Olly Cracknell: 'I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder'

Car enthusiast Olly Cracknell is revved up and raring to go after admitting being snubbed by Wales this summer left its mark on him.

While Aaron Wainwright and Tommy Reffell, his back-row colleagues in Sunday’s home clash with Saracens, added to their caps tally in the Nations Championship, Cracknell was overlooked in July by head coach Steve Tandy, despite featuring a few months earlier in the Six Nations.

“I was part of the intial squad but then I wasn’t selected for the tour, so that was obviously disappointing,” said the 32-year-old, who has made 87 appearances for Leicester since joining the club in 2022.

“It gives me a bit of a chip on my shoulder for this year, a bit of fire inside me to work and try and get back in that squad.

“If I am honest my performances at the back-end of last season here fell off a little bit, so I just want to get back to my best. That’s how I got into the squad, by playing my best rugby.

“You’re always trying to find that form, or whatever it is, and that’s what I have got to do to get back in.”

Rather than touring Argentina and South Africa with Wales, the five-times capped international spent the summer indulging himself by buying a long sought-after 1980s Mercedes W123.

Ask Cracknell about rugby and he’ll give you a decent answer, but when his latest classic purchase is brought up, the conversation has plenty more miles on the clock.

“Whenever it comes to buying a new car, I always look at this car, it’s a Mercedes W123. Over the last 10 years, I’ve always looked at it and thought, ‘that car’s nice’. But then I think it’s not practical, it’s 1985, it would be ridiculous to buy that,” he explained, before apologising for fear of ‘over-sharing’.

“But this time around my previous car had depreciated so much, I thought if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it. There’s a guy in Swansea, who runs ‘W123 World’, so I got in contact with him.

“They are quite hard to find, I went and viewed a few but rust really destroys them, and this guy said a couple of months after, there is one in the Isle of Wight. So me and girlfriend went down there.

“When I test drove it, it was the perfect day, the sun was going down and I was on this military road, and I bought it.

“I love that car because it is known as one of the most durable cars of all time,” he added.

“When it was designed, the mechanics were given a blank cheque for each part  because they wanted a car that would last, and it almost put Mercedes out of business, apparently, because the sales of the new version, W124, were really low because the 123 was still going so strong.

“I could talk about it all day. I’ve never particularly thought of myself as a petrol head but I do love cars, and this car is one I am particularly obsessed with.

“And I love driving, and I like roads as well. I find it quite a fun way of exploring. I’ve got this A-Z map, where I have marked all the best driving roads, and I’ll go and tick some of those off on the weekend. It’s quite a relaxing thing to do, I find.”

Head-to-Head

Last 5 Meetings

Wins

3

Draws

0

Wins

2

Average Points scored

25

23

First try wins

80%

Home team wins

60%

Cracknell wasn’t sure how his new motor would go down with his team-mates but he’s done an airport run with a few of them in the back, and club captain Olly Cracknell has been taken for a spin.

“I was a bit nervous about bringing it in. I called my girlfriend the day before pre-season, saying, ‘I don’t think I can take it in, the boys might think I’m being too flashy’. She said, ‘it’s 1985, they’re going to think you’re flashy.’

Flash isn’t how you’d describe Cracknell as a player. He relishes doing the Hanro Liebenberg-type role at Tigers – carrying hard and hitting people hard.

Of all the PREM players who played as many minutes as him or more in 2025/26, only Henry Pollock averaged more carrier per 80 minutes than his tally of 17.7.

Some of those hard yards and collisions took their toll, with the back-rower enduring a few concussions towards the end of the campaign. But he is all good now and hoping to bounce back as well as the spring-loaded seats in his prized motor.

“For me, it always goes back to the way that I train. Training physically and pushing myself physically is really important,” he said.

“You go through your career and there’s some people who amble around in training and then come matchday they will fly into it. But I am like most people, I will play how I train.

“So that’s was quite a big thing for me coming back into pre-season, and managing that through the season, because it is such a long season. It feels like this is going to be a really exciting season; there is so much going on. It feels like rugby as a whole is really building.”