The Spanish flier

I remember seeing Matt Dawson at the Commonwealth Games Sevens in Manchester at the beginning of August. I asked him about Northampton's new signings. 'We've got him,' the England scrum-half said, nodding down at Bruce Reihana who was busy masterminding New Zealand's successful defence of their Games title. 'Which can't be a bad thing. And then up front we've got Steve Williams from London Irish, who's back in the Welsh team, and we've got Mark Connors, who's been knocking on the Australian door for ages.' Anyone else? He paused. 'Yeah,' he finally added. 'We've got this little bloke, Oriol Ripol. He's lively, very lively.'

There is a general hubbub in rugby reserved for the ball going forward. It is the rumble of appreciation for yards gained the hard way: the drives and mini-charges and probes and half-darts. And then there is the other rugby sound: the sudden buzz when Jason Robinson starts to run. Or the new crackle across Kingsholm whenever the ball goes near James Simpson-Daniel. Or the mass intake of breath for lively Oriol Ripol. Please. Come on. Has he survived rugby league and stepped straight out of Wigan on to Twickenham and a Lions plane to Australia? No. Has he ever left Jonah Lomu in a spin? No. But the winger from Barcelona is the latest welcome shock to the game.

At the new Franklin's Gardens, space-age home of old shoe town Northampton, Oriol Ripol is making the crowd stir, moving them forward in their seats. He receives the ball and beats tackler after tackler. He sometimes ends up pointing the wrong way, but it doesn't matter. From one end of the horseshoe of brand-spanking new stands to the other, Ripol is the ripple. 'I have to beat people,' he said last week after training for today's away game at Bristol. 'When you have as few kilos as me, you have to beat people. If not, you are in big trouble.' His English is so good that it had to be taught to him by a Swede, in this case his girlfriend, Karin, whom he shares a property with, all of 100 yards from the ground.

He was obligingly posing for our photograph, leaning against some fading photo-portraits of Northampton's England internationals. He had slipped off his T-shirt, revealing - sorry to sound voyeuristic, but you may need to know these things - a chest that was well-defined without being as 'cut' or veined as Neil Back's for example. He put on a green, black and yellow Saints shirt, bearing, across the shoulders, the name of Reihana, who has yet to arrive in the East Midlands and whose place in the line-up may not be so automatic now that this Catalan has suddenly become the darling of the Gardens.

'Are more people taking an interest in me? Maybe,' he says, glancing at the small group of journalists waiting to interview him. 'But I have to concentrate only on one thing, playing for Northampton. I am so grateful to Wayne Smith for giving me this chance. I want to repay his faith in me. I know I have a lot to learn.' He is not quite as young as you might think. 'I am twenty-.... I want to be 26, but I suppose I have to say that I am 27.' Which means that he has seen a lot more action than his fresh face - sorry, off again - would suggest.

He is from a rugby-playing family. His father, Miguel, was a prop in the rugby section of FC Barcelona but Oriol began to play at a smaller club in the city, Union. His two brothers also play the game. Daniel is a centre/wing, playing in their home city, while Roger is a hooker with La Rochelle. Oriol, too, has played in France, for Mont-de-Marsan, the charming town not far from Dax in the Landes, where Waisale Serevi of Fiji also played. 'The budget ran out, so I had to move. I had always wanted to play in England. When Rotherham made me an offer, I went straight there.'

Barcelona, Mont-de-Marsan and Rotherham, where he arrived last November. 'Sure, it is not Barcelona. But I had a good time there. The only problem was that Karin could not find a job there, so we were looking to move again.'

This is where Wayne Smith came in. The former coach of the All Blacks arrived at Northampton halfway through last season, at a time when the club was out of sorts. He immediately laid down some decidedly no-nonsense ground-rules: no prima donnas, just hard work. The stars came down to earth and Northampton rediscovered their place among the pre-eminent. And then the club went out and bought this little Catalan flier in Yorkshire. It could be a visionary stroke: the famous players do the donkey-work and Ripol sets the place alight.

These are early days and he is fast becoming a marked man, but I think it is just about fair to say that he is the most famous Spaniard playing in England. As such he should surely be an obvious choice for Spain's 2003 World Cup campaign that begins soon with qualification games against Italy and Romania.

'I don't know,' says the man himself. 'Northampton is where I am going to play. Where I want to play. I don't want to say bad things...' In the 1999 World Cup it was generally concluded that Spain performed well, in that they did not go down by the hundreds of points many feared would be heaped upon them. But Oriol Ripol was given only one game. Since then, there has been a change of coach, but from the Spanish Federation to their slightly frustrated wing, not a dicky bird. This means that not only is he the most famous Spanish player in England but also the most overlooked in Spain. It may be their loss, but it also means that there will be more opportunities for the rest of us to sit forward and enjoy the crackle that goes with English rugby being electrified by someone lively, very lively.