Gerry Thornley talks to a man who has won some of the game's biggest honours but is enjoying his time at Leinster like seldom before

It's like a mantra really. Talk to anyone in the Leinster set-up and they all say the same thing about Will Green. A total professional, or for variation, a complete professional. The Leinster scrummaging coach, Roly Meates, says he has nothing but respect for a self-confessed sponge, willing to tear up his scrummaging technique at 31 and start again, despite his medals and Test caps. Even one of his rivals for the Leinster number three jersey, Emmet Byrne, says Green is simply a top bloke.

Paul McNaughton and Mick Dawson must have done their homework. Just over a year ago, when they had still to start their search for a new coach, they decided to ensure Green's arrival. It was, at the very least, a leap of faith by the player.

"I always pride myself on being slightly astute, on being aware of my surroundings. I read that the other week and asked myself, 'What was I doing?'" But he's being self-deprecating, for it was a decision made easier by what he says is his enormous respect for McNaughton.

"He has been a winner on the field and a winner in business as well, and I respect that," says Green, who has a degree in commerce and marketing. "He's been a friend to me and my family, and I look upon him as a very good operator, and if Paul is in charge he's going to get a decent coach in charge, and he has got a decent man."

Still, you wonder why a then 31-year-old prop with four caps to his name, three Premiership titles, a European Cup and a European Challenge, would take up such a challenge. Wasps, he admits, weren't coming to the table, but either way he wanted something new.

"I could have stayed in the UK or gone to Italy and played my career out there, but I wanted to experience a new environment with a challenge. I wanted to come here and get involved with a new team who had massive aspirations."

He had emailed Dawson two years before in sounding out a move to Leinster. Dublin was a destination he had a grá for, and it hasn't disappointed him since he and his wife, Charlotte Hanly, along with their young son, Arthur, took the ferry on June 22nd last year.

His wife is a fashion editor with the London Evening Standard and is stylist for the royal family among others. She commutes back and forth. "She is very good," says Green with deliberate understatement and admiration.

Happily settled and ensconced in Sandymount, up the road from today's venue, he particularly likes Dublin's comparatively slow pace of life and intimate scale. "We have our stock, tourist day-trips whenever mates come over. We either go north to Malahide and Howth or go to Killiney and do the loop around Sallygap. It's beautiful out that way and it's incredible for a European city to be that close to very wild countryside."

"Having said that there's a buzz about the place which is great, and mates are forever looking to come over and go out for the weekend, the weekends when I'm not playing," he adds with a wistful smile, for there haven't been too many of those.

Green confesses to not having done a proper day's work in his life to date, having slipped seamlessly onto the rugby conveyor belt following his graduation. He even spent six months in Cape Town combining cricket and rugby at club level, which is where he first met his wife, and through Leinster kitman Johnny O'Hagen he hopes to pick up his cricket bat again this summer at Merrion.

There was no real rugby bloodline in his family tree, albeit "a great childhood" with his brother Henry and sister Charlotte, on the family farm in Sussex: "A bit of everything, dairy, beef, arable."

His parents, Robert and Jane, have travelled the globe following their son's career and were in Toulouse for the quarter-final, along with his best man, Dan Church, and are all coming over for the semi-final along with his wife's parents.

The rugby came about, he quips, through "being a fat slob". He whispers self-deprecatingly that Eastbourne College played him at outhalf for two years when he was 10.

"But they soon came to their senses. Give it to the biggest bloke. It was pretty boring rugby, give it to the 10, but then everybody else got as big as me and I was pretty quickly back in at prop and I've never been anywhere else since."

He recalls devoted rugby and hockey coaches at Eastbourne who perhaps helped develop his professional outlook. He still stays in touch with his old rugby coach Dave Stewart and his hockey coach David Meadow, who drove the team an hour and a half to train on the kind of all-weather pitches they would play on. "He was relentless in preparation, and gave me that work ethic."

Green applied that work ethic, even if it was mundane, to his 13 unbroken years at Wasps, but he's not one for looking back especially.

"Certainly the best years I had at Wasps were the last three under Warren Gatland," he says, and his admiration for the one-time Ireland coach is clear. "He's an excellent head coach, and has the self-assurance to bring in specialist assistant coaches. To be honest, I'd say his abilities are wasted as just the forwards coach at the Chiefs.

"But the key is, although I'm not turning my back on Wasps and my team-mates are probably sick of me talking about Wasps, I'm a Leinster man now. I'm well in the thick of Dublin rugby, and that's where I am."

