Hat-trick hero Jonny is like ‘a dog chasing a ball’ reckons coach Jones

JONNY MAY grew up playing football with Ed Sheeran, pole vaulting in Swindon and looking after a pet lizard.

As the years passed, he turned to Harry Potter colouring books, revealed a fascination with North Korea – and was booted out of the house he shared with George Ford after spilling sauce on the fly-half ’s suede rug.

May is England’s wacky wing, as gloriously colourful a sports star as there is today. Everyone, it seems, has a funny tale to tell about a player whose birthday, perhaps fittingly, falls on April 1st.

But the Leicester wing, 28, is nobody’s fool and what he gets up to in his day job says everything about why England were in a class of their own at Twickenham on Sunday.

The Leicester wing did not score a hat-trick with his first four touches of the ball by chance. He did so because he devotes his life to squeezing every last ounce out of his potential.

Last summer, after bagging tries in each of England’s three Tests in South Africa, he rejected a beach break for two weeks intense training at the Michael Johnson Performance Centre in Texas.

Already a 10.7sec 100m runner, May wanted to improve his agility, his acceleration, his topend speed. As he put it, to get “quicker and smarter” as a rugby player. So he picked the brains of Olympic sprint relay champion English Gardner, learning how she had become faster after rupturing a cruciate ligament when “people say you lose five per cent”.

The fact-finding mission paid dividends with May now so sharp that in England’s three most recent Tests he has scored the first try inside three minutes. “Jonny is like the dog in the park, chasing after the tennis ball at 100mph and bringing it back,” Jones said after May had buried France to move joint seventh on England’s all-time list of try scorers.

“He’s one of the hardestworking guys in our team. He works hard on his high-ball catching, he works hard at his chasing, he works hard at his physical condition – and his improvement is all due to his desire to be the best.”

France, on the other hand, turned up with two centres on the wing, a wing at fullback and nothing resembling a game plan.

Their players did not need to be told they were on the wrong side of a gulf in class, they knew it. Morgan Parra criticised their preparation and said: “We are capable of doing what the English do, but are we working on this during training? I think we don’t work on it enough, even not at all.

“These are very simple things that are today part of high level rugby. We can do this. But do we work on it? No.”