Ben Harris
When he tested positive for Covid-19, Ben Harris counted himself lucky he only suffered a loss of taste. It was the latest event in a rollercoaster year that had seen him switch England Sevens for the Premiership, and then the Championship. But while he is focused on helping Saracens back to the top, he still has one eye on Tokyo 2021.
The Covid-19 induced storm that has whipped rugby into a financial spin has hit the sevens world hardest of all, with the cancellation of the HSBC World Sevens Series in June leading to livelihoods being suspended for an entire sector of the rugby industry.
Yet, so far, Ben Harris has beaten the house, signing a fifteens contract with Saracens before the RFU scrapped their professional sevens programme; and impressing in his new colours when the Gallagher Premiership re-started in August.
Then, aged 20, he became the youngest recipient of the RPA England Sevens Player of the Year award in October.
That said, he hasn’t come through 2020 unscathed. When Rugby Journal catches up with him via a Zoom call, he’s recently tested positive for Covid-19. “Symptom-wise I’m OK,” he says. “It’s just taste and smell, which makes eating boring but I’m not unwell so it’s OK.
“The only flavours I can faintly taste are salt and sweet so for lunch and dinner I’m having plain white chicken breast with salt, because I can’t get anything else from it. And then maybe some green beans or broccoli, again with salt.
“My girlfriend is in the same boat and can’t taste anything either. She’s just eating toast. I’m aware that we’re talking about it as if it’s the worst thing ever, but we could be dying on a ventilator. Instead, we just can’t taste our lunch.”
Ben’s isolation gives us a chance to track back through 2020 in forensic detail. In January, he started to make a name himself with a string of increasingly confident displays during the Sydney leg of the world series, helping England into the semi-finals and himself into the tournament Dream Team. An accolade which he refused to believe until Phil Burgess threw his phone at him with the news.
His subsequent performances in Los Angeles and Vancouver also caught the eye, emerging as England’s top try scorer during the three tournaments prior to the global lockdown, even out-scoring England’s established finishers Dan Norton and Tom Bowen.
Not bad for a player who had to go through an X Factor-style trial to become an England Sevens player in the first place. “I was at the London Irish Academy between the ages of fifteen to eighteen but I wasn’t offered a contract after leaving school [RGS High Wycombe],” he says. “But my school coach put me forward for an England Sevens trial, which was open to players in their last year of school who hadn’t been offered a fifteens contract.
“It was a two-day trial at Bisham Abbey. I remember it so well. It was April and it was so hot, about 30 degrees.
“We had a training session on the Friday then an overnight stay and then a sort of three-team rotational contact game the next day.
“It was a weird environment and we didn’t know how many contracts were at stake. There was definitely that element of boys trying to show what they had but it depended on how you looked at it: do you want your team to be winning, or do you want a contract?
“It was tricky but I just did what I normally do: get the ball and have a go, and pass when it needed to be passed. I didn’t read too much into it because you could tell when someone was trying to do too much.
“There wasn’t really any animosity [amongst the trialists]. I didn’t think it was a case of ‘he’s going to take my contract’ because they just offer it to whoever was good enough.
“I found out a week later that I had got in and two weeks after that I was making my debut in Moscow.”
It would take Ben a full year, however, to be included in a World Series squad, with that milestone coming in Las Vegas in 2019.
He then featured strongly for England in that season’s final leg in Paris and in Colomiers, where England booked Team GB’s ticket for the Tokyo Olympics.
That left him in a great space to tackle the 2019/2020 season, and although things went even better than he expected, there were some harsh lessons to learn along the way, including one served up by Carlin Isles, commonly touted as the fastest rugby player ever with a 10.13 PB for the 100m – a time quick enough to make the qualifying standard for the 100m at the 2016 Olympic Games.
“I got rinsed by Carlin Isles,” he admits, “because I did exactly what my coach said not to do! I tried to defend him like a normal player. I was on the wing outside Dan Norton and the plan was to make him go inside me and Dan could then handle his pace on the inside. But I showed him the outside and he was gone!
“Another time against Scotland, I was dying after we’d gone tryline to tryline. I got the ball fifteen metres out and it was almost a run-in, there was one player coming across and I was holding it in one hand and it just fell out of my hand! I have never been so gutted.”
