Ellis Genge

Catapulting sweets at sixth-formers, letting in goals ‘left, right and centre’ at football, running riot against Colston’s and the sight of Lesley Vainikolo have all played a role in the shaping of Ellis Genge. But, key to it all, was Leicester’s shit night life. 

Rainbow-coloured crunchy candy bracelets have played a significant role in the life of Ellis Genge. “Do you remember them?” he asks. “Well, I was biting them in half and flicking them (using the elastic band as a catapult) to the front of the school bus and I ended up having a scrap with one of the sixth formers. 

“I was such a prick at school,” he adds, repeating, “such a prick, I owe people a proper apology.”

In what way? “Just a dickhead mate,” he puts it, succinctly. “I was always answering back, shouting out, playing games on computers – that’s why they didn’t want to give me a computer at first [when they diagnosed him with dyspraxia], they actually blocked the internet on the laptop so I couldn’t use it.”

Ellis lives in the middle of nowhere in Leicestershire in a converted 17th-century country pub. Driving in the midst of early morning mid-winter darkness, we drive past it several times, before the sound of Cass – his boisterous but beautiful furrow-browed mastiff – signals we’ve arrived at the right place. “I’ve never lived by countryside, neither has Meg [his partner], but she lived by the beach in Wales,” he explains. “It was gorgeous, never knew how good she had it, I loved going down there.

“I had a house in Bristol which was technically in the countryside but you were just five minutes from the city, whereas this is really, very far away from everything.

“I don’t regret it,” he adds, as if predicting we might suggest he does, “I love it. Training is quite full-on, so for me to come back, to see Meg and the boy, and be far away from everything is a blessing.”

As he’s talking, he’s also carrying around one of the blessings, his then three-month-old son Ragh. “It’s the most challenging one,” he says of being a dad, “it’s rewarding at the same time though, but I got fuck all out of him at the beginning. I was actually, not exactly worried, but it was quite shit; he didn’t know who I was and it was proper grinding me. 

“I went away when he was six days old and came back when he was ten weeks old, do you know what I mean? He’d seen me once for two days, once for twenty hours and he’d been sleeping most of the time.

“He’s responding now though, which is nice.”

Meg joins us in the kitchen having just retrieved Cass from some garden-based mishap. “She’s stinking,” she says. 

The two met at Hartpury College, where Meg was playing netball. She joins in the conversation as we talk baby numbers. “I’ll have as many as she’s happy to push out to be honest,” says Ellis. “Three is a nice number,” responds Meg, putting something resembling a cap on the family size.

Although they dated as teenagers, it’s only been in the past couple of years that they have finally settled down, first moving into his flat then the family house in the country. “We were on and off for seven years, but we weren’t serious,” says Ellis, before quickly backtracking: “Don’t get me wrong, I love her to bits but we met when we were sixteen so it was early to sell your soul and give up everything.”

Meg laughs at Ellis’s delicate way of explaining their relationship. “You managed to commit to me then,” she jokes.  

“It’s tough when you’re young and have a girlfriend at sixteen,” he says. “It’s tough when you’re young and have a boyfriend at sixteen,” she responds. Meg clearly has his number.

We pick the story back up from the school-bus wrist-candy incident. “I got kicked off the bus after that and I had to ride my bike in,” he says, “and it was such a long bike ride. It was an hour and a half bike ride, Mum and Dad worked so they couldn’t always drop me.

“My mate Andreas lived nearer to school and he walked, but sometimes he didn’t go and I’d miss morning register as well. I was there in the afternoon, not always there for mornings though.”

The significance of missing school meant he was only put in for exams where the best available grade was a C, even if he aced it. Which is what he did, with tech the only subject he failed. 

There were other issues though, such as dyspraxia. “You know what? Pre year nine, before I was diagnosed as having dyspraxia, I do feel I got in a lot of trouble,” he says, “I’d have teachers saying I’d only written a date, but I was like ‘yeah, but I’m trying’. Then I’d get in trouble and I’d rebel completely, trying to cause as much trouble as I could.”

It was his mum that first noticed his condition. “She saw that I couldn’t hold a pen,” he says, “so she had to buy this special pen – they were like £5, with thick blue rubber things around them. But I still couldn’t write.

