'I thought I had cracked it with England – but I let myself down'

Gloucester's Luke Narraway tells Chris Hewett how he still harbours World Cup hopes but for now his focus is on beating Saracens today

(David Ashdown)

Mark McCall, who took over the running of Saracens when Brendan Venter cut short his stay in the Home Counties and returned to Springbok country midway through the season, is not known for his oratory: by comparison, the average Trappist suffers from acute verbal diarrhoea.

Yet this week McCall could be heard soliloquising on the perils of confronting Gloucester in a one-off match, such as tomorrow's Premiership semi-final at Vicarage Road. "They are extremely dangerous," he warned. "They have players who can hurt you when you least expect it, from positions on the field you don't regard as threatening."

His audience assumed he was talking about James Simpson-Daniel and Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu, about Charlie Sharples and Freddie Burns. As indeed he was. But he was also thinking of Luke Narraway, the England No 8 of the future who consigned himself to the past tense in the time it took fail a fitness test some two and a half years ago. Narraway has not started a red-rose Test since the ill-starred trip to New Zealand in 2008, during which his exceptional performances against a full-metal-jacketed All Black pack put him in a minority of Lib Dem-style proportions, and generally speaking, an individual who gets on the wrong side of the national manager, Martin Johnson, tends to stay there. There must be hope in his case, though. The Gloucester skipper has surely earned himself that much.

To those who yearn to see more from a No 8 than an 80-minute exercise in unadulterated bosh from the base of the scrum, Narraway is a godsend: a piano player in a world of piano shifters. A skilled seven-a-side practitioner, he has both a passing game and a running game, and frequently uses both, more than once, in the course of a single attacking movement. His continuity work is so superior to that of his common or garden peers that he sometimes appears to be playing a different game entirely. Only one rival has a similar skill set: the South African back-rower Ernst Joubert. As Joubert plays for Saracens, tomorrow's little set-to is one for the connoisseur.

So what happened, back in the early weeks of 2009? How did Narraway train himself out of the national squad he had played himself into only a few months previously? "I was young, I was inexperienced, I was a little arrogant and I didn't look after myself as well as I should have done," he says, with disarming honesty. "I suppose I thought I'd cracked it. I'm sure I wasn't the first person to make such a mistake – it must be quite a common trait amongst people who suddenly find themselves playing international sport – but it certainly hurt me. I didn't consciously set out to mess things up, but I allowed myself to move away from the things that had worked for me.

"I'd missed that year's autumn internationals through injury, but I was back playing ahead of the Six Nations. Unfortunately, I'd let my standards slip, and when I went for my fitness test, I did really badly. It was unacceptable, I let myself down and by the end of the season I was out of the squad. It was a bad year all round, but funnily enough, I don't think I'd change it. Did I lose caps? Probably. Am I a better player and a stronger person because of it? Definitely. These things are difficult when you're young, but to make the best of yourself you have to understand how quickly things can be taken away from you. I have that understanding now."

Narraway will be 28 in September – the month the World Cup begins in New Zealand. "People say I have time to play my way back into the England reckoning, but I'm beginning to feel quite old," he says. All the same, he has an excellent chance of making Johnson's summer training camp, which would give him a fresh opportunity to lay his wares on the selectorial table. "I'd love to be a part of that camp," he acknowledges, "but as far as the World Cup is concerned, I'm not holding my breath. A 30-man squad is very tight on numbers.

"Actually, I was thinking about this the other day, after the final round of Premiership matches. You always question yourself towards the end of a season – ask yourself whether you could have done more and all the rest of it. I suppose there are a couple of things that could have gone better, but on the whole I think I've had a pretty solid run. We're in the mix for the title, so we must be doing something right as a group. And I'm in the team, so I must be doing something right as an individual."

He is doing a lot right. Mike Tindall, the England centre and royal consort-in-waiting, started the season as club captain, but his regular appointments with both the England team and the medical team restricted him to 11 appearances across all competitions. Narraway was the next in line and in many respects, the responsibility has been the making of him.

"Captaincy wasn't completely new to me – I'd flirted with it on a stand-in basis once or twice before," he says. "I'm still standing in, in a sense: if there's a captain here, it's Mike. But Bryan Redpath [the Gloucester coach] has been right behind me all season and I can't thank him enough for it. He's a genuine believer in player power, which isn't always the case in the coaching community. He doesn't believe in dictatorships of any kind, and certainly not in a dictatorship of his own. Gloucester is a collaborative thing and I think that's the best way forward. Look at the most successful club teams – look at Leicester and Wasps in the professional era, look at Bath back in the Eighties and Nineties. The common denominator is a strong-minded group of players.

"Rugby is developing all the time, but whatever form it takes in the future, the spirit amongst the players will always be at the heart of it. A club is built on spirit: it's how the game works, how things run. Yes, there are tactics and skills to think about, but it's also about emotion and will. I think we're strong in that area now. I've been here nine years and that shows how much I believe in the place – in its philosophy, its ethos. If I'd felt the need to go somewhere else to make the best of myself, I'd have gone. I've never felt that, and I'm getting to the point now where I feel I can really have some influence on the way we play."

The Narraway influence is there for all to see. The age-old Gloucester tradition of strong-arm rugby – the pug-ugly forwards, the punishing kicking game from outside-half and full-back, the "lay on the ball and see what you get" way of doing things – has not been abandoned entirely, but there has been a broadening of the Cherry and White game season on season and they are now among the boldest, most inventive attacking sides in the land. McCall was not joking when he complimented them during the week. He was being deadly serious.

"During my time at the club, I can't remember anyone calling us 'boring' and don't recall a single occasion when we took the field with the intention of killing a game off," Narraway insists. "Whoever we find ourselves up against, we'll look to play." Does this make them the polar opposite of Saracens, who have reached this semi-final on the back of a hard-headed, highly organised, error-free style that bears little resemblance to the thrill-a-minute, wow-factor stuff they were producing this time last year? "I don't think that's the case at all," he replies.

"People are calling them 'pragmatic', but while they clearly play to a structure, they are as good as anyone at spotting opportunities. We've had only a couple of real beatings this season, and one was at Vicarage Road last month. We were poor that day – it was our third game in a week – but they showed some real quality. I remember us hitting the post with a penalty, and them running it back to score at the other end. I hear it won the Try of the Year award."

Indeed it did, beating four other contenders. Two of them, absolute belters, were scored by Gloucester. It should be quite a game, all things considered.