Henry Arundell lets out several laughs as we chat during a break in England’s pre-Six Nations training camp in Girona in Spain.
This is a happy place to be for the 23-year-old wing, who has already packed a lot into his short career, including two years in French club rugby, when England would not pick him, and he has so much to look forward to, now he is at the Premiership champions Bath and back in the England fold.
While Arundell was playing for Racing 92 and living in Paris, he made a friend of Owen Farrell, with whom he had endured the challenge that enters a few sportspeople’s lives: the tabloid storm.
“Oh, I don’t know how it got so blown up,” Arundell says now, with one of those laughs, when I ask him about the story that Farrell – then the captain of England – was on his case during the 2023 World Cup.
A newspaper reported it as a training-ground row; an ex-player on a podcast even said Arundell had been ostracised as a result.
Arundell didn’t feature much at the tournament, apart from a flash of five tries against the easybeats of Chile, but it’s worth noting he was aged 20, with just a couple of brilliant breakthrough seasons for his first club London Irish behind him, no right to be starting, and a skill set not suited to England’s kick-heavy game plan.
“It was just an in-session moment,” Arundell recalls. “Like, we’d have them today and every other day, it was nothing.
“And then, it was quite funny, it might have been down in Provence and it had kicked off in the media and they were out at a session, and we [he and Farrell] walked out, and said ‘shall we just fake a fight and see what happens?’”
But you didn’t? “No, but it was funny. And then, eventually, he came to Racing, and that was nice to have. I had been with him, obviously, in the England sense.
“But when there’s only a few foreign guys and a few English guys at a club, you get closer. We built a good friendship, which was really nice. We spent time together. He’s so… he’s a misunderstood guy. He’s lovely. And he’s helped me a lot.”
Henry Arundell laughed off talk of the spat with Owen Farrell (Photo: Getty)Farrell’s World Cup included booing from fans and led to his own French leave from England. Arundell in a quieter voice expresses his sympathy. “Yeah, it was… awful.”
Arundell’s French move was signed before the World Cup, with London Irish having gone out of business, and while there were blurred lines initially, in short he knew of the RFU/Premiership policy that prevents England picking players from non-English clubs.
Kyle Sinckler, Dave Ribbans, Joe Marchant and Jack Nowell are among several England players still in French exile. The national head coach Steve Borthwick once indicated he was against the policy, but has since toed the line.
Arundell’s view? “When I was out there, I’d be like ‘just get rid of it, because I want to play for England’.
“Now I’m here, I completely understand the risk that the Prem would be affected. I think now the Prem is an amazing place. You see it with Europe, how many teams have gone through. And the league’s just so hard. You lose one game, or you win a game, but you need that one extra bonus point because that could be all the difference come June time.”
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Arundell saw South Africa star Siya Kolisi and coach Stuart Lancaster unexpectedly depart Racing while he was there. It all turned into a valuable life experience more than a rugby one – although his 15 tries in 31 matches emphasised his scoring threat.
“Even though my family and my girlfriend would come over, it wasn’t easy. People go ‘you get paid well to play’ but it’s very different, when it’s a cold Thursday night in January on a five-game losing streak.
“It tests how much you want to do this, when you don’t know how life works, really.”
Having joined Bath last summer, Arundell has been helped by a performance psychologist, Katie Mobed, to define his goals, reasoning it is better to do this sooner rather than later. “I know what I want to do, I know how I want to do it, the approach I want to have with everything – not just rugby, but life. And that makes a big difference.”
Against Fiji at Twickenham in November, a 50-metre chase of a Marcus Smith kick added to Arundell’s catalogue of spectacular scores. With all his family in the stadium, the emotion burst out in an unusually exuberant celebration.
England’s strength-and-conditioning boss Phil Morrow says Arundell is the quickest player in the squad. Arundell says he hit a PB in December of “about 10.6 metres per second”.
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How about a run-off against other well-known speedsters, Louis Rees-Zammit, Adam Radwan and the like? “Yes, it would be fun for five, six lads to go and see who the quickest is over 60 or 100 metres.” More seriously, he adds: “It’s not about the top speed, it’s can you do it for 80 minutes, when you’ve already come through a lot of contacts, a lot of hits, and you’ve run a lot already.”
This son of a former colonel in The Rifles regiment, who went to Harrow School, hunts interceptions like the one for Bath at Saracens in November. He has been compared to Springbok wing legend Bryan Habana by Bath’s South African head coach Johann van Graan.
And another man in Arundell’s circle of trust knows plenty about rugby’s intersections with the public eye. Arundell’s girlfriend Mimi is the daughter of Will Carling, the former England captain.
“With Will, if anything I look for life advice more than rugby or technical advice,” Arundell says. “He did see me play at The Rec recently, and at one point I got taken out and had my face planted in the ground. Mimi’s mum was worried but I don’t think he was.” Another laugh. “It was ‘yeah, just get up and play on’.”
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