‘It's going to be pretty monumental': Harry Potter eyes Wallabies spot for Lions series
No, Harry Potter – the Australian rugby union winger – hasn't read the books. And the 27-year-old is unlikely to get to them anytime soon, given his focus on securing a precious place in the Wallabies' team for the coming tour of the British and Irish Lions.
'It's a massive, once-in-every-12-years event,' he says in the days before the first Wallabies squad of the year is named on Thursday. 'It's going to be pretty monumental.'
The Western Force player has perhaps the best name in Australian sport. But as cute as his moniker may be to non-rugby-following millennials, Potter cares more about how he is viewed by a man of more advanced years: Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt.
The 59-year-old Schmidt has more eclectic literary tastes but it appears, as far as rugby goes, he likes Potter. Under Schmidt, the winger won his two Wallabies caps on the side's European tour at the end of 2024. Yet the competition among Australian outside backs hoping to play the Lions is intense. Even big money rugby league recruit Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii, recovering from a broken jaw, is not guaranteed to start in a Wallabies team seeking to re-establish itself as a world power.
Potter says he is nervous ahead of Thursday's announcement, when Schmidt will name a squad for the Test against Fiji, the precursor to the prestigious Lions series. 'A lot rides on getting selected in this next squad,' Potter says. 'It would be great to be in any Wallabies squad but I do feel like this one is an opportunity to beat what should be really the best team in the world.'
The grand tradition of the British & Irish Lions, where four formidable rugby nations combine to challenge the three southern hemisphere powers every four years, is not lost on Potter, who was born in the UK and moved to Melbourne as an 11-year-old. Despite his roots, in the Victorian capital he was quickly won over by his new nation. 'Having an Australian accent certainly makes you feel even more Aussie, even if the rest of my family have English accents,' he says.
But in one area he didn't sway. After growing up in Bristol playing union, he found his new home did not have the same passion for rugby. On ovals in Melbourne's south-west he tried – but quickly gave up – Australian rules football. 'I was not so good at kicking and doing a bit too much tackling around the legs,' he says.
So a young Potter would stick to his earlier sporting passion, even if that made the slim prospect of a professional sport career even slimmer. He admits progressing through Victorian pathways had left him far behind his peers by the time he turned up at Sydney University rugby union training as a first year environmental science student in 2016.It was a bit random really – it was just a uni that I had applied for, and thought I'd go and check it out.'
Potter thrived in one of Australian rugby's storied communities. From playing fly-half at high school, he shifted wider in the backline over a period he grew into and developed what is now a powerful 185cm frame. While he couldn't make firsts in colts (under 19s) in his first year, by his third season he was helping the students' senior first grade to the Shute Shield.
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After injuries and Covid slowed his progress in Australian professional rugby, Potter took a chance in England with powerhouse Leicester in 2020. Within three years he was on the fringes of the England squad under Eddie Jones when he took up an opportunity to join the Western Force, partly motivated by the chance to represent the Wallabies.
Although ankle surgery 14 months ago forced him to miss much of one Super Rugby season, impressive performances on the Force's October tour of South Africa secured a Wallabies call up. 'I was thinking they've got a lot of guys that they can now choose from in the outside backs and do they want to take a risk on another one? But I certainly felt like I did what I could, and put my best foot forward, and I'm grateful that they rolled the dice and took me.'
Since then, Potter has elevated his game, and was named in the Super Rugby Pacific team of the year this season, even as the Force struggled to win matches. He finished near the top of the competition's leaderboards for clean breaks, metres gained and defenders beaten. 'Irrespective of stats, you always have your things that you're desperate to work on and feel like you could have gone better and wanting to improve,' he says.
Potter is now well-established within the Force setup, which includes a handful of former Sydney Uni teammates, even if they tease him about his choice of degree. 'A lot of them take that as an opportunity to think I'm some sort of left wing political activist. But I just studied the degree,' Potter says lightheartedly. 'Nick [Champion de Crespigny] likes to call me Greta Thunberg, but I'm trying to stamp that out of him because I don't think I'm quite there yet.'
Though his contract is up at the end of this season, he is currently enjoying living in Western Australia with housemates, including Force hooker Tom Horton – another former Sydney University and Leicester player – and competing over who makes the best coffee. The group has also recently forced him to sit through all eight Harry Potter movies. 'It was an experience learning about all these things that I've been told in various jokes,' he says.
While his parents once gave him the choice of changing his name, he has long ago become comfortable with it. 'It's a pretty funny name really, it's amazing how people will make jokes. I think, 'God, that joke's been made about 30 times', as I'm sure you hear with Snape jokes as well.'
But as his status in Australian sport rises, he is happy to remain patient with those only now coming across the words on his birth certificate, written not long after the first book was released. After all, Potter says, it could be worse. 'I think Harry Potter is probably a better name than Ron Weasley.'
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