Over four years of being understudy to Sean Fitzpatrick at Auckland got Ross Nesdale thinking. Sitting at home at about 2.0 a.m. one morning, he read an article about Rob Andrew's recruiting drive at Newcastle, so he rang directory inquiries and minutes later he was speaking directly to the one-time English out-half. Just like that.

As it happened, Andrew's negotiations with another hooker had broken down the day before. Andrew was interested, so Nesdale sent him a CV and some videos of himself in action for Auckland. A few weeks later, in April 1997, he flew to England. "I spent a weekend in London and then hopped on a train to Newcastle. There I was with a pack on my back and no idea what the future held in store."

It was destiny, it seems. Andrew liked what he saw, and Nesdale guaranteed his place last season. He recently signed an extension of his contract, keeping him at Newcastle until 2001.

The odyssey didn't end there. Nesdale had always carried an Irish passport, courtesy of his paternal grandparents, who hailed from Bantry. Even his great grandparents on his mother's side were Irish, so "it had always been at the back of my mind that I qualified to play for Ireland".

So much so, in fact, that he had written beforehand to about 20 Irish clubs with his CV and requested an AIL handbook from the IRFU. But no clubs made a firm response. In any event, Newcastle proved to be an ideal if unlikely launching pad for the player - Feidlim MacLoughlin, President of the Irish Exiles, lives there.

The rest is history. On MacLoughlin's recommendation, Nesdale was brought into the Ireland A squad for the game against South Africa last November, and won his first A cap when coming off the bench to replace Mark McDermott against France. Injuries to Keith Wood and Allen Clarke paved the way for a winning senior debut against Wales and tomorrow he wins his fourth cap, again in the absence of Wood. Nesdale grew up on a beef and sheep farm in a town called Oroua, where there "was nothing to do, and I mean absolutely nothing to do."

Except, of course, play rugby. "It was rugby crazy. Every weekend everybody watched and played rugby. It was the high-point of the week, so I got indoctrinated fairly early."

Nesdale went to a boarding school in Wellington - St Patrick's College in Silverstream, but he never made the first team there. The catalyst for his career was Waikato Polytechnic, where he studied graphic design. "When I started to make a few representative teams I realised I could start achieving things in rugby. So I began to take it a bit more seriously. I never took it seriously before then."

Work took him to Auckland, where he played over 30 times for the province - but was the understudy to Sean Fitzpatrick "close to 90" times.

The great legacy from his time at Auckland was Fitzpatrick's and everyone else's attitude to training.

"That's the one thing I really admire about New Zealand rugby. There's a really intense attitude to training. At Auckland the coach would come along and suggest a few things. Then some of the players would say: `Nah, we'd rather do it this way'. So the coach would say: `yeah, sure fellas.' With guys like Gary and Alan Whetton, and John Kirwan, the coach didn't argue."

But after four-and-a-half years, Nesdale began thinking about where he was going. "I felt my career wasn't progressing. Young hookers playing for other provinces were doing well and I was stagnating. Either I shifted to another province or I tried something really different."

And so he opted for something really different. In all probability, more regular match practice has made him a better player now than the one who left New Zealand.

"He has no weaknesses, that's his strength. He's a complete player," says Nick Popplewell, front row partner for club and country, when asked what Nesdale's strengths are. Strong in the tackle, a potent ball-carrier and a tighter forward than Wood, Nesdale is also renowned at Newcastle for his throwing in. "He never misses one," says Popplewell repeatedly, as if to emphasise how out of character were his two wayward throws in the second half against the All Blacks.