It’s been five months since Blair Kinghorn decided to move from Edinburgh to Toulouse in the middle of the season. He played 10 matches and won each of them. Toulouse are second in the top 14, two points behind Stade Français, and have a semi-final at home to the Harlequins in the Champions Cup on Sunday.
Kinghorn scored six tries and made a place for himself in a free-running back line that includes Antoine Dupont, Romain Ntamack and Thomas Ramos. It plays every two weeks in front of 20,000 spectators at home. And he and his fiancee settled in their new home next to his friend and teammate Jack Willis.
How do you think it works in the face of all this? “Honestly,” Kinghorn said, “I love it.”The game against Harlequins is another reminder of why he made the switch. “They dream about these big European knockout matches or big national knockout matches, that had a big impact on my decision to come here.”
The move has brought many people too short. Kinghorn had been at Edinburgh for eight years or his entire career and had established himself as one of Scotland’s best players. He was the youngest player to win a hundred international matches for the club. But he began to feel stagnant.
“I just feel like I could have been superior than me. And it’s probably also up to me not to work hard enough, not to have to action for a place in the Edinburgh team week after week. It may have made me a little complacent.”It’s not that he got lazy,” he says,” I worked really hard in Edinburgh,” it’s just that no one pushed him. “I didn’t want to sit still and be a good player, I wanted to move and become an even superior player, become a great player.”
He enjoyed having to prove himself again. “There is no looseness, because if they don’t train well or play well, the team is so good that they simply won’t be selected. “Toulouse used it at the back, with a strange look on the wing. And if his French is still quite scholastic – ” I don’t really understand much – he is doing well on the field.
“We play instinctively, you can see that in a lot of our games. Most of the tries we score are not solid strikes, we just play rugby and everyone adapts to each other.”
Scotland coach Gregor Townsend described this as a good blow for Kinghorn but a bad blow for Scottish rugby. But he insists that he is still committed to the national team. “I have a feeling that it will only make me a superior player for Scotland. The things I will learn here will allow me to excel in my own game, and then hopefully I can bring that back with good form and do it for Scotland.”