Rugby Union: Hill revels in the open season

Chris Hewett discovers the Lions link-man is adapting well to life in Africa

The imposing splendour of the Newlands stadium in Cape Town is so alien to the ramshackle lean-to that passes for the Saracens rugby headquarters in north London that Nasa might think twice abut sending a space shuttle between the two for fear of losing it. When you cover as much ground as Richard Hill, however, distance becomes an irrelevance.

Few rugby players - few sportsmen, come to that - have travelled so far, so quickly, as the 24-year-old breakaway from Surrey. Less than five months ago, Hill was untried, untested and uncapped. Today, he stands so close to a Lions Test cap that he can almost feel the cloth between his fingers and should he return to Cape Town on Saturday week having secured a back- row berth against the Springboks, he will have completed a remarkable journey in anyone's language.

Eight days ago, he galloped across Newlands like a thoroughbred, snuffing out Western Province attacks and linking so intelligently with the Lions' threequarters that Ian McGeechan's vision of a seamless 15-man game looked cemented in reality. "Like most open-sides, I'm happy to do the donkey work," Hill said. "But rugby at its best is about running with ball in hand, so this style suits me down to the ground."

Mature beyond his years, Hill has analytical abilities to match the shrewdness of his running angles. He is a thinking flanker, enviably equipped with a flexibility of both mind and body that allows him to grasp minor tactical adjustments and major shifts in policy with equal facility.

"The way the Lions have approached their rugby on this tour has surprised a lot of people but if you think back to the Five Nations' Championship, England were trying to develop along similar lines. It was just that we couldn't keep it going for 80 minutes; we either started slowly or, as in the game we lost to France, fell away towards the end.

"But the basics were very much in place and anyone who watched Northampton play under Ian McGeechan last season would have realised that he was intent on moving along the same track. The game is opening up in all directions; the New Zealanders are pushing back the boundaries by trying something different every season and their commitment to innovation is forcing the rest to keep pace."

Strange to relate, Hill's career as a specialist open-side began only four years ago; as a schoolboy at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, he was a class act No 8 and bore the stamp of a future international in that most creative of positions. "It was a size issue more than anything else. When I started playing first-team rugby at Saracens I soon realised that a 6ft 2in frame was not much use at No 8 and although there are exceptions now - Andrew Aitken is no great size but he managed a pretty spectacular match for Western Province against us - I'm happy I made the correct decision".

Given the Lions' high-octane approach to this tour and their determination to attack space in the furthest-flung areas of the pitch, Hill's role is as influential as it is demanding. On his own admission, he found the Western Province match exhausting and he is acutely aware that the going is unlikely to get any easier.

"You get the odd league match back home that turns into a fast, frantic lung-burner and the Five Nations tends to be played at high pace, but I would unhesitatingly say that last weekend's match was the most relentless 80 minutes of my career. The opening quarter was very quick indeed and it went up from there, so it was a case of staying strong mentally and fighting through it.

"Generally speaking, we've started well on this tour - there is a tremendous air of enthusiasm in the dressing room and the adrenalin really pumps through you - but there are drawbacks as well as advantages to scoring early because it's so easy to lose focus. With defences so tight in South Africa, you have to capitalise on every chance; if you mess up, the opposition are back at you in a matter of seconds. It is a matter of adjusting to new levels of intensity."

According to Fran Cotton, the Lions' manager, Hill has the credentials to establish himself as a new Peter Winterbottom. "You have to make these judgements over a substantial period and it's difficult to put someone with four caps to his name alongside one of the all-time greats," said the former England prop last week. "But Richard has that sort of quality about him. He has all the potential in the world."

Some testimonial. Yet Hill remains unfazed and undistracted by the praise showered upon him from on high since he marked his international debut in last season's Calcutta Cup match at Twickenham by giving Gregor Townsend an in-the face roasting; an achievement, incidentally, that South African open-sides are finding difficult to emulate on this tour. "I'm not interested in resting on my laurels," he insists. "What interests me is the next challenge, the next goal.

"At the start of last season, my goal was to get myself capped. Once that happened, the Lions became a natural target and now, the aim is a Test place. To my mind, sport at this level is about testing yourself against your own standards and on a tour of this magnitude, the standard is higher than any-thing most of us have ever experienced."