It was two years ago that this month that Ed Prowse feared his rugby dream was at end. Then a tighthead prop hopeful, he had endured a difficult day in a preseason clash with Leinster – shunted back repeatedly at scrum-time, always his limiting factor in five years of striving to make it at the coal face, Prowse was ushered in by Phil Dowson, Northampton Saints’ director of rugby, for a chat.
“Dows pulled me in to his office and said, ‘we don’t really see you having a future as a tighthead’,” Prowse recalls, bluntly. “It was quite hard news to take initially. I’d tried being a tighthead for five years at that point and not really seemed to make much progress.” But the conversation came with a twist. Dowson wanted to broach an idea. “How would you feel about giving it a go in the second row?” he enquired of a young man desperate to make the grade.
