11/19/2023 0 Comments Houzz login issues![]() It honed and fostered a love for scrummaging.” Sometimes I think they didn’t even care if we won or lost, as long as we won the scrum. Drums going at the start of the scrum, ‘bang, bang, bang’. It was all we ever spoke about, all the crowd ever spoke about. “The town had a phrase, ‘no scrum, no win’ - ‘pas de mêlée, pas de victoire’. ![]() “It didn’t matter - he loved pushing in the scrum, so he was playing,” Harrison recalls. Tao Tapasu, then a 40-year-old lock scrummaging behind Harrison, might not have been much of a mover around the field and was unlikely to be found jumping in the line-out. Team-mates who spoke English would translate messages to Harrison from the club’s coaches about his scrummaging technique during sessions where the pack would hit the scrum machine a hundred times. Life with Auch - Antoine Dupont’s first club - in the south of France required less paperwork and more mental resilience. And people probably can’t read my notes”. I see that as a problem-solving tool, it can be very beneficial.” He adds with a smile: “I’m not the biggest fan of writing on a whiteboard, put it that way. Sometimes they are brilliant ideas, sometimes they’re horrendous, but I probably think slightly outside the box to different people. Over the course of growing up I have learned different ways of thinking, someone called it cognitive diversity. ” is almost like you’re in a 100-metre race, but your lane has hurdles in it. And that fuelled my love for rugby,” Harrison explains. Mr Morris told them ‘it’s brilliant, you have found something that he’s invested in reading’. “I had an English teacher, Mr Morris, and my parents were a bit concerned that all I used to read were the programmes. More importantly he also spent that time reading something of interest which could help with his dyslexia matchday programmes. Tom spent his childhood, when not at Beechen Cliff School, watching Borthwick captain Bath at The Rec. Harrison’s father, John, was team manager at first Bath and then Bristol. ![]() Harrison’s connection with England head coach Steve Borthwick in fact goes back a couple of decades. ![]() There’s a two-way relationship there which is quite nice to have,” says Ludlam. “Having a young head who we can socialise and connect with as well has been really good. As pointed out by Lewis Ludlam, the Northampton and England flanker, he offers something different to the usual relationship between coaches and players. Coaching since 2012, including six years at Leicester Tigers capped off by winning the Gallagher Premiership title in 2022, Harrison is no rookie. Not that youth should be confused with inexperience. Harrison, at the age of 31, is young enough to have been at Hartpury College at the same time as England forwards Ellis Genge and Jonny Hill. Having battled with dyslexia and attended what sounds like an unofficial scrum university in the French second division during his playing days, the new England scrum coach is more interesting than most assistant coaches. Tom Harrison may have taken the road less travelled to reach the top of rugby union, but those paths tend to be the most fascinating. ![]()
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