The man England can't live without

There has been a steep downside for Dean Richards to his international return - which, by the way, he did not urge on the England manager, Jack Rowell. On the contrary, big Dean told big Jack that it would be better, in the interests of team development, to carry on without him.

Typical of the man, really, to wish to keep himself out of the way. This explains why the build-up to Saturday's game against Scotland at Murrayfield has been so excruciating for him and why the first blast of Derek Bevan's whistle will bring him sweet relief as well as his 47th cap.

Let me explain. In his recent autobiography Richards says a couple of significant things. "One aspect of rugby fame about which I am not enthusiastic is the pressure the media can apply... Sitting down and pouring out my thoughts on any subject is not something I enjoy."

So he is reselected, yet again, by England - and what happens? The media apply pressure on him - always assuming that an appearance in every one of last Sunday's heavier papers is the application of pressure. And, in more than one or two, he sat down and poured out his thoughts.

Others went for an alternative approach, and when you get anyone else to talk about this subject there is none of the laconic reticence that characterises the great one himself. There was never a player keener or better qualified to let his rugby do the talking than Dean Richards.

England's predicament is such, however, that he will also be doing the literal talking at Murrayfield. Amid the hubbub Richards, as reinstated pack leader as well as No 8, will be England's still, small voice of calm and, such is England's apparent desperation for leadership and sound decision- making, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he will be the de facto captain as well.

It is quite a renaissance, even if at 32 the temporarily retired PC Richards is scarcely an example of a rugby renaissance man. Still, he has now passed this way - discarded, then recalled - so many times that nothing about this man, with his famously equivocal attitude to the less pleasant rigours of the game (ie training) should any longer surprise.

This, you could say, is his fifth incarnation as an England player, since he has been dropped four times previously. First there was the incident with the Calcutta Cup in Edinburgh in 1988 when he and the Scotland flanker, John Jeffrey, abducted the silverware from the post-match dinner and, having tried to drop-kick it over North Bridge on to Waverley station below, refashioned the trophy as the Calcutta shield.

The japester's penalty, conveniently deferred until after England's Five Nations finale against Ireland, was suspension for one match. How useful that an extra, non- championship fixture against the Irish had been arranged for Lansdowne Road to celebrate the city of Dublin's millennium.

Given the acclamation with which he is now being greeted, it comes as a surprise to be reminded of the English management's consistently mixed feelings about Richards down the years. Yes, there was a time, during the earlier part of Geoff Cooke's stewardship, when the impression was given that Richards had only to stand up to be selected but even then Cooke was hatching a heretical plan to move him to the second row.

So here is a curiosity. If Richards had not given Cooke such a dusty response in 1988, we might never have heard of Paul Ackford, who was to become the finest front-jumping forward in the world but was an unconsidered middle-jumper when Cooke began hatching his plans all those years ago.

Cooke did not eventually dispense with Richards, who had blithely carried on as an apparently indispensable No 8, until the knock-out part of the 1991 World Cup, and if this is about as savage a selectorial setback as any player, let alone an icon/talisman, could suffer, Richards has ever after adopted a perfectly characteristic insouciance as his response.

He has, after all, grown used to it. Cooke brought him back midway through England's subsequent, riot-of-scoring Grand Slam but got rid of him again that autumn when one of those finger-pointing personalised videos showed him to be seriously off the pace against the Canadians at Wembley.

A year later he was back once more. Ian McGeechan never had any doubt who his Lions No 8 in New Zealand in 1993 would be and Cooke, the manager of that touring party, had him back for England as soon as he could. It took another damning video, of his sluggishness against the All Blacks in last year's World Cup semi-final, to persuade Rowell to act as Cooke had three years before.

Through every vicissitude Richards has carried on regardless. As long ago as 1990 he doubted he had the time or inclination to adopt the training schedule (or "nightmare", as he put it) that was inflicted on the England players in the protracted build-up to the '91 World Cup. Even now, when training regimes are yet more intense, he insists on devoting an 18-month sabbatical from Leicestershire Constabulary to his family rather than to rugby.

At the same time he now likes to admit to being a "closet trainer", and that for him is a breathtaking confession, remembering that Tony Russ, the coaching director at Leicester, was wont to say: "You've got to deplore his state of fitness." Oddly, Russ said so with genuine affection, and anyway Richards questions whether his rugby would actually be improved if he had to force himself into an ever-greater commitment.

How does he do it? How is it that he inspires such reverence at Welford Road and far beyond, such awe-struck devotion even from as reluctant an encomiast as Jim Telfer, Scotland's notoriously hard-to- please team manager and director of rugby, whose heart evidently sank when he found the most-capped of No 8s had been recalled?

It is mainly and most obviously to do with the man himself because, however unlikely a rugby athlete with his shambling gait and scruffy garb, he has the shrewdest rugby brain, the profoundest rugby knowledge of any forward - perhaps any player - in these islands. And this takes him to places, both within himself and about the field, that logic suggests he should not be able to reach.

"He is a much deeper man than he gives himself credit for," Chalky White, the fabled Leicester coach who introduced Richards to big-time rugby, said of his protege. Meaning, among other things, that he thinks more about the game - and doubtless life itself - than he likes to talk about it.

How droll of the management, then, to put up Dean Richards for general interview this afternoon as England's last act before leaving London for Edinburgh. The man to whom everyone wants to speak - and he will hate every second.