Ritchie embracing Edinburgh jeopardy & Lions snubs
Young and carefree, Jamie Ritchie played his first game for Edinburgh on an October evening in Dublin in 2014. Gnarled and focused, on Saturday afternoon in Pretoria he might play his last.If Edinburgh win against the Bulls in the quarter-final of the United Rugby Championship - it's 3-2 Edinburgh in the last five meetings with all of them settled by eight points or fewer - then the story continues. If they lose, the story ends. Eleven years, 130-something appearances and done. Next stop for the 28-year-old back-row: Perpignan.In a frenzied, and ultimately, successful bid for a place in the quarter-final, Ritchie feels like Edinburgh have effectively been playing knockout rugby for weeks."Yeah, it does feel a bit like that," the 28-year-old says on the Scotland Rugby Podcast."I think it means we're well prepared for the actual knockout rugby that we're playing now. We've been playing well with a little bit of jeopardy. "In games that we know we need to win, we've stepped up and played well, so that builds confidence."We've had a bit of jeopardy in the last few games and we've really had to lean into that. A lot of the games we've been playing have been physical encounters. We've needed to step up."We know the Bulls are coming with a physical threat and we always seem to step up in those games, so that's something we'll be looking to do again at the weekend. "Loftus is a hard place to go to but it's not necessarily a place that they've not been beaten at."Without the tangible rewards to show for it, Ritchie has been one of Edinburgh's great players of the professional era. You might say that his time with the club has been dramatic from the start.In mid-December 2015, Millie, his girlfriend then and his wife now, went into labour four weeks prematurely. It was a Friday night. Ritchie was due to make his first start for Edinburgh the following day in a Challenge Cup game at London Irish.It was 2am when the maternity ward staff told Ritchie that the baby's arrival wasn't imminent and that he should get some sleep, go to London, play his game and come back. He slept for two hours, made the plane, and reached into his pocket for his phone before take-off.It started to ring, 'Millie calling...'. Oscar had been born. Ritchie was 19 years old.So, the whole family have a connection with the club that runs deep. You could see that on the night he said his goodbye to the Hive when coming off the bench in a must-win game against Ulster a few weeks back."Very emotional, but a really nice night to finish it on," he says. "The recognition from the crowd when I came on was super-special. "I feel really privileged and proud to have been a part of this club for such a long time. Hopefully, I've shown that I care through the way that I played and hopefully the fans have picked up on that."
Ritchie has been playing some outstanding rugby this season, a return to the high-aggression, high-impact stuff that elevated him to the captaincy of Scotland.After a lull, his game has been in such good order that he put himself in the conversation for Lions selection, if not actually ultimately in the squad."Personally, I feel like I'd done all I could in terms of how I performed, so I was comfortable with that," he says on missing out on Andy Farrell's group. "It's out of my control. For 2021 tour I feel like I was further away than I was this year, but I was more upset then. I'm a bit more mature now in terms of how I react to these things. They might come around, they might not."I said this to my wife because she was quite upset when we watched it together. I said to her, 'if you'd looked at us in the position we were in a year ago after the Six Nations, where it hadn't gone the way I wanted to in terms of selection and missing out on the captaincy and humming and hollering about whether or not I was going to go on a summer tour."'If we'd said we'd be sitting here at the Lions announcement day feeling like we were in with a real shout and then disappointed when it didn't happen, we would absolutely have taken it'. That's kind of the perspective I'm taking on it."He's bound for Perpignan, crossing his fingers every day that when he gets there they will still be a Top 14 team. They are in a relegation play-off spot with two games to go.The focus, though, is not on France or the Lions, it's on Edinburgh and Pretoria. The end - or maybe not? The last act - or is there another twist? Whatever happens, the greatest certainty is that Ritchie will empty himself out there.
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