UR TV CAST

They still live there except for my dad, my mum, my brother and me.”But West, who is in the middle of a five-year sabbatical from the Leicestershire police force, insists he is English “I was three when we left Wrexham My Dad was in the coal-mining industry. He moved from the pit in Ynysybwl to Wrexham, where there was a mining college. Then he moved to Coalville, where there is the same sort of technical college.”West was educated at Ashby School and joined the Tigers when he was 16 “All I have played for is English teams,” he said. “I consider myself to be English.”He has three England caps to his name, all as a replacement, against France and Scotland in 1998 and then Argentina last November, but he wants more, wants to start a match in his own right.

“Recently I have been frustrated; having had a taste of the England scene, I think I have improved.”I felt good last season and I was disappointed not to have been involved in the World Cup, but I have carried on working hard since then and hopefully I am now a bit nearer the mark.”But if he does make it into the England squad for the big one at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday he has no idea who his immediate family will support. “There was a time, when I was a kid, when we were all cheering for Wales. It was the highlight of our year when Wales were on Grandstand.”If I get picked to play for England against Wales I will not get any abusive phone calls from the relatives in Ynysybwl, they are in touch with my mum all the time, and they will be pleased for me if I am involved.”I’d like to think my parents would be fairly neutral, although my mum did say that my dad had started singing the English National Anthem when we are playing.”But it is the Heineken Cup that matters to West right now, and he admits he is looking forward to confronting Jenkins today. “I have not thought about this Cup-tie as an individual thing of me against Garin. At hooker you are involved in so much – you have to get your line-outs right, you’ve got to get your scrums right, and if either of those two are not quite right then everyone else suffers.”So I will just make sure my game is right and let him worry about me But Garin is a very good player A real handful. It will be a hard, physical game.”Jenkins will find West something of an armful as well.

There is still a lot of the flanker to his game – he moved from the back row to the front during a five-year spell with Nottingham. Thanks to his first incarnation he gets around the pitch very well, has good hands and an astute footballing brain which sees him running cunning lines and popping up where he is neither expected nor wanted by the opposition.But he admits that the more prosaic aspects of hooking did not come naturally to him “I have had my problems. When I first came back here I did not get so many games because Richard Cockerill’s set-piece was so far in front of mine You have to do the basics of hooking well. So I have worked on those aspects of my game.”I have always considered myself a ball-player, but the most important things are the scrum and the line-out. If they go wrong, then the rest of your game tends to follow.”He is trying hard to avoid that This is one player whose game is definitely not going west. All it needs is for Leicester success and further England recognition, then Dorian West will be a picture of happiness So too, no doubt, will the inhabitants of Ynysybwl..