I’m aware of the expectations, but I’ve had pressure like that since I was 18.”People say it’s been hard following in Jason’s footsteps, but I don’t compare myself to him. Gloucester are doing well, not because of me but a good team effort. I’ve won the Hong Kong Sevens, the first time for 22 years that a northern hemisphere country has won the thing I’ve played in my first full international. I know people say I’m not as good as I was in league, but if my coach is happy, I’m happy. But still there is the perception that he has under-achieved Does this rile him?”No,” he says, clearly riled “I’ve got expectations of myself It means nothing to me what other people’s expectations are. He has played for England, in the winning Hong Kong Sevens side, and also as a replacement for Mike Tindall at the Stade de France in the 20-15 Six Nations defeat earlier this year. In a typical game of rugby league, at stand-off, I’d probably make 25 to 30 tackles and kick the ball maybe nine times at the most, but in union I’d be kicking 40 times and only making five or 10 tackles.”Now that Saint-Andr?as left, and Nigel Melville is the new director of rugby, Paul is much happier at Gloucester, who are riding high at the top of the Premiership.

“It’s Gloucester who pay my wages.” And the England coach, Clive Woodward, didn’t help to persuade him to switch? “No, Clive didn’t talk to me until after I had moved to Gloucester.” None the less, Woodward doubtless expected great things, yet great things were not immediately forthcoming, not least because Paul and the Gloucester coach, Philippe Saint-Andr?did not hit it off.”Philippe had a great passion for the club, but his man management was not the greatest It was not what I wanted I needed one-on-one stuff. If I was going to play fly-half, I needed to do lots of repetitive kicking, the quick snap-kick, over and over again until I was sick of it.”Union and league are the same in that you still run forwards, pass backwards, and score a try over a white line, but in between there are lots of nuances The physical contact is different In union, you hit the ruck and keep fighting, keep fighting In league, you hit, you’re down, you’re up, you’re back. Sale were good, and Leeds, although it would have been hard to play for Leeds being a Bradford lad [this delivered in a still-broad New Zealand accent] but Gloucester was the only club I seriously considered and who also wanted me.”With the help of RFU money? “No,” he says sharply. Last season, when the time came to renegotiate his contract at Bradford, he decided to make his move.”I was of an age, 27, when if I was ever going to play union, I had to do it properly.

“I liked the idea of playing with my brother, and I thought Bradford were on the verge of doing something great; they’d turned up in a couple of finals, and had some good young players. So I went to Bradford and won trophies there too.”All the while, however, the possibility of a switch in codes was nagging away. While at Wigan, he and Robinson had spent several months on loan to Bath following the cross-code challenge between the two clubs. And his wife looked after my partner [now the mother of his young son, Theo, although she and Theo have since moved back to New Zealand, a situation he firmly declines to talk about].”When Wigan, astonishingly, vacillated over an extension to Paul’s contract, he decided to join Bradford Bulls, where Robbie was already established. He always picked me up for training, talked rugby to me all the time, told me about his All Blacks days.

Wigan had always won stuff, so the challenge was to keep up the momentum.”He helped them do so, triumphantly. In his first season at Central Park, 1995-96, they won all four major trophies “I lived in Shevington, near Standish. You could feel it in the town when things were going well.”In the course of Wakefield’s escape from relegation, they beat mighty Wigan, who duly offered Paul a contract. At first his club in New Zealand, Auckland Warriors, refused to let him go, but eventually he was released in a trade-off involving Andy Platt.”And I became part of a million-dollar squad; they had Andy Farrell, Inga [Tuigamala], Shaun Edwards, Martin Offiah, Jason Robinson, just a phenomenal team The challenges were different from the ones at Wakefield. The club only had about 3,000 fans, but they were a hard-core bunch.