"If you should ever fancy an airgun pellet between the shoulder blades, you could do worse than cavort through the backcountry around Dunedin shouting, "Woo-hoo, The Hask!" The chances are you will tweak the nerves of James Haskell, who will almost certainly be out hunting somewhere nearby, armed with said weapon and urged on by Andrew Hore and his other new team-mates at the Highlanders.
"Please don't refer to me as The Hask," he says politely, but with a clear undertone. Then he complains they all call him that in Dunedin, the latest city he calls home, before launching into an explanation of the provenance of a nickname he considers a travesty. It's something to do with a perception that he promotes himself as a brand.
It is true that he has his own website and is an avid user of social media, but for all his love of gadgets and techno-geekery there is something very old-fashioned about him as well. For a start, there's his proclivity for lying low in the wilderness of the South Island alongside grizzled All Black front-row forwards.
"Andrew Hore is a big one for shooting," says Haskell. "He describes it as doing a few jobs, so he'll come up to me and say, 'I've got a few jobs on. You interested?' Last time it was some rabbit shooting, a bit of pest clearance on the farm of a friend of his, with him and Jamie MacKintosh [the Highlanders captain and a prop forward capped by the All Blacks]."
And then there's the fact that Haskell is to be found on the other side of the world at all, when every other English back-row forward of his calibre and generation is to be found up here, fighting for a place in the national team.
Haskell is ambitious, but not to the exclusion of everything else. His stint with the Highlanders in the Super 15 is the last leg of a three-year odyssey that has also taken him to Paris and Tokyo, before he returns to Wasps next season, the club where it all started. Never let it be said that he is shy of the more glamorous aspects of his profession, but this journey smacks more of a passion to see the world and to live life.
"It takes a lot of sacrifices to come over here. You're leaving your friends and family to go to a place where you don't know anyone. Financially, over here it's a very different ball game. The money just isn't competitive, so you have to make it a purely rugby decision. And you've got to give up your England place. So I don't think this will become a common move."
Ah, his England place. It might have been forgotten – amid all the recent excitement over England's ascension from "the gutter", as Graham Rowntree put it – that their growing stock of options in the back row will soon be supplemented further by the return of Haskell. England's descent into the depths was so vertiginous and so quickly reversed that it is tempting to ask whether it ever really happened. As someone who has seen England from the inside and out in recent times, Haskell's a good person to ask.
"It is up to Wig [Rowntree], his choice of words, but it was a difficult period of time. People made mistakes. But the problem with anything in life is that if you just focus on the media, without any inside knowledge of what went on, you naturally have a biased opinion. Everyone wanted an England team to be proud of [at the World Cup] and they were disappointed. If you took everything that was written at face value — that the guys were on a stag do and so on — then it helped to compound the problems and put English rugby into a dark place. But with the new coaches it's on the way up again and back to where it should be. Guys are focused on performance and the talk is about the rugby, and nothing else."
Haskell did not get to watch much of the Six Nations and what he did see was in highlights packages. Kick-off times in the northern hemisphere make it very difficult for those in New Zealand to follow rugby up here and this is reflected in their indifference towards it. There is an amusing video on the internet in which Haskell asks some of his Highlanders team-mates their opinions of northern-hemisphere rugby. The more mischievous (Hore, for example) use it as a chance to indulge in banter about how boring it is, but all of them confess to not knowing because they never watch any of it. This is one of several cultural differences Haskell has had to embrace during his recent adventures.
"It's interesting. You ask people in England what they think of Super 15, they'll have a lot more comments than the other way round. That's what I've always found with Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. They just focus on what they're doing, whereas in the UK we look outwards more. Talking to the guys who are All Blacks, when they're preparing for an international they do some analysis on patterns of play, but they don't focus on the minutiae of their opponents. Some players might disagree, but I reckon if you asked an All Black after a game who his opposite number was, most of the time he wouldn't know, unless it was someone like Jonny Wilkinson."
After the World Cup, Haskell went to Japan to play alongside Ma'a Nonu and Tamati Ellison for Ricoh Black Rams for a few months. He describes Japanese rugby as the fastest he has ever played. The players are so well drilled that skill levels are higher than in the Top 14 in France, where you might see 10 or 15 balls go down in a Stade Français training session. But the French are infused with their natural flair and a ferocious devotion to physicality. Their emotions fluctuate wildly. Japanese emotions can run high too, but they are tempered by the attention to drills. In New Zealand, the approach is more recognisable to an Anglo-Saxon one, but they are blessed with a culture that promotes touch rugby from a young age, with less focus on weights and conditioning.
After such an experience, Haskell will surely return to England a better player than he was when he left on a two-year deal with Stade Français in 2009, and it is to his credit that he has seen fit to embark on such an adventure. It was noticeable how improved his form for England was in the 2011 Six Nations, courtesy of his French sojourn, and Wasps (in particular) and England will wait with interest to see how he returns from his subsequent stints in Japan and New Zealand.
"I wanted to play Super 15. I wanted to develop some maturity, some leadership and to work on my skill set. Also I want to have played all round the world. Then you can come to informed opinions. People make very many comments in life when they don't have the background or the knowledge. I'll be able to tell you what it's like in four of the big leagues in the rugby world. I've had a great experience. I've played with some of the best players in the world, and I've loved every minute of it.""
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