Ollie Chessum

When Ollie Chessum saw his foot at an angle it wasn’t supposed to be, he thought his dream was over. He knew the long grind of rehab was ahead, but what he didn’t yet know was whether or not he could make it back in time for the World Cup. 

Ollie Chessum’s World Cup hopes were hanging in the balance. It was the lead-up to England’s game against Ireland in Dublin, their final match of the 2023 Six Nations, and in a training ground drill, Ollie had been tackled from behind. He thought he’d rolled his ankle, but when he saw the reaction of his team-mates, he looked down to see his foot pointing in the wrong direction. 

The six-foot-seven second row, who had been one of England’s players of the tournament, had dislocated his ankle, and with only five months to go to rugby’s biggest show, his chances of getting on the plane to France looked grim.

“I thought that was my World Cup,” says Ollie of his injury, “that was my first thought. Fred [Steward] said, ‘don’t think like that’, but it was hard.”

With a deadline to hit, his rehab was intense, but after months of graft Ollie was remarkably pulling the white shirt on again by mid-August, in the World Cup warm-ups against Ireland and Fiji. Despite five months out of the game, head coach Steve Borthwick selected him for the World Cup squad. It was a leap of faith for Borthwick to take Ollie, despite him being well known to him from his time at Tigers, a testament of how highly he is rated among the England staff. “Steve has been so good to me. I ended up playing every game of the World Cup, which I really didn’t expect after coming in injured. 

“He’s without a doubt the reason I’m playing for England,” he adds. “He got hold of me when I was nineteen and while Eddie Jones gave me my first opportunity with England, Steve gave me the coaching to earn that opportunity.” 

A remarkable recovery, a World Cup, and a Six Nations campaign later, when Rugby Journal meets Ollie he’s been under the knife again, this time to fix an ongoing shoulder injury that will keep him out of England’s summer tour to Japan and New Zealand. Two surgeries in as many years is far from ideal for such a young player, so with no World Cup to rush back for, this time he and the medical teams are taking a more considered approach.

“We were looking at a couple of surgeons that might be able to turn it around in twelve weeks, which would just about make me available for the tour,” he says. “But I did it with my ankle, I squashed my rehab down where I was working to deadlines, and it’s just stressful with any little setback you have.

“It’s a long career, I’m 23, this would be my second operation already, I don’t want to push my shoulder to the point where it really is bust. So, we decided the best thing for me was to get it done and have the proper rehab stint, which would mean sacrificing the opportunity to be selected for the tour, but give me the best chance to get the shoulder where it needed to be. Hopefully it means, come September, I’ll be ready to go again.” 

With England ending the Six Nations in such fine fettle, a last-gasp 23-22 win over Ireland followed by a heart-breaking but equally entertaining 33-31 loss to France, missing out on the second act is hard to take. 

“Mate, it’s exciting to see what this team can do,” says Ollie. “If I was an England rugby fan, which I can be for the next few weeks, I’d be properly excited.

“Japan, we played them in the World Cup, and I’d say other than obviously South Africa, the Japan game was the hardest. They ran us absolutely ragged, and it’ll be more of the same with Eddie [Jones] as coach, he will have a trick or two up his sleeve.

“The All Blacks, you don’t know what they’re going to do,” he adds. “They were heavily reliant on a Crusaders side that now aren’t performing, and with a new head coach who was the Crusaders coach [Scott Robertson], you don’t know what they’re going to come out with. They might be like we were six months ago.”

Despite England making a World Cup semi-final, only losing to eventual winner South Africa 16-15 with a final minute penalty, there was a sense that Borthwick’s England had yet to fully find who they were. That was certainly telling in the opening games of the Six Nations, where victories against Italy and Wales were undermined by unconvincing performances. What changed for England to have such an improvement come the end of the tournament?

“The Scotland loss,” says Ollie, quite simply. England had lost 30-21 at Murrayfield, their fourth consecutive Six Nations defeat to their noisy northern neighbours. “We’d beaten Italy and Wales, regardless of how we beat them, we beat them: Italy, they properly pushed us and we still won, what they did in the Six Nations shows that beating them was no mean feat. The Wales game, it was a close one at home. But the Scotland loss properly took the air out our tyres, and the boys were properly deflated. It was the kick up the arse that we needed.

“We had a week in York – we knew what part of the game we were good at, that contestable kicking game – and Steve just said, ‘let’s get excited about having our hands on the ball’. We probably hadn’t been of late. Wiggy [Richard Wigglesworth] was great that week, he gave the lads confidence to go and do what we did against Ireland and France.

