Heineken Cup: Why Exeter's Jack Nowell is happy to wing it

Anyone watching Jack Nowell trading metaphorical punches with the superstar Springbok wing Bryan Habana a week ago – or throwing himself fearlessly into the wreckage-strewn path of the spherical Goliath known as Mathieu Bastareaud, or mixing it with World Cup-winning forwards as menacing as Bakkies Botha and Juan Smith – might have struggled to credit the young Cornishman’s account of his own introduction to the union game. “I was the kid crying on the touchline, clinging to his mum’s leg,” he says, still mortified at the memory . “I didn’t like it at all.”

He likes it well enough nowadays: if there is a player in top-flight English rugby deriving more enjoyment from an afternoon’s thud and blunder, he is the supreme master of inscrutability. At 20, the trawlerman’s son from Newlyn – he grew up in a house overlooking the fish market – already has a Junior World Cup winner’s medal in his kitbag, a nailed-on place in the Exeter starting line-up and a seat among the Saxons, the second-tier England squad into which Stuart Lancaster, the national coach, has no choice but to dip ahead of the Six Nations Championship, now a mere seven weeks distant.

Lancaster is in something of a pickle on the wing front, thanks to form and fitness – or to be brutally accurate, an alarming absence of form and fitness. Marland Yarde, Christian Wade, Ben Foden and Ugo Monye are all crocked; Charlie Sharples, the one man who might reasonably complain of rough treatment at the coach’s hands over the last two years, has not been playing regularly; Chris Ashton is injury-free, but also free of anything resembling confidence. All this puts Nowell on the red-rose radar. Jonny May of Gloucester and David Strettle of Saracens are the remaining wide men in the Saxons group, and of those, Strettle’s star is in the descendant.

According to Rob Baxter, the rugby director at Exeter and one of Lancaster’s lieutenants on England’s three-match trek to South America last summer, there are good reasons to think that the lowest-profile of the wing contenders will make a proper name for himself in the coming months. “Is Jack a natural wing? Let’s just call him a natural rugby player,” Baxter says when asked if Nowell is coming to terms with the demands of the No 14 role, or whether he is a career full-back in make-do-and-mend mode. “You get the impression that he doesn’t have express pace, yet he never gets caught. Put him anywhere on the field and he’ll give you something. As for England, I’m a great believer in coaches picking players in form. If they’re watching Jack, I’d advise them to believe their own eyes.”

It may be Anthony Watson, who left London Irish for Bath at the end of last season, is the youngster being watched most closely: he is certainly in Lancaster’s thoughts as a potential challenger for 2015 World Cup selection and if he wins a first cap before the end of the season, the irony will not be lost on the Exeter man. The two of them played together when England won the global Under-20s title by beating Wales across the water in Brittany back in the summer: Nowell at full-back, from where he scored a game-turning try; Watson on the right wing. On Planet Premiership, it is Watson who operates at No 15 and Nowell who performs the wing duties.

“I’ve played most of my rugby at full-back, so when they first put me on the wing at Exeter, I didn’t quite know what to think,” Nowell admits. “But now I’ve spent some time in the position, I’m not sure how much it matters – especially when you play the kind of rugby we play. I don’t spend all day standing on the wing: along with the other backs, I tend to get around a lot. I’m learning all the time, of course, but things have gone really well for me over the last few months and I’m enjoying the role. I think I’m at home there.

“All I want at the moment is the chance to keep doing what I’m doing. If something happens with England, I’ll see it as a bonus. It’s my main goal to play international rugby one day, but I can’t afford any distractions. I’m lucky that there’s so much big rugby on at club level because it forces you to concentrate on your job. Playing against a team as big as Toulon, as I did last week, and facing someone like Habana, who I’ve been watching since I was a kid, that just makes me want to carry on improving my game.”

His initial experience in union, unrewarding as it may have been, was with the massed ranks of muddied urchins playing mini-rugby at the local club, Penzance & Newlyn – or Cornish Pirates, as they are now known. “I was a bit of a nutter as a boy, always running around the house,” he recalls, “so my parents thought rugby was the thing for me and took me down to play with the under-sixes. I hated it, but my dad told me he’d give me a quid if I scored a try and I soon realised I was quite quick – quick enough to run round the other kids. “

One of those other kids was the rather more substantial Luke Cowan-Dickie, who is regarded by coaches up and down the land as a racing certainty to play hooker for England at some point over the next few years. “He’s like all those other front-rowers from Cornwall,” says Nowell. “Terrible haircut, massive body.” The two played together at Truro College, worked their way up through the regional and national age groups and were still cheek by jowl on Junior World Cup final day in Vannes, having clawed their way to the showpiece occasion by beating New Zealand in the last four. “We go right the way back,” Nowell continues. “I remember our school matches against Ivybridge College, which also has strong links with the Exeter club. They were real Devon-Cornwall battles, games you felt you just had to win.”

That kind of game is now the rule rather than the exception, especially when the Heineken Cup comes around. Nowell was still awaiting his chance in the European big time when Clermont Auvergne visited Sandy Park last year and scored almost 50 points in the course of a sublime performance. “We played really well for the first 20 minutes that day, then found ourselves two tries down, having not missed a tackle,” recalls Baxter. “That’s what the really good sides can do to you, I suppose.” A few weeks later, the coach picked Nowell against Scarlets. “I enjoyed it... until I got knocked out,” says the wing.

This season, he has been an automatic choice at European level, hence his meeting with Habana, Bastareaud and the others – yes, Jonny Wilkinson too – when the mega-rich Riviera-istas came visiting last weekend. Habana was sufficiently impressed by Nowell to offer some public praise via social media, which was, according to the youngster, “a bit surreal”. Tangling with Bastareaud was a different experience altogether. “The only thing I could think to do when he was running at me was to speed-bump him,” Nowell says. “He landed on me more than once.” It is an eye-watering thought.

Today, Exeter find themselves on the Côte d’Azur for a return match that promises to be significantly more testing than last week’s fixture in the depths of Devon, and as they lost that one, albeit narrowly, their chances of maintaining some interest in what seems certain to be the last Heineken Cup of its kind appear unnervingly slim. “We said we would have to take five points off Toulon to make it through to the knockout stage,” Nowell says. “We got one of them last week. All we need now is the other four.”

If he does not sound entirely serious, he is not the sort to travel without hope. “If you’d said three years ago that we’d play a side like Toulon on our own ground in the Heineken Cup and only just lose, there’d have been a lot of people in the bar saying: ‘Nah, that won’t happen.’ As it turned out, we did play them and were genuinely gutted not to win the match. I think we’re capable of a big performance. Things happen so quickly in rugby.”