Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman): ‘That don’t make you a murderer. Bad husband, maybe . . . Feel bad about it if you want. But you didn’t pull the trigger.’

Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins): ‘No. I didn’t. Someone else did, and I wound up here. Bad luck, I guess.’

Red: ‘Bad luck? Jesus.’ Dufresne: ‘It floats around. Has to land on somebody. Say a storm comes through. Some folks sit in their living rooms and enjoy the rain. The house next door gets torn out of the ground and smashed flat. It was my turn, that’s all. I was in the path of the tornado.’ - The Shawshank Redemption

There was no storm forecast for that Tuesday in Northampton; no warning of the catastrophe about to engulf the team. James Haskell pulled back the curtain of his room at the Hilton hotel and the skyline - cold and grey and overcast - was no different to countless he had witnessed. At least it was dry. He pulled on a tracksuit and headed for the door.

It was the final week of the 2005 Under21 Six Nations Championship and after a couple of days at home Haskell had rejoined his teammates the previous evening to begin preparations for Friday’s televised game against Scotland. The faces that greeted him in the breakfast room were all familiar: Tom Varndell, Matt Cornwell, Matt Hampson, Tom Ryder, Will Skinner and Ross Broadfoot from Leicester: Mark Hopley, Richard Blaze and Simon Whatling from Worcester.

The Sale boys, Ben Foden, Martin Halsall and Sean Cox; Dan Smith, David Ward and Ryan Davis from Bath; Toby Flood and Lee Dickson from Newcastle; Tom Biggs and Michael Cusack from Leeds; Neil Briggs from Rotherham; Wayne Thompson from Bristol; David Seymour from Saracens; Olly Morgan from Gloucester. And Tom Rees, the team captain, Haskell’s clubmate at Wasps.

Young, gifted and bulletproof, they were the future stars of England and the Premiership. The talk was of cars and girls. Haskell was two weeks shy of his 20th birthday that morning. Born in Windsor, he was educated at Wellington College and traded on the image of the ebullient toff. Three years had passed since he had made his debut for England but the tale of his first night with the under18s was still earning him laughs.

Summoned to a pretournament training camp at the RFU development facility in Wolverhampton, he had travelled from his home in Berkshire expecting a hotel and levels of comfort and service commensurate with the status of a budding England lock. The reality, however, was absolutely ghastly. The food was awful, the hotel was a shack and, most incredibly, they wanted him to share a room with a prop!

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh no, a fat bastard! I’m sure he’ll smell . . . This is going to be a nightmare’,” he laughs. “But I met Hambo and we got on quite well.”

Hambo was Matt Hampson. A few days later, they travelled north by coach and played their first game for England together at a Four Nations tournament in Scotland. In the second game, a brutal encounter with Wales held on a miserably wet day, Hampson was rattled by a blow to the head. It was a cheap shot, one of many in the game; Hampson responded with interest and was sent to the sin-bin. He had no regrets.

Born in Leicester, and one of only two state-educated players on the team, Hampson had learnt the game at Syston before joining the academy at Leicester Tigers. During his first term at the club, Dusty Hare - the academy “Dumbledore” - invited him to sit down one afternoon for an appraisal. The kid clearly had potential but needed to be more assertive. He was confusing the game with chess. “I don’t want to see anyone messing with you,” Hare announced, fixing him with a steely gaze. “I want to see you dominate. It’s the tighthead’s role to be dominant; they are ruthless; they take no prisoners; they are always the first into battle. I want you to be ruthless. I want you to be ‘the man’.”

The kid decided to make the words his creed. On the training ground, and on the playing field, there was a new edge to his play. He was aggressive. He was abrasive. He was not a guy you wanted to mess with. Haskell had never met anyone like him before. He dubbed him the “Leicester mutant”.

“One of the first things that I noticed about him was his physicality,” says Haskell. “He loved smashing people and giving the second-row players s***: ‘Come on boys!’ I don’t know if that’s what made him but I hadn’t come up against anyone as aggressive before. With him it was 100% or nothing. He didn’t have a neutral. It showed me exactly where I had to go as a player; I needed to get more of that edge.”

