"I'm sticking to my guns regardless of what happens"

He's one of the most electrifying talents in the world game and 2023 will be remembered as a whirlwind year for so many reasons - this is what happened when we met Henry Arundell

- Alan Dymock

THERE’S A multiverse dimension out there somewhere in which Henry Arundell is not a defence-dizzying international outside back, but rather standing at the foot of the corporate ladder. Had he leapt at another chance, maybe things would be very different. 

As he explains to Rugby World, he’d tried the university thing, briefly taking history at UCL, but he couldn’t balance it with rugby commitments at London Irish. So he switched to an Open University course. But there was one other way.

“I had options to possibly get a scholarship to go to America,” he says. “Because they want the game to grow. There was a genuine conversation of: ‘Is that an option you should take?’

If you go to an Ivy League university and play rugby, you get your fees paid for, you get tuition at one of the biggest universities in the world. Maybe you finish uni and you get an incredible job somewhere. You could become the next entrepreneur. But it’s kind of like, hmm...

“That was never my dream. As a child it was always to be a professional rugby player. To play for England. Play for the Lions. Play at World Cups. That kind of thing. So I knew that if I’d ever done that other side of things, there would always have been something inside of me thinking I cheated myself, that I didn’t try it, that I didn’t give it a go.”

The daydream of this only really happens because we ask him what life might be like had he seen what was behind door number two, rather than the one he chose to run through. We can speculate all we want, but the reality has already been a lot of fun.