Edinburgh's Ben Healy reveals when it started to click for him as stats back up strong start

Stand-off settling into life at capital club as gameplan continues to suit

Edinburgh's Ben Healy during the weekend win over Glasgow Warriors.

Ben Healy’s value to Edinburgh this season has been easy to appreciate with the naked eye but the statistics help confirm it.

The fly-half has played every minute of every United Rugby Championship game so far since making the post-World Cup switch to the Hive stadium from Munster, his 90 points making him the top scorer in the competition. Healy also leads the way when it comes to penalties kicked (19), kicks in play (77) and the most kick metres (2376) throughout the division, that efficiency with the boot making up for the fact he is yet to score a try for his new club.

After years of chopping and changing amid the failed experiment to convert Blair Kinghorn, Edinburgh now have an undoubted first-choice, first class operator at number 10 – something that rivals Glasgow must be looking at enviously given their own struggles in that position. There have been a few bumps in the road for Edinburgh throughout the campaign but the victory over Glasgow in front of more than 37,000 supporters at Murrayfield on Saturday lifted them, temporarily at least, into fourth place in the table. And Healy’s smooth transition and consistency have been significant contributory factors.

“I’d say six or seven weeks in, it really started to click, where I just felt really, really comfortable with the boys around me,” revealed the 24 year-old. “I was clear on what the coaches wanted us to do – our game plan, how we saw ourselves as a team and what we wanted to impose on the opposition.

“It wasn’t perfect at the start – we scraped a few wins. But I would say the place where we are at the moment, I’m really confident every time we go out that, when we do what we say we’re going to do in terms of game plan, if we execute it, we’ve never lost this season.

“Any time we lose, when we come in on a Monday we’re just looking at copious amounts of clips of us not doing what we said we were going to do. So that fills me with a lot of confidence. If we can just get more consistency with that, fine-tune that, we’ll be in a really good spot going forward.

“We’re growing. We don’t need to peak until the play-offs, and it’s a long old season. We’re definitely far better - if you think back to that first game against Dragons down there - we came away after scraping a win. We have a lot more strings to our bow now. So I’m happy with where we are. The first half of the season has flown by but there’s still plenty more to grow.”

Healy would seem to have nailed down his place as Scotland’s fly-half first reserve behind Finn Russell ahead of the Six Nations, although the suggestion that Gregor Townsend hasn’t given up on luring Fin Smith into the camp could complicate matters. For now, though, Healy is happy to keep the focus on club affairs, with Edinburgh off this weekend before heading into two vital European matches. “We’ll tackle it when it comes,” said the man from Tipperary on Six Nations selection. “We’ve got two more club games to go in the Challenge Cup. I’ll focus on Edinburgh for the next three weeks.”