Everyone, it seems, remembers the first time they laid eyes on Guy Pepper. For Lee Dickson, the former England scrum-half who coached Pepper at Barnard Castle, it was on the school’s tour of South Africa.
“It was one of those moments when the hair stands up on the back of your neck,” Dickson told Telegraph Sport. “Straight away, you are like ‘this kid got something special’. When you are playing in South Africa, you are up against really big, physical players and a hostile crowd, and he just took the game by the scruff of the neck. He looked head and shoulders above the South Africans. He was like a cheat code.”
For Johann van Graan, Bath’s head of rugby, the epiphany occurred when reviewing footage of Newcastle’s defeat by Saracens, in which Pepper made a Premiership record 35 tackles. He resolved to sign the flanker there and then and has since made a lofty comparison to Richie McCaw, the All Blacks legend.
Half an hour was all it took for Steve Borthwick to come on board the Sgt Pepper Club bandwagon, having been pointed in his direction by another all-time great back-rower. “It was Richard Hill who said to me, ‘you need to go and meet Guy Pepper’,” Borthwick said. “His ball-carrying, the power contact and his footwork. He only played about 30 minutes that day because he got injured. He went off but in that 30 minutes I thought this guy’s a real talent.”
For a long time, Pepper was like the cool up-and-coming indie band; the type that hipsters will say if you know, you know. Gradually, however, word of Pepper has spread as he delivered man-of-the-match performances in both the Premiership semi-final and final before going on to make his England debut on the summer tour of Argentina. His performances in South America left a number of England’s coaching staff practically swooning at his work rate.
