Mike Brown, the full-back who gives Harlequins an extra edge

Once he has finished with the play-offs England's summer tour looms and the Quins man says: 'It'll be brilliant to get back out there and play the South Africans again'
mike brown
Mike Brown, the Harlequins full-back who has been picked again by England, can score tries as well as stop them. Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images

Some professional sportsmen spend an entire career not being fully appreciated by anyone beyond their own dressing room. Some like it that way, others battle constantly with the gap between perception and reality. "Everyone thinks I'm a boring full-back who doesn't do anything," says Mike Brown, Harlequins' often invisible match winner. "I still get the 'Oh, he's just a solid full-back' thing."

Boring? Brown is the most misunderstood player in the country. Quins, who stand on the brink of their first Premiership final, are in a similar boat. Despite having topped the regular season table, few have them as title favourites. The 26-year-old Brown is the club's top try-scorer, most reliable defender, longest kicker out of hand and general backline rock, yet is still viewed as Ben Foden's less talented, stroppy, skinhead understudy. "It's taken a long time to change everyone's perception and I'm still not fully there," says Brown, a thin smile flickering across his lips.

There comes a point, though, where the seemingly innocuous dots merge to form a picture so obvious people wonder how on earth they missed it. When Quins scored their famous win in Toulouse in December, Brown scored two tries and put in two decisive match-saving tackles. Foden, his opposite number at The Stoop on Saturday, has played 161 career club games, scored a healthy 44 tries and is seen as one of the world's sharpest attackers. And Brown? His record is better still, with 53 tries in 162 matches for Quins. Three times a week he visits Margot Wells for extra sprint training and has transformed his old hunched running style. His reward? People still like to perceive him as relatively pedestrian.

Just two players, furthermore, have been nominated for both of this season's two highest-profile individual awards. One is Chris Robshaw, the increasingly respected England captain; the other is Brown who, as a comprehensive schoolboy growing up on the Wilts/Hants border, was never chosen for a single England age-group representative side. He is still shocked any of his fellow pros nominated him. "I didn't expect it because I think I'd be the sort of player other players wouldn't like to play against. I'm probably a bit of a niggly person on the field and most of them don't know what I'm like off it."

It is, indeed, widely assumed that Brown could start a series of fights in an empty room. The calm, if slightly bruised, man sitting placidly on a sofa at Quins' training ground is very different on the field. Others still recall the lurid headlines of 2008, when Brown was one of the players fined following an eventful night out in Auckland during England's summer tour of New Zealand. Brown, for the record, was fined £1,000 for staying out late and missing a physio's appointment the following morning. He is still paying in certain ways. "People don't really know what happened so they perceive you a certain way because of what they read. Everyone thought the guys involved were big drinkers who were just on the trip for a jolly. It wasn't like that at all."

Come on, then, Mike, put the record straight. "We went out but it's completely different in New Zealand. You're like a footballer. It's ridiculous. You're not used to it. You're just doing what a single lad, with a night off and no training the next day, would do at the end of a long season. You're in the company of your mates, talking to a girl who's also single. You're just doing what normal lads do but, at the end of the day, we're not normal, I suppose. That's what you've got to learn."

Despite not being at last autumn's World Cup in New Zealand, he knew just how the players would be feeling as the media firestorm raged. "I've only got myself to blame for putting myself in that particular situation but it was really tough. Reporters were going round to my dad's house but I didn't want to ring around everyone and tell them my side of the story. I just wanted to get away from it but it doesn't go away, does it?" One irony is that he rarely drinks. "I don't drink much in the season at all. Ask anyone in the squad. I've never been a big drinker. My girlfriend gets annoyed with me that we don't go out and socialise more with her friends but that's the choice you make as a professional rugby player."

Brown has frequently had personal issues to contend with, too. His parents split up when he was 12 and he has little contact with his mother. His father, Mick, who used to coach him at Salisbury RFC, was subsequently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It has taken a while for the teenage fly-half with a dislike of Chippenham – "They had all the county players and always used to try and rough me up. I just thought: 'I'm going to stick up for myself'" – to find happiness with Eliza, the daughter of the former England footballer Tony Woodcock, who played for Nottingham Forest, Arsenal and Köln. "He's good friends with Jason Leonard and he asked Jase about me before we met. I think he got a decent report back. You've got to be really understanding to go out with a professional sportsman and Eliza's always there for me."

It has certainly been a bumpy ride since his first cap for England in South Africa in 2007 as a callow 21-year-old with a nasty stomach bug. "I just remember sweating loads during the anthems and thinking: 'Oh my God.' I hadn't eaten anything all day, apart from a bit of toast. When they started smashing everyone I knew it was going to be a long afternoon." Little wonder he is delighted to be returning on tour with England this summer. "It'll be brilliant to get back out there and play the South Africans again. I was a boy back then. I'm completely different now."

The shy, frustrated lad has indeed matured and blossomed. Even the "Mr Angry" tag is outdated; he has had only one yellow card in four Premiership seasons. "I couldn't speak more highly of him," says Conor O'Shea, Quins' director of rugby, who will be without the injured Danny Care on Saturday. "He needs to be patient because the man in possession is a pretty special player but I think it's great for England they've got two full-backs who are as good as they are. I'm sure it'll be a good match-up this weekend." May England, at some stage, stick Brown at 15 and switch Foden to the wing? Saturday would be an ideal day to change a whole load of perceptions.