the times | Saturday December 4 2021 1GS 19
Sport
Dolly became
England player
No 1,442 against
South Africa, coming
on as a replacement
when the away
side’s fearsome pack
were on top of their
rivalsculture
There seems a risk of an overload of voices
given the club also has Billy Millard as director
of rugby. To have so much coaching input
requires everyone pulling in the same direction.
But which way?
To help to answer that question, Harlequins
turned to Owen Eastwood. An expert in
leadership and particularly in cultures, he has
worked with the England football team and the
South Africa cricket team, and now sits on the
Quins board. After canvassing 55 people
connected with Quins and doing a deep dive
into the history, he gathered the hierarchy and
players — of men’s and title-winning women’s
squads — to tell stories about their ancestors. “It
might sound sappy to some but stories that give
you goosebumps,” Jones says.
Can the tale of Ronnie Poulton, an Oxford
Blue and England player killed at Ypres in the
First World War mean anything more than one
hundred years later to a lock from Pretoria?
“If you stand in a group of 50 people, it
won’t mean something to everyone,”
Stephan Lewies, the Quins captain, says.
“But I know what it meant to me.”
The lock tells of Poulton, renowned for
his dazzling runs for Quins, turning up
late for an England game at Twickenham
after a family saw him on a train and asked
him to sit at the bedside of their dying child.
“It only came out after he died when his sister
told people,” Lewies explains. “What we took
from that story is that in a world where
everything is on Instagram, you shouldn’t do
something because it looks good. Do it because
it’s the right thing to do.”
Will it help when they are
scrapping in the last five
minutes against the Tigers?
What does it mean to talk
about a tribe, and culture?
“When it gets dark and you lose
a couple of games and people
get disgruntled, that’s when you
really see the culture,” Matson
says.
Third in the table as they head
into the winter months, perhaps
it is about to face its ultimate test.playing
Care remembers wondering this
time last year if he wanted to continue playing
rugby. Sport in a pandemic was not much fun
and Quins were going nowhere. But Gustard
departed, everything changed and, six months
later, he was at Twickenham holding a trophy
There are no guarantees that moment will
come again even with the best sports science —
or, indeed, the weekly bonding session among
the players, mobile phones banned so that they
actually talk to each other, and the fish and chip
van due to arrive after training. All part of the R
part of the TRUE acronym and mission
statement — Tempo, Relate, Unconventional,
Enjoyment — introduced to the club under
Conor O’Shea a decade ago and now refreshed.
In elite sport, Care knows team spirit can be
illusory, or all too brief. He remembers securing
the title in 2012 and the sense of it being
frittered away. “We had a bit of success and then
nothing,” he says, ruefully.
Will it be different this time? Care, 34, is
already certain that it is different given that,
from being close to giving up, he now says
that he wants to play as long as possible.
Care says that there is a renewed joy
about being at Quins. Fast rugby, coaches
who listen, an attacking mindset, low contact,
not to mention three days off: he tells his
team-mates not to take it for granted. “I tell
them, ‘We’ve got a great gig here, we’ve got it all
so don’t take the piss,’ ” he says. “My last big
thing before I go is I want to help them win year
after year. And then I want to sit in the stands
with a beer, enjoying it from there.”You see a club’s
culture when it
gets dark and
people are
disgruntledcucultlture
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C
l tyearifAnyanwu, centre
of main picture,
hones his skills
during a training
session in which
no tackling can
be seen. Above
left, the club use
acupuncture and
the best possible
sports science to
aid recovery and,
above right,
Flannery leads a
detailed video
analysis sessionWhen Eddie Jones was asked which
of the young England players had
stood out for him during the autumn
series, the head coach could have
picked Freddie Steward, man of the
match in the wins against Australia
and South Africa, or Marcus Smith,
the new fly half and golden boy of
English rugby. Instead, Jones chose to
highlight a player in whom he sees a
bit of himself: the Leicester Tigers
hooker Nic Dolly. “What a story it
has been in terms of resilience,” he
said. “Dolly is a good, tough player, he
wants to learn and he’ll give you
everything he’s got.”
