Robert Kitson RUGBY
They seem hazily distant now, those nervous pre-World Cup days when a nation’s rugby hopes lay at the fingertips of faith healer Eileen Drewery. In retrospect England’s scrum- half does seem to have enjoyed a degree of celestial turbo-thrust; sadly for the psychic profession and Kyran Bracken fans the body thrillingly suffused with special powers has been Matt Dawson’s.
Everyone, Dawson included, is willing Bracken back to full fitness, but the latter will find a substantially tilted international playing field from the one he left. Against Italy this weekend the 27-year-old Dawson will not only lead out a team seeking a fourth consecutive Six Nations win but one increasingly fashioned in his own image.
It is the wonder of English rugby’s millennium so far, given Clive Woodward has been through more captains in nine months than the average snake sheds skins. As a reincarnated Oscar Wilde might have put it: “To lose one may be regarded as misfortune, to lose two suggests careless talk to a Sunday tabloid.”
Lawrence Dallaglio and Martin Johnson, both world-class forwards, excelled in the role but their teams fired, at best, sporadically. Suddenly, as Ireland, France and Wales have discovered, something has clicked. People are putting two and two together and coming up with England’s number nine.
Some say Dawson, who insists his idea of a big Sunday scoop is beating Paul Grayson at snooker, has simply benefited from the old sporting adage about teams needing a fresh voice from time to time. Others, though, are convinced his impact has been more profound, and feel Woodward, by accident or not, has stumbled across the missing piece of his coaching jigsaw.
The inescapable fact is that ever since Woodward nominated Bracken as his first- choice scrum-half, Dawson’s star has steadily risen, to the point where even those outside the England camp are noticing the difference.
“Already, from the body language of the England players, there’s a buzz there and a lot of that will be down to Matt,” says John Steele, Dawson’s director of rugby at Northampton.
The Saints’s captain Pat Lam also knows a contented bunch when he sees one. “They look very happy, the way they celebrate after tries, even the way they get together behind the posts when a team scores against them. Matt’s doing a great job.”
If good England sides are irrevocably cast, publicly at least, in the mould of their leader – the too-good-to-be-true Will Carling, the honest-as-they-come Bill Beaumont, and so on – what sort of squad are we dealing with here?
Dawson uses “cheeky chappy” to describe himself, but his mates talk more about his competitiveness and the confidence of a natural sportsman, versatile enough to have played soccer for Chelsea schoolboys and kept wicket for Buckinghamshire schools.
In public he is not exactly Les Dawson, more Jack Dee. A sharp sense of humour and a brief spell spent as a teacher allows him to slot easily into the classroom atmosphere of so many England press conferences. The voice can be deliberately downbeat, flat even; physically, in a sport of giants, only the ears stick out.
Dawson enjoys walking his two springer spaniels and is actively involved in a sports memorabilia company currently sprouting wings on the Internet.
There is nothing too exceptional there. Yet he is already England’s most capped scrum-half with 32 Test appearances, has scored one of the most replayed tries in Lions history (against South Africa), can kick goals, play at centre or fly-half and, the way things are going, could end up skippering the Lions in Australia next year. He is young, gifted and loved by his pack, in other words.
“I’ve always seen myself as someone who can captain, no matter what level it is,” he says firmly. “If I’m captaining any team I also want to be a captain in Matt Dawson’s style. I don’t want to be a Johnson or a Dallaglio or a Carling. Having said that, I’m the sort of person who likes to learn, so I might see something I can use to my advantage and plagiarise it.”
Dawson’s ease in the role has even extended to pacifying his own coach, instructed to “back off and calm down” in the lead-up to the French game.
If this all sounds eerily mature, Steele, who played alongside him as a teenager, suggests it is a relatively recent phenomenon. “He was always an amazing talent but he’s matured and grown up a lot in the last year or so,” continues Steele.
“He’s turning himself into a good captain by understanding other people’s needs. Matt knows how to lead by example but also how to get the best out of people. In that respect he’s got an old head on young shoulders. I think he’ll develop into a better and better captain.”
Barbed remarks about Jack Rowell, his first international coach, this week, though, suggest the saintly Saint has not yet lost all his devil. “I’ve always been a bit of a cheeky chappy but I’ve definitely changed over the last couple of years, since the Lions tour anyway.
“It was a massive education for me. I went out from being a cheeky little scrum-half who’d managed to get on the tour to being thrown right into the heat of battle. I needed to grow up very, very quickly.
“My girlfriend Natalie will sometimes say ‘You don’t seem very excited to be England captain.’ Now and again you have to sit back and think: ‘It’s not going to get much better than this.’
“I’d never take it for granted but, if you become too openly emotional, it can get the better of you, you can lose focus of where you’re going. I like to keep myself to myself a bit. It’s not part of my make-up to be loud, Austin Healey- style.”
Healey, needless to say, is a great mate, which tells you something about both men. “We both want to win in everything we do, even if it’s just a conversation,” confirms the wing. “To be honest, I thought he was pretty poor against France.”
Sides who feel free to laugh with their captain, as opposed to at him, are worth keeping an eye on. “I’m very proud of what he’s done with the team. You can see England are a very different side,” says Lam.
The revitalising process should continue this weekend.