“Training was short and sharp, we only really had one pitch session and it was a different kind of training session to anything we’ve done before. Against Ireland we stripped it back to the set-piece fundamentals, but you can see from that first try, boys just wanted to attack. Against France, I know we lost, but we were properly gutted because we felt like we should have won it. That kick at the end for them to win is a shit way to lose any game.”

Plenty of criticism had been sent England’s way as the bedrock of the Borthwick way was being implemented, but Ollie was used to it. “We’d had it at Tigers for a year when Steve came in – he came in for the covid games, and that next season we finished sixth. All the comments were, ‘you’re just kicking the ball, you’re not attacking’, and it’s like, how can you not see the improvement?’

“People are always going to be sceptical of change,” he says, “and the problem with playing for England is, everyone expects you to win. It’s a bit of a weight on your shoulders sometimes. That’s why the Scotland loss was so frustrating; people were asking where England were heading, but we knew we were heading in the right direction. We just needed to execute, and that’s what we got right against Ireland.”

It may have taken time for the results to turn England’s way, but one thing for sure is that the England environment could not be better. “Being in camp is such a good place to be, boys are itching to go back in,” he says. “Before, it wasn’t quite like that.

“At Pennyhill, you’ve got the hotel, you walk down to the training camp for the day and you’re there, and once you’ve finished and walked back up, that is your day. Before, you might head back up to chill in the team room, but there’d be a coach and they’d pull you for a half-hour meeting. It felt like boys would hide in their rooms to avoid it, but now Steve and the coaches make it very clear.

“On the high intensity days you have to be on, training hard, but now on a Wednesday, whereas before you had to stay in camp, Steve’s like, ‘lads, if you’ve got family, go home’, and guys like Joe Marler or Dan Cole who are very family orientated can spend time with the kids. What used to feel like eight weeks away from your family, the week gets broken up nicely.

“There’s no cliques; historically there probably had been. The squad feels very together, and that comes from enjoying being in camp.”

Not that he has a bad word to say about Eddie Jones in the short time he had with him. “Steve is very down the line, Eddie liked to toy with you a bit, but I think that’s a good thing sometimes,” he says. “Eddie was so good with me – he gave me my debut [against Italy in the 2022 Six Nations], and he backed me to go and start in the third Test in Australia [sealing the series 2-1 with a 21-17 win]”. 

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With a summer of rest and rehabilitation ahead, it’s a good time to pause and reflect with Ollie on what has already been a full career for the 23-year-old, with 23 England caps, three Six Nations campaigns and a World Cup under his belt. It’s not a bad showing for someone who, just six years ago, couldn’t even get a place in the Leicester Tigers academy. 

Rural Lincolnshire is where Ollie grew up, in his words, ‘the middle of nowhere’. “The family owns an agricultural engineering business, so everyone thinks I must have grown up on a farm, but I didn’t,” he says. “We have a very big, very close-knit family, mum is one of six children so there sixteen or seventeen grandkids, and a lot of us are the same age. All bar a couple live in the same village, same with my dad’s side of the family, so nobody is more than ten minutes away.” 

Summers were spent working at the family firm, helping his mum in the office, or as he got older, helping out on the factory floor – in the pandemic, he had a stint as a welder. Is it something he’d go back to after rugby? “I don’t think it’ll be me, but I’m sure my cousin might, he’s an engineering mind. I left school having done A- levels thinking I was gonna go work for the family business for at least a couple of years until I figured out what I wanted to do, but then rugby kicked on.”

Rugby had only started for Ollie when he was thirteen. “I’d always been interested in rugby; dad played rugby, but I was pretty good at football and loved my cricket – dad was a massive cricket player,” he says. “My secondary school had a rugby team, so my PE teacher who was a family friend asked me to give it a crack, so I did. The fact I was miles bigger than everyone else meant I enjoyed it; it was like playing against toddlers sometimes.”

School rugby was a rather different prospect for him to many of his now England peers. “Some lads in academies, they’d be training in the gym three times a week, and at private schools with full-time programmes. At my school, it was more like if you had a game on Wednesday, you were walking around with the team sheet trying to get people to sign up on the Tuesday lunchtime.