The crummy hotel in Wolverhampton was the first of many Haskell and Hampson would share on England duty and a strong bond developed between them over the next three years. “I played second row [at the time] and probably had a better relationship with Hambo than anyone,” Haskell says. “I had my head between his arse in the scrums and he was lifting me in the lineout.”

THE DATE is March 15, 2005; the time is 9.45am; the England Under21s have arrived at Franklin’s Gardens for training; James Haskell and Matt Hampson have just started their warm-up. They are wearing the same-colour tracksuit top. They have slept in the same hotel. They dream of playing for England, but there’s bad luck floating towards them . . . it has to land on somebody.

After the warm-up, the session kicks off with some semi-opposed team play and some clearing-out and rucking. The team to play Scotland has yet to be announced; they’re all working hard and keen to impress. Hampson attacks the contact work with relish. “I don’t think we were as physical as we should have been against Italy and we were having a full-on contact session, wearing these body suits,” Haskell says. “It’s the first session of the day and we’re battering the crap out of each other and it all kicks off between Michael Cusack and Hambo. Normally scuffles are broken up after a couple of seconds but nobody broke them up.

“We were doing lengths [of the field] . . . they started fighting at the top end; we turned around, got to the bottom end, turned around and came back and they were still fighting. They are leaning, propping each other up and throwing these windmill punches until Nigel Redman [forwards coach] steps in, ‘Right that’s enough’.

“They are both absolutely f*****. Both players have punched themselves out. Cusack drops to his knees and says, ‘I can’t go on’. Hambo is absolutely knackered. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen.”

A short break for drinks is followed by some pattern play against passive opposition and a sharpening of the team’s kick-off reception and restarts. Then the forwards and backs split. Jim Mallinder, the coach, directs the backs to the far end of the field; Redman leads the forwards to the scrum machine. He reminds them of the problems against Italy and what they are trying to achieve. “Six of the seven scrums against Italy had to be reset,” Redman says. “The games against Wales, France and Ireland weren’t much better. The theme of the session is the ‘three-second scrum’ – hit, ball in, ball away in three seconds.”

Tony Spreadbury, the international referee, has driven from his home in Bath to supervise the session. After 10 hits on the scrum machine, Redman splits the forwards into two packs (A and B) for a series of contested scrums in different areas of the field. “Remember, it’s not a points-scoring exercise,” he cautions as they prepare to pack down. But they’re all thinking of Friday and starting against Scotland.

Spreadbury scrapes a line with his boot: “That’s your mark,” he announces. The front rows bind and prepare to engage. Haskell is the pack A blindside flanker. Hampson is the pack A tighthead prop. For Haskell, the scrummaging session is a labour he must endure. For Hampson, it is his raison d’être.

“Hambo was just a nightmare,” Haskell says. “You couldn’t take him anywhere without him wanting to batter someone or take it to a new level. He was fired up, ‘Come on boys, get the aggression levels up; get this right’. I just wanted to get it done and get out of there.”

The time is 11.10am. The packs have engaged 15 times; four of the scrums have collapsed; several more have been reset; Hampson has been penalised once by Spreadbury for not binding properly and going in at an angle, but he is scrummaging well. Redman calls a drinks break. The coach commends the players on their work and reminds them of the scrum that resulted in the try against Ireland.

Richard Blaze, the second-row, is worried about the Scots. “They’ve a habit of crabbing across prior to engagement,” he observes. Hampson is a disciple of Johnno [Martin Johnson]. “Then we’ll hit-in and f****** pile through them,” he says. “If they are coming around, put the ball in and we’ll go all the way through them. Let’s f*** them up, yeah?”

The session resumes with another contested scrum. Spreadbury calls the mark: “Crouch and hold.” Neil Briggs lifts his hands above his head and drops his arms over the shoulders of Hampson and Martin Halsall. Together they bend and lower. Tom Ryder and Dan Smith have slotted in behind. Haskell and David Seymour are linked on the flanks. Mark Hopley stands at No 8. Pack A is ready.

Dave Ward lifts his hands above his head and drops his arms on the shoulders of Michael Cusack and Wayne Thompson. Together they bend and lower. Sean Cox and Richard Blaze have slotted in behind. Tim Weighman and Tom Rees are linked on the flanks. Will Skinner stands at No 8. Pack B is ready.

