The Australian cricketer Alex Dolly pulling strings for Doncaster Knights RFC's Premiership push

This afternoon he will run out as a scrum-half for Doncaster Knights, part of a team attempting to take the momentum gained from a block of cup fixtures into their stop-start league form as they host Cambridge.

Then in the evening he will head home and review the film of the Yorkshire 2 team he is on the coaching staff of, Dinnington, who take on Northallerton looking to extend their unbeaten start to the season to 11 games.

“If you would have said to me I’d have spent most of my time in England in South Yorkshire, I probably wouldn’t have thought so,” says a laughing Dolly as he sits in the stands at Castle Park in between a training session with Doncaster and one later that day with Dinnington.

“I came over to England at age 19 for cricket. My mum was originally from Chester so that’s where I initially settled and played for a team in the Greater Manchester Cricket League.

“I wanted to go all the way in cricket, but when you get the opportunity to become a professional rugby player it’s hard to turn down. Luckily I took that opportunity and here we are eight years later and I’m in my fourth season at Doncaster.”

It wasn’t as if he first touched a rugby ball when he landed in England. Playing an oval-ball game is woven into the fabric of an Australian childhood, and Dolly had played club rugby back in Sydney.

He got the opportunity to pick it up again as an amateur with Fylde when they were in National One, and by the time a year later he had made the move to Rotherham Titans his focus had shifted.

He moved on to Nottingham in the Championship but when they reverted to a part-time model, he took the chance to move to Doncaster four years ago.

“I still had aspirations to be full-time, and Doncaster met that,” says Dolly.

“I was fortunate with the way things aligned. I played club rugby back home, but cricket was always the thing I wanted to do and rugby got pushed to the side. Until I came here when it flipped and rugby is now the main thing and cricket has been put to the side.

“I still go back in the summer and play for my team in the Greater Manchester League when I can but cricket is something I do for pure enjoyment now, it’s no strings attached. I get enough competitive sport through rugby, so I don’t need that edge.”

Rugby in South Yorkshire is certainly giving him that challenge.

The full-time day job is helping Doncaster climb the table back to the top end of the Championship. As the only team who have applied for and meet the Rugby Football Union’s minimum standards criteria for promotion to the Premiership, Doncaster have a target on their back. Three out of the five teams that have taken aim so far have hit them.

“I think as a playing group we’ve been frustrated with a couple of the results we’ve had,” admits Dolly, the home defeats to London Scottish and Nottingham, immediately springing to mind.

“We should have controlled the momentum better; look at Nottingham here, it’s an intercept try that’s a 14-point swing, similar to that at Bedford.

“Then if we go to the Cup against Sale and Newcastle it’s those ‘what-ifs’ again, which is probably the most frustrating thing.

“Throughout my time here Castle Park has been a bit of a fortress, so to lose those two is not where we want to be but it’s happened now and it’s about trying to progress forward. You have to be on it for 80 minutes for the results to go in your favour.

“We know how good we can be, and hopefully we can take some momentum from the cup into the league.”

On an individual level, the 27-year-old is always learning, and in former fly-half turned head coach Joe Ford, and British and Irish Lions legend turned Knights director of rugby, Sir Ian McGeechan, Dolly has two inspirational sounding boards.

“Fordy is brilliant, he fills you with loads of confidence to play what you see,” says the scrum-half. “It’s nice to have those conversations with him.

“And Ian will grab you on the side after training, have a conversation about something he’s seen. It’s that personal touch. He’s been brilliant just dropping those little bits of insight here and there. Things as a player that you maybe don’t see in that moment.”

All of which he then takes into the evening job, coaching at Dinnington.

“I really do enjoy the coaching. They’re a good group and they’re buying into everything we ask of them,” says Dolly. “It’s nice to take some of the things off my mind, or implement some of the things I’ve learned from the coaches here – Steve Boden, Fordy, Tyson Lewis – taking the good bits and implementing it into my playing group.”