“So the school brought in someone who tested how many words you write in a minute, and I wrote two words. I had to sit there with blinkers on and I wrote two words which were completely illegible, you couldn’t read them. Then I sat at a PC and did 30 words per minute – I was good at touch typing – and they said ‘he’s got dyspraxia’, just from that one test.”

What did that mean? “Well, the big one for me, or so my mum told me, was that I was lazy, messy – I’m comfortable around mess – clumsy, and basically have no co-ordination, and I’m just unorganised. I also used to scuff my feet when I walked so I had to get these special Clarks shoes.

“At the beginning my mum was like, ‘ah my poor little boy he’s got this wrong with him’, but as I got older, it was ‘you fucking lazy bastard, you haven’t got dyspraxia, you’re just lazy,” he laughs, before admitting, “and I don’t really know if it is my characteristics or I’m just shit at throwing.”

Growing up in Bristol, with both parents working, his nan’s was a second home. “She lived on the next road with my great nan, and my mum would drop us off on the way to work and we’d go to nursery or school from there, and quite often stay over,” he says. “But my parents were a  massive influence. 

“My dad, big fan,” he says. “Dad influenced me with stuff that I did, Mum influenced me with personal decisions that I made. Dad would be like ‘football was shit’, so I wouldn’t do football. I always looked up to him, and mum influenced me on the personal side, such as whether or not I should go out.”

At this point he looks down at his own son, not related to the conversation, simply due to his heft. “He’s just heavy man, fucking heavy,” he says. “He’s three months and he’s in year-old nappies, he’s the same size as my seven-month-old niece...”

Back to his own dad. “He got me to try everything: karate, boxing, judo, football, and rugby was obviously the last one,” says Ellis. “He bought me a set of golf clubs: he plays golf – he’s off sixteen, which is alright. Although if you’ve been playing for 30 years you should be better than sixteen,” he adds, laughing. “I just used to fuck around though [on the golf course], ruining greens, ruining it for everyone else, digging for gold with a putter. Dad hated taking me.

“I asked him the other day, ‘did I ever hit the ball off the floor, or a swing, that made him think ‘wow, he’s got fucking something’? And he said, ‘nah, did you fuck’ – so he knew it wasn’t my game from the off...”

He’s picked up golf again recently, “I’m still shit,” he says. “I’m probably playing off about 28 if you had to write something down!”

Having dyspraxia would impact most sports. “Not rugby,” he says, “I only had to catch the ball, run, try and score – nobody can tackle you when you’re younger, I didn’t have to pass so I didn’t know I was going to be shit at passing or throwing. 

“When we played rounders at school I’d always miss the ball, I got bowled out at cricket first time, a golden duck, so I never played again.”

He stopped playing football at eleven. “I was letting in so many goals, I was leaking them left, right and centre,” he explains, “I just thought ‘this is my fault we’re losing’, so put my eggs into one basket.”

His rugby career began at Old Redcliffians but after playing a school game against a side containing players from Cleve [who were one of the area’s strongest clubs], he was tempted into a move. “Cleve put 50 points on everyone,” says Ellis. “I was invited to play for them against Pill Harriers, who hadn’t lost for two years, and we beat them, horrible bastards, we had a pitch fight.”

Two years at Cleve followed before Ellis, then a No.8, switched to Keynsham, where he was spotted by Hartpury College DoR Alan Martinovic. “I wasn’t even playing for them at the time, but they were playing Colston’s in a pre-season friendly and I hated Colston’s, they were a private school and I was bitter. 

“I played centre and ran riot. Alan was like ‘fuck it, I want him’. He’d been there to scout Colston’s boys for Hartpury, but he signed me.

“I wrote down on the trial form for the scholarship, I can play: 8, 13, 14, 11 – FYI, I kick my own goals,” he laughs. “I already had the scholarship before the game though, so I just came on for five minutes, ran amok, and they said ‘you can come off now’. 

“In the next game for Hartpury I remember seeing Jonny [Hill] handing everyone off, two storeys taller than everyone else – it was fucking good to see.”

Hartpury College was the making of Ellis. “I went there at sixteen, [when] I couldn’t give a fuck about rugby really,” he says. “At the time I just wanted to go and play with my mates.”