Jones prizes that attitude in a
player. He spent time with Dolly
during the autumn, discussing his
own career as a wily hooker for
Randwick in the Sydney competition
who was small in stature but sharp-
tongued and aggressive. Dolly grew
up playing for Eastwood and he is no
front-row behemoth either, although
at 6ft and 16st he would have been
considered one back in Jones’s day.
“We spoke about it,” Dolly said.
“Eddie would say so himself, but he
was a small hooker and I guess, for
the size of everyone now, I am too. So
for me it is about throwing myself
about, getting stuck in and being as
aggressive as I can be.”
Dolly’s Test debut was a true
baptism of fire. Selected for the South
Africa game because of injuries to
Luke Cowan-Dickie and Jamie
George, the 22-year-old, who was
unemployed last year after being
released by Sale Sharks, was sent on
just as the revered Springboks pack
was bringing the heat.
The wisdom of Jones’s selection
decision was widely questioned. Why
throw a rookie to the wolves when he
could have called in a more steady,
experienced operator?
England had no answer to the
Springboks’ power in the second half.
Joe Marler was sent into reverse by
Vincent Koch and England
struggled to gain a foothold in the
lineout, with Dolly twice unable
to hit the target, and the Boks
mauled their way upfield with
ease. But South Africa were
profligate and England’s
backs engineered a way to
win the game.
Jones liked the cut of
Dolly’s jib; he liked the
player’s resilience to
fight through difficult
times, to take the
opportunities when
they came, and the
coach backed his
fellow Sydneysider to
emerge from the
Springbok furnace a
better player. “I would
not have wanted it any
other way,” Dolly
reflected.How family trip
started career of
England hooker
Alex Lowe hears how
Nic Dolly saw no future
in rugby in Australia,
only to have a swift rise
after coming to the UK
Five years ago, Dolly, his parents,
brother and twin sisters travelled to
Manchester to spend Christmas and
new year with his grandparents.
Dolly was 17 and had no real
aspirations of making it as a
professional player in Australia,
having never played representative
rugby at schoolboy level. He turned
out for the Eastwood club and
probably still would, combining rugby
with a job as a personal trainer, had
his family not all flown to England
five years ago.
He wanted to play some rugby
during his two-month visit to the UK
and so his grandfather, Tony Palin,
who is clearly well connected in the
Manchester rugby scene, put out
some feelers and the Sale academy
were alerted to this young Australian
boy who was keen for a game.
Within three years, Dolly was
playing for England Under-20. The
road hit a bump last year when Dolly
was released by Sale. With no offers
on the table because of Covid, he set
up a fitness business, coaching people
through lockdown.
Coventry offered Dolly a deal and
after three tries in three games in the
Greene King IPA Championship, he
was snapped up on a short-term deal
by Leicester. Then England came.
“I never had aspirations [to be a
rugby player],” Dolly said. “I didn’t
really see a professional pathway in
Australia at the time. I didn’t go to
private school and I was never picked
up by any of the schools that were
major feeders for the Waratahs.
“I had a chat with my grandad. He’s
mad for rugby, and I wanted to try to
get some good-quality rugby in before
I went back. A few emails flew about
and they got me in touch with one of
the academy managers at Sale and it
snowballed from there.
“The choice of what to do next was
made for me, in a sense. I had nothing
to go back to in terms of rugby in
Australia. The obvious decision was to
repay the country that had given me
the opportunity.”
Dolly would stay at Tom Curry’s
house three or four nights a week
during his Sale days, so they could go
to the gym together or recover in the
sauna. It was not a party house.
“There was not much seasoning in
the kitchen, just fuel,” he said. Curry
presented Dolly with his England cap.
Dolly will be on the Leicester
bench against Harlequins
tomorrow. The battle is on for
Six Nations places, with Cowan-
Dickie fit again, George set to be
ready for the championship and
Jamie Blamire ahead of
Dolly in the pecking order.
“It’s made me hungrier
to play at the highest
level,” he said. “You
don’t want to be that
person who just plays
one cap.”PHOTOGRAPHS:
MARC ASPLAND