Simpson-Daniel strives to break free from difficult year

When you have succeeded in making a fool of Jonah Lomu on your first appearance in an England shirt, running cherry-and-white rings around the likes of Olly Barkley and Tom Voyce while on Premiership duty with Gloucester seems small beer by comparison. Yet if anything confirmed James Simpson-Daniel – "Sinbad" to his club colleagues, "Princess Precious" to his mates at national age-group level – as the richest attacking talent of his generation, it was a single coruscating flash of something very like genius that illuminated the dark dungeon of Kingsholm exactly a month ago.

Simpson-Daniel had not been granted so much as a sniff of an opportunity all afternoon, but when Barkley, the Bath outside-half, lifted a siege of his line with a punt down the park, it was as if the previous 70-odd minutes of derby cut-and-thrust had been a prologue to this one moment. Aware of the imminent danger as Simpson-Daniel fielded the ball, Barkley and Voyce instantly closed him down in a pincer movement. Barkley is bright and organised and secure in the tackle, while Voyce is as rapid as most, yet neither laid a finger on their target as, with a feint here and a shimmy there, he left them with their faces in the Cotswold dirt. Whatever Simpson-Daniel did in that split-second – and it will forever remain a mystery to mere rugby mortals – it was done with the force of an epiphany.

This is the way he always plays: with confidence, boldness, an unbridled delight in his God-given gifts and a freedom of the imagination that distinguishes the few from the many. But while this season has had its moments, the cares of the world have been on his shoulders and his confidence levels have gone from subterranean to stratospheric and back again. For all the positives, it has in many respects been a pig of a year.

Having missed both his club's victory in the Zurich Championship final at Twickenham and England's summer tour of Australia because of a busted bone in his foot, Simpson-Daniel struggled to break back into the Gloucester starting combination at the outset of the current campaign – and when he did, his coaches insisted on picking him at right wing rather than outside centre, which the world and his dog considered his optimum position. He was picked for the Test team anyway and shone against the All Blacks and the Wallabies, at which point he contracted glandular fever. Then, late last month, Nick Duncombe died. Born five months apart, the two 20-year-olds had played together for England under-19s, had shared the good times and had recognised something of themselves in each other. The loss of the Harlequins scrum-half was, and remains, a terrible burden to bear.

"I went to Nick's funeral last week, and while it was very well done, it was horrible too," Simpson-Daniel said sadly, after being selected on the wing for tomorrow's Six Nations fixture with Italy at Twickenham. "I haven't even started to get over it. When we played Leicester in the Cup semi-final last weekend, I thought about him the whole game. I don't know why, but I did. At some point over the next few weeks, I'll go to Nick's grave and spend a little time there, on my own. I'll say my goodbyes then, because I don't think I've really done that yet."

The Duncombe trauma occurred just when Simpson-Daniel was feeling at his brightest for three months. He had felt under the weather during the build-up to the Wallaby Test in mid-November, and while the match-day adrenalin helped him thrive against a quality Australian back-line boasting the likes of Burke and Herbert and Mortlock, he could barely manage a celebratory pint afterwards. The glandular fever had kicked in, and he was diagnosed less than 48 hours later. It was the last anyone would see of him for weeks.

"Injuries do you in mentally," he said, "but you can rationalise it, because rugby is such a physical game. The broken bone was a massive knockback, coming when it did, but I told myself: 'Hey, people go through a lot worse than this.' The illness was different, another thing entirely. I remember Nigel Melville [Gloucester's director of rugby] ringing me after I had seen the doctor, and me telling him that I'd be back in a fortnight, or the week after that at worst. I really thought it would just go away. As it turned out, I couldn't get off the couch for days on end. Everything I did exhausted me.

"Thankfully, the antibiotics did the trick and my blood tests have been clear. I feel good now, better than at any point since I fell ill. But the thing stays in your mind, doesn't it? When I first came back and got a little tired in training, I'd think: 'Oh no, it's coming back.' I still don't understand the full implications of the illness, or exactly what happened to me, but I'm fairly confident I've seen the last of it."

He may also have seen the last of life at outside-half, the role he performed with a startling degree of brilliance throughout his schooldays at Sedbergh and on his rise through the England age-groups, during which time he took his running game to such heights that he scarcely, if ever, kicked the ball. "I didn't need to kick," he explained, simply. "I was lucky in the players I had around me. I played in some amazing teams, especially at school. We felt we could run from anywhere, achieve anything by keeping the ball in hand. I consider myself fortunate to have experienced that, but I guess it worked against me in a way."

It was Melville who, following one of Simpson-Daniel's exercises in youthful virtuosity towards the end of last season, pronounced that the youngster could not be risked in his preferred position at Premiership level. "James can't kick, and a stand-off needs a kicking game," insisted the boss. But a player of Simpson-Daniel's stamp can do any number of things in any number of positions, and the fact that Clive Woodward, the England manager, sees him as a full-time wing with potential as an outside centre is unlikely to cramp his style.

"England is so new to me, such a privilege," he said. "When I speak to schoolmates and they tell me they'll be watching the England game, part of me thinks I'll be watching it with them, just like the old days. I'm amazed by the speed at which all this has happened, and I'm more than happy to play where I'm told to play. But as far as positions and shirt numbers are concerned, I don't need to be wearing 10 to be first or second receiver. The players are so skilled in this team, and the style is so fluid, that positions don't count for as much as people think. If Jonny Wilkinson finds himself stuck on the wing, he doesn't have to sprint 50 metres to stand between the scrum-half and the inside centre. Other people can fill in there, me included."

Woodward's cherished vision of a 15-man, fully interactive approach a million miles removed from the brutally systematic Grand Slam-winning style in which he was involved as a player more than two decades ago, has yet to be realised, and the temporary abandonment of the dual outside-half strategy featuring Wilkinson and Charlie Hodgson has not brought that realisation any closer. But when Iain Balshaw, the uniquely threatening Bath full-back, returns to fitness and Woodward has a full range of attacking options at his disposal, he will be in a position to redefine the limits of international rugby, just as Andrew Slack's Wallabies did in 1984, and the All Blacks did at the 1987 and 1995 World Cups.

And if those frontiers are pushed back when the fifth World Cup takes place in Australia this autumn, James Simpson-Daniel will be one of the pioneers. Not bad for a 20-year-old who has not enjoyed the happiest of seasons.