Sixteen lads playing for England; 16 kids living the dream; 16 memories forever scarred by that routine call to “engage”, the scrum going down, his body on the ground, the bad luck floating above them and the moment it chose to land.

A SUNNY Tuesday afternoon in west London: Matt Hampson is staring out the window of a van travelling towards Acton. His mind has returned to a Sunday afternoon in November, 2004; Tigers are about to play Wasps in the Premiership and he is sitting in the away team dressing room at Adams Park. Johnno, the greatest England player of all time, is having strapping applied to his fingers and wrists. Neil Back, Graham Rowntree, Darren Morris and Austin Healey are getting changed alongside. It is Hampson’s first time with the big boys and he’s thrilled. He had been buzzing since Thursday when Richard Cockerill had given him the news: “You’re ready, Hambo, you’re good enough.” But he wasn’t quite good enough. He would watch the 17-17 draw with Wasps from the bench. A week later, he spent another afternoon on the bench against Saracens at Welford Road. He was 20 that weekend and it was as close as he ever came to playing for the first team. The accident was four months later.

His friends assure him regularly that he would have made it. They compare the graph of his career to Haskell, Flood and Rees and conclude that he, too, would have played for England. He smiles and thanks them for their certitude but the truth is that he just doesn’t know.

How good was I? What heights would I have reached?

He doesn’t know. He will never know. It hurts as much as not being able to breathe. The van turns right into Twyford Avenue and enters the Wasps training ground. Hampson glances at the empty playing fields and recalls his only previous visit here, a game with the Tigers academy. They were stuffed. “Oh well, into the enemy’s den,” he smiles, heading towards the clubhouse.

The enemies are mostly friends these days: Shaun Edwards is just clocking-out for the day when Hampson arrives. The coach strides across and greets him with a kiss on the head. “Sorry I missed your call last week,” Hampson says.

“That’s okay,” Edwards replies. “There’s something I want to ask you about. I’ll give you a call later.”

Tom Rees breaks off from a session in the weights room to say hello. “So how’s the injury?” Hampson inquires.

“Yeah, not bad.” And waiting just inside the clubhouse, with a smile as wide as London, is the beaming tower of Haskell. “How have you been?” he inquires. “How was the journey up? All right?”

“Yeah, good,” Hampson replies. “Was it a ball ache or was it all right?” “Yeah, it was difficult,” Hampson concedes. “It’s not just getting here, it’s finding the place; it is in the middle of nowhere.”

“I know what you mean. It’s not the best is it?” Haskell concurs.

Three years have passed since they last played rugby together in Northampton. Haskell has fired up his laptop and they are watching an edited recording of what happened that morning on DVD.

Clad in orange track-tops, the session has just started and Haskell and Hampson are buzzing around the field during the phase play.

“Those horrible orange things,” Haskell observes. “What were they thinking? And you’re still not good-looking there, are you? I remember those boots you used to wear. Those Nike ones. The little white, black and red ones.”

“Yeah, Moon boots,” Hampson says. “Moon boots! They were a little bit cutting-edge . . . There’s Broadfoot! Squat Rat.”

“Horse face,” Hampson laughs. “What’s he doing?” “Austin Healey used to take the piss out of him, ‘Do you want a Polo mint?’ Stuff like that.”

“Why the long face?” Haskell grins. “Yeah, why the long face.” “It’s weird watching it now,” Haskell says. “I remember that, I remember Dawsy [Tom Varndell] carving up and scoring a try. It was a big deal to play for England Under21s, that was where your aspirations were; that was all I was interested in doing at that point in time.”

“How different from the 21s is that step up to the full-team squad?” Hampson asks.

“Because you are all professionals, they expect a little bit more from you,” says Haskell. “It’s not so much of a school environment. The 21s is professional and things are taken care of but everything is prescribed. The big difference to our day, Hambo, is we didn’t taste the luxury. We were staying in these horrible little rooms eating school food.

“The highlight of our day was when they brought out the protein shakes. Now, everything is taken care of. We have an amazing guy, Matt Lovell, who takes care of everything. It’s unreal. You wouldn’t want for anything. There is no excuse why England shouldn’t perform well on the pitch.”

