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Six Nations 2011: Chris Ashton keeps on smiling, diving and scoring
Less than a year after his England debut the winger has grabbed attention with his tries and his celebrations
Less than a year after his England debut the winger has grabbed attention with his tries and his celebrations
- Michael Aylwin
- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 February 2011 22.00 GMT <li class="history">Article history
Chris Ashton just can't help himself when it comes to scoring tries for England. Photograph: Henry Browne/Action Images Anyone would think he had become the first man in history to dive over a tryline, the first to score four tries in a match, the first to enjoy himself on a rugby field.
To England fans, it probably does feel a bit like that. And so Chris Ashton has become a hero within a year of his international debut, the most talked-about man in European rugby. Even more impressively, perhaps, he has managed to turn that commonplace flourish of the prolific try-scorer, the swallow dive, into a matter of intense and widespread debate. Should we celebrate it as an expression of his irrepressible joy, or should we frown upon it as an indulgence or a slight upon the opposition? And what if he drops the ball?
The airwaves have been crackling with these questions, but at the middle of it all we have a young man of 23 who cannot stop smiling and cannot stop scoring. Nine tries from nine Tests, and they comprise some defining scores in some defining wins. Even England's one proper setback in their recent improvement, the defeat by South Africa, maintained the correlation between the progress of England and that of Ashton. He was knocked out in a first-half collision with Victor Matfield and played most of the match stumbling around with concussion.
Ashton's star has risen perfectly in line with England's. Is it just a coincidence? He is just a finisher, after all. No, says Martin Johnson. "He's more than just a finisher. He's a good lad. He has brought an energy to the team, as have all the young guys. Everything's a little bit new to them, it's all exciting, and they're having fun."
So, too, is Johnson. Not so long ago a defining image of England was of Johnson smashing a table in frustration at yet another penalty conceded. Now the cameras turn to him during a match and there is a fair chance he will be smiling. He has caught the Ashton bug as much as anyone. "I always have fun," he says, practically laughing. "It's a weakness, isn't it?"
James Haskell is less measured on the emotional front and leaves us in no doubt about what Ashton's swooping does for him. "All I can say from a player's point of view," he says, "is that when Ashy scored and did it with confidence, my first reaction was: 'That's awesome, I love it.' He's put two fingers up and he's playing with confidence. It put a smile on my face and it just lifted the whole occasion. It wasn't necessarily the diving, it's just the fact that players are playing in this England squad with no inhibitions."
It is this exuberance that is endearing Ashton to his public. Diving for tries is nothing new. What strikes a chord is that he cannot seem to help himself. Here is what he said before the Italy game, in the wake of his swallow dive against Wales, which prompted warnings from the management not to jeopardise the team's hard-earned tries. "If I'd dropped it, there would have been a whole world of pain. I'll not be doing that again."
We all know what happened next. There were five seconds between Ashton receiving the ball for his first try against Italy and the scoring of it, plenty of time for us to turn over in our minds the question of how he was going to do it. We might as well have had a stand-off between him and Johnson. Twickenham was like a classroom of 80,000 kids holding their breath as the school miscreant was hauled up in front of the headmaster. And, boom, the place erupted at the sheer cheek of the boy.
"I didn't think about it until I was close to the line," he said that night. "I was going, eeny, meeny, miny, moe. I got to moe, so I thought I'd better do it." It's as if when it comes to swallow-diving he can't help himself.
Such antics tell us more about the boy than any number of interviews. Graham Mayor is a family friend of the Ashton's from Wigan. His son, Chris, is a professional rugby player, who played for a few years with Ashton at Northampton, and his daughter, Katie-Beth, was one of Ashton's best friends at primary school. She gave him his first scar, still there on his forehead, when they clashed heads in their rush to get to the playground, succeeding where Matfield failed by sending Ashton to hospital.
