‘I love the battle’: Why Billy Pollard chose rugby’s dark arts over bright lights of NRL
By Iain Payten
For a young footballer, they are words that would normally be enough to seal the deal.
Wayne Bennett wants to meet you.
“It was unreal. I was pretty star struck being in the same room as him,” Billy Pollard recalled this week.
Pollard is now a fledgling Wallabies hooker, and will make his run-on debut against Georgia at Allianz Stadium. But back in 2019, the burly 17-year-old from Asquith was a year 12 student with offers to pursue professional careers in both rugby league and union.
In 2019, Pollard had already played hooker for the Australian schoolboys rugby team a year earlier and as a hard-charging back-rower in league, Pollard was in the shadow squad for the Australian schoolboys rugby league team, too.
And so to a meeting with Bennett. The Rabbitohs were the most serious of several NRL clubs keen to sign Pollard, and even had him in the dressing rooms for an NRL game.
Billy Pollard during the Wallabies captain’s run training at Allianz Stadium.Credit: Louise Kennerley
“It was a general chat, he probably has a couple a week – but it stuck with me,” Pollard said. “He told me wherever I go, if you want to be the best you have to train like it and to act like it, 24-7.
“I definitely took a big learning from that, even from that little meeting. Just how serious it is and how full-time you have to dedicate yourself to getting better. I did have an opportunity to go to Souths, but by that stage I was probably looking at union.”
From when he began playing league at age six at the Asquith Magpies, and rugby about five years later for the Hornsby Lions, Pollard was always one of those kids.
Billy Pollard with the NSW PSSA trophy after playing for the Sydney under 11s league team.
Stocky but also armed with speed and skill, he progressed through the rep ranks as a backrower in both codes. The Pollards are a staunch league family and Billy’s early rugby interest was mostly to hang with mates. But when he ended up at Barker College in year 11, a new fork in the road arrived.
“I moved to hooker in year 11. I wasn’t too keen at first, with all the scrums and throwing. But they basically said you’re too short and fat to play in the back row,” Pollard said.
“They told me if I wanted to pursue union professionally, that would be the position for me. And thanks God I listened to my coaches. That’s when I really started to enjoy and focus on union.”
Pollard made the Australian schoolboys and toured Ireland in 2018, but he was still a leaguie too and Trevor Schodel, the coach of Pollard in the North Sydney Bears’ SG Ball side in 2019, said it was clear that Pollard was NRL-quality.
“[Bulldogs back-rower] Jacob Preston played in the same side, and if he had stayed in league, Billy would be playing NRL as well, 100 per cent,” Schodel said.
If he had stayed in league Billy would be playing NRL as well, one hundred percent
Former Bears SG Ball coach Trevor Schodel
“He was a great kid, very well-mannered, and he was there to learn as well. He was very coachable. He wasn’t going there thinking he was a big deal, as an Australian schoolboy in union and all that.”
The day Schodel knew Pollard was destined for big things was in a game against Cronulla, when the back-rower chased down a Sharks player to save a try. The Bears won the game.
Rugby fans saw the same sort of thing later that year when Pollard ran 95 metres to almost score for the Australian schoolboys in a win over New Zealand. The story goes it sealed the deal for Pollard to turn down Bennett and the Bunnies and pursue rugby.
“It didn’t sway my decision, really,” Pollard clarifies. “But I was enjoying rugby, and that was what I was looking for. It was weird, there wasn’t a moment I can tell you I sat down and picked league or union. It just kind of happened.”
Then-Brumbies coach Dan McKellar had been working away on the recruitment front, too, and at the end of 2019 it was announced Pollard had been signed to play in Canberra on a four-year deal.
Where many contemporaries returned to league after private school educations, like Tolu Koula, Joseph Suaalii and Pollard’s good mate Kaeo Weekes, the hooker went the other way. And he not only turned down the bright lights of the NRL , but Pollard signed up for McKellar’s plan that he drop off the radar in the first few years, learning the dark arts of the front-row in club rugby.
“It is so important on when we expose them. Because I have seen it happen so often, that players are thrown into a professional environment and don’t necessarily succeed,” McKellar said in 2022.
McKellar admitted he thought the long-term plan might send Pollard into the arms of the NRL - as it had done with other young talent. But Pollard says he understood the vision.
Brumbies hooker Billy Pollard, with Scott Sio.Credit: Lachlan Lawson/Brumbies
“I tried to be realistic and understood I am going against men, now. There was no way I would be ready in a year or two, when I was 18/19. Particularly in the front row,” he said.
“It definitely took me a while to develop the passion for set piece. That has taken a while but I have really started to enjoy that side of the game, particularly this year.”
Pollard was given a cameo debut off the bench for the Brumbies in 2021, before becoming a Super Rugby regular in 2022.
He made a rushed Test debut in the same season, after being late call-up to Argentina to cover a number of injuries to hookers. When another injury occurred on the game eve, he won his first cap in a heavy loss in San Juan.
Pollard freely admits he wasn’t ready to be playing Test rugby then, but after two more seasons with the Brumbies and a short stint with French champions La Rochelle last year during the World Cup, he has returned to the Wallabies this year feeling far more confident.
After several years of study, the former hard-running league player on the right edge now has a dark arts degree.
“I love the battle of it. It’s eight v eight, it’s very confrontational. They’re very big men and some of them really want to hurt you. I enjoy that side of it,” Pollard said.
But what of that free-running wide game? Having grown from a 100kg league back-rower to a 112kg rugby hooker, Pollard jokes he may have lost a yard of pace but says he keeps an eye out for chances to surprise a few backs in wide channel.
“It’s just about finding the balance. None of that stuff is possible if I don’t nail the set-piece,” Pollard said.
In another world, Pollard might have spent Saturday afternoon running wide for the Rabbitohs in their clash with the Wests Tigers at Gosford.
But instead he will at Allianz Stadium, deep in battle with enormous Georgian front-rowers who live and breathe scrummaging.
Pollard is happy with his choice.