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'A lot of people have been scared to say what Dylan said in his book - people needed to hear that'
It’s still one of rugby’s strangest recruitments, how a visit by Dylan Hartley to his old Rotorua school during the 2011 World Cup resulted in Teimana Harrison, the Northampton skipper for Sunday’s Champions Cup quarter-final at Exeter, effectively doing a Hartley – upping sticks, leaving New Zealand and making a life for himself in the English Midlands that even included representing his adopted country.
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Sharp as a tack, Harrison admits it remains the one opportunity that most changed his life. Recently turned 28, he’s a new father these days, a new business owner as well, but everything he has achieved dates back to that sliding doors moment nine years ago when Hartley went on an educational reminiscence and picked up some excess baggage.
“I’m a long time in England,” enthused Harrison to RugbyPass, his September 5 birthday the prompt for him to skirt down memory lane and reflect how the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have unfolded at Northampton. “It has been nine years over here. I love it over here. It’s home now. I have met a lot of good people, my partner is from England. I can definitely see myself staying. It’s definitely home for me now.”
Further underpinning the passage of time is how his old mentor Hartley is now past tense in the rugby sense, his stellar playing career over and all the details of the various ups and downs packed into the widely acclaimed tome released two days before Harrison’s birthday.
“I like to reflect back on opportunities and like to think I have taken the majority of opportunities that I have taken – and that is definitely the one that has changed my life the most,” continued Harrison, recalling the moment when he was invited north of the equator as a precocious 19-year-old.
“He [Hartley] was the biggest influence on me coming over and was the biggest influence on me staying here. Just being able to meet him and talk to him and get his take on it. I went through a bit of a rough patch after a couple of months when I first got here. I sort of wanted to pack it in and go back home. But him and Paul Tupai were the guys that sat me down and said, ‘Look, this is your opportunity and you only get it once. You throw this away and it’s gone forever’. Having them two wise heads around has always been good for me. I owe a lot to him.”
Their bond remains strong even if Hartley’s retirement, followed by the lockdown, means their lives are now following different trajectories. “It’s still good. It’s been good to be able to pick up the phone and to talk to him and pick his mind on things that I’m necessarily not good at, leadership roles and everything, just trying to pick his brain, getting tips on how to manage the team.
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“It’s been really good to have him around still even though he has left the club,” explained Harrison before delving into one of September’s hottest topics, the painful legacy rugby can have on an ex-player’s body. It was last month when James Haskell, who spent the final year of his career at Saints, outlined to RugbyPass how his body had lately fallen apart, a grime tale since mirrored by Hartley’s candid book revelations about how he painfully limps around from place to place.
Those stories were sharp reminders to Harrison that health is real wealth. “James Haskell was a big one for me,” he said. “In his last couple of years the amount of tape that he had to put on to put a performance together. Rugby is a contact sport and it takes it out of you for sure, especially when you have been playing the game as long as them guys have been. It does leave some probably life-changing damage.
“It is interesting to read Dyls’ book and his views on it. People needed to hear that because a lot of people have been scared to say what he said in his book. It lets people know because it [rugby] is hard. People criticise a bad performance from someone but they don’t necessarily know the amount of willpower to get up and put a good performance in. It does take a lot to put a performance in when your body is struggling and you’re beaten up from a long season, or in Dyls’ case twelve or 13 seasons.”
With Hartley’s career finished at 33 and Haskell put out to pasture at 34, Harrison is aware the clock is ticking regarding his own rugby mortality and rather than this year’s pandemic lockdown being a negative, he endeavoured to put it to good use in Northampton by laying the foundation for a post-career business in the rag trade.
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A petrolhead, who took delivery of a new Harley in recent months to go with his dirt bikes and his drift car, Harrison was never the biggest fan of clothes growing up but the Northampton dressing room culture, where looking the part is important, piqued his interest.
It reeled him in over time and while to many launching a new business during the lockdown would be economic madness, the free time Harrison had away from rugby became his perfect learning ground to quickly learn the ropes and get things moving with Wolfe and its array of wardrobe essentials.
