Frank Pritchard: ‘Frank the Tank’ adds weight to Hull's Super League hopes

The Super League season starts on Thursday and the 19st Pacific Islander aims to make a big impression and help his new team over the line, he tells Dave Hadfield

Frank Pritchard holds up a sign to the crowd after his final match for the Canterbury Bulldogs last September (Getty Images)

If Super League is, at least in part, about importing heavyweight players, they don’t come any heavier than Frank Pritchard.

The Pacific Islander, who will make his debut for Hull in the new season’s opening round against Salford on Friday, will weigh in at 120kg (nearly 19st), the heaviest player in the competition, now his one potential rival, St Helens’ Mose Masoe, has gone back Down Under.

“Scott Taylor comes pretty close as well,” Pritchard says of another new signing, the former Hull KR, Wigan and Salford prop.

It is by any measurement, though, the signing of Pritchard – nicknamed “Frank the Tank” – that shows Super League can still attract star performers in their prime. At 32, he has plenty of his best rugby league left and turned down a lucrative late offer from the New Zealand Warriors to keep his word and join Hull.

“My dream was to be a one-club player,” he says, but that prospect disappeared when Penrith let him move to the Canterbury Bulldogs. Here he fell victim to the NRL’s stringent salary cap, which forced a change of emphasis at the club. “They wanted to look after some of the younger players,” he says. “So that was when I started to look at my options.”

Hull offered him a three-year contract and the deal was done, to the sound of applause from the powers-that-be at Super League. “Players like Frank Pritchard, Pat Richards and Dave Taylor [the latter pair have joined Catalan Dragons] have done it all,” says the competition’s managing director, Blake Solly. “Internationals, State of Origin – they’ve played at the very top level. We don’t get as many of them any more, so it’s doubly important we get players who bring some excitement.”

Richards, with his match-winning goal-kicking, certainly falls into that category, as does the more hot-and-cold temperament of Taylor. Both should give the Dragons the extra fire-power which will bring them the wins away from home that would make them real contenders. It is crystal clear from talking to Solly, though, that the captured scalp that really sets the pulse racing is that of Pritchard. “Frank will be a wonderful asset, not just to Hull but to the whole competition,” he says.

Hull would be most people’s nomination as the sleeping giants of Super League. They have a specific problem that they hope Pritchard will help to solve. No side spends as much time in their opponents’ 10-metre zone and comes away with so little. By throwing Pritchard into the equation, they are in effect saying: “OK, if we can’t go around you, we’ll go right through the middle of you.”

Few forwards are as adept at turning territory into points, as his career tally of 64 tries illustrates. Near the line, he can be close to unstoppable, either charging over himself or using his surprisingly delicate ball skills to release a team-mate, even in the heaviest of traffic.

“It would be easy to go to a top-four side, but I prefer somewhere where there’s a job to be done,” he says. “Somewhere they could win their first Grand Final.”

Pritchard is vaguely aware of Hull’s strong links with New Zealand, starting with players like James Leuluai, Gary Kemble and Dane O’Hara, who were such a big part of the black and whites’ domination of the domestic game in the early Eighties. He is a little more familiar with the time that the current Kiwi coach, Stephen Kearney, spent there.

What he doesn’t know a great deal about is the current Hull side, its strengths and weaknesses. “They don’t have Super League much on TV any more,” he says. “I’ll have to see what they’re all about when I play with them.”

That experience of playing alongside them is currently confined to one pre-season friendly – admittedly against the enemy from across the city, Hull KR. So far, so very good. Pritchard had a hand in a number of tries as Hull defeated their neighbours and rivals 60-20.

Even before that, says the Hull coach, Lee Radford, the big man’s presence was demanding attention. “He’s box office, but he also has that influence on the group,” he says. “The first day he came into training, the session came to a standstill, which is genuinely something I’ve never seen.”

Pritchard is also something of a Pacific all-rounder. Born in Sydney, he played 27 times for New Zealand before switching to represent Samoa, from where his family originally hails, in 2014. Now he is playing league in a fourth country, and insisting that he has arrived on Humberside for the long haul.

It is no small task relocating the Pritchards from the other side of the world. He has moved here with his wife and three children, including a daughter named Nevaeh – “which is heaven backwards,” he explains. Hull will be hoping that this unusual hint of a better life in the hereafter will be an omen for a city more often – and unfairly – bracketed with hell.

If the Pritchards settle in England in the way some of their predecessors have done, there could be a transformation on the banks of the Humber in 2016.

Bennett confirmed as new England coach

Wayne Bennett, the most successful Australian rugby league coach in history, has been appointed England head coach to replace Steve McNamara, whose deal has not been renewed after five years.

Bennett, 66, has agreed a two-year deal that will see him take charge for this year’s Four Nations and the 2017 World Cup, though he will remain coach of Brisbane Broncos. He has guided Brisbane and St George Illawarra Dragons to seven Grand Final triumphs.

The RFL chief executive, Nigel Wood, said: “Wayne is regarded as the outstanding coach of his generation. The [England] players deserve the very best coaching as we attempt to move from contenders into potential winners of international tournaments.”