JOHNNY WATTERSON

Tommy Bowe. People love for what he's not. He's not fire and ice, a smoking volcano. There are no thunder clouds following him, no hair trigger temper or flashing signs to tread carefully. He doesn't stride towards you lips curled, fin breaking the surface. He's no Peter Clohessy or Roy Keane. Recently, though, he has been tested.

Occasionally circumstances hand you both an answer and a question. When Bowe injured a groin muscle in late November the answer was four to six weeks, the question his fitness for Treviso and the December pool matches. But a scan showed the leg muscle was torn. The news was as welcome as the dull thud of a wet sod on the lid of a casket.

Four to six weeks were the original numbers in his head but they slowly doubled. It was three months before he made his comeback at the end of February, last week in Cardiff was his first real 80 minutes of rugby. As ever he’s sprawled on the chair and welcoming, nothing twitching irregularly.

“Last weekend was the first 80 I’ve had where I can really say I’ve pushed myself and got myself right up through the gears,” he says. “It’s the second Six Nations I missed in two years so I’ve come to realise how precious it is when you do get to play. It [Cardiff defeat] gave us a shock and a kick up the arse.

"I probably went for a stretch of eight years, where I never got injured and maybe took that for granted. Now I'm hungry for it and I don't want to get injured again."

Desperate slap
In his locker Bowe has pace. His try in the Grand Slam winning match against Wales in 2009 was a gather from Ronan O'Gara's cross field kick and a race against Shane Williams, who finally resorted to a desperate slap at Bowe's heels. For that sort of fizz you need a decent groin.

“I found last week was the first week where I have really felt a genuine progression,” he says. “The problem with the groin is that it does linger. I’d been taking small steps, small steps all the time. Last week was a huge step.”

Calibrated comebacks with science leading the way along return to play paths is where rugby has gone. Subjectivity has been sidelined.

Bowe’s speed and leg strengths are routinely charted and he has to meet his own numbers or get close before facing into a match like Saracens.

“It is a confidence thing,” he says. “But before I came back into the team I had to hit the markers. Now we have GPS that monitor exactly how fast and how far you travel. So before I was ever to get back on to the pitch I had to make sure I could hit those top speeds. That was done four or five weeks ago.

“Yeah, I hit them. I did yeah. I’m back up to that level again. You need to be. If I wasn’t at that level it would have been a case of pulling it back until I did get there. As a winger there’s no point of being on the pitch if you can’t hit top speed or you can’t finish something. I confident I can hit the speeds that I was hitting before the injury.”

“Back even two three years ago, ‘it was how do you feel?’ And you’d be going ‘uh, it’s still a little bit sore.’

“But the fact I was able to have a small bit of pain – and that was always going to be – but I was still able t get to those top speeds. Now that pain is starting to go away I can still do that and do it a bit easier and hopefully push along.”

Saracen's will test everything about Bowe. If Chris Ashton and David Strettle or American Chris Wyles line out on the wings, he has a ready made challenge. While the body is right, performance can lag and despite his experience telling him the moves and the tactical shifts in the match, there's an aspect too that only game time can mend.

Like flanker Stephen Ferris, who started a few weeks ago against Edinburgh after 16 months out of the game, Bowe's fine tuning to the demands of competition are, like work on the refurbished stadium at Ravenhill, still applying the last splashes of paint.

“Yeah,” he says. “They [Strettle and Ashton] do pose a threat. They’ve scored quite a few tries this year. They look to get heavily involved off their 10, look dangerous out wide. Definitely danger men, clinical try scorers. I’m aware of the threat that they pose.

“Myself, I eh, am trying to get back up to that level again. Everybody told me with your groin you can come back and hurt it and then you’re out for the season. But I knew there was still a huge amount of the current season and obviously it’s now Saracens.”

Now for Bowe, it's only Ulster. Thoughts of an Ireland tour to Argentina can wait. Unable to close the deal in the last three years, modern Ulster stands apart from past winners Leinster and Munster.

The mood in Belfast is Bowe’s mood, hunger and self belief.

“Off the park there’s a lot of smiles around here,” he says lightening the room. Across the table is one of them.