The days when simply having a book in the dressing room was enough to have a player nicknamed “The Professor” are long gone, but Rob Harley still stands out from the intellectual crowd in rugby.
Most players seem to be doing online degrees or courses of some description now but probably only the Glasgow veteran is studying Classics, not because he sees himself following that other scholar of the antiquities Boris Johnson, but simply because he’s interested in it.
“I get a bit of stick from the other guys for not doing something specific and career-focused, but I essentially picked something I was interested in and thought I would study and get a degree at the end of it,” he reasons.
When Open University studies allow Harley is a voracious reader – he also writes himself but has found less time for that recently – and his lockdown book list was suitably extensive.
“I was reading an Ursula Le Guin anthology of science fiction stories,” he said. “I read a good book on Afghanistan called ‘No Good Men Among the Living’, which I would recommend.
“And during the phase out of lockdown, when we were travelling to Edinburgh back and forth, I thought that was a good chance to use that time as well, so I finished The Brothers Karamazov on audiobook during the time we were travelling back and forth to Edinburgh.
“Not always cheery, but I found it quite funny.”
Surely Harley would be the only Scottish sportsman listening to Dostoevsky on the way to the training ground, but once he gets there he’s the physical and forceful nuisance to the opposition that the Warriors fans know and love.
Harley has seen years of Glasgow dominance over Edinburgh in his time with the club but accepts that the capital club have the mob hand at the moment, going into the second re-start game at Murrayfield.
“You look at the Edinburgh side now, it’s a quality side, they have a lot of good players and that has to play into it,” he said. “For us, looking at what we’ve done, we weren’t perfect, it’s our first game of the season, we have some pretty clear things to work on and hopefully we have the chance to redress that on Friday.
“We went through a few different aspects of the game and what we are going to do differently. There’s a clear picture in terms of holding the ball a bit better and being smart with how we get into shape.
“Credit to Edinburgh because they pressured us and they forced some of those errors. There’s an onus on us as well with how we use the ball, decision-making and trying to put that pressure back on them.”
Harley feels that now the Warriors are on board with the new breakdown interpretations, they’ll be more of a force.
“I think there’s some clear pictures from that game where, early on especially at the breakdown, we made a lot of mistakes,” he said.
“They were sharper than us there. In general a lot of the defence was really good from us, but where we let ourselves down was in those open-play passages.”
Harley’s one of the handful – with Pete Horne and Chris Fusaro – who are still there for Richie Gray’s return to the club, and they’re thrilled to see him back and performing.
“Richie he was at the academy when I was, and then he got promoted, and kind of showed the way for the group of guys in the academy to break into the first team,” he said.
“He was the first of the players that I played with to do that. On top of that he is a gigantic human being, someone you can just throw the ball at in the lineout, and he’s a tough human to move on the park.
“He has grown a little bit but I’m not sure he has changed that much. His French is much better as well!”
