Ben Youngs: Why Springboks' Handre Pollard is thriving at Leicester

Long-serving scrum-half Ben Youngs has spoken about the silver lining of falling down the pecking order with England – getting to start five Gallagher Premiership wins in succession at Leicester with the World Cup-winning Handre Pollard. For the past decade or so, Youngs would have been away during February and March on Test duty with his country. However, his only appearance in this year’s Guinness Six Nations came in the closing stages of the opening round defeat to Scotland.

After that, the 33-year-old record men’s caps holder was only involved with England for their start-of-the-week training sessions and he instead went back to Leicester on the Tuesday evenings to be available for weekend selection with the Tigers.

That situation resulted in him getting paired regularly with Pollard as the starting half-backs – a selection that had happened just once previously this season (away to Clermont in the Heineken Champions Cup) before it was reprised for the league matches versus Saracens, London Irish, Bath, Gloucester and Bristol.

Youngs was injured in that last fixture, and he sat out last weekend’s Champions Cup round-of-16 win over Edinburgh. Since then, he has made a guest appearance on the latest Rugby Pod episode and spoken about how great an addition Pollard has been at the Tigers.

There were initial fears that his signing might be an over-indulgence as he was injured on his October 1 debut and wasn’t available until late December. However, the out-half has since shown the best of himself and Youngs couldn’t be happier playing alongside the South African.

“The only thing I could do (with the England situation) was to go back to the club and play well and I felt like I did that. I felt like I contributed to the run of results, and I really enjoyed just being at the club and playing for them and building that partnership with Handre, and being a part of a group that went on a bit of a run. We have still got that run now.

“He [Pollard] is a very good guy first and foremost, but he has a real calming presence. He is not someone that says anything less than needs to be said. He is a very calm character, very relaxed, gives off a real sort of calm energy. But what he is able to do I guess is he able to mix it. Whether that is his kicking game, whether that is his distributing game, he defends very well.

“He has got a real balance to how he plays and he has brought that. It takes a while for any player to settle in and especially having come from France, from Montpellier where he had a bad injury and then when he got fit, he didn’t play much.

“He struggled out there and he is just really pleased to be in an environment and a place where he is thriving, and he is loving it and the environment has brought the best out of him and he is now able to then perform at the weekend. He has been class, absolute class.”

Youngs also praised interim head coach Richard Wigglesworth, a fellow scrum-half with whom he jostled for selection until Wigglesworth retired in December to take charge on a temporary basis for the rest of 2022/23 season before linking up with Steve Borthwick’s England set-up ahead of the World Cup.

“Genuinely he has done an amazing job. We didn’t just lose Kev (Sinfield) and Steve, we also lost Richard as an attack coach because he had to go and fill Steve’s (head coach) role. We basically lost a forwards coach, defence coach and an attack coach. Matt Everard has come on and does attack and defence, Richard oversees everything and Danny Wilson has come in to do the set-piece work.

“He [Wigglesworth] has done an amazing job because that is difficult. I have to credit him, but also all the players and the staff because when something like that happens unless you have got a really good culture and a really good group of boys then I can see some teams throwing the towel and going, 'We lost two coaches, we have got a new coach coming in next year'.

“But no, it’s not the way the group is and it is not the way that it has to be, so the boys have grabbed hold of it. He has done a great job and although we had a bit of a sticky patch at the start... it kick-started in Clermont and went from there. He will be a loss next year.”