Eric Rush, Christian Cullen and myself all made it into the All Blacks via sevens. The Commonwealth Games are already on the guys’ minds, believe me.”I believe him. Not only does Lomu have a sweet, God-fearing nature to lend conviction to his words, there is also the memory of him obliterating Mike Catt on the way to scoring the first of his four tries in the 1995 World Cup semi-final against England in Cape Town.For that one fleeting moment, Catt was reduced to a mere pretence of a rugby player, a lonely figure in the right kit but the wrong place, like an Action Man being squashed by a Sherman tank. His consolation is in knowing that Tony Underwood, Jeremy Guscott, Will Carling and Austin Healey, and that’s just to name the Englishmen, have since shared the experience.Lomu seems to reserve his awesome best for matches against England, yet professes great admiration for English rugby “Martin Johnson is inspirational,” he enthuses “Dallaglio, Healey, they’re great players And you have lots of unsung heroes, like Jason Leonard.

Jason Robinson, he’s excellent, too.”He and Robinson have something in common, I point out, both having changed codes from rugby league. “Changing codes, yeah, yeah,” says Lomu, excitedly.”I started in rugby league and things were going really well, but the problem was that my parents wouldn’t let me play on Sundays and the trials were always on Sundays. I had to go to church.”I have never thought of Lomu as a latter-day Eric Liddell – another international wing threequarter, as it happens – but then there is much more to him than meets the eye, as if what meets the eye were not enough. He tells me about his childhood in a notoriously tough neighbourhood of notoriously tough South Auckland.”We lived in Maunganui, which we call ‘Man Angry’ There was one street known as ‘The Gauntlet’ There’s a motorway through there now. But back then, if you could run ‘The Gauntlet’ you’d be all right.”You only walked it if you were stupid or had guts. A couple of mates and me decided to walk it when I was about 12 If you didn’t know how to fight, you were in trouble But I was OK I could fight and I could run I got my sports talent from my mother. She used to be a runner, and a lot of my uncles, her brothers, played rugby for Tonga.

A couple of them were boxers, too.”When Lomu was 12, he was sent to a boarding school, Wesley College. To pay for it, his parents took out a second mortgage on their home, not that his father, a mechanic, was there much, for he had to work overtime on his overtime. Why, I ask, did they take such drastic measures to send him away to school?”Well, I lost an uncle who was decapitated and chopped up in a shopping centre,” says Lomu, as matter-of-factly as I might tell him that I had an uncle who was a fishmonger. Sorry? Did he say decapitated?”Yeah, it was bit of violence between two rival Polynesian groups And then in the early ’90s I lost a cousin who was stabbed That’s when my mother said: ‘Pack your bags, boy. You’re off to boarding school.’”It was hard in my first year there. I missed my friends and I tried to get kicked out so I could go home. But when I was 14 I got into the first XV, and that made it easier all round, because other colleges started offering me scholarships, so the Wesley College trustees stepped in and gave me a full scholarship.”He joined the first XV as a second-row forward.