Genge is bidding to star on Gogglebox
I don’t have loyalty to the Tigers shirt
ELLIS GENGE slopes into the Oadby Town football clubhouse across the road from the Leicester training ground, says hello and sits down. He is wearing jeans and a coat with dark goggles sewn into the hood. The goggles cover his eyes, giving the impression of a human fly.
For half-an-hour Genge talks, giving his often contradictory but always entertaining opinion on everything from the plight of the Tigers and the death of loyalty, to prison visits and mobility scooters. All the while the goggles remain firmly on. There is no explanation.
In a Premiership increasingly stocked with battery-reared academy robots, Genge is a man apart. Raised on the tough Knowle West estate in Bristol, he has emerged from an adolescence peppered with police runs-ins to become an international sportsman capped, so far, five times by England.
His modus operandi is naked aggression. Before every home game he writes on a board in the changing room the same few words – ‘I am going to run over these ***** ’.
Racing 92, the Tigers’ Heineken Cup opponents at Welford Road tomorrow, felt the force on one extraordinary 40m carry last Sunday which saw six opponents brushed off. “I was being lazy in the kick-chase and found myself in the back field when the ball came to me. I was happy to be there. I thought, ‘I’ll eat that up’,” he said.
“I am sure there are flyhalves who get motivated by perfection and that is why they are so good at kicking. I am an abrasive and aggressive person.”
Only now, two games into a season disrupted by a knee injury picked up on England’s tour to South Africa, are Leicester realising how much they have missed Genge.
There is too much wrong at the fallen grandees of English rugby for one murderous prop to put right on his own – he talks of “disconnects” and “leaks” diminishing them over the past three years – but, boy, does it help having that sort of forward thrust. It comes at a cost. “It’s a job at the end of the day and I think fans forget that sometimes,” he said.
“They say it’s the greatest job in the world – you **** ing go and run into a 150kg Samoan for a living.
“I’ve ripped my shoulder off the bone, I’ve got no cartilage left in my knee and I’m 23 years old. But it’s what you sign up for. I’m not moaning about it.”
What powers those skittling runs? The romantic notion would be pride in the jersey. You can forget that for a start.
“I don’t do that for Leicester. I do that because I’m good at it and it’s my job,” he said.
“I’ve seen Richard Cockerill get binned off, Aaron Mauger thrown out, Matty O’Connor binned out, Peter Betham, Lachie McCaffrey chucked out, all these players, close friends of mine, great coaches too, gone. So I don’t think there is loyalty in that regard in rugby. You ask about loyalty: I don’t have any loyalty to the Leicester Tigers shirt.” Genge’s drivers are more personal.
He wants to perform for acting head coach Geordan Murphy, his friends in the team, for his own pride and that of his family, back in Bristol. When he left the city three years ago, he did so to jettison some personal baggage as well as to join a top Premiership side.
He is not about to switch clubs now Bristol are above the Tigers in the league, he insists, but he is open about how much he misses his people there.
“I don’t have any family up here. It is tough for me,” he said. “I have got a newborn niece who was born premature and I didn’t get to see her until she was three weeks old. She was the first baby in our family in six years.
“My mum has been ill. My nan is ill. I have missed all that. I haven’t been able to support them.”
There is a warm heart beating within. The mobility scooter he bought to get around after knee surgery has been donated to a Leicester fan. He has also taken time out to visit a friend in prison in Oxford.
Tomorrow at kick-off time though, the walking block of TNT will re-emerge as Genge tries to revive a Leicester side who face European elimination if they lose to Racing.
“I have a lot of confidence that we are going to go through,” he said.
“What we are talking about is getting belief and pride back into the jersey because there hasn’t been a lot in previous years. We want to get back to the giants we were.”