“Ironically, when I got to fifteen and everyone caught up in size, I wasn’t so good anymore, so I actually gave up for a year – I’d got into the Tigers DPP [developing player programme], and rugby went from something I just enjoyed doing to this thing where I had to train on a Tuesday night. I wasn’t enjoying it enough.”

It was thanks to his cousin, who a year later encouraged Ollie to join him at a session at their local side Kesteven RFC, that he got back into the game. When he hit eighteen, things started to pick up. “I was playing in the NLD counties programme [Notts, Lincs and Derbyshire], and from there I got picked for the Midlands team and then for England Counties.” Ollie was named captain for their tour to Ireland, a springboard for interest from Leicester. “Off the back of that, Tigers asked if I’d come in and do a mini six-week trial, but nothing came of it – I got injured in the second week so only trained twice. They pulled me in and said, ‘we can’t offer you anything, but we’ll send you to Nottingham’.”

He had a summer of pre-season to prove himself with the Championship side, and he did just that, and was offered a one-year contract. Less than ten appearances for the Archers later, and Leicester were already seeing what they’d missed out on. 

“Tigers had said they’d keep a close eye on me, but I was like, how many people have been told that by a club? But in January, they got back in touch – they offered me an A League game against Gloucester, and eventually they put an offer on the table.”

A one-year contract at Leicester Tigers, the biggest club in England, was there for Ollie to sign, and now he had a chance to make rugby his career. He joined in the summer of 2020, at the same time Steve Borthwick was just getting his feet under the table. “Working with coaches like Steve, Aled [Walter], Kev [Sinfield] from day dot, that helped me massively,” he reflects. “At that point, at nineteen, I was still quite raw; I hadn’t played enough to pick up any bad habits. I probably didn’t appreciate how good I had it – Leicester is so set-piece orientated, and they are the foundations of a player in my position, so they were instilled from the first day. I was built like a rake, but being in that environment and not knowing a lot meant the coaches could do what they wanted with me.” 

What is it that Steve wants from Ollie? “Just work-rate, run, hit and carry hard. It’s a non-negotiable to work hard and be a dominant forward pack, you have to be physical.

“The thing is, he doesn’t demand anything else. Steve’s big thing is he picks you to be the best of you, so he’s not expecting me to throw out-the-back-door offloads, that’s never been my game, it’s my lineout set piece and my work rate. It seems simple, but that’s all I’ve ever had to do under him. In a way, he’s taught me how to play professional rugby.”

It’s a role that has seen him touted as the natural successor to Courtney Lawes for England, and with the ability to play at five or six, the similarities are strong. “I’ve been predominantly second row up to now with Leicester and England, until the Ireland game [George Martin started at second row, with Ollie moving to six]. But I’ll play wherever a coach wants me. Is there a preference? I think the big thing for me is to be in the position to play both.”

In his first full season with Leicester, Ollie made five first team appearances, but the season after, he’d racked that number up to 25. “We were exposed to Prem rugby young,” says Ollie. “Steve threw the youngsters in and trusted them, he wasn’t bothered if you were twenty or 28 as long as you could do the job.”

Bringing through the likes of Ollie, Freddie Steward, Jack Van Poortvliet and George Martin would pay dividends at the end of the 2021/22 season, three of those four involved at Twickenham as Leicester defeated Saracens 15-12 in the most dramatic of Premiership finals, sealed by Freddie Burns’ late drop goal. Seasons don’t come much better for a young player than a league trophy and an England debut, but this was to be just the start of an remarkable three years.

“Everything has just kept snowballing – it’s going to have to stop at some point, but I hope it doesn’t,” he says. “I never expected it to pan out the way it has, certainly not as quickly anyway. Of course you aspire to play international rugby, I would have always said I wanted to do it, but did I really believe it? Probably not, but I was gonna try anyway.”

Getting there via the non-traditional route is a source of pride for the second row. “I wouldn’t swap the way I’d gone around doing things. If you’re in an academy, doing A-levels is filling the time between rugby, that puts a lot of pressure on a sixteen-year-old’s shoulders, which I didn’t have. For me, things just happened off the back of enjoying it so much.”

One person who has taken the more traditional pathway is Ollie’s six-foot-ten younger brother, Lewis, also a Tigers player who, inadvertently, was crucial to Ollie’s own success. “I’d never had anything to do with Tigers before Lewis got involved, so I probably owe a bit to him that I got picked up. I don’t know how true it is, but our head teacher at school was the dad of a guy in my year who’d gone through the Tigers academy. Lewis had got picked by the academy, and he mentioned to the coaches, ‘by the way, there’s another Chessum brother, you should probably have a look’.”

