Nowell gives Gatland plenty to think about
It was the 14th minute of extra-time, the 94th gruelling minute of the Premiership final, when Jack Nowell collected the ball from the base of a ruck and looked up. Around him, there were Wasps defenders out on their feet, Exeter teammates running on empty, yet the wing summoned on his incredible energy levels and burst down the blindside with an insurgence that drove into the opposition 22 and paved the way towards the penalty that would win Exeter Chiefs their first Premiership final.
The 24-year-old British and Irish Lions wing, who on Sunday joined up with the rest of the squad in London ahead of Monday’s flight out to New Zealand, was relentless in his work rate and clinical with his
finishing when it mattered most, with the Englishman darting over in the corner to open the scoring for the Chiefs in a pulsating final at Twickenham.
“I just go and trust in our set-piece, trust in our phase,” Nowell said after the 23-23 extra-time victory over Wasps. “We’d been working on a move in the week and sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don’t and thankfully it did today. With [Luke Cowan] Dickie coming out the back and with Stu [Townsend] going around the front, we worked on that all week and for the whole group, not for myself, I’m happy to finish it off.”
It was the third consecutive play-off match that Nowell has crossed the whitewash, having scored against Saracens in the semi-final and also in last season’s final defeat to the same side, and further cements his reputation as a big game player that can be depended on when it matters most.
That weighs a lot in his favour, then, ahead of the Lions tour, with Warren Gatland willing to give every one of his 41-man squad the next four weeks to prove they should be in his side for the first Test against the All Blacks on 24 June. But, he stressed, that quest to secure a place in the Test side began on Sunday morning rather than Saturday night, and in true Exeter fashion, Nowell joined his teammates in heading back down the M3 to Exeter to celebrate their success, before returning to London first thing in the morning.
“I’m going to enjoy it tonight with the boys because at the end of the day it means so much to all of us,” Nowell said. “I’m going to go back with the boys, I’ve got a taxi booked for seven o’clock in the morning, but I’m going to make sure I enjoy this. Times like this don’t come around too often.
He added: “I’m going to enjoy tonight, then all my focus is on going away on tour and trying to get one of those test shirts.
“As soon as I’m on that taxi ride I will be thinking about what’s ahead of me, that I’m going to get the chance maybe to play for the Lions. That’s any rugby player’s dream and I can’t think too much about what happened today. I’ll focus on that tonight but then tomorrow it’s a complete switch, a completely different mentality with a different team and I want to make the most of it and go for one of those shirts.”
The challenge ahead of Nowell is his biggest yet. He must fend off competition from England teammates Anthony Watson and Elliot Daly, Scotland’s Tommy Seymour and Wales duo George North and Liam
Williams to secure one of the two test spots on the wing.
Yet his departing Exeter teammate, Geoff Parling, who heads to Japan after collecting his third Premiership winners’ medal following his successes with Leicester Tigers in 2010 and 2013, believes that Nowell’s X-factor gives him a genuine chance of tying down a place in the first XV because his ability to create something out of nothing can lift the rest of the side during a match.
“He is the type of player, certainly from my point of view, that when he gets the ball, you expect him to do something whether that is beating one man or a few,” said Parling. “As a forward that’s pretty good. He gets you on the front foot.
“Hopefully he gets a chance in that Test team because he certainly wants that ball.”