Maud Muir: ‘I am nowhere near reaching my potential – I want to be one of the best in the world’

Maud Muir bounces into Pennyhill Park with a spring in her step and a trademark grin on her face. The rain is beating against the ornate windows of the Bagshot hotel that is the Red Roses’ training home for the tournament, but it is a lighter training day – Muir’s session on the bike is done and thoughts now turn to the task ahead.

That task is a tussle with Wales in England’s opening home game of this year’s Women’s Six Nations. It is a rare chance for Muir to start. There have been times in her young England career where you would forgive Muir for cursing her luck, stuck as she has been behind the world’s premier prop in Sarah Bern. But with Bern on the sidelines recovering from knee surgery, the starting shirt is up for grabs – and Muir is ready to seize it.

“It is a big opportunity,” the Gloucester-Hartpury prop tells The Independent. “Out of my 25 caps, I’ve only started five times, so I’m excited to be given a shot starting. I have really enjoyed coming off the bench – and as a prop, you do get a decent amount of game time – but hopefully, I can cement my position starting at tighthead.

“I want to be one of the best tightheads in the world. I just want to be the best that I can be and I know that I am nowhere near reaching my potential.

Muir burst on the scene as a teenager, catching the eye in a dynamic Wasps side and offering the same balletic, bruising blend as Bern. She was in the England reckoning quickly, making her debut in the autumn of 2021 against the world champion Black Ferns and not at all looking out of place. A prop polyglot also capable of covering hooker, a desire to get Muir on the field saw her deployed regularly on the loosehead, filling in wherever a spot opened up.

But a new regime has brought fresh instructions to become a tighthead cornerstone. The Red Roses are benefitting from the expert input of scrum consultant Nathan Catt during this tournament, working to develop a trio of 22-year-old tightheads of which Muir is – strangely, she admits – the senior figure.

“It is a great quality to be able to play both loosehead and tighthead, and hooker if you need it, but you can’t be the best prop in the world,” she explains. “You can’t be the best scrummaging prop, or as dominant as you could be [were you to] just focus on one position.

“Catty has been really specific in his coaching – the detail is incredible and I want to knuckle down at tighthead. We are a very young front row. I think that is what is so good – we are malleable and our technique can be changed. We want to be top of the charts in open play, but it’s always scrum first as a prop.”

Time with Catt is Muir’s first exposure to concerted, specialist scrum-time coaching in England camp. “We’ve been doing lots of analysis – I think it was needed. Although we were dominant, other teams are going to get better, so we need to keep getting better. We need to raise the bar.

“It’s about having different tools to add to the box, knowing how to cope on the pitch with different looseheads or hookers. Having that ability to whip out other skills is important. When I was younger, I just scrummaged. Now I’ve got so much detail, I’m thinking about various angles and stuff like that, which is important – but sometimes you just need to put your head down and push hard.”

An encounter with Wales will bring Muir into conflict with a plethora of Gloucester-Hartpury club mates. The Premiership Women’s Rugby leaders provide nine of Ioan Cunningham’s matchday squad at Ashton Gate on Saturday, including the entirety of the replacement front row on a power-packed bench picked to try and combat England’s ability to finish strongly.

The six-strong Gloucester-Hartpury contingent in John Mitchell’s line-up also helps explain the dominance of the reigning PWR champions and evidences the competition within their squad. Muir, for example, competes with rising star Sisilia Tuipulotu, veteran Cerys Hale and Spain’s Laura Delgado for the No 3 shirt at club level, a quartet that any international coach would be happy to have as their prop pecking order.

Yet, one of the remarkable things about Gloucester-Hartpury’s success is how close-knit the squad remains. It helps that you can virtually throw a blanket over the entire squad if you pick the right Gloucester postcode – “we literally all live in close proximity to each other”, Muir laughs – but also of an excellent culture at the club.

That will be put aside on Saturday, of course. “That group of girls, I love. They are so good, they will do anything for each other,” Muir says. “There might be a cheeky smile in the first scrum, we’ll have a few hugs after the game and probably a swap of shirts, but during the game, it is a case of parking those friendships and doing everything we can to win.”