But somehow, after three seasons, the duo have still not played a game together. “Yeh, I don’t know how that’s not happened,” says Ollie. “His first pre-season was 21/22, the year we won the Prem, and he’d been training a lot with the first team, so I thought that year there was a chance, in a Prem Cup game or something, but then he rolled his ankle in a lineout session – I think I was actually the one lifting him, so I feel a little bit responsible.”

Since then, Ollie’s rise to the international side, plus poor timing with injuries, has prevented the Chessum duo from locking out the second row together.  “We’ve not played a game together ever at any level, we’re two school years apart so he was always a bit too young. At some point this year, if we both manage to stay fit, hopefully there’s an opportunity for us.

“We fought like mad when we were younger, mum hated it, but ever since we’ve been at Leicester together, he’s been one of my best mates, he’s actually moving in with me. We’re quite similar personalities but quite different too.”

And there’s a third Chessum brother, Dylan, who has just also just joined the Tigers under-17s. “He was a fly-half until about two months ago, and they’ve got him playing six now. Four, five and six, you never know what might happen. There’d be good odds on that mate, chuck a bet on it, in a few years you might make a bit of money.”

With Steve Borthwick now in England colours, the arrival of Dan McKellar has brought a new era and a new style to Leicester, one that has yet to fully click as Tigers finished the season eighth in the table with nine wins and nine losses. 

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“We’re expected to make semi-finals, and we expected ourselves to be there,” admits Ollie. “People will go, ‘it’s a transition year with a new coach’, but our view is that we shouldn’t have transition years – this time last year, we were in the semi-final after Steve left and we lost the whole coaching setup. Come pre-season we’ll be chomping at the bit to right some wrongs.” 

The reduction of the league to ten teams has meant internationals like Ollie now aren’t missing out on games played over the Six Nations period, but it also means every game has so much more riding on it. “What has changed is once you lose three or four games, you are playing knockout rugby. From a player’s perspective it’s not nice, but as a fan and a league I’d really grab hold of that concept. You’ve got maximum five games for a margin of error, and everyone’s seen from this year it goes down right to the very last weekend, I think the top four changed four times.

“It’s devastating to lose three teams, but it’s made the league seriously competitive. There’s not a single week you can guarantee the results. As a player there’s more pressure on every game, but that’s a good thing.”

There was a time that Ollie didn’t see pressure as a privilege – as a younger player, dealing with setbacks wasn’t his greatest strength. “I’d just be so frustrated with every mistake I made. I remember Cockers [Richard Cockerill] pulled me aside in the Australia camp and said, ‘you need to stop showing your frustrations’. I felt I had to be perfect at everything I did, but as you learn more and watch the best, you realise they don’t get everything right, unless you’re Antoine Dupont maybe. You learn that from being around guys like Coley [Dan Cole], he’ll tell you he’s never had the perfect game of rugby but that hasn’t stopped him from getting 100 caps and winning Premierships. There’s still pressure – when I’m playing big games, I’m still cacking my pants, I’m still one of the worst for being nervous.”

Having now had the experience of major setbacks, whether that’s injuries, Six Nations defeats or agonising World Cup exits, does he feel he’s better at coming to terms with them? “I don’t think anyone gets better at that disappointment. With South Africa, it’s what could have been. I have to go to training every day at Leicester with Handré [Pollard], and every time he misses a kick you just give him a little nudge and go, ‘where was that in October?’.

“The next 48 hours are pretty tough [after losing the World Cup semi-final], but then it’s, alright, we’ve got a medal to play for, if we want to win it. Before you know it, you’re thinking about Argentina, and then we won that medal, and so as much as it’s not the medal you wanted to win, that following Sunday instead of crying into my parents’ arms, you’re celebrating winning a medal. So, it’s strange how things just move on so quickly.”

At 23, he’s already reached heights many players never do, but with 2025 in sight there’s a looming question we have to ask Ollie – have you thought about the Lions?

“Genuinely honest, obviously it’s there and it’s a goal, but there are steps in between. One, I’ve got to get back fit, two I’ve got to get back playing good enough for England, and then I’ve got to be starting for England. 

“I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t want to go on that tour, but you can’t start picturing yourself in a Lions shirt, there’s a lot of jobs in hand before that point.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Russ Williams

This extract was taken from issue 26 of Rugby.
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