Ed Prowse: Northampton's tighthead-to-lock reinvention

Ed Prowse thought his career as a tighthead prop was finished two years ago this month, until Phil Dowson called him into his office with a different idea.

The Northampton Saints director of rugby had just watched Prowse struggle at scrum-time in a pre-season match against Leinster, the latest in a run of setbacks at the position he had spent five years trying to master.

"Dows pulled me in to his office and said, 'we don't really see you having a future as a tighthead,'" Prowse recalls, bluntly. "It was quite hard news to take initially. I'd tried being a tighthead for five years at that point and not really seemed to make much progress."

Dowson had a proposal instead.

"How would you feel about giving it a go in the second row?"

The switch ran against the usual pattern in rugby, where players tend to move into the front row rather than out of it, and Prowse feared it might end his career rather than save it.

"Growing up, I'd mainly played second row or back row," Prowse explains. "Then trying to make a go of being a professional as a bigger lad, I thought I'd try and play prop. I suppose that got my foot in the door..."

He points out drily that "no one usually goes backwards" in that direction. Dowson's thinking was built around size rather than convention.

"He sort of had a vision for that bigger body in the second row, a bit like they do in France. That was the initial vision. Dows reassured me that it was a way he could keep me around and have another bite at the cherry."

Prowse's reinvention comes as Saints, founded in 1880 and playing out of the 15,249-capacity Franklin's Gardens, open their Gallagher Premiership defence off the back of their final win over Exeter Chiefs. In the Premiership Rugby Cup they sit fourth with one point from two matches, a modest return that leaves room for depth players like Prowse to press their case. Contract talks with flanker Henry Pollock continue separately, but Prowse's path shows Saints are just as willing to solve a squad problem by reshaping a player as by re-signing one.