Even for those familiar with Henry Pollock’s extraordinary exploits, last Friday was quite astounding.
Early in the second half of Northampton Saints’ tight loss to Sale Sharks, the 20-year-old tyro scorched 50 metres for a remarkable solo try. He pinged like a pinball off Luke Cowan-Dickie and Tom Curry, two of the best one-on-one tacklers in the country, before regathering his own delicate chip to finish the job.
Combining speed, balance, deceptive power and skill, the moment was so exhilarating as to eclipse another awesome highlight in the first period. After accelerating onto Fraser Dingwall’s pass to pierce the defensive line, Pollock had brushed away one defender and swerved past another. When a scrambling opponent eventually caught up, he turned to loop a one-handed offload to Alex Coles.
“Virtually every single game, he’s doing something that would be a special moment in any other player’s season,” states Jason Sivil, an integral member of Northampton’s strength and conditioning team who has worked with Pollock since the latter was 16.
An expert in biokinetics, Sivil joined Saints from Gloucester to continue an impressive career that began in his native South Africa. He is well placed to categorise Pollock’s athleticism as truly exceptional. “I’ve been working in this field for 20 years and there are very, very few players as gifted as Henry is,” Sivil adds.
“If Henry was in South Africa, he’d be an outlier. There are people physically put together like him, but not a lot of them. It wouldn’t matter where Henry is in the world, he would be a stand-out.”
Now in his second year with the Saints senior squad, Pollock has bulked up to around 105kg. He can squat 230kg for three reps and bench press 140kg for two, sprinting speeds of around 10m per second – admirable for outside backs – and jumping 54cm vertically into the air from a static start. But physical prowess means little without a resolute mind-set.
Grant Seely, the former Northampton flanker, arrived to teach at Stowe School in the same year that Pollock came into the fourth form at 13 years old. One of Seely’s earliest impressions remains vivid.
“He wasn’t in anyway big,” he says of Pollock. “He was actually built like a long-distance runner, if anything. We had this school cross-country and he came second out of over 100 in that for his year.
“It was him and another lad streets ahead of the others at the front, neck-and-neck. The other boy was an out-and-out runner with proper shoes and all that nonsense. It was just impressive seeing how much fight and dog that Henry had at that age.”
From good sporting stock
Strong genes are clearly useful. Hester, Pollock’s mother, was a national-level triathlete and Henry competed as a junior. A gruelling sport must have sent him to dark places and challenged his stamina.
“I found his engine, his ability to go and go and go, just incredible,” Sivil adds. “I’d put it down to a few things, and one of them is being exposed to a sport like triathlon, where you’ve got to be able to push deep and hard and for a considerable amount of time. Henry could push himself further and further all the time.
“Another thing was that, from the first time I met him, he has been immensely determined and driven. Whatever I gave him, he wanted to do it and more. He was always looking to push himself more and more and more.
“As a youngster, if I had him in the gym doing a particular group of exercises, and I wanted him to go up to a certain weight, Henry would push himself beyond that. My instincts would obviously compel me to be hesitant, to ask him to pull back. After a while, you realise that he just has this capacity in him, as well as that drive to be pushing himself.”
Seely, who supplements his job as director of rugby at Stowe with stints as a citing commissioner for the Rugby Football Union, introduced 7am gym sessions to nurture a work ethic in potential 1st XV prospects: “I just wanted see what they were made of and to see how hungry they were, really.”
Pollock’s boarding house, Grafton, was closest to the on-site facility and those sessions provided a concrete example of Stowe and Saints collaborating because the club devised the programmes.
“Henry didn’t have loads of size on him really until sixth form,” Seely explains. “He was a good player, always in the thick of it as an openside being a nuisance to the other teams, but winning the Vase at the Rosslyn Park Sevens in his lower sixth year was a turning point for me.
“He was just on fire that year, scoring tries from the halfway line and that’s when people started to take notice. He exploded away and hasn’t really stopped since.”
As part of an extremely sporty family – sister Zoe is a 400m hurdler, with father John and brother Angus scratch golfers – Pollock kept his horizons broad, which Seely respects.
“I always use Henry as an example to other sporting kids. When he was 16, he was still playing hockey for the school, still doing athletics. Sometimes, particularly with cricketers, they might specialise at 13 or 14 and that drives me nuts. Henry, fair play to him, played as many sports as he could for as long as he could.”
By under-18 level, Pollock had zeroed in on rugby union. And that bloody-minded streak was still prominent. If Sivil had asked Pollock to hone a basic barbell back-squat at 150kg, the weight would soon hit 170kg or 180kg. “And once he’d hit that, it wouldn’t be good enough anymore and he’d go to 190kg and 200kg. He’s just constantly like that.”
“As an under-18 player, he would have been squatting around 190kg,” Sivil continues. “He was running 10 metres per second, which is what top-level backs are running. He would have had really, really high output in terms of accelerations. We did a bronco test and Henry would run between 4.25 and 4.30. That’s very much endurance based but, again, it’s a really good number.”
The bronco test is a sequence of 60m, 40m and 20m shuttles that adds up to 1.2km. For a long time, Beauden Barrett’s time of four minutes and 12 seconds was revered around the world. Seb Atkinson, the Gloucester centre, is thought to have set a new record by clocking 4.08 recently. A mark of 4.25 or so demonstrates how Pollock marries perseverance – he is a busy, tough defender – with explosive dynamism.
“He’s unbelievably powerful,” Sivil says. “We know power is a product of strength and speed and most players are biased towards one or the other; they’ll have really good strength, but their speed might not be as high and that is what will limit their production or vice versa. Henry has very good speed and very good strength, and because he is high on both of those metrics, his power is through the roof.”
‘When someone is that good, you don’t get in the way’
Seely is often asked about his part in the Pollock story so far. He usually laughs.
“I’d like to tell you that we did all these intricate things,” he says. “It was about getting him in the gym just to see the hunger he had. The programmes were done through Saints. We were supervising them and making sure the environment was right – making sure they had breakfast, for instance – and then it was down to him.
“There are a lot of people who ask why Henry is so special and what I did. When someone is that good, you just don’t get in the way of it or mess it up. I’m not talking up my job here, but it’s true. I had Courtney Lawes while I was with the Northampton academy and it was the same. If they’re on such an obvious upward trajectory, you just don’t get in the way.
“Obviously, you are there to support them if something goes wrong… but Henry just didn’t need that. Our relationship with Saints is very good, so we spoke to them to make sure we weren’t telling him conflicting things. And we let him go.”
Sivil echoes that sentiment, describing Pollock’s rise concisely: “Every time the bar gets raised for him, he just manages to step up.” And yet, Pollock is still surprising even those closest to him. “I never thought he’d play at No 8,” Seely admits. “But his power is deceptive and he’s a real specimen now.”
Friday evening’s Champions Cup last-16 encounter with Clermont is the next stop for Pollock as he breaks new ground again. Victory would put Saints into the quarter-finals and, this summer, who knows? The smart money is on him heading to Argentina and the USA with England, but Pollock is on a fast track. Andy Farrell may fancy a brash, bold youngster for the British and Irish Lions. Athleticism and attitude forms a potent blend.
“I get a bit cross when people say Henry is cocky,” Seely finishes. “He isn’t. He’s cheeky, and always was at Stowe. People loved him for it. That might be mistaken for arrogance but it isn’t at all; you see it on the pitch. He’s talking to pros that are five years older than him, geeing them up. And they’re loving it.
“The boy’s special, which isn’t because of anything I’ve done. A lot of it is from his family background and what he’s done himself.”
