Salute to Leonard, enduring wonder of English rugby

It Is not always easy measuring the true worth of a man's achievement. Prejudice and taste intrude. Memory is uneven and arbitrary. However, some sportsmen make it less difficult than others and in this category is Jason Leonard today at Twickenham when he runs out for his 100th cap for England's rugby union team, against the French in the Six Nations' Championship.

It helps that at 5ft 10in and 18st 7lb he looks like a low-slung monument hacked out of granite.

He is, of course, a monument. A hundred caps, think of it. Indeed, think monumental.

Think of all the collisions of bone and gristle and wild, pagan spirit that have gone into Leonard's unprecedented career in the unbridled trenches of international rugby. A front-row forward just should not last this long. It smacks of the inhuman. In the roll call of rugby honour and longevity only two players are ahead of him, and, inevitably when you consider the differing levels of wear and tear the game exacts on its separate disciplines, they are both three quarters: Philippe Sella, the sublime French centre (111 caps) and the flying Aussie winger David Campese (101).

The nearest front row to Leonard, the former All Black captain and hooker Sean Fitzpatrick, is also retired. When you add Leonard's five appearances for the Lions, including one when he was drafted into the less familiar tight-head role and was a crucial factor in victory over Fitzpatrick's team in Wellington, in 1993, he is 12 caps in front of the phenomenal Kiwi – and he aches, literally, to play in the World Cup in Australia later this year.

All of it makes Leonard a glory of English rugby men – and, for a wider audience, a stinging rebuke to a new policy of their football cousins. At West Ham on Wednesday, when England lost to the Socceroos of Australia amid a combination of shame and disbelief, England's manager, Sven Goran Eriksson, handed out 22 caps. Leonard has mined the sporting earth for each of his caps. The football equivalents are now handed out like sweeties.

This week Leonard's captain, Martin Johnson, spoke for the rest of English rugby when he declared: "I cannot comprehend what he has gone through and how hard he has worked. He is everything you want in a team-mate – solid, steady, always willing to train – completely professional. I think he is incredible."

Leonard shifts his feet uneasily when the plaudits heap upon him. When he returned to the team in the winning series against the Southern Hemisphere in late autumn, when Trevor Woodman, one of a new generation of props who had steamrollered him into the fringes of the squad was brought down by a passing bout of metal fatigue, the rugby cognoscenti opined that against Australia he had put in one of his best performances for several years.

Did this mean that he could fight his way to his 100th game under the shadow of younger and more eye-catching performers like Woodman, and Phil Vickery and Julian White? "I don't count caps," Leonard said. "I just want to play. If you counted caps you would be thinking too much of the past and the future. In this job you have to live in the present. Sure, I'm proud of winning all those caps, but the important thing is to be contending for a place in the next game, to be still doing what I have to do to be in the reckoning."

By the time he had finished speaking in a backroom at Twickenham a duck-egg sized lump on the side of his head had turned into something that might have been produced by a Condor. Props live with bumps and gouges and pain. If they did not feel pain after a match they would be worried that something had gone missing from the rhythm of their lives.

At 34, Leonard's fitness regime is as relentless as ever. This week at England's training headquarters in Bagshot he was chided by the Independent's Chris Hewett for hauling his chin up to the bar a mere three times. Leonard asked: "Didn't you notice I had 20-kilogram weights around both ankles?" If you are a prop you work and survive – if you are one who wins 100 caps you work and enter another range of human endurance.

A lesser man would have been sickened – and perhaps mentally destroyed – by his experience at Twickenham 11 years ago. Leonard ruptured a disc in his neck in victory over the Welsh. For the last half-hour of the game his right arm was useless. He recalls: "Within 10 days I was in so much pain down my right shoulder, in the muscles of my arm and my hand, that at one point I could bite on my thumb, draw blood and not feel it."

Eventually, the surgeon told him that he would have to cut through his throat, his windpipe and on to the other side of his neck in order to screw two vertebrae back together." That was 80 caps ago, but although it represents four or five times an impressive career lifespan for a prop, some still remember a missing element in Leonard's account. They say that he was first aware of a serious problem when he realised he could not feel the beer glass in his hand.

Leonard's 100th cap pits him against another survivor, Christian Califano, who has played for France 65 times and is an inch taller and two stones lighter. A prop could never be described as sleek, but if it was possible Califano might be a contender. His reflexes are sharp, his understanding refined, and, like Leonard, he can operate on either side of the front row. Califano is another monument – to endurance and wit that has not been bludgeoned away by some of the fiercest action in all of sport.

Classically – and recent regulation has done much to re-instate their old role – props do not catch the eye. They operate in the engine room while the heirs of Sella and Campese do a little preening on the bridge. But today all those who care about the integrity of a competitive instinct are duty bound to peer into the trenches. There they will see an Englishman who represents the very heart of their sport.