Henson now talks - and plays - a good game

The lobby of the hotel tucked away in the countryside flanking Cardiff was rather busier than it might usually have been as the new week was dawning. Men in suits loitered around the foyer, speaking into mobiles to clients who never existed, checking watches for meetings never arranged and shuffling papers for deals that would never be struck.

And then he appeared. Hair pointing northwards, cheeks a Bisto brown, legs as smooth as marble; just as they had last seen him (the odd silver boot aside, of course).

Gavin Henson picked his way through the outstretched pens and tear-stained programmes, making his tired way to yet another media appointment and you could almost here him mutter "yes, I do shave my legs" and "no, I was not nervous over that kick".

The script might have been penned only a few hours before, but the 23-year-old was as well versed in it as Derek Jacobi is in Hamlet. Only no one was letting this particular young prince slip out of character.

So Henson decided to put straight an oh-so-wise world, which had decided it already knew everything there is to know about this cocky little so-and-so as that ball arched its fateful way between those posts last week to give Wales an historic Six Nations win over old foe England. "I'm shy," he declared.

Cue stunned silence. If he's shy, then what the hell are we supposed to call Jonny Wilkinson?

"It just comes down to rugby, doesn't it? I'm really comfortable with rugby. But off the field I'm not comfortable," he said. "I am a shy person. I don't really speak that much." If his Welsh team-mates did not know him better, they might have laughed their unheralded socks off at such a statement. In the build-up to that epoch-defining victory over England, they could not open a menu without expecting to see the name "Henson" in capital letters.

"Yeah, I had a lot of stick from the other players because we have a wall at our training headquarters with all the newspaper articles stuck on it," he said. "And I just seemed to be totally all over it."

So why did he do all that press then? "That's not my fault, that's the fault of the management for putting me in all these bloody media things all the time," he said with a smirk, although he appreciates there is a method in what Sir Alex Ferguson and other guardians of the precocious would undoubtedly call madness.

The tactic was first devised by John Connolly, the wonderfully intuitive Bath coach then Henson's mentor at Swansea, who recognised that this boundless talent would never be given its full expression until freed from the timidity that had plagued the IRB's International Young Player of the Year in 2001.

So every morning when Henson arrived at St Helens, Connolly made his reluctant superstar go into the office to talk to the staff in an effort to draw him out of himself.

The new-found ability of the second five-eighths to wax lyrical in public has indeed seemed a turning point in the formation of Wales' latest "saviour". When asked how it could be that the last two Welsh coaches ignored him for nigh on three years after his debut in 2001, Henson snorted: "Yeah, why innit?"

Alan Phillips, the former Lions hooker now Welsh team manager, was around at the time and remembers the young Henson. "He was like a church mouse," he said and local journalists concur. "He was so hard to talk to it hurt," recalled one.

"Coaches and players have spoken to me and said that I have matured a lot lately," Henson said.

Now there is the starkest of contrasts, with Henson one of the few sportsmen who can actually play a game as well as he talks it. "Yeah, I built myself up in the papers before the England game," he said, "and it meant I had to deliver. I think I did that. But so, more importantly, did the team."

Mefin Davies, the veteran hooker, called the Maesteg boy's self-belief "infectious", and it is with this collective sense of their own quality that they fly to the Italian capital today intent on further raising Welsh rugby from the ruins they so infamously left in Rome two years ago.

"People won't believe me, but I've forgotten all about the England game now - I've had to," Henson said. "What we as a team have got to do is back it up in Italy. We've got to put right what happened there last time."

Yes, Henson is "super confident" that Wales will do it, although it is highly doubtful that you will have heard him say as much yet in the build-up to this match. As he left the interview room after this particular session, he turned to the Welsh press officer and pleaded: "Can I have a break from all this for a while then?"

But, despite the gel, fake tan or the shaved legs, privacy is still what this side-stepping paradox craves most. He aborted a night out in Cardiff after the match, saying "there were too many people around" and fidgets almost uncontrollably when plonked in front of the media.

"My family are the only people I really talk to," he said. "They've always believed in me ... they always believed I was going to make it in rugby because that's all I ever wanted to do."

It is all his nation ever wanted him to do, too, although Wales would not be Wales without at least a love-spoon of pessimism.

One of the first well-wishers Henson ran into was soccer coach John Toshack. "I said 'well done' to the lad, terrific," Toshack said. "But I also told him 'can you imagine what they would have been saying if you'd missed that kick'?" Henson never stopped to consider it. It is not in his nature to either think or talk about it.

SIX NATIONS
ROUND TWO

* Italy v Wales

Rome, tomorrow 2.25am

* Scotland v Ireland

Edinburgh, tomorrow 4.55am

* England v France

Twickenham, Monday 3.55am

* All live on Sky's Rugby Channel

- INDEPENDENT