“But you appreciate it now, don’t you?” Hampson suggests.

“Yeah, that’s the thing. I mean we had the Halls of Residence, didn’t we?”

“With the tiny beds,” Hampson laughs. “I don’t know how you coped; my feet were over the edge.”

The scrummaging session has started. Tony Spreadbury has entered the frame.

“I love Spreaders,” Haskell says. “He’s a top boy, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, he is,” Hampson concurs. “You have that excited look on your face, standard Hambo. There’s [Tom] Ryder, ah mate, his team talks are unreal.”

“I know.” “I forget all these boys that we did it with,” Haskell says. “[Richard] Blaze, Hoppers [Mark Hopley], I rang Hop up by mistake the other day actually.”

“I speak to him,” Hampson says. “He trains near me, close to me.”

“Oh really?” “Yeah, he comes to see me.” “You are really smashing him there,” Haskell laughs.

“Well it is a scrummaging session.” “Yeah, I know. Who were you opposite? Was it Thommo [Wayne Thompson]? You were f****** battering him mate.”

They have just finished the drinks break and are about to pack down for the critical scrum. The packs hit. The scrum goes down. The screen fills with the shocked expressions of Haskell and Ryder, gazing at the prostrate body on the ground.

“When I watch the initial bit [the start of the session], I don’t really feel any sadness,” Hampson reflects. “I’m more interested in what I was doing. You kind of forget what level you played at, and what an achievement it was to play with those guys. If you look at most of them, they are playing professional rugby in the Premiership now, and quite a few of them have played for England, which is nice as well.

“But it’s hard when you get to this bit. You think, ‘From that point on is when I’m in a wheelchair and I can’t walk again’. It’s that split-second in the scrum that’s so . . . it just looks like a normal collapsed scrum that you see every day on TV. Then you get thoughts like, ‘What if?’ “What if I hadn’t hit that scrum? What if I’d been like Matt Cornwell and had the day off [Cornwell was sidelined with an injury] and not trained? But if you think like that you’d go crazy, so you’ve just got to get on with the hand God dealt you.”

“Do you remember it?” Haskell asks. “Not really, I remember going down,” Hampson replies.

“You had your hand on the floor when you hit, didn’t you? You hit and then gave him a touch on the floor, folded in that way.”

“I haven’t got a clue mate, to be honest with you.”

“When it collapsed, I noticed nothing untoward,” Haskell says. “I got up and you didn’t get up; it was just the angle where you were turned. You were turned in, you didn’t move. I looked down, I was going to pull you up and I thought I heard you say, ‘I can’t feel my legs’. I don’t know if you remember any of it.”

“Not really.” “I think you said, ‘I am struggling to breathe. I can’t breathe’. I was like, ‘What? F****** hell’. Then I remember the doctor [Tim Weighman] saying, ‘Come on’, and we got ushered out of the way. We walked over and I said to the rest of the boys, ‘I think he is in some real trouble’. We were told to get on with it but we can see what is going on.

“Matt hasn’t moved. One minute we are doing the lineouts and the next minute Spreaders is performing CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation]. It’s a pretty scary thing to watch your friend, your teammate, being resuscitated. It doesn’t really hit you straight away because you don’t know what is going down.

“We didn’t understand the full gravity of the situation. You don’t fully understand what it means to have the injury that Matt had. We were pretty shielded from a lot of it. The coaches were good. They gave us information but we still didn’t understand the full gravity of the whole situation.”

“What effect did it have on you when you did understand?” I ask.

“I have to say, not because he is sitting here, but it has had one of the most profound effects in my life,” Haskell says. “It makes you realise how lucky you are to do what you do. You never thought about something like that. You never appreciated what you had. Sometimes you lapse out of it, you take things for granted and do stupid things or drive like an idiot before it sinks in. The human body is a pretty fragile thing. It really made me appreciate what I have and made me work hard at maintaining it. I also want to help people who aren’t as lucky as me. What I have seen from Matt is . . . I don’t think I would be as strong as he has been.”

“You don’t know,” Hampson says. “You don’t know what you would be like unless you are in that situation.”

