LONG READ Elliot Millar Mills: 'You've come this far, you're being a coward if you give up'

The enduring image of the Champions Cup semi-final in Dublin has the look of a Renaissance frieze. Every time you peer at it, your attention is caught by a different character, a fresh angle of elation or despair or just a spent warrior crumpled on the canvas.

At its centre stands Elliot Millar Mills. A wild euphoria burns in his eyes. The prop’s headband is askew, his hair and beard sprouting, mouth agape and arms raised. Bodies litter the turf behind him, reeling from a seemingly relentless Leinster onslaught on the depleted Northampton ranks. Jordie Barrett, the great All Black, is doubled over in the periphery. Leinster’s fortress has been sieged and their Galacticos vanquished.

“I was trapped under a ruck for about 30 seconds,” Millar Mills remembers. “I get up and see the clock has gone over the 80 and everything hits – Christ, we’ve actually done it.

“That could go down as one of the best games of rugby ever played. I don’t want to watch it back because I couldn’t handle it… I was thinking, oh my god, we’ve just beaten the best team assembled in the history of rugby union.”

Millar Mills’ journey to the summit of European rugby is a remarkable strand of the Saints tapestry. Two years ago, at the age of 30, he’d never started a Premiership game. He’d lost his job a few months earlier when Wasps went bust and picked up a short-term gig in Edinburgh. Retirement was a very real consideration.

Since joining Saints that summer, he’s won the league, made his Scotland debut, beaten Wales in Cardiff, hoisted the Calcutta Cup, packed down against the world champion Springboks and reached Saturday’s Champions Cup showpiece.

Yet having spent much of his days beneath the glitz of the top division, Millar Mills is pretty rational when all these late-career feats are put to him.

“Most rugby players are very arrogant, aren’t they? You always think, ‘if they can do that I can.’ I’d already come from playing for Stockport and Macclesfield down in Nat Three and Nat Two, went through two seasons of only winning two games in Nat One.

My wife’s waters broke the night before the Leinster game. She said ‘you go, you might never play in a European semi-final again’.

“When you get higher, the differences are smaller. The gulf between Nat One and the Premiership is a lot bigger than between the Premiership and international rugby.

“It’s great it all happened – amazing – but I’m not massively surprised by it.”

All that said, he mightn’t be here at all if not for his wife, Melosa. And in more ways than one. While Millar Mills was sacking the Aviva, she was in labour with the couple’s second child, a daughter named Ori.

“Her waters actually broke on the Friday night before the game,” Millar Mills says.

“We’d discussed what we’d do because she’d been having contractions for about two weeks before then but nothing was happening. The coaches were getting a bit sketchy.

“It wasn’t really a discussion. She said, ‘you go, you might never get a chance to play in a European semi-final again’. I got the flight back straight after the game and luckily Ori didn’t come until the following morning.”

It was Melosa, too, who silenced Millar Mills’ retirement talk. After the Wasps debacle and the stint in Scotland, the landscape was sparse. Millar Mills plans to work in coding after rugby and felt ready to enter the real world.

“I told my wife I thought it was time,” he says. “There were no contracts available and I could get a job, we’d be financially fine and could move on with our lives.

“She said, ‘no, you’re taking the easy option – you’ve come this far and you’re being a coward if you give up’. Sometimes you need to hear that. You need someone to support you like that.

“The talk of Wasps going bankrupt had been around for a few years before it happened, and it was always in the back of my mind. We made sure we would be okay if I lost my job tomorrow. We always had a six-month runway if something did go bad. We weren’t one of the higher earners at Wasps and losing that income at that point wouldn’t have been that big an issue.

“A lot of the boys were absolutely devastated, but only being there a year, I didn’t have the same emotional connection. Some of the boys had been there from the age of 15 and were just bursting into floods of tears when they found out the club was gone. It really was quite dark. It was their home.”

I put the phone down and sat down, trying to be really nonchalant and tell my wife, then I realised all my skin had gone bright red and I was sweating.

Considered and easy-going, you sense Millar Mills takes this stuff in his stride. Sometimes, though, there is strong evidence to the contrary.

He qualifies for Scotland through his mother, Elspeth, who was born in Hamilton. His sisters have both played international rugby too, Harriet for England and Bridget for Scotland. They actually played against each other in a 2013 Six Nations fixture.

Millar Mills got the call from Gregor Townsend before last year’s championship. It was late one night, and he’d just put two-year-old son Otto to bed. He tried to play it cool but his skin cells clearly didn’t get the memo.

“I put the phone down and sat down, trying to be really nonchalant and tell my wife, then I realised all my skin had gone bright red and I was sweating.

“Playing for the first time at Murrayfield was incredible. Nothing like it. Getting off the coach and there are ten tiers of people either side of you screaming. I tried to keep my headphones off from about five minutes before we got to the ground, I wanted to hear and feel the energy coming from the city.”

Millar Mills won seven caps last year. He did not add to them in the Six Nations, flitting in and out of the Northampton side for a chunk of the campaign. He credits Saints’ weekly chess games with a role in his impressive recent form, primarily as a tighthead finisher off the bench.

“I’m terrible at chess, but I think it’s helped me cognitively a little bit. Maybe I process things a bit more consistently, and I am performing a lot more consistently. I can feel it making a bit of a difference. Alex Coles is ridiculously good. As is Sam Vesty.”

Given his back story, Millar Mills would have every reason to bear a chip on his shoulder striding out in Dublin. Northampton, as a collective, simmered at how they’d been labelled lambs to the slaughter, and at how close they’d come to a staggering upset at the same stage a year earlier, when a tame first half did for them in Croke Park.

“A lot of the boys were annoyed about that,” Millar Mills says. “They felt they’d let themselves down in the first half, the bench came on in the second and we had nothing to lose and threw it to the wall a bit more. We didn’t want to be sat at the end of the game thinking, ‘we could have done something there’.

“I couldn’t believe how much we were written off. I don’t think you could ever say our forwards are the best in the world but our backs are one of the best units in the world. Our forwards probably punch above our weight. If we can put those two things together, there was no reason we couldn’t go after them.”

The hunger and the brotherhood were typified by what happened as the teams emerged.

“You might call it a bit amateur, but when we were coming out of the tunnel – we weren’t made to do this as a team – we had all our subs plus travelling reserves lined up next to our team absolutely screaming at them. Leinster didn’t have a single person in the tunnel. I don’t know if that created an edge, but the noise we created was incredible.

We were there for a street fight and everyone was buying into it. I think they were there to be professionals and play rugby.

“It happened again at half-time. We’ve got maybe 30 men before they go out into the arena. One of the reserves, as Sam Prendergast was walking out, started laying into him before the second half started.

“We were there for a street fight and everyone was buying into it. I think they were there to be professionals and play rugby.

“We’d gone out and done it as a group of mates.”

Bordeaux-Begles and their firestarters await on Saturday. It’s a pulse-quickening prospect, two of the club game’s ultimate swashbucklers with ammunition everywhere you look. Fittingly for Millar Mills, the final is staged at the Principality Stadium, the site of his first Scotland cap last February.

“We’ve played three French teams this year – Clermont, Stade and Castres, twice. They’re all a bit different but play very, very similar rugby.

“It’s the same things most non-French teams do against them: increase the speed so they can’t play, and try and stop their counterattack.”

In the Millar Mills household, you wouldn’t know such a monster game was looming. He spent his Wednesday off running errands. He had a suit resized then picked up an attachment for Ori’s pram. Now, though, it’s onwards to Cardiff. Another streetfight, another conquest, and perhaps another iconic image of Northampton’s unassuming gladiator.