LONG READ Thriving at Leicester after years on the move, Billy Searle has found his club

This year will mark a decade since Billy Searle made his top-flight debut, as a teenager playing for Bristol Bears. Since then the fly-half has never stayed at any of his previous seven clubs for longer than two seasons, largely due to circumstances outside of his control.

“A lot of my decisions to leave clubs have been rugby reasons or forced out of my hands. It’s not been by choice. I don’t want to be moving around like I am,” Searle tells RugbyPass. “I wouldn’t change anything in my journey, but obviously there’s been a couple of times where I’d ideally have it a bit smoother than it’s been.”

Leicester Tigers, professional club number eight, feels different. Having arrived as one of three new fly-halves in the summer along with Orlando Bailey and James O’Connor, Searle came off the bench against Bath back in October, kicked the match-winning penalty and has never looked back.

He took the No 10 shirt the following month and has made nine consecutive starts in the PREM and Europe, with Leicester right in the mix for the playoffs in Geoff Parling’s first season as head coach. Which has all led to Searle being announced on Tuesday as the Gallagher Player of the Month for January.

That award for Searle unquestionably hits different. Before he arrived at Welford Road in the summer, his last action in the PREM had been in the dying days of Worcester Warriors, left along with the rest of Worcester’s squad scrambling for a new club, the start of a road which included brief stops at Bath and Toulouse (more on that later), Biarritz and Agen and led to Leicester picking up the phone last summer.

Receiving an accolade like Gallagher player of the month at the age of 29, having been on quite the journey, must feel pretty sweet. Arguably even more so than if Searle had won the award when he first dipped a toe into the league with Bristol and then Wasps.

“Definitely. I think it’s sort of gone a bit full circle, starting here and going out to France, coming back. And now really finding my feet in the Prem probably for the first time properly,” Searle explains.

“I’ve had spells at Wasps and Worcester where I was number one, but for a set period of time. Now, I feel really comfortable in my game. It comes off the back of results with Leicester and us doing well as a club. A lot of thanks has to go to the boys and obviously I’m getting the accolades from that award, but it’s down to our team performances in January.

“[The award] is probably one of those you look back on further down the line when maybe when you’re retired or near the end of your career, and you’ll be really proud of those moments when you’ve consistently played well, getting those little accolades. So it’s obviously great to win that.

“I feel like I’ve always had this sort of ability in me. It’s probably a bit of experience and just knowing my game a little bit better, a bit more game management. But also just timing and getting that right opportunity at the right time and taking it.”

Searle is certainly delivering on that front. His running threat from fly-half makes him stand out compared to other No 10s in the league. He also throws a lethal dummy, as Gloucester found out when Searle scored a spectacular solo try in December, beating six defenders to score. Be it for Leicester or recently for England ‘A’, Searle seems to be playing with no fear.

“I feel in a great place, really confident in what I’m doing. I’m always trying to take the ball to the line, it’s always been my game. If that can free up a bit of space for the boys outside, even better.

Having Orlando Bailey at inside-centre, another Leicester signing last summer, communicating and organising the rest of the backline gives Searle “the ability to just go at the line and focus on my role and then hopefully put the ball in space”.

That approach worked for England ‘A’, with Searle and Bailey combining again in an eight-try thrashing of an Ireland XV. Using a similar system to the senior England side, including some strike moves passed down from attack coach Lee Blackett, seemed to work extremely well.

“It’s a short week, so they want us to express ourselves,” Searle adds, praising the England ‘A’ and Gloucester backs coach James Lightfoot-Brown’s ideas and perspective.

Searle now has an England ‘A’ cap to go with his appearances for Cornwall back at the start of his career, winning back-to-back County Championship titles while he was playing for Launceston and then Plymouth Albion. He was only 17.

“I was such a young kid back then and was probably learning what I was like. But I know I was just as confident as I am now, probably with a lot to learn. I really enjoyed those times. It put me in good stead, those two years playing men’s rugby, National Two, National One and then those County Championships. When I went to Bristol, it wasn\’t like a shock playing straight from juniors to men’s.”

That spell in France, after the collapse of Worcester, seems to have taken his career to a new level. He arrived at Toulouse and, unsurprisingly, was blown away by the passion of the fans and the care the club provided helping him to settle in.

“I didn’t speak any French and they looked after me so well off the pitch. The training and the rugby was amazing. My first game away at Bayonne, the fans out there, well it’s just different. They’re so passionate. The first home game, you get off the bus and you’ve got probably 100 metres of fans either side of the rails going nuts, [setting off] flares. It’s just a crazy world out there.”

Searle had joined as a World Cup joker to bolster Toulouse’s squad and did not know whether beyond that time period there would be a role for him, so he signed for Biarritz after the first week, eager for some security after the disaster with Worcester. It turned out Toulouse did want to keep him but the ink was dry on his contract. Still, for the final few weeks of his time with Toulouse he trained alongside the likes of Thomas Ramos and Antoine Dupont, picking their brains.

“[They’re] superstars but just such normal people when you’re around them, it was amazing. It could only have been good for my game and I think it’s probably showing now.”

Training alongside Dupont in particular will make a good tale in the decades to come. “You don’t really appreciate it when you’re in the moment because you don’t want be that guy. You’ve just got to get your head down and train. He’s just like everyone else. He works hard. He trains well, but he just does the basics so well. Looking back, it’s just such a cool memory to have.”

Biarritz, despite amazing supporters, an incredible location on the coast and playing alongside familiar faces in Jonathan Joseph and Zach Kibirige, was more testing, with rumours about the club’s financial state giving Searle unwelcome flashbacks. “It was very difficult off the pitch, I can’t lie. Everything going on at the club, rumours they were going to go bust.”

That financial strain showed in the “very poor” facilities, with only one club physio – “which is not enough for an elite squad” – and a bin for an ice bath, taking his own kit to games. By June, as Searle recalls, “the situation was if you can get a contract elsewhere, we’ll let you go, we’ve got no money. I was like, ‘this can’t happen again after Worcester’.”

It was practically summer by the time he signed for Agen, staying in the ProD2 on a three-year contract. “Luckily I could get out, but I did feel for the boys [at Biarritz] because there was a period for about a month where we weren’t sure if they were going to keep afloat.”

Agen gave him stability, playing on a weekly basis, developing his French and his leadership skills. But the aim was always to either get back into the Top 14 or return home to the PREM. When Leicester made an approach last summer, he could not have been more thrilled.

“It was perfect timing for me, and a club like Leicester, I was chomping at the bit for it. It sort of felt like a bit of positivity after the last few years, being forced to move about. Just somewhere I can go and hopefully try and make it my own. And yeah, give it another shot in the Premiership.”

Surprisingly, the Exeter-born Searle has never had an offer from the Chiefs. A RugbyPass article recently linked Bayonne with an approach to buy Searle out of the second year of his Leicester contract for next season.

But you get the impression that he is finally settled, embracing his new club and elated that it has embraced him, letting his game flourish on the field without worrying about his next destination. A club, like Searle hoped for, that he can make his own. So far, so very good.