Joe Batley: From cancer survivor to one of the Premiership’s most durable players
‘Resilience’ is a word that is thrown around with abandon, a staple of pep talks and motivational posters. Joe Batley makes it a more tangible concept.
Along Batley’s journey to this season, the best of his career to date, the 27-year-old lock has beaten cancer and survived a former club falling into financial turmoil. A couple of fractured ribs, sustained during Bristol Bears’ win over Gloucester last month, were only ever going to be a temporary hindrance.
“I broke two ribs in a maul, first half,” explains Batley, who missed the victory over Newcastle, but is on the verge of a return to action. “I felt them go, tried to carry on, took a few more shots to it. Getting my breath back was getting harder and harder and I had to bow out, to my annoyance. We had a maul coming up five metres out. If I’d jeopardised that, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”
Bristol scored shortly after Batley’s departure to take the lead at Kingsholm, vindicating that decision. But the exit will have been irritating. Until that point, Batley had been on the pitch for every minute of the Premiership campaign. Over the 16 consecutive fixtures between September and the Six Nations, he only skipped the Champions Cup trip to Bordeaux.
An affable and engaging character, Batley presents an amusing slant on the “washing machine” schedule and how he kept trucking. “After different games, different things hurt. After a Leicester or a Sale game, you’ll have more achy shoulders. After Quins or Northampton, your lungs are still recovering. The nature of rolling into new weeks with a new opponent and how you master that means it was only when we had the Six Nations break, that you appreciated how crazy it was.”
Maybe such stoicism should not be surprising. Back in March 2018, as a 21-year-old who had joined Bristol from Gloucester, Batley was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His world was flipped upside down. Although he would earn a Premiership debut within a year, the road to remission was gruelling, physically and mentally.
“For the start of my chemotherapy, I had probably dropped down to 110 or 111kg from 123kg,” Batley recalls. “Near the end, from chemotherapy to radiotherapy, I really jumped up in weight. Initially, I lost a load of muscle mass and then I replaced that with a lot of fat so I went up to 129kg. I went to two extremes, which was tough because I then had to pull back all the fat and put muscle back on.
“I was having a protein-deficient diet and probably not enjoying the food I was eating and not feeling hungry because of how sick I was. There was a panic. The chemo was over so I’d stopped being sick, but the radiotherapy was happening and I was knackered. I’d have these easy snacks, which were high in sugar, because they hadn’t got any dairy in them and they were vegan-friendly.”
A plant-based diet was recommended by various nutritionists and Darren Dawidiuk, the hooker who had battled cancer over the previous year. Yet it came with challenges: “Taking away cheese, which is obviously lovely, made going vegan pretty hard. Whoever tells you that tofu is just as good as meat is an absolute liar. I found the texture really… mushy all the time.”
Batley gradually progressed to different markers in training and was loaned out to refamiliarise himself with match demands: “Nothing prepares you for mauls and scrums like mauls and scrums.” His sense of humour and his tactful nature will be valuable to the sufferers he speaks to as an ambassador for the Rugby Against Cancer charity, and indeed anyone hoping to pick his brains. One lesson that Batley took on board, for instance, was that he could have shared more conversations with his mother, Julia.
“What I find when I look back now is that I coped with it well in the moment but those closest to me really struggled,” Batley says. “My mum struggled, and wouldn’t have necessarily known how I was dealing with it. Instead of us talking things through, she’d wear it.”
Being a sounding board, for those affected directly and for their families, has been “rewarding”, because Batley has accepted his past as part of his identity. “Going through it at 21 I didn’t want to be known as ‘The Cancer Kid’,” he says. “But I had a really good opportunity to reflect during Covid. I’ve tried to own it rather than cowering away from it.”
A move to Worcester in 2020 seemed promising as Batley enhanced his reputation at Sixways. And then came the Warriors’ downfall. Inherent optimism was the antidote.
“To the annoyance of my partner sometimes, I tend to have a lot of confidence that it’ll be alright,” Batley says. “[When Worcester went under], it helped that I was playing well. Your currency is your performance in professional sport, so I had that comfort.”
There were opportunities abroad and Batley’s partner, Anna, was “open to every possibility” despite the couple’s son, Wilfred, only just being born. Pat Lam’s phone call in the autumn of 2022, felt serendipitous. Anna is Bristolian and Batley was still hugely grateful for how the Bears had treated him during his cancer battle. This season, the faith has been repaid in spades.
Bristol did well out of the 2022-23 season, when three clubs went under. As well as Batley and Noah Heward from Worcester, Lam recruited Gabriel Oghre from Wasps, and Josh Caulfield and Benhard Janse van Rensburg from London Irish. All five have enjoyed strong campaigns and the Bears have surged into Premiership play-off contention. Batley has been among the most impressive forwards in the entire competition.
Besides scoring four tries, he has led the line-out with distinction. According to Stats Perform, Bristol have the highest success rate in the Premiership (95.1 per cent) and have scored 33 tries from that platform. Only Saracens, with 37, have more. Bears are also third for steals, with 18. Batley and James Dun boast five each.
“The set-piece, and the line-out specifically, is my bread and butter,” says Batley, who is capable of moonlighting in the back row. “I love that competition, the game within the game between myself and the other line-out caller. I know how much work I’ve put into the week, so I want to make sure that I haven’t been outworked. Anything on top of that is a bonus.
“I love the ball in my hands, which is a massive part of the way Bristol play, and any confrontation, which is what rugby is about. Second row suits those three things really well, but I want to play as much rugby as I can. If Pat rang me up and said, ‘Mate, what do you think about playing full-back this week’, I’d be more than happy.”
Two wins, from a sequence of three games against Leicester Tigers, Saracens and Harlequins to finish the regular Premiership calendar, will probably be enough for Bristol to emerge from the scramble to land fourth place. Should they get there, they will be indebted to Batley’s rare resilience.
