Interview: Tim Visser, rugby player with Edinburgh

A Friday night in May, Treviso against Edinburgh in the Stadio di Monigo, last game of the regular Magners League season and a victory for the Italians. Not just a victory, in fairness. A trouncing. Three tries to zip, 31 points to six, a humdrum Edinburgh campaign ends in a routine defeat, but there is a story within a story here.

Tim Visser is as dejected as any of his team-mates when leaving the field but there is something on his mind. He goes to the Edinburgh media man and asks: “What’s happened with Brew?” What happened was that Visser was on 14 tries for the season and was being pursued by Aled Brew of the Dragons, who was on 12. In his dejection he could imagine the crumb of comfort – a successful defence of the top try-scorer title he won the previous season – being snatched away from him at the death by a Brew hat-trick. “Don’t worry, he didn’t score,” was the reply. “You’re top man again.” On the night, it was something to hold on to.

We should talk about the numbers first. On Friday night, against Aironi, Visser scored three tries which brought his total in the RaboDirect Pro12 to eight from his nine games. He leads the scoring charts again, by three. Last season in the Magners, he scored 14 tries from 21 games. Nobody had ever scored that many in a single season since the competition began. The season before – his first in Scotland – he scored ten tries from his 17 games. He’s one of only two players who made the Magners Dream Team in each of the last two seasons, Jamie Heaslip being the other.

The numbers are extraordinary; 32 tries in 47 appearances. He is fourth in the all-time table, with only Nikki Walker, Shane Horgan and Tommy Bowe ahead of him. Walker has scored at an average of a try every 3.25 games, Horgan at an average of a try every 2.58 games and Bowe at an average of a try every 2.54 games. Visser’s average is a try every 1.46 games. It is an astounding strike-rate for any player at any club, never mind a player at a club that has, in his time there, lost considerably more games than it has won.

By comparison, the great Shane Williams has an average of a try every 2.66 games in this competition and the legendary All Black and Munster wing, Doug Howlett, has a 3.2 average. No wonder Andy Robinson is ticking off the days on the calendar to when Visser becomes eligible to play for Scotland, in June next year.

“After the first season, there was a question in my mind about whether I could do it again,” he said. “I heard people talking about ‘second-season syndrome’ but my second season was a lot better than my first, so I answered that question and I’m going well again this season. I’m on a massive high.” He was talking the night before his hat-trick against the Italians, which took his total for the season – Pro12 and Heineken Cup – to ten tries in 11 games.

This is freaky stuff. His whole story, in fact, is a bit trippy. He takes us back to his upbringing in Maartensdijk, a village about a 20-minute drive from Hilversum, where his father, Marc, played his rugby. “We would go to the rugby club every Sunday and watch him play. Our whole life revolved around Hilversum rugby club. All of our friends are from there. Dad talks about games he played in for Holland. They used to play in the World Sevens series, or whatever it was called back then. They were playing Fiji and it started raining and the coach said: ‘Right guys, these guys from Fiji are not used to rain so let’s get out there and put some points on them’. Ha ha ha. Holland got destroyed. Fiji ran in tries from everywhere. He’s really funny when he tells that story.”

Marc might be an institution in the small world that is Dutch rugby – about 120 clubs – but his boys, Tim and his youngest, Sep, who plays for Boroughmuir and has his eyes on a career with Edinburgh, started off by playing netball, a mixed sport. “Well, it was a variation of netball. The choice was to go to Hilversum to play rugby or play netball locally, so I played netball. I played for about four years but I lost interest. I was too rough for it. I needed something different to get rid of all my energy. Sep was the same. In one game he pulled a girl back by her pony-tail. That did not go down well, I can tell you.”

Rugby claimed Visser from the age of eight and he was only 16 when he first moved to England and only 19 when he made his debut for Newcastle as a replacement for Jonny Wilkinson. This was the Newcastle of Jonny and Toby Flood and Matt Burke, the great Australian full-back. That first game was against Worcester and he scored the winning try in the last play. “It was Matt who put me away for the try. What a start. John Fletcher was my coach and everything was brilliant. I literally thought I’d made it. People were saying: ‘This lad will play for England when he qualifies’. But then I got in a rut. Fletch left and Steve Bates came in and my fortunes changed. I had a lot of promise but I didn’t make it come true. I don’t blame Bates for not playing me because he only ever saw me when I was in that rut. He didn’t play me but I didn’t give him a reason to play me. Then Andy (Robinson) brought me to Edinburgh and here I am.”

He gives huge credit to Robinson and to Rob Moffat, who soon replaced Robinson as Edinburgh coach. “The Moff”, as he calls him, the “Silver Fox”. Moffat backed him and filled him with confidence. Michael Bradley, he says, has taken it on to a new level.

Visser will play for Scotland next year, qualifying on the three-year residency rule. The team is crying out for his predatory instincts. Of course, he will have questions of nationality thrown at him and he’s ready for them. “Andy said he will consider me for the summer tour. He just told me to concentrate on performing for Edinburgh. He said: ‘You might have a chance but I don’t pick players who don’t perform, so keep doing what you’re doing.’ If it happens, I’m sure some people will talk about me and England, but that thing was stuck on me when I started at Newcastle and scored tries in my early games. I never invited that stuff.

“The truth is that I was born and bred in Holland and I lived there until I was 16 and then moved away, but my home is Scotland now. My brother is here, so half my family is in Edinburgh, so I feel part of it. When people ask ‘do you feel Scottish?’ it’s a tough question to answer because I’m not. But I feel part of Edinburgh and I would love to be a part of Scotland. When Scotland play, I cheer for them. I’m up in the stand at Murrayfield and feeling proud of the boys. I’m not legally Scottish, but I feel very much at home here and, if I get capped, I would consider it a great honour to represent Scotland. A huge honour.”

It’s fortunate for Edinburgh that they have Visser on contract for another year and a half because there’s no doubting that his exploits have caught the eye of the biggest clubs in the hemisphere. France, included. That epic victory over Racing Metro in the Heinken Cup reverberated around the country with Visser’s double – his first after less than a minute and his last, the match-winner – earning headlines in the French press.

Visser is, it’s fair to say, one of the more sought-after players in Europe right now.

The Metro game makes him laugh. The madness of it. Brilliant, he says. “We got off to such an incredible start that night. We were well ahead and then they hit us with 20 points around our ears and, with ten minutes left in the first half, the only thought in my head was that we’d already lost the game. We went in at half-time and said: ‘Right boys, if we give them any more points then it’s all over for us’. And we gave them another 16 points! And still we won. It was crazy out there.

“We played with a sense of desperation. We were throwing passes between our legs and over our shoulders. Nick De Luca thought he was Freddie Michalak – and he pulled it off. We watched bits of the match the following week and there was a lot of giggling going on.”

With the tries continuing to flow, the mirth should last a while yet.