Thank you bro I’m glad you like it ?? https://t.co/IltR3DLjiZ
— Teimana Harrison (@TeimanaH) June 26, 2020
“Back to Dyls talking about his body is broken, you can’t really go into anything physically with your body,” said Harrison, explaining why he has taken the route into selling threads. “I always use Rob Horne as an example, you never know when your time is, when your career is going to be called. If I can start something up now when I have still got about four years, five years left in me – hopefully by then the business is running itself and is producing a good income for me and is something I can fall back on.
“In the present it is helping me as something that takes my mind off rugby so when I leave the ground and stuff I can keep my mind ticking over, it’s not about rugby and I can completely switch off with that and I’m fresh when I come back in in the mornings.
“It’s been an awesome project for me, something that I can focus on through the lockdown as well. When you’re at the club you have always got a programme, always have got a schedule to work to and the first couple of weeks of lockdown I was a bit lost without that so my business helped me get schedule back in my life and gave me something to work towards.
“It was probably the worst time to launch given the situation and everything, people losing their jobs. It has been a massive learning curve but we are in a good place as a business considering the conditions and everything going on. Looking forward to seeing what the future has for sure. It would be nice once everything is back to normality a little bit.
“I wouldn’t say I was the biggest fan of clothes. I always had a different taste in clothes, especially here. Again, that has been a massive learning curve, trying to sit back and listen to what boys’ ideas that they have and what they actually wear and what the fashion is now. That takes a bit of research to figure that out but I have got a lot of guys around me that are pretty fashion conscious, so it’s nice to pick their brains about what they would wear. A lot of boys have helped me with designing it.”
Affirming as well during lockdown was the effect having no rugby had on his family life. A downside was how the restrictions robbed him of his bi-annual trip home to New Zealand in the traditional off-season, but the heart-warming upside was the invaluable time Harrison got to spend with his 15-month-old, something that would have been greatly reduced if rugby at Northampton had continued its relentless demands.
“You get caught up when you’re playing rugby, that it is your life. You spend more time at the rugby club around your boys than you do with your family, but I got to see things that I probably would have missed out on if we were playing rugby. I got to see his first steps, I got to see him develop from a baby to a little toddler. All those things are really valuable. In saying that, it’s good to be back and into a routine and around the boys.”
Just don’t mention the results. Before the Premiership juddered to a halt last March, Saints would have been favoured to make the play-offs and further endorse the progress under Chris Boyd that had seen them qualify in January for the last-eight in Europe. Now, they are adrift in seventh and scratched from the top four race following just a single win in seven outings.
?? "Raw power.”
A typically @TeimanaH try from last year’s Cup Final. pic.twitter.com/stuQGQ810W
— Northampton Saints ? (@SaintsRugby) July 19, 2020
It’s an annoying sequence for Harrison as the Northampton back row had always wished the top flight would experiment with a summer season. “It suits the style we want to play, not necessarily the style that we have been playing, but we want to throw the ball around and get some good running rugby.
“You have see a massive difference, especially in the scorelines that have been happening over the last couple of weeks. It’s exciting rugby whereas you go to a winter game and you go down to The Rec and it’s boggy and everything. Unless you are a die-hard rugby forwards fan you don’t really want to watch that sort of rugby.
“Everyone is still in good spirits. Although the results haven’t been going our way we have been putting in some good work. Just a couple of times we switch off and don’t convert pressure into points. But things are going to come right and it’s exciting to be still involved with the Champions Cup.
“That is a massive focus, get a performance for Exeter. I get what you’re saying with fans, people only see the results really. But we’re not a million miles off. We just need to filter mistakes and cut them out of out game. We need to perform how we did before lockdown happened.”
The Premiership play-off ??
Familiar foes @ExeterChiefs and @SaintsRugby battle it out for a spot in the #HeinekenChampionsCup semi-finals to round off the weekend ?
But who will clinch it?? pic.twitter.com/PXRQdqCbHR
— Heineken Champions Cup (@ChampionsCup) September 18, 2020
That advice applies to Harrison as much as anyone else in the Northampton dressing room where his pre-game routine is to have his headphones on to chill with some Bob Marley (Three Little Birds is his favourite) or New Zealand raggae while Lewis Ludlam fires out the music that collectively gets the Saints pumped for a match.