He still has a burning desire to play for England, citing the example of the older Perry Freshwater, despite his move to Perpignan, and reckons he's already a better player for the move to Dublin. He says "an environment has been created where work is a drug, and luckily we have a few addicts now. It's not about flogging the body, it's about being smart, being focused and switching off and switching on, and that's where Mike is very astute. And always a purpose to whatever you are doing. Each game is different and to pinpoint stuff for that individual game."

Green lauds the addition of Mike Brewer to the coaching ticket, primarily for the kind of in-depth, one-on-one analysis lacking at Wasps, where the emphasis was more on the collective. And then there's Meates. We regard him here as not only a scrummaging guru, but something of a hidden treasure, and it's good to hear our judgment validated.

"I've totally changed my technique, and again it's down to doing things individually," says Green, in reference to feet positioning and the use of his right arm. "At Wasps it was very much an emphasis on power," he explains, emphasising this by punching the palm of his left hand, and explains any technical shortcomings were largely of his own doing.

"I had (Trevor) Leota on my left, (Simon) Shaw behind, (Lawrence) Dallaglio on my right . . ." he says with a self-explanatory smile. "With that lump behind me, that lump to my left and that lump to my right, possibly I didn't think too much about the technical side."

Meates reminds Green of another influential guru, the English scrummaging coach Phil Keith-Roach, who had a couple of years at Wasps.

"They're very similar and one day I'm going to get them to meet each other. I have a very good relationship with Roachie as well. We used to have red-wine lunches and talk about scrummaging for three hours, and then get into trouble. But I'd like to merge these scrummaging gurus; it would be good fun, and they'd have enormous respect for each other I'm sure."

Nor is Green a slouch around the pitch, and in the Bath game at the Rec especially he seemed to revel in Leinster's expansive style, for he is mobile and has good hands.

At 32, he's still a self-confessed sponge for information and self-improvement, and everything that has happened so far has completely justified the move. "The icing on the cake is that I'm in a good rugby environment, which is great at this stage of your career."

The most seismic game at Lansdowne Road in recent decades was the Munster-Wasps semi-final three years ago, but the noise tomorrow is set to register even higher on the Richter scale, and as fate would have it, Green's first and third sorties to the old ground have coincided with these encounters.

"It was like a ladybird, a sea of red with little black spots," Green laughs in recalling the extraordinary colour of that Munster-Wasps tie. "With a bit of luck it will be a sea of red and blue this time. It was a great game, and I enjoyed it a lot. I've never actually seen it since.

"I can safely say we probably overdid it in Dublin. People were still reeling by Wednesday or Thursday, and we had a game at the weekend. I remember in the warm-up in the sun at Gloucester getting a very early sweat up. That was probably the Guinness."

He speaks of his enormous respect for Munster, a European powerhouse and a pack of forwards to truly judge oneself against. "Bring it on," he says.

He was glad to get speaking with Anthony Foley toward the end of last season, a man for whom he has palpable respect, and recalls how they played against each other in an Irish-English schools match.

That English team surely produced more topflight test players than any other since. Shaw, Will Greenwood, Matt Dawson, Tim Stimpson, Austin Healey, Richard Hill and Paul Burke all played for England that day, though they would go on to lose their tilt at the Grand Slam in Colwyn Bay.

Green thinks both coaches will have a few new tricks up their sleeves, and it might be a game of chess initially.

"But at the end of the day it's a simple game. It's about the gain line. It's about winning the collision. It's about winning and retaining the ball. Two big defences too, so it's going to be great."

You sense Green has extracted everything he bargained for and more from this move. Perhaps because he was so long in an environment at Wasps that was fully professional in outlook before Leinster were. Perhaps it's those old schools coaches.

"It's my job," he begins, matter-of-factly. "It's my family. If I came and wasn't (professional), I'd be letting down my family. And that's the key. You've got to get your priorities right, and my priority is very much my family, and if I'm doing my job within the team we can derive a lot of satisfaction from getting that bit right.

"I can't operate on the basis of it being all right on the night. I don't work like that. Some players do and I have enormous respect for them, because they manage to switch it on and switch it off. I have to make sure I get a good week's work under me to perform, but through experience, I also have to adapt if I haven't had a great week's work . . . you learn that."

He talks of using all he's learnt from rugby when taking it into the business world. "We're so lucky in what we do. There's 48,000 people there at the weekend who would give anything to be out there with us and to have a professional rugby career. We are the lucky ones. It would be disrespectful to your job, and more importantly to your team-mates, not to do your bit, not to get your house in order."

Happy in his new environment, and with his lot, and devoted too.