The Rugby Paper

Pirates were one hell of a club to be at for so long MY LIFE IN RUGBY

THE NOW-RETIRED CORNISH PIRATES PROP

BEATING Saracens when we hadn’t played for almost a year was probably the most memorable moment of my Pirates career, which has now come to an end after nearly 200 appearance­s for the club. It’s such a shame that we had to play the game behind closed doors because of Covid restrictio­ns because it would have been one hell of a party. But even so, it was an iconic day for Cornish rugby and for all of us involved. On a personal level. I was up against World Cup winner Vincent Koch that day. Whenever we won a scrum penalty, and there were quite a few, the euphoria was off the scale. As a forward pack, we had a good day and never relaxed for one minute. We knew we couldn’t go off-task and risk letting a big victory slip from the palm of our hands so, although we were all knackered about 60 minutes in, we managed to dig deep and get the result we, and I think the Championsh­ip as a whole, wanted. Personally, I think they under-estimated us a little bit.

As a Rugby League fan growing up the things I loved about rugby was running hard and hitting people hard. The set-piece side of the game was only really a focus when I moved to the UK. I went to Mount Albert Grammar School in Auckland, which I think is one of the top five schools for producing All Blacks. Sonny Bill Williams and Steven Luatua are two of the most high-profile examples. Sadly, we were always the bridesmaid and never the bride having finished runners-up in the three main competitio­ns without actually winning one. The year we played an Australian Schools team featuring Quade Cooper and Kurtley Beale was the year I was converted from the back row to prop. I think my diet changed my position for me! My nickname from all the boys is Tucky, which is short for Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s a guilty pleasure of Islands or, in my case, Maori Hawaiians.

I got picked up by the Blues straight out of school and stayed there for a year or so. But then I ended up going to Australia to see some of my wider family in Perth and ended up joining the Western Force academy. They tried to change me to hooker because I was a bit on the light side, and that’s when I fell out of love with rugby, a few injuries didn’t help either. I gave it up for two or three years and worked for my uncle’s building firm before deciding to head off on an overseas adventure.

I met my partner in the UK and that’s when I started playing rugby again. Her family lived in Cheddar, on a farm in the middle of rural Somerset so the nearest club was Weston-Super-Mare, and they were in National 3 South-West. I played for them for a bit, while putting my CV out there, and that’s when I got the call from (Pirates co-coaches) Gav (Gavin Cattle) and Paves (Alan Paver), and the rest is history. I was offered a short-term contract, and at the age of 26 I became a full-time profession­al rugby player. It was winter of 2015 and it was cold and dark when I arrived in Penzance but the welcome couldn’t have been warmer and over the last 10 years people have accepted me as one of their own and I’ve made some great friends.

All of a sudden I found myself scrummagin­g against future England internatio­nals like Harry Williams and Argentinia­ns, so it was a steep learning curve for me from a scrummagin­g point of view. Bristol had this Puma called Gaston Cortese, he was probably the trickiest customer I had to deal with. He wasn’t the biggest or the strongest but he knew how to buy a penalty or to manipulate you into a certain position so that he could dominate you. I got him back a few years later once I had picked up a few dark arts of my own!

To be fair, I couldn’t have asked for a better coach to teach me the scrum than Paves. I think I rocked up 106kgs and was 118 kgs by the time the season ended. You naturally put on weight over time over here. Paves said to me, ‘you’re too flash, we’ll breed the side-stepping and offloading out of you!’ He was a real fiery character when I first turned up but he has calmed down over the years. You dreaded the week ahead if you’d had a bad day at the office on the weekend because he had this thing called ‘the cleanse’. He’d sack off all rugby-based activities and instead of doing two scrummagin­g sessions a week, we’d have two a day. I remember him saying to one of the boys, ‘you owe me 5,000 scrums this season’. I don’t think we were too far off that. I grew to love scrummagin­g, which is something I never thought I would hear myself say. But I did grumble about the cleanse and after a while I like to think the boys had me to thank for him easing off a bit.

The trouble we had at Pirates was that at the end of every season, pretty much, we’d lose one or two of our frontline props or both to the Premiershi­p so you were constantly having to start from scratch again. I did have a brief loan spell at Wasps myself, but I think the fact I started pro rugby late and didn’t have EQP status at first counted against me stepping up more permanentl­y. That said, I am happy with the career I have had and the Pirates were one hell of a club to be at for so long.

I would have probably continued on for another season but I was offered an excellent opportunit­y to better myself as a coach at Ealing. I’m going there as academy forwards coach and I can’t wait to experience for myself the excellent environmen­t they’ve created there. With all that in mind and the uncertaint­y over the Championsh­ip and the Pirates’ funding, it was too good an opportunit­y to turn down. Initially, I didn’t know if I would like coaching or not but I thought I would give it a go four years ago and it has slowly built up from there. I did a bit with the Exeter Chiefs academy, down in Cornwall, did Redruth this last year and I have been at Truro School for the last four years as well. I probably enjoy it more than playing to be honest.

I think it is absolutely crazy that the Championsh­ip is run the way it is. The whole system is set up for you to fail. Gavs and Paves gave all the players clarity about what was happening, that contracts could only be guaranteed for so long, instead of saying everything is fine and dandy. At least I am at the end of my career, it’s the young lads I feel sorry for. There is so much talent down here, as we showed in achieving the club’s highest-ever position of second, but all that could be lost unless an agreement can be made with the RFU. I would have been tempted to stay on if the climate was different. But I have been through a few of these transition­s where money has gone and come back in and the squad is rebuilt again and it gets a bit tiring after a while. If I knew the money was there and there was a goal to work towards, like challengin­g for the top, I could put all my energy into it. But because everything is so up in the air and contracts could be terminated in January, it made sense for me to accept the Ealing job and I am now looking forward to making the best of that opportunit­y.

“It’s crazy the way the Championsh­ip is run. The system is set up for you to fail”