“No you don’t,” Haskell agrees. “But I think if it had happened to me people would have said, ‘We remember what James was like – loud’. And to see me in a different state would have been a shock. But I didn’t look at Matt and go, ‘What have you done with Matt Hampson?’ Hambo is the same guy, the same character, the same everything.

“He has got on with his life. He is doing things very successfully. He is really living his life. If they made a Ferrari that he could drive, he would be in one. It really does make me think about it. I talk to my girlfriend about it. Every time I speak to Matt or see him, I say to her, ‘It is amazing how well he is doing’.”

“What’s her name?” I ask. “Felicia,” he says. “A posh bird,” Hampson laughs. “A posh bird, yeah,”

Haskell smiles. “But it did have a huge effect on me really, in terms of a lot of things. I looked at my friends and thought, ‘How many would have done what Matt Cornwell [who helped set up and run a charitable trust for Hampson] has done or been through for Matt?’ I thought about how well liked he was, and what a good lad he was, and what a good family he has. All those things come to your mind.”

“What about James, Matt?” I ask. “What do you make of his career since you played with him?”

“Well,” Hampson says, “I’m just so proud, you know, to have played with all of these guys . . . Reesy, Toby Flood, it’s unbelievable. And well, I am closest to Haskell. He has done well. He still thinks he’s hard, starting fights. What’s that about?”

“I’m always starting fights,” Haskell laughs. “I’ve got the Hambo aggression, mate. The Hambo aggression.”

To contribute to the Matt Hampson trust fund, visit www.matthampson.co.uk

Class of 05: where are they now?

Matt Hampson’s neck injury was sustained during scrum practice at an England Under21 training session. What’s become of the players packing down with and against him that day?

Richard Blaze: joined Leicester from Worcester in 2007, after featuring in the 2006 under21 grand slam-winning team at lock

Neil Briggs: the hooker is now with Sale, where he is regarded as one of the club’s rising stars

Sean Cox: the lock is another at Sale, where he has struggled to establish a regular starting place in the scrum

Mike Cusack: nine Premiership appearances for Leeds this year but the prop will miss the rest of the season after a thumb injury last month

Martin Halsall: the Sale prop had previously represented England at under18 level as well but recent appearances for his club have been limited

James Haskell: seen as a rising star of club and country, for whom he made his debut last year, and a possible England captain

Mark Hopley: left Worcester in 2005 to play for Northampton. The No 8 has recently signed a new two-year contract for the club, who will be back in the Premiership next season

Tom Rees: the fl anker, right, made his senior England debut against Scotland last year and has six caps

Tom Ryder: currently with Saracens, for whom he signed in 2005, and hopes to appear in today’s Heineken Cup quarterfi nal against Ospreys in the second row

Dave Seymour: the Saracens fl anker has played for the England Sevens team and was called up to the Saxons squad for last summer’s Churchill Cup

Will Skinner: left Leicester in 2006 to join Harlequins. The No 8 made his England Saxons debut in the win over Ireland A in February

Dan Smith: plays his club rugby at Bath but has struggled to make the side owing to the squad’s strength in depth in the second row

Wayne Thompson: local boy who played all his club rugby with Bristol before being loaned out to Newbury, the prop recently signed a new two-year contract

Dave Ward: made debut for Bath as a teenager in the Heineken Cup but the hooker left in March 2007 to join Northampton

Paul Kimmage and the Matt Hampson story

- Paul Kimmage, shortlisted in the sports journalist of the year category at this Tuesday’s British Press Awards, first interviewed Matt Hampson for this newspaper in March 2006 , a year after the prop sustained the training-ground injury that would confi ne him to a wheelchair. It was that interview that helped him win the interviewer of the year at the 2007 Sports Journalists’ Association awards

- Kimmage also interviewed Hampson last March. Since then, Paul has been working with Matt on a book to be published by Simon & Schuster later in the year.

Guinness is sponsoring the Slo Progress music gig (which will feature Hampson’s former Leicester teammates Dan Hipkiss, Sam Vesty, and Ollie Smith, and Wasps’ Ayoola Erinle) at the Mason & Brooke Pub in Oadby on Tuesday, May 6 and will be making a charitable donation to the Matt Hampson Trust

- For more information, visit www.guinnesspremiership.com or call 020 7202 2836