LONG READ Ollie Blyth-Lafferty: 'I had my plumber's tool bag ready to go, then Edinburgh offered me a contract'

Had things turned out a little differently, Ollie Blyth-Lafferty would be servicing boilers instead of grinding at the coalface of rugby’s least forgiving frontier. The enormous tighthead prop, who thundered onto the URC scene last season, had his heart set on becoming a plumber before rugby jolted suddenly from hobby to career path. In the past nine months, the 20-year-old has signed his first professional contract, captained Scotland U20s, and played 15 games for Edinburgh, four of them in the Champions Cup. His first start came in a sterling win opposite Toulon’s gnarled loosehead Jean-Baptiste Gros. His immense 6ft 4ins, 135kg frame is a precious rarity in Scotland. His clear zest for scrummaging and the dearth of options to back up Zander Fagerson have fuelled clamour for him to be capped at Test level. The mending of leaks and unclogging of toilets, then, can wait.

“I was planning on leaving school at 16 to do plumbing and heating,” Blyth-Lafferty says. “I had a start day lined up, I had my own tool bag ready to go, and then I got offered a senior academy contract with Edinburgh and that was full time. I couldn’t go into plumbing.

“During the early stages of high school, I was playing rugby for fun, enjoying the social side and playing with my mates. As I got into fourth and fifth year, I had been in the junior academy with Edinburgh, and I was also training with the Boroughmuir Bears Super6 team. I was lucky enough to have a good, small group of people who helped me understand the trajectory rugby could take. It gets you thinking – I actually love this, I love playing rugby, and I love it more than the idea of being a plumbing and heating engineer, much as I would still love to do that. When I was about 16 or 17, I really started to think I could go far if I were to work hard enough.”

Blyth-Lafferty is steeped in sport. The youngest of four siblings, he and elder brother Jerry were virtually inseparable throughout their childhood, lurching from one activity to the next. Jerry, too, came through the Boroughmuir club ranks and is on the books at Edinburgh. A mobile, explosive hooker two years’ Ollie’s senior, he did his chances of URC action no harm with an impressive 40 minutes in the pre-season hit-out against Ulster on Friday.

“My dad was the first person in our entire family to play rugby,” Blyth-Lafferty says. “He played schoolboy rugby and played for Boroughmuir for years. My two oldest siblings, Charlie and Kate, weren’t interested in the rugby. Charlie is a hairdresser; Kate is doing her probationary year as a primary school teacher.

“Me and Jerry were always palling about together outside of school. Monday was boxing training, Tuesday was rugby, Wednesday was swimming, Thursday rugby, Friday boxing, and we did judo as well. Jerry was a really good boxer. He was a Scottish champion at the end of primary school. I wasn’t as good at boxing or judo; rugby was the one I took a liking to the most, but I was happy to do them all.”

These days, the brothers are flatmates. Ollie took his first step on the property ladder in May and soon invited Jerry to become his lodger. They live in the Slateford area of Edinburgh, a couple of streets from Boroughmuir’s Meggetland pitches where they learned the game, and a mile or so from Murrayfield itself. It’s a novel dynamic, the ‘wee’ brother leasing a room to the big one. “It hurts when I have to pay him on the first of every month,” Jerry joked recently.

“People say it’s funny you are looking after your older brother,” the younger Blyth-Lafferty says. “I’m the landlord taking digs off him.

It makes you think, where did your childhood go when you get excited about the washing machine or using a new detergent, like why am I getting excited about fabric softener?

“I said to him, ‘Look, we work at the same place, it’s a two-bed flat, come in with me and it would be so much easier instead of living at home’. It is also good for life skills outside of rugby.

“It was a bit of a shock to the system; it put into perspective how easy it was living at Mum and Dad’s house. A lot of the grown-up things you have to do – paying the mortgage every month, paying your gas and electric. You get home from training and you’re sore and just want to sit down and you need to get the washing done, do the ironing.

“It’s a bit sad; it makes you think, where did your childhood go when you get excited about the washing machine or using a new detergent, like why am I getting excited about fabric softener? Or doing your first adult shop with all the necessities whereas before you’d go to the shop just to buy a bottle of juice.”

In rugby as well as homeowning, Blyth-Lafferty has always been precocious. He was involved with Scotland U20s at just 17 and was primed to debut for the youth side in Wales during the 2024 Six Nations. He’d had his jersey presentation, his backslaps from teammates and done his captain’s run, before tripping over a whole pile of red tape. Because of his age and position, World Rugby laws prevented him playing.

