The home of Ampthill RUFC, Dillingham Park, is gloriously quaint, flanked on all sides by the forests of rural Bedfordshire. A visit to the Championship club requires the players of both teams to make their way out among the oak trees that cloak the glade of pitches, trudging through the mud out into an anachronistic arena for elite sport. And so it was at this somewhat unlikely location where on 22 December 2023, when much of the rest of the United Kingdom were entering their festive stupor, that a gloriously-gifted teenage back row announced his arrival on the senior stage; an acorn soon to grow to great things falling in the forest and producing a try heard around the world.
Those inside rugby already had passing familiarity with the schoolboy exploits of Henry Pollock, a star at Stowe and an England Under-18 captain. But having been granted an opportunity to impress in his first year out of Northampton’s academy on loan with the Bedford Blues, the openside flanker burst into the consciousness of the rugby public with a searing 75-metre score, in the process rounding two backs and holding off another with pace and power belying his tender years.
