Earlier this season, Northampton beat Munster in a volcanic Heineken Cup match at Franklin’s Gardens. Courtney Lawes, the giant 20-year-old Northampton forward, played a staggering game. Some time after the final whistle, one of the Northampton backroom staff tapped me on the shoulder.
“Don’t build Courtney up too much,” he asked. “We’re trying to keep him under wraps a bit.” I pointed out that the giant Lawes, 6ft 8in and 17.5st, had just won the man of the match award in front of a live television audience, making his usual power bursts and hits and elastic lineout takes. And since he had left the field to an uproarious standing ovation from a packed stadium, and that during the post-match interviews, none other than Munster’s Paul O’Connell, the Lions captain, had delivered a glowing tribute to the athletic excellence and competitive fire of the tyro, the news was already out.
Last week, Lawes was named in the England squad for the 2010 RBS Six Nations. He has one cap, as a replacement against Argentina. Today, he plays on the blindside flank — the other key string to his bow — for Northampton against Perpignan, a vital Heineken Cup pool game. He will not be representing the exotic contingent in the club's squad, but rather, the local Northampton Old Scouts club and this most fervent of rugby towns itself. He is a local hero.
His father, Linford, is Jamaican and mother, Val, from London but they settled in the Midlands years ago and yards from Franklin’s Gardens. He feels keenly the community bond. “It’s fantastic when the people around here are behind you. I love speaking to them after the games and giving a bit back,” says Lawes. Just a bit. Lawes is special. It is more than 21 years since I first saw Martin Johnson play, in a schools match in Glasgow, less than a year before Lawes was born. Lawes is the best young forward I have seen since Johnson, anywhere in the world. It is a mild irony, I suppose, that it will be Johnson who decides whether Lawes will start in the opening game of the Six Nations against Wales on February 6. Unless Johnson stubbornly extends his bizarre devotion to the beavering but unexceptional Steve Borthwick, Lawes is the only possible selection alongside Simon Shaw.
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Comparisons made across the decades are difficult but Lawes suffers not a jot by comparison. When Johnson was 20, he had not yet undergone his finishing school — two seasons in New Zealand. Nor did he have access to the kind of relentless, scientific regimes of fitness and conditioning Lawes has at his command. As Lawes towered around the place last week, I realised my impression of him physically, that he was tall yet beanpole willowy, was wrong. He simply carries no excess, he is a formidable athlete. What is his preferred fighting weight? “I am aiming for 18st. That is about how much heavier I can be without losing the speed and athleticism.”
His is a natural, rather than manufactured athleticism. “My dad was the same, and he played all sports. I do weights because it is part of the regime, but what I have comes from playing all sports, all the time, when I was young,” he said. He came to rugby only at 15, has had expert help from Northampton School, the Old Scouts and from Northampton’s academy and coaches.
Lawes is fiery. At the end of last season, as a fringe Saint and unknown outside the Midlands, he came on as a replacement in the European Challenge Cup final against Bourgoin and within seconds was involved in a mass fight.
He has his own corner of YouTube featuring playbacks of his thunderous defending; one of these hits, on Morgan Parra, the French scrum-half in that European final, cost Parra a tour of New Zealand. “It is how I play, I try to do as much damage as I can. And if people get upset it doesn't bother me,” says Lawes. “But I’d never aim to tackle late, I am not a dirty player.”
You have to remind yourself that he is only 20. Lawes is measured and unfussy. His speech is a low drawl. “I am quiet in the dressing room. I absorb what the others are saying.” Drawing on the testimony of those close to him, I conclude that his quietness is not the diffidence of youth, but the focus of the truly steely.
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No doubt he will experience the equivalent of second-season syndrome, no doubt he will have dips. But even when Northampton are in the full fury and tumult of Munster’s Thomond Park in the final pool game of the Heineken Cup next weekend, it may well be others who bow the knee before the youngest man on the field. This is a warrior, a rare talent. Johnson says Lawes could be around for eight or nine years. How did he view the prediction? “I have to keep my head down, keep working. There is a bit of excitement in the England squad about what we can do. I don’t mind where they pick me, second row or back row, I will do whatever they ask.”
What of his allegiances, apart from the bond with the town rugby team? He has a Japanese tattoo on his left arm and a Maori one on his right but only had them done because he liked the look of them. He may once have hung the Jamaican flag on the bedroom wall, but he is not quite sure. He never had sporting idols on his wall, although he recalls a poster of the All Blacks. There is, of course, his Xbox, the refuge of this generation of young players. Call of Duty is the favourite game, played online against people in different locations. “There are eight or nine of the Saints who play it, and I know some of the England guys do too,” says Lawes.
Who are we to demand that they read books and go to art galleries? They are young men living dreams. And the lack of other diversions and passions in the life of Lawes suggests not a lack of interest in the wider world, but a beady focus on the world of rugby.
Johnson may or may not be correct to look ahead to nearly a decade of Lawes and England, but Perpignan today will be far from the last opposition to be threatened by the dazzle of a meteor.
• Northampton Saints v Perpignan, today, Sky Sports 3, 3pm