It’s 2016 since the Kiwi won the last of his five England caps. Eddie Jones was in touch earlier this year and while winning a sixth cap would mean the world to Harrison, getting it spot on for Northampton is top of the agenda.
“That is always the ambition – until I retire I’ll be gunning for an England spot again. But no, I don’t think I will be in the mix for that. I need to focus on my performances here, I need to get back to where I was pre-lockdown. My focus is on here, getting us into the semi-finals.
“No contact from Eddie at the minute but that is down to me, I haven’t been putting in the performances that warrant an England call. I’m probably a little off the pace from where we before Covid. Just a couple of little things that I need to tweak in my game, just getting the ball into my hands a little bit more, hunting for that work rather than being stuck out on the wings a lot.”
Comments on RugbyPass
Exciting place to be for the young fella. I expected he was French Polynesian when I saw him included in the France 6N squad (after seeing him in NZs), and therefor be strong grounds we might loose him to rugby down here. Good, in that he is good enough to warrant such a profile, and from a journalism’s fan interaction aspect, to finally get a back ground story on the fella. Hope he has settled into NZ OK and that at least one rugby country will fit with him to help his development, which, if so, he should surely continue for a few years, and then that he can experience France to it’s fullest with a bit more maturity and less reliance on family than you would have at his current age. A good 3 or 4 years before he would be ready for International duty if he wanted to wait. Of course he already sounds good enough to accept a call up, and to cap himself, in the more immediate future (he’d have to be very very good in the case of the ABs), and he’ll get a great taste of that being with the Canes who have a bunch who are just a few years further into their career and looking likely Internationals themselves.
11 Go to commentsI remember towards the end of the original broadcasting deal for Super rugby with Newscorp that there was talk about the competition expanding to improve negotiations for more money - more content, more cash. Professional rugby was still in its infancy then and I held an opposing view that if Super rugby was a truly valuable competition then it should attract more broadcasters to bid for the rights, thereby increasing the value without needing to add more teams and games. Unfortunately since the game turned professional, the tension between club, talent and country has only grown further. I would argue we’re already at a point in time where the present is the future. The only international competitions that matter are 6N, RC and RWC. The inter-hemisphere tours are only developmental for those competitions. The games that increasingly matter more to fans, sponsors and broadcasters are between the clubs. Particularly for European fans, there are multiple competitions to follow your teams fortunes every week. SA is not Europe but competes in a single continental competition, so the travel component will always be an impediment. It was worse in the bloated days of Super rugby when teams traversed between four continents - Africa, America, Asia and Australia. The percentage of players who represent their country is less than 5% of the professional player base, so the sense of sacrifice isn’t as strong a motivation for the rest who are more focused on playing professional rugby and earning as much from their body as they can. Rugby like cricket created the conundrum it’s constantly fighting a losing battle with.
3 Go to commentsOh wow… “But as La Rochelle proved in winning in Cape Town this season, a cross-continental away assignment need not spell the end of days.” La Rochelle actually proved quite the opposite. After traveling to Cape town and back they (back-to-back and current champs) got mercilessly thumped the next week. If travel is not the reason, why else would a full-strength powerhouse like La Rochelle get dumped on their @r$e$ one week later?
26 Go to commentsYou know he can land a winning conversion after the full time siren is up. (Even if it takes two attempts.)
5 Go to commentsA very insightful article from Jake. I would love to know how South African’s feel about their move to Europe. Do you prefer playing in Europe or want to go back to Super Rugby?
3 Go to commentspure fire
1 Go to commentsA very well thought out summary of all the relevant complications…agree with your ”refer the Cricket Test versus 20/20 comparison”. More also definitely doesn't necessarily mean better!
3 Go to commentsMust be something when you are only 19 y.o and both NZ and France want you. Btw he wasn’t the only new caledonian in french U20 as Robin Couly also lived in Noumea until 17. Hope he’s successful wherever he chooses to play.
11 Go to comments“Several key players in the Stade Rochelais squad are in their thirties” South Africans are going to hate the implications of that comment!
