When he was nine years old, Andrew Porter’s uncle packed him and his cousin David Priestman into the car and headed for the All Blacks’ team hotel.
s the current players milled around, the youngster in the Old Wesley jersey spotted the man he wanted to meet and made a bee-line for him. Jonah Lomu was a Cardiff Blues player by this stage, but Porter and his pals were obsessed with his video game ‘Jonah Lomu Rugby’. His name still held weight.
In his prime, the great All Black wing was a force of nature; a man whose powerful running style changed the game.
He transformed the way we thought about backs and forwards and set in train the move to bigger wingers across the next couple of decades.
He also started the process of reimagining what bigger men could do with the ball.
Given his size and incredible physical strength, honed in the St Andrew’s College gym, Porter was only ever heading towards the front-row. However, that didn’t mean he was going to leave the things he learnt emulating Lomu in the back garden or on the PlayStation behind.
When he emerged on to the professional scene, the coaches took a look at their depth chart and realised he could do a job on the tighthead side of the scrum.
He flourished, earning 36 caps and a Lions call-up as a No 3. However, there’s always been a latent desire to free the powerful runner up and unleash his open-play game, putting him in the same starting team as Rónan Kelleher and his old rival Tadhg Furlong.
Now is the time and last week we saw the devastating effect that combination can have at the top level.
“You want all of your players to be a ball-player or distributor in some sense,” Porter says. “With the personnel we have it’s huge being able to have that kind of variety in our game.
“Obviously, the role of a prop has changed in recent years, it’s not just about scrums and lineouts and set-pieces. You have to be a ball-player in today’s game because the game is evolving so much and the speed of the game has gone up as well. It’s great to see the amount of talent and skill we have in our team at the moment.”
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At one point in the second half, Furlong made a lung-busting line-break and found his fellow prop Porter on his shoulder. It was an all-court game we’ve rarely seen from this team.
According to Opta, Porter made eight dominant carries in his 12 attempts last week – the best of anyone in the Autumn Nations series.
He’s not alone, Josh van der Flier has increased the speed at which he takes the ball into contact, while he links the play well. Tadhg Beirne’s passing in tight is excellent, while Jack Conan is so comfortable in the wide channels.
When he took over as coach, Andy Farrell targeted getting a more dynamic, athletic profile of player into his pack.
That is starting to bear fruit, but the coach believes there’s more to come.
“Well, the pack that played together last weekend hasn’t really played together before,” he says.
“I suppose it’s the start, there are other guys that are looking at that pack and saying, ‘I deserve to be in that’, so they know the type of game that we’re after playing and I suppose there are another five, six, seven lads on the edge of that pack that are going to back themselves to add to it. It’s a continuing journey.”
Porter is a key part of that plan. The idea of switching back to loosehead was first flagged last spring, but the devastating blow of missing the Lions tour brought with it the time and space to make the move at the start of this season.
“I had some really, really bad days after that injury,” he says of the toe issue that ruled him out of the tour.
“At the time it is easy to get caught up in your emotions and your feelings in the there and then. It meant so much to me when I got my name read out.
“That being taken away was tough. It was gut-wrenching stuff. I am nearly getting emotional thinking about it now.
“I put in a lot of work that time I was injured, especially over the summer.
“I got my weight down. I feel really good around the pitch because of that. I have come out stronger on the other side of the injury.
“At the time I had a lot of people around me, supporting me, people fighting my corner; my family and my girlfriend, people like that and obviously coaches and teammates reaching out to me, helping me along the way when I was injured. It puts things into perspective how people are around you when the chips are down.”
Hard work was his way out of the hole.
“Get back in the saddle, keep going, get back to work,” he said.
“I feel, for me, when I am not working I get very distracted, caught up in my emotions.
“I felt getting back to training and the normal swing of things over the summer was the best way for me to deal with that; get my head straight. Coaches were there for a bit of guidance. (It helped me) put things in perspective.
“It was kind of like therapy over the summer, when I had those tough days of knowing the tour was going on. I just put my head down and got my training done. Hopefully it pays dividends in the season to come.
“I’ve cut weight since last season. That’s all due to my training over the summer and I feel great.”
Today is his reward and while he tries not to get too emotional before the game, the memories will come flooding back during the haka.
“A small bit, yeah, I try not to get too nostalgic when I’m preparing for a game. I’m trying to be present,” he says. “But, it’s hard not to think of those memories growing up, to games my dad brought me to when I was younger.
“Watching it transpire, to turn to where I am now. It’s crazy.”