Bracken sets sights on return to England fold

Kyran Bracken has been a part of the international set for very nearly a decade now: a long time in anyone's language, especially in an age when the vocabulary of the game is dominated not by the familiar words and phrases of the dressing room – scrum, ruck, maul, knock-on, shoe pie, bunch of fives, get the beers in – but by those of the medical centre. Neck spasms and A/C joints, cruciates and medials, pulled quads, twanged hamstrings and dear old concussion... these days, the average prop forward knows more about anatomy than he does about slipping his binding.

Indeed, one of the reasons why Bracken has been around for so long is that he has played so little. He has 41 England caps in his kitbag, a very decent total to be sure, but, since making his Test debut against Sean Fitzpatrick's All Blacks in the autumn of 1993 when he found himself on the painful end of a profoundly cynical act of violence perpetrated by the Otago flanker Jamie Joseph and played virtually the whole game on one leg, his career at club and international level has been punctuated more frequently than one of Proust's more ambitious sentences.

Bracken has missed months through injury – a chronic back problem undermined his best and bravest efforts for years – and has also been inconvenienced by the fact that the scrum-half role of which he is an acknowledged master has been the most relentlessly contested England position of them all. Six half-backs have started a red rose Test at number nine since that Joseph-scarred victory over New Zealand: Bracken, Dewi Morris, Matthew Dawson, Andy Gomarsall, Austin Healey and Scott Benton. Of those, only Dawson has managed more than six matches on the trot.

Benton played only once, against Australia in Brisbane four and a half years ago. (A 76-zip defeat did not do a great deal for the Yorkshireman's career prospects). Healey, whose contribution to his country's cause as a scrum-half has not been noticeably greater than Benton's, made three starts in the position between the spring of 1996 and the autumn of 2001, and is most unlikely to achieve a fourth. Gomarsall put together a six-match run at the fag end of Jack Rowell's time, but has started only once under Clive Woodward – in Argentina last summer, when both Bracken and Dawson were absent.

As for Bracken... well, he must have been an absolute wow when it came to the hokey-cokey on New Year's Eve. For one reason or another, he has been in and out of the England team on 13 occasions – his spells lasted three matches, then five, then one, one, two, two, three, two, one, three, three, one and six – and the last smack in the teeth was delivered as recently as November, when Woodward picked Dawson and Gomarsall ahead of him against the three big southern hemisphere nations. That really hurt. He had occasionally been ranked second to Dawson, but never third behind Dawson and somone else.

And he is still third, in so far as anyone can second-guess Woodward on such matters. What is more, it is World Cup year, a fact that makes Bracken's current predicament seriously alarming. There have been two global tournaments since the Dublin-born law graduate reached rugby adulthood and he appeared in the grand total of one of the 11 games played by England in those finals. Morris beat him to the punch in South Africa in 1995, injury defeated him in 1999. Given that he has not made much impact as a Lion either – 54 midweek minutes in Welkom five and a half years ago is it – a decent World Cup shot in Australia this autumn would count for an awful lot in terms of self-fulfilment.

"It is target, of course," Bracken agreed, 36 hours and one hard training session into 2003. "But it is a distant target. If I've learned anything in this game, it's that whatever plans you may make for yourself are terribly fragile. Rugby is so hard now, so physical, that it is almost ridiculous to look more than a couple of months ahead. I've had my share of injuries – more than my share, probably – but I am on a good run at present. That said, who knows what might be around the corner? We're off to Leicester in the Premiership this weekend, which is always a joy. If I get through this game, I'll start thinking about the next one. There is no other sensible approach."

This time last year, Bracken had just produced one of the finest performances in recent memory, running the Wallabies ragged at Twickenham at the heels of an astonishingly precise and disciplined England pack. He would go on to play all five Six Nations ties – he had a rough one in Paris, but was spot-on everywhere else – and, unlike many of his fellow hardened internationalists, had decided to travel to Argentina for the one-off Test in Buenos Aires before injury struck. Had he gone, he might well be in the England side now. But he didn't, and Gomarsall did. It was a significant moment.

"I know a lot of people opted out of the trip, but I had no intention of following their lead," he said. "I was on Clive's list for the trip, and I was going. I'm not the sort to pass up a chance to play for England, especially with the competition in my position as fierce as it is. Then, 10 minutes from the end of the last Premiership game of the season, my ankle ligaments went. Snapped to hell, they were. So that was that. Andy played against the Pumas, England fought their way to a famous victory and I've been up against it ever since."

Up against it indeed, especially when Wayne Shelford, the Saracens coach, omitted his captain for a run of Premiership games in October, just when Bracken needed to remind Woodward of his existence. "I can't say I was over the moon," he admitted. "But what can you do? Bugger all, basically, except get your head down and work. Especially when you're dealing with someone like Wayne, who is bigger and harder than everyone else. You're not going to argue the toss with him, are you? In fairness, I wasn't playing particularly well. It wasn't something I could put my finger on, but bits of my game had definitely gone missing.

"You have to remember that it is not the job of a club coach to help a player make the England side. International recognition is a welcome bonus, because it reflects well on the team, but, as far as Wayne was concerned, he was doing what he considered best for Saracens. England was not a priority for him and I understood that, even though I was less than ecstatic at not playing when I felt I needed to play."

He is playing now, though, and playing well. Sarries have won four in a row, beating Colomiers both at home and in France, Sale in the Powergen Cup and Leeds in the league last weekend. Gomarsall is still strutting his stuff behind a rampant Gloucester, but Dawson is injured and shows no immediate sign of returning to the frenzy. A big performance at Leicester today would give Bracken a leg up at the start of this most important of years – his 32nd year, and one that offers him a third and final chance of leaving his imprint on a World Cup.