“I still have nightmares about that. I’m sure guys like [then-coach] Kenny Murray and Graeme Beveridge, our team manager at the time, do as well. I’d done all the prep, I played the warm-up games and been in the Edinburgh academy. I’d been going to Ravenscraig in Motherwell to train with the rest of the boys, up at 6am every morning, you go in and it’s dark and you leave and it’s dark. It’s brutal. All that hard work.

“We had a team meeting the night before the game and they got the boys to do a darts challenge, forwards v backs. As that was going on, Kenny asked to grab me for a second. At this point I’m thinking, what have I done? Did I not have my notebook or something? He basically said, ‘all day we’ve been fighting your case with World Rugby but because you’re 17 and a front-rower, there has to be a cut-off somewhere’. It was the start of February and my 18^th birthday was in the April. I was absolutely raging and thinking, whose fault is this? How has it taken until now to find this out?”

Two summers later, Blyth-Lafferty spent July with the U20s in Georgia rather than touring Argentina and South Africa – two of the ultimate proving grounds for a fledgling prop – with the senior team. There had been calls to give him a run at the highest level, but the Scottish Rugby hierarchy decided a final age-grade tournament was the right call.

“I wasn’t gutted about it,” Blyth-Lafferty says. “I had some interviews at the tail of the end of the season and people asked me about my expectations for the summer. I wanted to sound confident but in absolutely no way did I want to come across as arrogant. If you look at my position, and how long it really takes to develop, I don’t want to think of this as a cop-out, but I have got time.

“After the season I’d had, going to Georgia was an opportunity to really show how strong I am in my set-piece and again, without sounding arrogant, I needed to show I was the most dominant there, that no matter who you put in front of me at this level, I’m going through them every time, and in open play, I’m carrying hard.

“I needed to show whoever is watching, these are my strengths and this is how I want to be no matter what team I’m in.”

I’ve improved and want to keep on improving my ball-carrying, my repeat efforts at high speed, being dynamic. Am I able to carry, get up, hit a ruck, and go again?

By that point, Blyth-Lafferty had become a regular in Sean Everitt’s injury-hit Edinburgh pack. He made an 87-second debut against the Ospreys in December, and seven days later, found himself packing down opposite Gros, a beast of close to 50 France caps, backed up by such formidable company as Kyle Sinckler, Dave Ribbans and Zach Mercer.

“The whole week, I never felt nervous,” Blyth-Lafferty says. “Sean told me, ‘If you couldn’t do it, you wouldn’t be here’. The guys I was playing with were who I thought about the most: Grant Gilchrist, Magnus Bradbury, Pierre Schoeman, Ewan Ashman. I wanted to do right by them. I want to be as good as them and dominate for this club. I grew up watching half of them play so to play with them now is mental.

“I used to be bad for overthinking. Ed Kalman [the former Glasgow prop, Strathallan School physics teacher and age-grade coach] really helped me with that. He always said, ‘no matter who you are against, you need to treat them like they are the number one loosehead in the world’.

“It didn’t matter who Jean-Baptiste was, how many he caps he had and who was behind him, all that matters is me showing him zero respect and thinking about my own process. I try and do that for every scrum. I picture I’m scrumming against Ox Nche or Steven Kitshoff when we are live in training.”

The Scotland camp are of course monitoring his progress. Blyth-Lafferty has regular talks and review sessions with scrum specialist Pieter de Villiers and some contact with John Dalziel, the forwards coach. His now former U20s mentors have impressed upon him the need to get excited about more than the set-piece. While it is no bad a thing to have a young tighthead obsessed with scrummaging, Blyth-Lafferty knows there is work to do on the anaerobic side of his game to harness that size and power.

“Obviously my set-piece is my bread and butter, and I see that as a super-strength. My maul defence, maul attack, scrummaging – I want to be the best I possibly can at them.

“But in open play, I’ve improved and want to keep on improving my ball-carrying, my repeat efforts at high speed, being dynamic. Am I able to carry, get up, hit a ruck, and go again?

“Zander is a really dynamic tighthead for Scotland, and I’ve always looked up to Thomas du Toit. You watch his pick and goes for Bath, he gets on the scoresheet a lot, he packs down well, and he’s a similar size to me. I played against him last season and spoke to him afterwards and he was absolutely unreal. He seemed such a humble guy, and as a player and a person, that’s the guy you want to be like.”

Blyth-Lafferty is still a greenhorn in the ruthless waters of elite rugby. Like all fresh-faced props, he’ll be taught a lesson here and there. He wants to become more explosive, more often to thrive as an international. But if he can put those pieces together, what a talent Scotland have on their hands; the like of which the nation unearths so rarely.