He made new friends quickly at college, including Jonny, and Mark Harrison – who he labels the best player he’s ever seen. “It brought something out in me that I didn’t know I had,” he says. “It aligned me with everything I  needed to do [to succeed], and if I didn’t get that feeling – if I’d gone to Filton in Bristol – I don’t think I’d have made it. But at Hartpury, even at sixteen, everything was about being a professional.

“It was simple things too, they’re everywhere now, but even seeing signs saying ‘be your best’ all that stuff, it was professionalism and to me it was ‘fuck me they mean business’. 

“There was the gym which everyone with a student card could use, it was like £3 a month, but nobody was allowed in the elite performance gym unless you were in the first team.

“It meant something to get in there and I wasn’t in the first team but, soon
as I got in, it was like ‘right I can go in there now’ – I didn’t even go to it, but I was allowed to it.”

They’d train two to three times a day. “You’d do fitness the next day after a game,” he says, “I’m not even joking, and then you’d do weights all weekend. 

“You’d get to watch the slo-mo cam playing your passes back to us – that’s what it’s like at England camp now, but you don’t relish it as much because you’ve been around it so long. 

“But I do get the same feeling [as at Hartpury] in the England camp, where everything is done for me to make me the best I can be: food cooked for me, supplements put out for me, literally being spoon fed to be the best in the world. 

“The difference now is that we’ve got a good balance in camp for switching off, which is so important, to weigh things up, but when you’re younger you think ‘fuck it, if you want to do it, you’ve got to sacrifice everything’.”

It also helped that his side was part of a period of huge success for the college. “We had 2,000 people coming to college games, singing Hartpury songs,” he says.  “We were the invincibles, something like 55 games in a row unbeaten, that’s unheard of – five years or so unbeaten.

“I think in my year we had fifteen age-group internationals and two of us were on the bench, from 1 to 13 were internationals – we had Merab [Sharikadze] from Georgia, Ross Moriarty, Steph Reynolds, Billy Burns, Will Hunt, Niall Crosley... all these names are coming back to me now.  

“I didn’t think about it at the time, but we were a match, sides would fold against us, just saying they weren’t going to play. It was such a good environment to be part of but I’d say only four or five of us went on to play professional, which is not a lot in my year. One guy we had, a full-back Ben Thomas, best player we had, and he’s a golf caddy now.”

Ellis was made captain in his second year. “That changed me too,” he says. “It meant I had to look after people, such as the boys that were down because they hadn’t played many games. And then one of my friends, Henry Harper, a family friend and younger, came through and I had to look after him, so it taught me about nurturing.” 

Not that he didn’t have his own teething problems. “I was homesick big time,” he admits. “I begged my mum to come home, but I couldn’t because I didn’t have money for the train, and she wouldn’t pick me up, so I had to stay. 

“She knew if I came back I’d go off the boil, so I couldn’t come home, I was allowed to come home once a month for the weekend, which was enough.

“This is what I’m saying,” he says, addressing a wider point of rugby, “if you didn’t put these kids [from working class backgrounds] into private schools, they wouldn’t be given the opportunities and the pathways. It would be frowned upon if they didn’t go, it would be ‘ah, he doesn’t want to come to Colston’s, fuck him, he won’t make it.’”

Being at Hartpury also gave Ellis a glimpse into professional club life. “You’d see the Gloucester players coming in for training because they trained next door,” he says. “I remember seeing Lesley Vainikolo coming in with his big dreads, it was mad. Shit like that geared me up to do what I wanted to do. It made me want to do it.

“I’ve never really thought that before, but that’s what got me here.”

And it kept him on the straight and narrow. “I do feel like most of the stuff I’ve done was before college,” he says, “every time I got arrested or in trouble, was before college, I only got arrested once since going. I guess you could say I changed at Hartpury, I got away from all that, it stopped happening...”

He never had the chance to join Vainikolo, at least not immediately after college, as he’d already committed to Bristol. “It doesn’t get much press but you sign that slave contract when you’re a teenager and train with the academies,” he explains. “It essentially means if another team want you, they have to pay a fee and, in rugby, when you’re eighteen, you don’t know if you’re going to crack it at that point because so many people are carving it up, it’s not like football, where it’s more technical. 

“Rugby is more about what’s up top,” he says, pointing to his head, “so clubs don’t want to take a risk on you and pay for your release.

