Competitive Currys on fast track to reach twin England target
The 18-year-old Sale pair tell they aim to achieve a Red Rose first in June
Eddie Jones, the England head coach, needed to watch Ben and Tom Curry in action for Sale only once to know that he had to accommodate the 18-yearold identical twins in his squad to travel to Argentina in June.
“You could see they have got something about them,” Jones said. “I want them to come in and raise the intensity of training. I want them to be the new energy in the team. The only thing the senior players ought to ask of them is to tone it down. We’ll see how good they are, and if they’re good enough – and we think they are – they’ll play.”
Consider that challenge accepted. There is no thought about meekly learning the ropes from the sidelines. The flankers, who are too young to remember the 2003 World Cup, want to be the youngest players to represent England since Jonny Wilkinson – and the first set of twins.
“There’s a massive emphasis on being there to play,” Tom said. “We’re not there to hold water bottles. It’s in our personalities that we’re quite high-energy. A lot of the senior players here probably don’t like it much – we’re probably a bit too energetic, but we’ve been told it will die down as we get older. I’d like to think not. It’s in our game so we’re not going to take it away just because we’re stepping up.”
Ben echoes his brother. “It’s one of the biggest learning opportunities of our lives so far,” he said. “Eddie is probably the best coach in the world at the moment and we have to learn from him and likewise the players, but we are there to try to get into the squad.”
Already Jones is looking forward to his own challenge of distinguishing between the brothers. “I want to find out if I can tell the difference between the two of them,” Jones said. For the England coach’s benefit, Ben is an inch taller and Tom a few pounds heavier. Facially they are pretty much indistinguishable. Fellow call-up Denny Solomona has been at Sale for five months now and still cannot tell them apart.
It does not help that they are both flankers with the same tenacious foraging style. Steve Diamond, the Sale director of rugby, has rotated them, and today Tom starts against Leicester at Welford Road, but there is no doubt that they work best as a package.
Their uncle, the former England hooker John Olver, describes their “sixth sense” of knowing where each other is on the pitch. One chops, the other swoops over the ball. “The biggest asset of a back-row player is relationships and being able to know what each other’s strengths and weaknesses are and what they are going to do in certain situations,” Ben said. “That is a really big strength of ours and it definitely helps.”
It is just as well that they work well as a combination, given how ferociously competitive they are. That is a trait prized above all others by Jones. “I hear they’re very competitive about everything: A-levels, their weight, their haircuts, their girlfriends,” he said.
“I’m not sure where he got that last one from,” Ben says. “The others are very true.” Anyone who saw Olver play for Northampton or Harlequins will know exactly from where they inherited that win-atall-costs mentality, which even extends to a family game of hide-and-seek. “We’re going into an environment where the competition is massive, but we’ve had that since we started playing at the age of four,” Ben said. “We’ve always had that competition driving us, everywhere from how much food we eat, what weights we are lifting, how well we are training and playing. We’ve always had it. It can’t be anything but beneficial to always have competition.”
Olver, who was the long-term England understudy to Brian Moore, is a true character of the game and the boys were brought up upon his ‘war stories’. “In those days the bench would only get on if there was an injury,” Ben said. “Someone dared him to be naked under his boiler suit, which he did. Then Brian Moore went down injured and he had to sprint back into the changing room to get changed.”
They have also received input from Richard Hill, the World Cup-winning flanker, while with the England Under-18s, but their biggest influence has been their father, David, who coached them until they were 16. They still get his help. “Thank God there are bigger crowds, so you can’t hear him shouting any more,” Tom says.
Their tight-knit family was rocked three weeks ago when their grandmother, Norma, died