Emmanuel Iyogun has told how a chance encounter with Springbok prop star Ox Nche helped upskill him and set him on the road to becoming England’s newest senior rugby cap.
The Northampton loosehead is preparing to face Leicester at Mattioli Woods Welford Road on Saturday. “It means more than bragging rights,” he says. “It’s a rivalry that defines how you’re spoken about for the next six months.”
A two-time Premiership winner, Iyogun is in the prime of life. He reached 100 Saints appearances in June and made his Test debut away to Argentina the following month.
“The man is a legend of the game”
His career was on an upward trajectory even before messaging Nche out of the blue two summers ago, but he has no doubt his progress was accelerated by the World Cup winner’s response.
“The man is a legend of the game,” says the 25-year-old. “He had no reason to have time for me. He was in a Test week and was about to go out for food with mates.
“He was in London with South Africa preparing to play Wales and I saw him put up a story on his Instagram. I was in London that day myself and thought I’d just give it a go, send him a message and see if he wanted to grab a bite to eat and talk scrums.
“I sent it, expecting him to fob me off and ignore me, like ‘this weird guy, why is he messaging me, whoever he is?’ Instead, he really politely sent me a message back.
‘Yeah, I’d absolutely be up for that’.
Iyogun continues: “I waited for him downstairs at the Boks’ hotel in Kensington and saw Eben Etzebeth, Kwagga Smith, Andre Esterhuizen and Cobus Reinach, who I said hello to as he’d been at Saints.
“Ox appeared and we walked to a pub, both had some diet Cokes and, honestly, just chewed the fat about scrums for what must have been three hours.
“He taught me some really neat things, spoke to me about life, spoke to me about his journey, what he found important, from a set-piece point of view to general gameplay.
“I was honestly in awe about how open he was and how much time he made for me. He took time out of his day to not only speak to me but upskill me. It’s something I’ll always be grateful for.”
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“I’ve had to almost like reinvent the wheel”
Iyogun’s journey to the England team started in Madrid, where he was born to Nigerian parents, and has taken him via Glasgow in Scotland and Southend on the Essex coast, to Northampton.
Along the way he played centre-back in football and No.8 in rugby. “I had to have speech therapy lessons,” he admitted to Rugby Pass last year. “My parents were teaching me English in a Spanish accent and in Glasgow nobody could understand me.”
Once Saints relocated him in the front row, everyone quickly understood ‘Manny’ was destined for the top; helped, ironically, by all the chopping and changing he had done along the way.
“How I’ve developed from a positional point of view, starting off in the back row, I think has worked to my advantage,” he ventures. “I’m a player that carries a lot more, that moves around the park a little bit more, that tackles a lot more than probably a regular prop does.
“A lot of props who have played the position their whole life struggle with soft skills and struggle with the amount and the volume that they tackle and carry.
“But their set piece is something they’ve had from a young age, right? Set piece is something I’ve had to go away and work at. I’ve had to almost like reinvent the wheel.”
Iyogun has done a good enough job to win two PREM finals, start a Champions Cup final and now join Fin Baxter, Bevan Rodd, Beno Obano and Asher Opoku-Fordjour in challenging Ellis Genge for his No.1 England jersey.
With head coach Steve Borthwick naming his squad for the autumn Tests on Sunday, Iyogun is fully focused on sending a reminder of what he has to offer, the day before.
Given the opposition, that much was never in question.
“Leicester is more than a game for us, it’s us representing our town,” he says. “It’s massive for our community, it’s how people speak to their colleagues in the office. That’s something we carry going into it.”
“We are the forefront of that collision, that violence”
Iyogun made his Saints debut against Tigers in 2020, suffered PREM semi-final defeat to Tigers in 2022 and again last season in a regular season game – a month before Saints turned the tables with a commanding semi-final win when it really mattered.
“If we’re honest with ourselves, we probably didn’t get our mindset right in terms of what we knew that they were going to bring last season, from a physicality point, in that first game.
“That was really disappointing for us, because you can cope with a lot of things: the bounce of the ball or your set piece potentially not going right from a technical point of view. But what you can’t deal with is physically and emotionally not being at the game.
“We sat down after that performance and we spoke very honestly with each other about what we wanted the semi-final to look like. It was a very important one for me, being my 100th Saints appearance, and we went out and we executed.
“But we fully understand our record at Leicester [29 defeats in 38 league and play-off visits] and what it takes to win away at Welford Road and there is definitely not an air of complacency in the building.
“If you watched our training session today, you’d have seen a sort of animosity amongst the boys. There’s a level of physicality we know we’re going to bring the weekend. I think we’re in a good place.
“If you look back at what the Leicester and Northampton rivalry is about, you think about scrums, you think about mauls, you think about impacts.
“That’s something we understand as a front row. We are the forefront of that collision, that violence. That’s something we’ll be relishing come Saturday.”
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