There is a quote from Lawrence of Arabia that Fin Baxter particularly enjoys. In the film, TE Lawrence snuffs out a lit match without flinching. When another soldier tries the same thing, he yelps in pain and asks what the trick is. Lawrence replies: “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
This helps to provide a small glimpse into the mentality of Baxter, who played 63 minutes at loosehead prop on his England debut against the All Blacks last week at Forsyth Barr Stadium. “He has to put himself in some uncomfortable places and he has the mindset that he is willing to experience that discomfort for longer than his opponent,” Ian Baxter, his father, tells Telegraph Sport.
While the England scrum suffered last week in Dunedin, it was largely on the tighthead side, which qualified judges – including Telegraph Sport columnist Brian Moore, David Flatman and Adam Jones, Baxter’s scrum coach at Harlequins – believe was the result of illegal scrummaging angles by the All Blacks. Baxter more than held his end up. The 22-year-old also finished with 16 tackles and hit more than 30 rucks after replacing club-mate Joe Marler in the 17th minute. Baxter rose from the flames of his baptism of fire.
‘Every time he steps up – every time’
If there is a theme to Baxter’s early career, it is that he rises to every challenge, whether that was for Wellington College, England Under-18s, England Under-20s, Harlequins and now England. Still, this does not make it any easier for Ian to watch, particularly when he was going up against 24-stone tighthead Ben Tameifuna in Harlequins’ Champions Cup quarter-final away to Bordeaux-Begles in April.
“That first scrum in Bordeaux, I was pretty terrified,” Ian says. “I was thinking, ‘Holy f--- what is he up against here?’ Will Collier is obviously a rock on the other side but I thought, ‘This could go wrong’. I have never told anyone this but I was physically sick before that game, I was so worried about him. You get very emotional about it. But then when he popped Tameifuna up in that first scrum, I was like, ‘Oh, this could be interesting’.”
Baxter and the Harlequins front row went on to dominate the scrum battle in a landmark performance. “It was always a case of whenever he went up to a new step, my wife and I were frantically biting our nails, thinking, ‘This is the point where he is going to reach his level?’” Ian says. “Every time he steps up. Every time.”
There is no history of rugby ability in the Baxter family, although the genes of his maternal grandfather, who was built like a “proverbial outhouse”, have clearly been passed down to Fin. By the time Fin was six, Ian realised that football was not going to be his son’s sport so he took him along to Cobham Rugby Club where Ian enlisted as a coach.
“That was a lovely journey, it really was,” Ian says. “We discovered this game but we had no preconceived ideas about it. Every time we came across something new, it became an interesting puzzle or problem to solve together. We loved discovering rugby, the sport and the culture around it.”
Interestingly, Baxter wanted to apply for an engineering degree, which – as Ian points out – is all “about applying angles and finding stress points”. However, under the tutelage of Dan Richards at Wellington and then Jim Evans in the Harlequins Academy, his dad’s influence waned. “I don’t understand the technicalities of the scrum,” Ian says. “I got myself trained up but had to leave that behind when he was 15 because the level was way beyond me.”
Approximately, 99.9 per cent of people have no idea of what actually goes on in a scrum. Jones, the 95-cap former Wales prop and Harlequins scrum coach, is among the 0.1 per cent of people who truly do.
‘S---, we’ve got something here’
Last season, Baxter was scrummaging against Exeter’s Ehren Painter, who in Jones’s words is a “serious operator” and was putting the squeeze on the young Harlequins loosehead with his 21-stone frame. “You judge a loosehead about how they respond when the pressure comes on,” Jones tells Telegraph Sport. “A lot of looseheads if they get under pressure, they will put their heads on the other side to take pressure off their neck or they take their hips out.
“Fin didn’t do that. He planted his feet in the ground and put his head underneath the tighthead’s chest and clenched until the scrum was over. It won’t do his neck any good in the long run, but the fight he shows is phenomenal. I thought, ‘S--- we have got something here’.”
Coming through at Harlequins, Baxter was originally a tighthead but with Collier, Wilco Louw and Simon Kerrod in their ranks, Jones proposed switching to loosehead. “He has no neck, big shoulders, strong hips, I thought loosehead is probably his role and he needed to be playing games,” Jones says. “The grounding he has had from the age of 19 against those operators have stood him in good stead. He is a fast learner, which is probably the best thing about him. He picks up things really quickly.”
‘He is two people... on the pitch he is ruthless and steely’
While Jones warns about throwing young props in at the deep end, he has no doubt that Baxter is ready to start the second Test against the All Blacks at Eden Park. It seems appropriate given his cherubic face that Baxter chose Angels by Robbie Williams as his initiation song, but Jones warns that appearances can be deceptive.
“You don’t have to be hard, you don’t have to be a tough guy, you don’t need to have a broken nose and a face full of stitches,” Jones says. “But you have to be competitive and take enough pressure so you don’t go backwards.”
Ian says that that bloody-mindedness comes directly from his mother, Penny, but anyone underestimating his appearance does so at their peril. “He can’t help how he looks,” Ian says. “It does not mean if you are mild mannered and polite, you can’t be an absolute bully on the pitch. He is two people: off the pitch, he is the most lovely, charming man you could meet; on the pitch he is not very nice. He is ruthless. More than anything, he is really steely. He knows what he needs to achieve and he very rarely gets in the way of that.”
