no. 10, or Antoine Dupont, France’s brilliant scrum half, gloating over their rivals.
He can wind up opponents until they need a bomb disposal expert to calm them down
So what to make of young Master Pollock? Well, let’s hope he can stay forever young: that in ten years’ time he is still as chirpy as he is now; his hair as ridiculously abundant, his features still rounded, and his body still able to flex, scoop up a ball one-handed and carry him bouncing through for a try that brings Twickenham to its feet, as happened at the weekend. But given the battering way rugby is played today, it seems a tough ask. The moving presence at the match of Lewis Moody, truly an inspirational sportsman, a real team player, now stricken with motor neurone disease, was a reminder that rugby is more than headbands and heroics.
Anyway it’s something for Steve Borthwick to chew over. His (reasonably effective) strategy so far seems to have been to kick long and often to squeeze the life out of opponents before bringing on his ‘bomb squad’ of massive forwards to flatten the enemy. Now he’s got the problem that English rugby’s most recognisable face is a free-running headline-grabber. A good problem to have though.
It’s a recurring issue in all team sports: what do you do about the maverick? Sometimes it works out (Kevin Pietersen, Paul Gascoigne); sometimes it doesn’t (Danny Cipriani and any number of playboy footballers from the 1970s). Pollock, like Jack Grealish, is a classic example of this. A fan favourite, capable of turning a game on its head in an instant.
But it’s not the crowd you have to impress, it’s the coach, and coaches tend to be suspicious of such talents, perhaps with good reason. It may be an apocryphal tale, but when Danny Cipriani went on tour with the Lions, he cooked his goose before the squad had even touched down. On entering the plane, while his team mates turned right, he turned left, exclaiming words to the effect of ‘Stuff that, I’m going first class’. Which may explain why he only played 16 times for England, when far less talented players amassed five times that number of caps.
Pollock may or may not be cut from the same cloth – we shall see. But as Austin Healey said last weekend, he clearly ‘knows where the camera is’. So is he a bit of a prat? Quite possibly. But rugby being the bants-driven leveller that it is, you hope that he will learn fast and go on to be a magnificent team man, just like his fellow flanker, Lewis Moody.
How wise of England’s top batsmen to play themselves wildly out of form on the eve of the Ashes with a humiliating white-ball tour of New Zealand. Take away Harry Brook’s breathtaking 135 in the first 50-over international, and the batsmen with their eyes on the Ashes totalled 129, at an average of 9.21. That should strike fear in the Aussie hearts all right. What was missing was Ben Stokes’s captaincy and skill. England dearly needs him for the Ashes: let’s hope he lasts the course.
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