“And so I was straight back to Bristol and, bang, straight back in amongst it,” he says, “I couldn’t afford to rent a place away and so I had to get a bus to training which nearly killed me. 

“I failed my driving test four times,” he continues. “Andy Robinson gave me the morning off to take my test because he was so fucked off with me being late for training all the time

“Every time I failed, I remember doing the walk from the bus stop across the training ground and remember seeing them laughing at me from the window.”

When he passed, he got his nan’s Micra. “It was silver, a good car, it only had 30k on the clock and I had that for two years,” he says. 

Bristol weren’t in the best of shape at the time, financially or on the pitch. “We had this sponsor, an electric shop, and we all had to go down and pose naked for a calendar,” he says. “We were doing it to raise money for a social fund, and I remember we lost to Bedford and Robbo pulled the plug on it, he said we couldn’t put this out having lost to Bedford.

“Redford Pennycook – our social sec, the best social sec ever – put his life and soul into it and it got chopped at the last minute. 

“That was the first time I’d even been around fully naked grown blokes,” recalls Ellis. “I’d showered naked at college obviously, but this made you realise they were the exact same as us just ten years older, still just as childish, it was refreshing to see. We did one scene with a shop, like a veg shop, and I remember Errie Claassens, the winger from Worcester, moved the carrot and put his piece in – it was a big piece,” he laughs.

“It got a bit more serious in my second or third year, we signed Jack Lam, Ryan Jones, Ian Evans, Dwayne Peel, but nothing really changed for me, I didn’t play...”

Not playing wasn’t good for Ellis, especially as he was back on his old stomping ground. “I got in trouble at the club,” he says. “I was getting in trouble at parties, I was a bit fed up, there was trouble off the field too.

“It was just my nature then,” he says, “it was where I was brought up, and it was always within me to go back to what I was before. So I’d go out with my mates and on nights out I was very different to some of the other boys. If someone bumped into me, I couldn’t let stuff go. 

“It was just that sort of stupid shit that never should have happened, I was eighteen or nineteen, not playing rugby but hitting the gym five times a week, I didn’t know my own strength. We’d go out on a uni night, and there’d be some 23-year-old student, and you’d end up getting in a bust-up, you didn’t realise you were towering over them.” 

Bristol and Ellis agreed to go their separate ways. “I had to get out of Bristol for a bit and initially we agreed that I’d return after three years but when that time came up, I was already signed [with Leicester] for another three years.”

His destination was a good match. “The night life is rubbish in Leicester so it felt like the best place for me.”

Richard Cockerill was just what Ellis needed. “When I signed, Cockers said ‘right I’ll have a word now’, and he set out early that there was no fucking about.  “First day of training I got battered by Tom Youngs, Ben Youngs, Tom Croft, Ed Slater at a scrum session, proper filled in, and I thought ‘yeah I’ll enjoy this place’.”

In his time at the club, Leicester have struggled to reach the heights they’d become accustomed too. “Yeah, it’s been terrible really,” he says. “I’m the demise of Leicester.”

On a serious note, he does believe his former coach’s methods have been hugely missed. “Cockers, as much as boys used to probably not think it, he was a genius tactician,” he begins, “but one thing he did do was keep order and there was no fucking about.

“I’m not saying we’ve fucked about, but we’ve let standards drop. 

“I remember for one team walk-through, I was wearing these trainers and I walked up all chilled and everyone was looking at me, I didn’t know what had happened. But Cockers pulled me to one side and said, ‘Genge, if you don’t go upstairs and change those fucking trainers now, you’re not playing.’ ‘Genuine?’ I asked. ‘Do I look like I’m fucking joking? You’ve got two minutes’, he said. 

“I’ve never sprinted so fast, I ran to the hotel, pressing the elevator button a hundred times, it wasn’t coming, so I legged it up the stairs – bang, the right trainers on, sprint back. And Cockers said, ‘right, we good to start now?’.

“He was brilliant,” continues Ellis. “He held the same values as me. I remember I had a bust-up in training – there was always a few fights, that was what Leicester was – and he would always handle it in the right way. He had such a good grip on the club, if he decided something, the boys would listen. 

