England’s Te’o owes much to Dublin tuition
IT wasn’t supposed to pan out like this when two of actor Russell Crowe’s NRL title winners bid adieu to the Rabbitohs’ rugby league scene in Sydney in the autumn of 2014.
Slammin’ Sam Burgess was the one supposed to come home to England and make banner headlines for all the right reasons, not Ben Te’o who only belatedly wound up in his mother’s native land following a twoseason pit-stop in Dublin.
Burgess never settled on his return home, plunged straight into the national team set-up as a centre, even though his new club Bath figured he was a back row.
The confusion spelt disaster, his World Cup ending in disaster and so forceful was the pool elimination fall-out, he figured the flak wasn’t worth it so he swiftly absconded back to where he came from, back to the Rabbitohs.
Te’o, though, has proved it’s possible to handle the many stresses and strains of crossing the rugby divide. He switched from league and slowly built his union reputation on Leinster’s books before leaving for Worcester and the start of an England Test career that had his name up in lights last month, his tryscoring cameo clinching the comeback win over France and spawning multiple ‘Big Ben’ headlines.
It was proof the experiment concocted by Matt O’Connor, the former Leinster coach from Australia, was a success, with Ireland’s loss now very much England’s gain.
How so? Two seasons was quite an apprenticeship for the RDS club to invest in a longshot, yet they aren’t reaping the dividend. Worcester’s bulging pay offer instead convinced Te’o he was better heading to England. There he’s become immediately eligible for them through his English-born mother rather than stick around for a third season on far lesser money in Dublin where he would have been available to Ireland later this year under the 36-month residency rule.
Money talked most and Te’o sounded somewhat uninformed in a December interview when stating he never imagined Worcester would be in a battle for Premiership survival, even though the club’s years in the English top flight have always been a lower-place struggle.
‘I never envisaged being in this survival battle,’ he said. ‘I thought this was a club that had come up, would stay up and really kick on. That’s what I thought; top eight, top four, then grand finals. It’s not really been what I thought it would be.’
No player would ever want to get injured but reflection on Te’o’s stint in Ireland suggests him getting injured early in his Leinster debut was a blessing. A six-week recuperation that winter for a hand fracture on his debut against Edinburgh stopped him being fasttracked into becoming a mainstay of their midfield after Brian O’Driscoll retired.
Instead, fresh from that NRL title win, he was able to bide his time, not only settling into a new way of life in Dublin but having not played the game since he was a teenager a decade earlier, he had the scope to properly relearn the union ropes on the training ground without match pressure
The approach worked a treat, Te’o even playing some reserve team British & Irish Cup games (including a semi-final at Worcester) before really coming into his own as a force last season. Leinster had nourished their signing in contrast to Bath and England who wanted immediate return on their big Burgess buck. ‘I’d a lot more experience, learning the steps,’ reflected New Zealand-born Te’o on the different union paths taken by the old Rabbitohs pals. ‘He [Burgess] went in pretty early. He was also playing two positions at once, so I can see how that would have been very difficult. ‘I came in and there were probably some guys looking over their shoulder thinking, “I don’t know about this guy”. But they all helped me and I’d have to say the majority, 80 per cent of all things I’ve learned in rugby union, has come from my team-mates.’ Pre-season 2015 brought him on a ton. So, too, sitting down with housemate Noel Reid to watch almost every match of that year’s World Cup. ‘I fell in love with rugby union again,’ he said, pleased he came through the other side. ‘There was a lot of really hard times in terms of the skillset and training and early days when sometimes I thought had I spent too long away and was this going to be a bit too hard? But I just really, really wanted to give it a good crack to really make sure I excelled.’ Te’o had 39 games at Leinster, his last the Pro12 final defeat at Edinburgh where Robbie Henshaw, who soon traded west coast for east to fill the Te’o void, excelled for Connacht. Now, seven England international caps and eight Worcester appearances later he returns to Dublin aiming to enjoy another championship late, late show like last month. That would hurt given where he learned his trade.