Exclusive – Jay Tyack loving rugby after ‘uncertainty’ following Worcester Warriors’ administration
Jay Tyack made his debut for Bristol Bears off the bench against Northampton Saints
©JMP for Bristol Bears
Since arriving at Bristol Bears, tighthead prop Jay Tyack has been loving playing rugby again. Coming to the West Country in the wake of Worcester Warriors’ liquidation, the 26-year-old has left the uncertainty of what the future held behind at Ashton Gate.
His arrival at Bristol came thanks to Bristol’s scrum coach, Mark Irish, who performed the same role with Warriors, the club low on numbers as a result of injury and drafting in Tyack. For some weeks prior, the prop had largely trained by himself and a return to Cornish Pirates was well and truly on the cards.
That phone call meant that Tyack began to join fellow former Warriors Joe Batley, Noah Heward and Sam Lewis on the early drives down to Bristol, and within a couple of days testing himself at the Bears High-Performance Centre, he was offered the opportunity to play that weekend against Northampton Saints.
Those 18 minutes off the bench in a 45-31 loss were enough for the powers that be at Bristol to offer Tyack a contract until the end of the season, and offer plenty of relief following the ordeal he and his former teammates had experienced for months prior to the 2022/23 season getting underway.
“There is a photo of me coming off the pitch against Northampton,” Tyack said. “You can see my face, Bats [Joe Batley] is rubbing my head and the next photo is me looking in the air and that was just relief at being back playing.
“I can’t describe it. After everything that had gone on, the weeks of uncertainty, to be able to have that all out of your head, to be able to go and play rugby, hit a scrum and make a tackle, and just be in that environment again, I never felt decompression like it.”
In the weeks that have followed since his debut for Bristol, Tyack has remained a near constant in the match day 23. Starting against Saracens and Zebre, many of his outings to date have come from the bench, the tighthead playing a part in a 26-26 draw with Leicester Tigers as well as the side’s 15-12 win over Harlequins at the Twickenham Stoop in late-December.
Having joined Worcester in 2021, Tyack had made his name in the Championship with Cornish Pirates. One of the players that played an influential role in Pirates’ historic win over Saracens, his journey to the top was a unique one.
Leaving his home county of Cornwall to test himself in National League Rugby with Chinnor and then Birmingham Moseley, as a part-time player Tyack would find himself working on building sites and in schools before heading back to Penzance and establishing himself as a stalwart in the second tier at Mennaye Field.
Getting a first taste of what it was like to be in a top-flight environment with Gloucester after signing on a short-term deal in the midst of lockdown, Tyack’s arrival at Sixways was sped up by injuries at Worcester and during his time with the club made 21 appearances before the club were placed in administration and contracts cancelled.
Able to have kept fit thanks to the administrators allowing players to use facilities to keep fit, it was a trying period to say the least for those waiting for the phone to ring with new opportunities elsewhere.
“You’d just plug your code in, you’d go in and use the facilities, which was class of them [Begbies - administrators] to be fair,” Tyack said. “That was probably the only thing that kept you sane, that routine.
“Creatures of habit, rugby players. You get sent your schedules, and you live and die by the schedules. Then you have to create your own schedule and it’s like ‘get yourself out of bed, go to the gym and get the training done that you need to do’.
“I fell out of that for a week or two after a couple of weeks where I was really positive. I lost the positivity that I had, that something was going to bare fruit somewhere, or I was going to get a job. The uncertainty.
©JMP for Bristol Bears
“Those couple of weeks were tough, and it was just like trying to drag yourself through and luckily I did. Because when the opportunity did come, it landed in my lap, and fortunately I had kept myself in good enough shape and worked hard in that time, so that I managed to take the opportunity, rather than fuck it up.”
Tyack’s temporary unemployment came after months of speculation surrounding the future of Worcester. Served a winding-up petition over unpaid tax, while the sale of the land which surrounds Sixways began to draw scrutiny and questions began for the club’s owners, who were absent throughout the whole process.
“Alarm bells were going off pretty early doors,” Tyack said. “I remember they said something about the kit, they were like ‘we owe money, so we are not getting new kit yet’, and then it was the same with the supplements.
“At the end of the season, a few of the Wattbikes were repossessed, or they were on lease and got taken back because they hadn’t been paid for. When you look back, red flags should have been popping up that something wasn’t right.
“To be fair to Dimes and the rest of the coaching staff, a positive spin was put on everything and galvanised everyone. It is classic rugby; every preseason we do stuff for team bonding, I’ll tell you what, going through that together as a team made us the tightest group of boys that you can imagine, because we were all going through the same shit.
“We had a class season and a great time and then we came into the season. We should have beaten [Exeter] Chiefs and finished on a great win against Newcastle [Falcons] when we knew that Newcastle potentially was out last game.
“We had a meeting with PRL, with all of us on a Zoom call, to say the insurance was going to run out that hadn’t been paid for. So unless that was paid on Monday, then we weren’t going to be able to play anyway. It went to court on the Wednesday, so everyone was like ‘this could be it’.
“It was a nice way to finish. I think if things didn’t go so wrong or we were saved at the final bell, we would have done alright this year. Which is a bit upsetting.”
When thinking back to his first scrum session with Bristol, after several weeks of not having heard ‘crouch, bind, set’ being said in anger, Tyack says he had “never been so happy to have my spine compressed”.
Having been faced with a return to life before being fully professional, it has well and truly made him all the more grateful for the opportunity presented to him at Ashton Gate.
“My old man is a builder,” Tyack said, “so any time I had off, especially when I was semi-pro at Moseley and Chinnor, I was on site. There was never any doubt. It scared me off. It is good coming from that route, you see the real world and you are trying to progress.
“I went from Chinnor to Moseley and you work all day from 07:00 or 08:00 in the morning until 17:00, then you have to be at training for 19:00 and then you’ll get home at 21:00 and then it starts all over again.
“The work that goes into that, when I think about having a long day now, waking up at 05:00 to meet the boys an hour later and then get home at 17:30, that’s when I have to say ‘come on mate, the shit you did to get yourself here and you are morning about that’. It’s mad. It gives you a good perspective about how lucky we are to be in the position that we are.”
Not involved this weekend for Bristol’s trip to the capital to take on London Irish on Sunday, Tyack says that his main aim between now and the end of the season is to play as much rugby as possible. With his contract at Ashton Gate only running until the end of June, what the future holds is somewhat unclear at present, but a string of good outings will result in brighter horizons.
Immersed in the Bears culture, Tyack has learnt quickly alongside the likes of Kyle Sinckler and Ellis Genge, while coming up against familiar foes from his time in the National Leagues in the form of Jake Woolmore, while simply enjoying every second of the whole experience.
“All my goal is, is to get those minutes under my belt and play and be black out on the pitch,” Tyack said. “I think you don’t need to worry about what is going to happen outside of that if you are playing.
“After everything that’s happened and everything that went on, that is why we do it. That is why we train every week, that is why you run around, you do your gym and you do your extras and all that; because you want to play on the Friday, Saturday or Sunday.
“There is nothing better than that. There is nothing better than that feeling of walking off the pitch after having a good game. That is all I want to do now for the rest of the year. Just work hard, pick up as many minutes as possible and whatever will be will be from there. That’s the most important thing.”
