Pollock has managed every significant step up in his career with youthful abandon.<\/p>\n
A try against Leinster helped Northampton Saints to another European final, a crucial score against Australia helped steer England to victory – one of 11 successive Test wins in 2025. Even on the Lions tour he was undaunted.<\/p>\n
“For me it was going into that environment and learning as much as I could from world class coaches and players,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I was in awe of everyone around me but I definitely didn’t feel out of my depth.”<\/p>\n
While his talent is obvious, his character has and will divide opinion in a sport which has traditionally been about the collective.<\/p>\n
England and Lions captain Maro Itoje branded him a “pest”, Courtney Lawes called him “cocky” and Jamie George warmly described him as “an idiot, but he’s our idiot”.<\/p>\n
Pollock admits he revels in getting under the skin of opponents.<\/p>\n
“That part of the game I find fun. How can I make them annoyed at me? Then you never know what happens on the back of that,” he said.<\/p>\n
Pollock recalled the moment he faced the New Zealand haka at the Allianz Stadium in November.<\/p>\n
“I look back on that and think ‘what was I doing?’ I stared down one of their players and the next thing you know I’m licking my lips. I got a little bit of stick from that, but it’s all for the love of the game.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pollock has managed every significant step up in his career with youthful abandon. A try against Leinster helped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-405211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}