Sam Prior makes his Exeter Chiefs Debut aged 33

“Who’s that?” the bloke sitting behind me asked his mate as the Exeter Chiefs team to face Worcester was announced on the big screens at Sandy Park.

The number 8 was the only one of the starting line-up represented by a silhouette rather than a photo.

“Sam Prior,” mused the mate, “No idea. Probably one of the Academy lads.”

That’s no teenage Academy lad. That’s our Sam Prior. Turbo.

With the Taunton Titans for over a decade, Sam continues to break new ground. This is the guy who was on life-support, who was in a coma,who had a tumour removed from his adrenal glands and still had the willpower to make it back onto the rugby field before Covid closed down the 2019/20 season. The same player who travels to Taunton from Dorchester three times each week to the rugby club he loves and who has been making the earth shudder on grounds from Plymouth to Darlington in Titans colours this season.

“Strange that Santiago Grondona, who plays number 8 for Argentina, is wearing 6 instead of this guy,” came another observation from a row back.

As I looked at the silhouette, I felt pride and excitement for Turbo making his Exeter Chiefs debut at the age of 33. He was joined in the squad for the Premiership Cup game by some familiar faces. Jack Walsh ran the game from fly-half and Sam Leworthy also made his Exeter debut off the bench.Cory Teague who, like Walsh and Chiefs captain Stu Townsend, had trod the well-worn loan path from Sandy Park to Hyde Park, lined up in the second row.Sam Prior’s was a loan move in the opposite direction, the recent Champions of Europe drafting him in from their National League One neighbours.

During the warm-up I couldn’t help but watch Turbo. He did his runs, he did his stretches but, when it came to line-out practice, he wasn’t required to lift, nor to jump. When the Chiefs ran out of the tunnel, he was last man onto the field.

Any concerns that he would be marginalised were short-lived.Roared on by a crowd in excess of 10,000, Turbo was used three times in the first few minutes to hit the ball up. With barely ten minutes on the clock, referee Adam Leal awarded a penalty to Exeter when Prior’s strong jackal was frustrated by a Worcester player not releasing. Fourteen Chiefs ran over to slap Sam on the back. This was no duck out of water. This was a player revelling in his day in the sun.

For 53 minutes of Chief’s Premiership Cup victory until he was replaced, Sam Prior mixed it with professional rugby players and looked every bit the part. Who knows whether Turbo himself heard it, but when the ball was passed to him in the centres or when he fielded a clearance kick and ran it back into the oncoming Worcester Warriors, there was a surge in crowd volume?

Once dubbed ‘Shadow’ by a team-mate who accused him of blocking out the sun, Sam Prior may have been represented on the screen by a silhouette but there was rock-solid substance to the impact he had on his Exeter Chiefs debut.

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