Thompson the fighting bull fired up to banish pain of past

The scars of battle are many and varied: a deep scratch running like a river from cheekbone to jaw, with a funny little bit at the end that may eventually turn into the facial equivalent of an ox-bow lake; a crusty scab over one eye and the shadow of a bruise under the other; stud marks clearly visible under the close-cropped hair now favoured by the vast majority of front-row forwards. Steve Thompson looks quite a picture – something by Picasso, admittedly, but a picture all the same. If Northampton RFC ever put him on the market, the Tate Modern will want first refusal.

Not that Northampton are likely to consider selling Thompson in the foreseeable future; when a club has the world's best hooker on their books, they tend to move heaven and earth to keep him. At 24, around the age the great All Black Sean Fitzpatrick and the Australian maestro Phil Kearns began their respective reinventions of the hooker's role, the self-confessed "reformed wild child" from Hemel Hempstead is being spoken of in the same august company. He is frequently described as the "new Kearns" – they are not dissimilar in looks – but Thompson is bigger, quicker, blessed with better hands, and possesses a far greater range of footballing skills than the former Wallaby captain ever did. No contest, really.

There was, however, a very serious contest at Lansdowne Road last weekend, when Thompson went eyeball to eyeball with the frenzied Irish on Grand Slam afternoon. "That first 20 minutes was quite something," he recalled. "I was dying, it was so fast. I looked at Graham Rowntree [the long-serving loose head from Leicester] just as he looked at me and we both said simultaneously: 'I'm not going to last this.' But come the second half, I couldn't stop running. I knew we had the Irish going – I could see it in their eyes when the whistle went for half-time – and I reckon that sense of almost being there, of almost winning the Slam, took me to a new level."

And now, six days later, Thompson is on Powergen Cup final duty with his club in front of another Twickenham full house – an intriguing little personal match-up with Gloucester's Olivier Azam, the combustible hooker from the Armagnac region of France who frequently gives the impression of playing with rather too much of the local firewater in his bloodstream. If Thompson had a wild past, Azam has a wild present. It could well be a case of "seconds out, round one". It will certainly be exhausting.

Yet if Thompson is weary of big-time rugby – alone amongst his red rose peers, he has started all 14 internationals since the Calcutta Cup match at Murrayfield at the start of last year's Six Nations – he is not letting on. "Quite honestly, the rugby can't come quickly enough," he said. "People talk about fatigue and burn-out and plain old knackeration, but I don't like missing matches. Apart from anything else, it gives some other bugger a chance in the team, and that, in my view, is not the point of the exercise.

"I hate it when I'm not playing, when I'm sitting on the bench or, worse, up there in the stand. When it happens, I try to take the positives from the situation, to make the most of the rest. But basically, I want to play every weekend. And when you get an occasion like this one, which means so much to the people who watch you religiously, week in and week out for nine months of the year, you're burning to get out there and hit that first scrum. I'll feel the same way next week, too. We're off to Toulouse in the Heineken Cup, and rugby doesn't get much more extreme than that."

Thompson traces his energised brand of can-do confidence to the remarkable performance of a profoundly under-strength England team against Argentina in Buenos Aires last June. A couple of months earlier, he had endured the most miserable afternoon of his career as Northampton flunked a Powergen Cup final against London Irish so comprehensively that they might as well have pushed off home at half-time. "We didn't really get off the bus in the first place, did we?" he said. "We didn't turn up. We built ourselves up so much for that one game that we went right over the top." Had Buenos Aires not happened, Thompson might still be stranded in a sporting no-man's land.

But Buenos Aires did happen, and how. "That was the turning point in my game, the day I knew anything was possible. I watched France, pretty much at full strength having just won the Grand Slam, lose at the same stadium the previous week, and I remember thinking 'Oh God, we'll get absolutely battered here.' But our build-up was outstanding, the atmosphere within the team was unique – probably because we knew we were never likely to play together again – and I thought: 'Hey, no one gives us a prayer, so why not just have a dart at it and see what happens?' When I first got into the England side and found myself surrounded by the Johnsons and the Hills and the Backs, I was bloody petrified. This time, there was no pressure and not even a hint of panic. We played out of our skins, and we won. I've been on a roll ever since."

This afternoon, then, is all about a righting of wrongs at club level, having helped England do precisely that in the Test arena six days ago. "I've only played in one Grand Slam match, and finished on the winning side," agreed the great fighting bull of the East Midlands. "Christ knows what it must have been like for all those blokes who lost at Wembley, at Murrayfield, in Dublin 18 months ago. I hope I never go through it. But I have lost a cup final and I know how it hurts, both personally and in terms of the people who paid their money in the hope and belief you would win. When we got back to Northampton last year, the clubhouse was full of supporters trying to make us feel better. We felt able to have a few drinks that night, thanks to them. This time, we're hoping the beer will taste better."