I feel like an old man!

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE NORTH, AGED 27...

GEORGE NORTH has started to notice something on those occasions when he cannot hide from the inevitable. Every so often, in the mornings mainly, he feels it in his hips, his back and his knees. Just as he feels it when people mention certain numbers, or when he has been around the new kid at training with Wales across the past week or so.

‘Louis Rees-Zammit, he is 18,’ North says. ‘Now that makes me feel old. Wow. He looks a player, but it makes me think. I mean, 18. I was in his shoes.’

That was almost a decade ago, when North was the prodigious winger with speed and power and an endless pitch out in front. Now he’s observing the rise of newer machines — those like Rees-Zammit, who has 10 tries in 11 matches for Gloucester — and he finds himself laughing about where the time went.

‘It is a new era in Welsh rugby — new coach, new staff and new faces. Does that make me old now? Don’t mention it’s been 10 years. Just please don’t…’

Aged 27, the player they used to call Manchild at Northampton — ‘the size of a man, brain of a child’ — has become a grown-up. Or rather, he is closer to that point. He is a young guy, in real money, but longevity in sport distorts perceptions and it changes bodies. So, for North, 27 isn’t the same number that it is for others.

‘Mentally I feel 18. I’m still a big child, but physically sometimes I feel 47, knocking on 50, some days even older,’ he says. ‘When you give so much, everything aches. The next day you have to expect to repay it in some way. Back, hips, knees — I feel them all some days. I have got years to go in the game, touch wood, but in rugby terms maybe I am becoming an old man.’

When he runs out against Italy in the Six Nations on Saturday, it will be for his 92nd cap. It’s nine years and a bit of change since he erupted on the international stage at 18 with two debut tries against South Africa in 2010. As he sits in a corporate box at a deserted Principality Stadium, looking out at an arena that he still dreams about, he is feeling reflective.

He will go over the ‘seven stages of grief’ that followed his second defeat in a World Cup semi-final, he will revisit the nightmare of his concussions and the public wisdoms that made him want to quit, and he will ponder the approaching birth of his first child with Becky James, the Olympic medal-winning cyclist.

‘Baby is due in April, so I was building a wardrobe the other day,’ he says. ‘ That makes you feel old as well.’

Before all of that, and the new beginnings of the Wayne Pivac era, he goes back to the island of Anglesey and the start of a journey that might reach a spectacular milestone by the end of 2020.

‘I’ll be brutally honest, when I started, growing up in North Wales, I never felt there was much opportunity to play rugby at the highest level,’ he says. ‘It took so much hard work from myself and my parents and some amazing coaches from grassroots level up to have that opportunity.

‘As a kid, all I ever wanted was to play for Wales. To get one cap I would have been happy even if I never got another. Now, 90 later, I still have that same desire. Not that I endorse drugs but I imagine it is the best one you could have, running out there in red in front of 80,000 people in this stadium in this country.

‘I try to explain to people what it is like playing for Wales. It’s the vibe, the build-up in the week, the conversations you have when you’re doing your shopping and people want to know everything. “Are you well? You fit? Are the boys going well in training?” ‘Like I said, experiencing all that once was a dream. Hopefully, I’ll get to 100. If you get to 100 I guess you can say that you’re a half-decent player.’ In the context of elite Welsh wingers, he has done OK for himself. Going into this Championship, he has 39 tries from his 91 Wales appearances — third in the list behind only Gareth Thomas (40) and

Shane Williams (58). If he does reach 100 caps, he will be only the sixth Welshman in that club.

At times, he has been a wrecking ball at 6ft 4in and 17st with a 40m sprint personal best of under five seconds. He has excelled in the power mould of the modern player, and carried a status since that wider breakthrough in 2013 when, in touring Australia with the Lions, he scored a solo try in the first Test and then, in the second, lifted Israel Folau on to his shoulders and ran in a marvellously iconic moment.

Folau has gone on to infamy and exile for his views on homosexuality; North unwittingly became the centre of a separate debate that nearly forced him out of the game.

North’s multiple concussions in the middle of the last decade made him the face of the issue at a time when rugby started to wake up to the severity of its problem. Scrutiny on North came from a place of healthy concern, but the player carries the scars of the attention he received.

At one point he was forced to apologise to a BBC reporter for his angered reaction to questioning and at another he considered quitting altogether. Today he just about accepts the topic will always be tagged to his narrative.

‘Now I can look back and say I don’t mind being brought into the conversation because it’s obviously got us to a better place in dealing with concussions,’ he says. ‘But at the time it was horrendous. Sometimes I was like, “Maybe I will retire and then no one can question me about it again”. But I’m glad I didn’t.

‘ It was frustrating, though. I would get dragged into it for easy headlines. People who I had never spoken to would have an opinion about whether I should stop playing.

‘One time I was walking around Tesco and an old lady says, “Oh, congratulations on your career”, and I was like, “What?” and then she said she’d heard I had retired. Have I? It was a very s****y time in my life.

‘But the more people learn about concussion the better and I get that my experience might have helped.’

North, playing his domestic rugby at Ospreys since 2018 after eight years between Scarlets and Northampton, reveals he does monitoring of his own choosing, outside of what is provided by club and country.

‘I deal with a guy, Professor Tony Belli in Birmingham,’ he says. ‘ I see him on a private basis because I was sick of people telling me that it was the end.’

North is hopefully the other side of it as he heads into a new period in the history of Welsh rugby, following the end of the 12-year reign of Warren Gatland.

Under Gatland, North won two Grand Slams and reached two World Cup semi- finals, the most recent one having ended with that awfully narrow loss to South Africa and the further trauma for North of a torn hamstring.

Making peace with defeat has been a slow process. ‘What is it they say? That there are seven stages of grief? Looking back a few months on, the World Cup was a weird one because on a personal note I didn’t hit my straps like I wanted,’ he says. ‘ I can be

honest about that. But I was building up, getting back to myself and then I tore my hamstring, which really is no fun. ‘As a squad we did tremendously well. People say it was a step too far. I don’t think it was. I am still licking the wounds but you have to move on. ‘There is no fuel like disappointment and the bigger the disappointment, the more fuel. But you do find yourself thinking back, of course you do.’ A 10-week rehab of his hamstring has been completed and now North stands as part of the fresh start under Pivac. ‘We had a great run under Gats,’ he says. ‘From when he came in, the only person who was there before him and survived him was Alun Wyn Jones. This is new for just about all of us but with that comes an energy.

‘Under a new coach, it is all very exciting. We are right at the start of it but the messages have been on point about where he wants to be, where he wants to get to and how we get there, and he has spoken very well. It’s a bit of an unknown for everyone and I feel we’re in a very good place. We are starting again, a new set-up, a defence of the Six Nations, and that is fun.’

After a pause and a grin, North goes again. ‘It might have been almost 10 years for me, as people keep reminding me,’ he says.

‘But I have a long way to go. I might end up like a creaking old wooden door, questioning my life choices, but I just want to get back in the red jersey.’

• Dove Men+Care is celebrating the values of rugby in partnership with the Guinness Six Nations. Follow @DovemenUK on Twitter or @Dovemencare on Instagram.

PS

NORTH has scored Wales’ only hat-trick in the Championship in the last 50 years. His treble against Italy in 2015 was Wales’ first since Maurice Richards scored four v England in 1969. ‘People said the semi-final was a step too far for us — I don’t think so’