"He was always a cheeky chappie," says Mayor, "but not in an offensive sort of way. He was endearing, because that smile you see now on the telly, he's always had that, and it's got him out of a lot of scrapes."
Ashton's adventure into professional rugby started in rugby league with Wigan, for whom he made his debut as an 18-year-old in 2005, filling the boots of the legendary Kris Radlinski. True to his subsequent form, he scored twice. "He certainly doesn't let much get to him," says Radlinski. "He doesn't see the seriousness of life it's just a big party to him. He seems to have matured a lot, listening to him in interviews, but I like his outlook on life. He plays like he's on a field with his mates."
In his first full season as Wigan's full-back, he was top try-scorer and looked set fair to become Radlinski's heir. "He might have been if he'd been managed better, but it's amazing how things happen. One minute he was frozen out, and his career could have gone either way. Luckily, he knuckled down and it has all paid off."
The dream of being the next Radlinski turned sour, as Ashton was dropped in his second season and took the huge step of turning to rugby union, when Northampton signed him in 2007. "When he broke into the team he had no money," says Ian Millward, his first coach at Wigan. "But we put him on a full-time contract of maybe twenty-something thousand. By the time union came in I'd left the club, but I reckon it was to his disappointment that Wigan let him go. His agent [Andrew Clarke] told me he was prepared to stay for £75,000. It was his town and his team, and he'd always wanted to be the No1 full-back for Wigan. But they didn't think he was worth that."
Northampton were offering him £140,000. For a 20-year-old, there was only one decision to make, whatever the heart said.
His first season at Northampton was a riot. The Saints had been relegated to the First Division. Ashton scored with his first touch and went on to register an extraordinary 41 tries in 28 games. But his inexperience of the intricacies of union caught up with him when Northampton went up to the Premiership, and he went through his second "second season", languishing in the reserves for long stretches, wondering whether union was for him after all.
For all his carefree irreverence, though, another trait that comes up over and again is his work ethic. Everything about Ashton's game may look effortless, but his gracefulness is belied by relentless industry beneath the surface, on and off the field.
"In that season in the First Division he was a complete unknown and he was scoring tries for fun," says Jim Mallinder, his director of rugby at Northampton. "What's pleasing about Chris is that he then had to go back and work hard at his game in that first year in the Premiership. But he's now moved it back to where it was, and he's managing to do it not only at Premiership level but at international level."
Attracting almost as much comment as his dives has been this ground-breaking knack he has for finding himself on the shoulder of the right team-mate at the right time. It looks simple, but it involves a rare instinct for second-guessing the patterns of a game, and it does indeed involve a hell of a lot of work, running countless, often unrewarded supporting lines.
It also involves sheer speed, which is another thing Ashton has worked on. Northampton have employed Frans Bosch, the Dutch sprint coach who is currently working with Wales.
"Rugby players have the same deficit when it comes to sprinting," says Bosch, "and if you keep on playing rugby it gets worse. If you are carrying a ball into contact, you have a tendency to crunch over a little bit. Then you switch off your abdominals and the muscles that are important for high-speed running. If you're diligent it can be fixed in about three months, and Chris has really bought into it. You can see a big difference in his running."
You can see a big difference in the England team, too. They have 10 tries in two games this Six Nations, and Ashton has six of them, equalling the Six Nations record of Will Greenwood and Shane Williams with three rounds to go. He is also in sight of the all-time record, eight tries, set by England's Cyril Lowe and Scotland's Ian Smith in the opening decades of the last century, when it was the Five Nations.
Everything is coming off for Ashton, and English rugby has not enjoyed someone enjoying himself like this since Greenwood, Ben Cohen et al were scoring every which way at the start of the millennium. He will almost certainly have to endure a third "second season" at some point when international rugby adjusts to the Ashton energy. How he reacts to that will define the nature of his star. It says a lot for him already that press, public and manager all hope against hope that it should never come down to earth with a dislodged ball bobbling harmlessly away.
People just really like Chris Ashton.
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