5 Go to commentsI know Leinster did a job on La Roche but shortly after HT Leinster were 30-13 ahead of them and at a similar time Toulouse were trailing Exeter. At 60 mins Leinster were 27 ahead but after 67 mins Toulouse were only 19 ahead before Exeter collapsed. That’s heavier scoring by Leinster against the Champions. I think people are looking at Toulouses total a little too much. I also think Northhampton are in with a real chance, albeit I’d put Leinster as favourites. If Leinster make the final I expect them to win by more than ten and with control.
5 Go to commentsHey Nick, your match analysis is decent but the top and tail not so much, a bit more random. For a start there’s a seismic difference in regenerating any club side over a test team. EJ pretty much had to urinate with the appendage he’d been given at test level whereas club success is impacted hugely by the budget. Look no further than Boudjellal’s Toulon project for a perfect example. The set ups at La Rochelle and Leinster are like chalk and cheese and you are correct that Leinster are ahead. Leinster are not just slightly ahead though, they are light years ahead on their plans, with the next gen champions cup team already blooded, seasoned and developing at speed from their time manning the fort in the URC while the cream play CC and tests. They have engineered a strong talent conveyor belt into their system, supported by private money funnelled into a couple of Leinster private schools. The really smart move from Leinster and the IRFU however is maximising the Irish Revenue tax breaks (tax relief on the best 10 years earnings refunded at retirement) to help keep all of their stars in Ireland and happy, while simultaneously funding marquee players consistently. And of course Barrett is the latest example. But in no way is he a “replacement for Henshaw”, he’s only there for one season!!! As for Rob Baxter, the best advice you can give him is to start lobbying Parliament and HMRC for a similar state subsidy, but don’t hold your breath… One thing Cullen has been very smart with is his coaching team. Very quickly he realised his need to supplement his skills, there was talk of him exiting after his first couple of years but he was extremely shrewd bringing in Lancaster and now Nienaber. That has worked superbly and added a layer that really has made a tangible difference. Apart from that you were bang on the money… 😉😂
5 Go to commentsNot sure exactly what went wrong for him at Glasgow but it’s pretty clear he ain’t Franco’s cup of tea. Suspect he would have been better served heading out of Scotland around the same time as Finn, Hoggy and Jonny!
1 Go to commentsBulls disrespected the Northampton supporters and the competition. Decide quickly, fully in or out.
26 Go to commentsI wonder if Parling was ever on England’s radar as a coach? Obviously Borthwick is a great lineout coach, but I do worry he might be taking on too much as both head coach and forwards coach.
1 Go to commentsJason Jenkins has one cap. When Etzebeth was his age he had over 80 caps. Experience matters. He will never amount to what Etzebeth has because he hasn’t been developed as an international player.
2 Go to commentsSays much about the player picking this gig over the easier and bigger rewards offered to him in Japan. Also says a lot about the state sanctioned tax benefits the Irish Revenue offers pro rugby players, with their ten highest earning years subject to an additional 40% tax relief and paid as a lump sum, in cash, at retirement. Certainly helps Leinster line up the financial ducks in a row to fund marquee signings like this!!! No other union anywhere in world rugby benefits from this kind of lucrative financial sponsorship from their government…
5 Go to commentsTrue Jordie could earn a lot more in Japan. But by choosing Leinster he’ll be playing with 1 of the best clubs in the world and can win a champions cup and URC…..
6 Go to commentsThanks for that Marshy, noticed you didn't say who is gonna win it. We know who ain't gonna win it - your Crusaders outfit. They've gone from having arguably the best Super Rugby first five ever, to having a clutch of rookies. Hurricanes all the way!
1 Go to commentsGeez you really have to question the NRLs ability to produce players of quality. Its pathetic. Dont the 25mil in Aus produce enough quality womens players. Sad.
1 Go to commentsBulls fan here, and agree 100% with the conclusion (and little else) of this article. SA sides should absolutely f-off from the champs cup until we get fair scheduling, equal support for travel arrangements and home semis. You know, like all the european teams get.
26 Go to comments