That was until the global lockdown in March, which led to the postponement of the World Series, then the cancellation of the entire season. At that point in June, the fate of England Sevens programme was decided, and it became clear to Ben that players would soon be made redundant.
By his own admission, he got a bit lucky. And in his agent Billy Clark, he had a man he could rely on. “A few weeks before the programme was announced to be cut, I knew fifteens was coming back yet we were still on furlough and there was no motivation for them to put us back into training.
“I remember speaking to my agent about initially going somewhere for a few months on a part-time thing, so I'd still be able to play sevens. But no clubs were that keen, and sevens didn’t look like it was going to re-start.
“They [the RFU] gave us the idea that it might get cut. They said that if they don’t get this funding, we’re going to have to start making people redundant. I was like ‘well, I probably better head off now.’
“I remember calling my agent when I was on the golf course, and saying, ‘I think I need to start looking now, I am a bit worried this isn’t going to re-start and at my age I need to be training and playing and learning’. He was like ‘OK, leave it with me.’
In the rugby equivalent of Craig David’s song 7 Days, Ben spoke with Billy on a Tuesday about the options he had on the table, had an interview with Saracens on Thursday and by Saturday he had signed for the club. He trained on Monday.
In the process, Ben turned down at least one other offer from another Championship club as the lure of Saracens became too strong, especially as his contract would permit him to still play for England Sevens when the world series returns, whilst offering him a chance to make his senior 15s debut in the Gallagher Premiership. Although he admits that the whole matchday experience left him feeling like a boy on his first day of school. “I hadn’t played fifteens in two years, since school,” he says. “It was my first senior 15s appearance and it was my Saracens debut.”
With his opposite man one of the rapidly rising stars of the division, Louis Rees-Zammit, the potential for more lessons to be dished out was certainly real.
What concerned Ben more though, was the alien environment of fifteens. “I didn’t have nerves about the debut, I just had no idea what was going on. The structure of a match day in terms of when you get there, what you do, what the warm-up is like, I had no idea what that was like. And then being on the pitch for so long at a time was weird to me as well. 40 minutes on a pitch! And then 15 minutes at half-time – what do you do for that time? In sevens you get a minute, two minutes in total, so by the time you come together you’re catching your breath, throwing a cold towel over you and then you’re back into it.”
Against Gloucester his half-time passed by in a daze, having scored a debut try for Saracens – his first since touching down for England at BC Place in Vancouver in March – not long before the interval.
It was a well taken try too, collecting a pass from No8 Andy Christie before sizing up Lloyd Evans in a one-on-one, beating Charlie Sharples and sliding home. “I was buzzing [at half-time],” says Ben. “I came in, sat down, got the burns on my legs dressed, had a few conversations. I was so gassed I’d scored, half-time actually flew by!”
He would make Saracens’ matchday squad on one further occasion (against Worcester) before the end of the season.
Now of course, it’s life in the Championship that’s in his immediate cross-hairs, although sevens and the Olympic Games remains a priority, if and when the series comes back to life.
So how does he feel about exchanging the global glamour of the world series for the charms of the Championship? “I don’t know,” he admits. “It’s just part of it isn’t it? It’s a tough situation [for England sevens players seeking contracts in fifteens] because a lot of it is to do with your age. It’s easier for younger guys to pick up contracts because they're cheaper. And you can be moulded a little bit more. I do miss sevens though. Being away with fifteen of you for two weeks, spending every day together. It’s just so fun.
“The Olympics is still a priority for me – it’s what I’ve dreamt about for the past two years. But it’s got to be there for it to actually be a priority. The fact of the matter is fifteens is now my job and I’ve got to adapt to and keep learning that game.
“Because I just want to be playing. I always really loved the places that we go in sevens, the stadiums, the crowds, but as soon as the whistle goes, you don't really think about that. That just focuses me in on what's going on in the game.”
Whether it’s Dubai or Doncaster, Ben Harris has boots, and will travel. And he’s grateful for that.
Story by Jack Zorab
Pictures by Oli Hillyer-Riley