“I do feel that when we weren’t getting to the finals, he didn’t lose his way, but he sort of lost faith in what he was doing, so he swayed a bit more to the new generation of coaching which is a bit more laid back and relaxed and not as strict.

“I feel he should’ve stuck with his guns and been that nutter shouting at everyone because it did keep you in check. The boys didn’t like him as much, but it did keep people in check. 

“I always got on with him,” he concludes.

His first England cap arrived just six months after he’d been playing on loan [from Bristol] in the Championship with Plymouth Albion, reflecting the immediate impact Cockerill and Leicester had on him. In the four or five years since, he’s clocked up a further 24 caps.

“I’ve had a weird one with England,” he says, “When you don’t think you’re going to play, you find it hard to be invested, to feel part of that squad.

“But now I’m speaking to Eddie about it, and he’s done well making me be a part of it; he’s allowed me to be myself and a character in the squad and I’m closer to people, there’s more friendships, I’m more comfortable.”

He lists his rivals, including Beno Obano, among his friends. “The way we train it’s impossible not to go hard at each other and compete for positions,” he says. “How you act off the pitch is up to you, and if Beno didn’t want to talk to me, that’s up to him, but we do. On the pitch I’m always going hard, and he’d be disappointed if I didn’t, same the other way around.”

Playing for England, having an opinion and having the odd post-match beer in front of TV cameras, has meant Ellis is sometimes a target on social media. “I ask my old man if something blows up, I ask him if it’s bad,” he says. “If he says ‘yeah’, then it’s something to worry about.

“People want different things [from players],” he says, “that’s how I see it on social media; someone always has a problem with what you do. It bothers people around me more, it bothers my old man when he starts to read this stuff.

“Fuck me, if you’ve got a soft underbelly, though,” he says. “I actually don’t think young people, young athletes, should have social media and get exposed to it at such a young age. I can’t imagine what the footballers go through, they get it so much worse. 

“Social media is a devil but, at the same time, it’s one of the best things out there isn’t it, especially for building a profile and you can’t shy away from it commercially.”

It also plays a role, both positively and negatively, in addressing some of the issues often asked about, including inequality in rugby. “The thing is that everyone wants to ask me about it, but not many people want to do anything about it,” he says. “Someone tweeted me the other day and said, ‘well you’ve got two black kids in your Twitter picture, both from underprivileged backgrounds, so how can you say there’s a class problem in rugby?’

“Just because I’ve made it and Kyle [Sinckler] has made it and maybe a few others, it doesn’t mean there’s not a class problem, and for them to automatically associate race with class is probably part of the problem, do you know what I mean? The irony of this person tweeting me this...”

Through his Baby Rhino training scheme, he supports and funds kids from underprivileged backgrounds to receive coaching, and he’s also an ambassador for a youth centre in Knowle, the area he hails from in Bristol, so he heads back to talk to kids about his own experiences. “These kids now, they’re being told they’re different gravy, they’re not posh enough to make it to top level, so when they see me, I can try and help them bridge that gap.”

The inequality is definitely real. “If there’s smoke there’s fire somewhere,” he says, “but I want it to erupt rather than just keep flickering away.”

Aside from bridging gaps, he’s also spent time looking into business beyond rugby. “I’m trying to buy some excavators at the moment,” he says, “I’m trying to get my hands on some electric ones from China, because the new ruling with emissions means that diggers are going to change from the petrol ones.

“There’s money in mud mate.”

Head coach Steve Borthwick is good for Leicester, believes Ellis. “He’s obsessed with making people better,” he says. “He’s made a big difference at the club. Since Cockers left I think people got away with not doing extras. With Steve and Aled [Walters, the head of physical performance] that’s not happening now.”

He’s moving forward on all fronts. “I’m happy,” he says, after admitting that he did get cold feet about buying the house, especially with the uncertainty in the rugby world at the time, but since the arrival of Ragh, everything has fallen into place. “I want to focus on them, and let my rugby do the talking.

“I’m not content with where I am,” he adds of his role in the England squad, “I want to be the best player I can be, there’s growth for me yet, and I don’t know where that’ll take me, for my club or country. 

“But you have to take it as it comes,” he sums up, “I was playing for Plymouth six months before England and I might be playing for Plymouth six months from now.”  

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Philip Haynes

This extract was taken from issue 13 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.