Dave Ewers interview: Coming up on blind side for World Cup, but keeping focused on Exeter play-off hopes

The Zimbabwe-born flanker’s recent stellar performances have caught the attention of Stuart Lancaster but he tells Chris Hewett he is more focused on Exeter’s play-off dream than facing his Springbok heroes this autumn

Dave Ewers (GETTY IMAGES)

When Dave Ewers was growing up in the Zimbabwean city of Mutare, situated at the foot of the evergreen Bvumba Mountains a few miles from the border with Mozambique, his heroes wore shirts of a similar shade. “The players I wanted to be were Bobby Skinstad, Gary Teichmann and Schalk Burger,” he says, reeling off the names of three stellar Springbok back-rowers. “And of them all, Schalk became my favourite. I loved the way he ran around clattering everything that moved.”

Bookmakers might have offered short odds on this preference. Skinstad was undeniably blessed with God-given gifts, but the contrast between his occasional showboating extravagances and the Exeter flanker’s highly developed form of workaholism is jarringly obvious. Teichmann was one of the more cerebral No 8s: Ewers, a No 8 himself in his early days in the Premiership, agrees that he has thrived since moving to the blind-side position and leaving the game-management detail to someone else. In the final reckoning, Burger’s bruising, bone-crunching style was always likely to leave the deepest mark.

It is a long shot, admittedly, but it may just be that Ewers finds himself in a clattering contest with the main man later this year, when England, his adopted country, hosts the World Cup and South Africa, complete with Burger, head north in pursuit of a third title. Over the course of this current league campaign, now in its penultimate round of matches, nobody has clattered harder or to greater effect than the Sandy Park forward, and if there is any justice to be found in this rough old sport he will be rewarded for his efforts with a place in the red-rose training squad when it is announced in a little under a fortnight’s time.

A quiet sort who is generating an awful lot of noise amongst the cognoscenti of the union game, Ewers is not comfortable with giving voice to expectation – partly because he considers the blowing of one’s own trumpet to be a sin and partly because he believes he has more to do to convince Stuart Lancaster and the rest of the England hierarchy of his Test credentials.

Yet the uncapped 24-year-old is clearly on the radar. Lancaster has picked him for the second-string Saxons on three occasions and his display in the last of those games, against the Irish Wolfhounds in Cork earlier this year, was a triumph of selfless industry. He also happens to be the best performing blind-side specialist in the Premiership, by a country mile.

All the same, this does not lead him to assume that Lancaster knows a form flanker when he sees one and must therefore be sorely tempted to give him the once-over by inviting him to the World Cup camp. “I have no expectation of anything,” he insists. “There are people ahead of me in the No 6 position and they are ahead of me for a reason. I really don’t know how to talk about this subject, except to say that at the end of the day you have to be playing well at club level to have any kind of chance. We’re going to Saracens this weekend and it’s an important match for us. That’s enough for me to be thinking about, to be honest with you.

“I certainly have my goals, though. If I wanted to be a Springbok when I was living in Zimbabwe – where I came from, it was natural for any rugby-loving kid to dream of playing for South Africa – things changed quickly when I arrived here. To be picked for the Saxons was a great honour for me and one I took very seriously. When I reflect on that game against the Wolfhounds and look at the strength of the side we sent over there, I have a real sense of pride. To be on the team list with players of that standard was a marker for me. Would I like to achieve more? Of course.”

Dave Ewers in action for Exeter (GETTY IMAGES)

Ewers was 13 when his parents decided to leave Zimbabwe, then deep in the throes of the Mugabe government’s notoriously ruthless “fast-track land reform programme”, and head for Devon. “Members of my family were farming up in the Eastern Highlands, and those farms were lost,” he says, his barely audible tone reflecting a deep reluctance to discuss the matter at any length. “My father, a teacher in Mutare, was also working on a farm at that point. That was lost too. So the decision was made to move to England. My parents wanted to do the best thing for their family.”

His paternal grandparents were living in Ivybridge and Ewers continued his education at the local community college, a state-funded secondary school that just happened to be one of the most productive rugby nurseries in the country and would, along with Truro College in Cornwall, become a feeder establishment for the increasingly successful Exeter club. Ewers had shown considerable promise as a union player in Zimbabwe, where the game was “rooted in the culture” as he put it, and having landed by chance in a similarly sport-driven environment he continued on the same trajectory.

“When the school became linked to the Exeter academy, that was the start of it for me,” he recalls. “I was asked to train with the club during the week and I was lucky enough to be offered my first pro contract when they won promotion to the Premiership. There are quite a few of us who have come through in this way: people like Jack Nowell, who is already in the England side, and Henry Slade and Sam Hill and Luke Cowan-Dickie, who are playing really well and being talked about more and more.

“We’ve already been through quite a lot together and we’re a very close-knit group as a result. The dressing room is just a brilliant place to be: there’s a buzz about it that I love. In a World Cup year the excitement levels are bound to be high, but with so much to play for over the next couple of weeks we have all the motivation we need right here.”

If Ewers has been a pillar of motivation all season, his performances recently have been off the scale. Against Northampton last month he made a persuasive declaration of Test ambition against Tom Wood, one of the men obstructing his passage into the senior England side. Against Wasps a fortnight later he made up for some uncharacteristically charitable tackling in the first half by pretty much dominating the second with a series of close-quarter drives that might have made the best All Black blind-side practitioners sit up and take notice.

Lancaster says he is serious about running a competitive training camp, so he will need a bunch of outsiders good enough to ask awkward questions of the incumbents who played through the recent Six Nation. If, as seems all too likely given current obsession levels, the rugby-league convert Sam Burgess is included, it will be fascinating to see whether the red-rose coaches view him as a No 12 or a No 6. If it turns out to be the latter and he squeezes out Ewers, it will be the travesty of all travesties.

Another striking display against a powerful, hard-bitten Saracens loose combination on Sunday will emphasise the point. More importantly from Exeter’s perspective, it could lay the foundations for a victory on the road that would give them a realistic shot at a semi-final place.

“We’ve been in and around the play-off spots for a good part of the season and while I don’t think we’d necessarily see it as a failure if we missed out – you have to remember how far we’ve come in a short time – it would be a massive statement from us if we made it,” Ewers says. “We’ve won at Saracens before, although not at their new ground, so we believe it can be done.

“Then there’s our final game, at home to Sale, who give us a real battering in front of our own supporters towards the end of last season. I’ve never worked out what the hell happened to us that day, but I know this much: it’s a terrible memory.”

When Ewers says there are more pressing things on his mind than an England call-up, he appears to mean it.