European Cup Jim Williams: If you believe in predestination, then Jim Williams's story is for you. It is as if a guardian angel watched over those broad shoulders until he finally shed his 20s and misfortune and his easy nature to lay claim to greatness.

Jim Williams came alive at an age when most athletes review their medal collection and think of calling it quits. He might never have been a world champion. And, inconceivable as it is now, he might never have heard of Munster, let alone carry the province's hopes and principles in that stern and magnificent face of his.

So many wet Irish days of recent years have been fired by tales of unlikely Munster rugby feats and Williams has been at their epicentre: the father figure, a chiselled frame in drenched red leading the charge across the ruined turf, the irreplaceable man of all irreplaceable men.

His hair, in fact, does not grey at the temples; you just imagine it should be so. How did he get here, Jim Williams? So easily, he could have led a placid and unremarkable rugby life that would have met a quiet climax in dear old West Hartlepool. A black and white photograph of the WHRFC chairman presenting a smiling Jim with a token of many years' good service could have been the cherished highlight. Something to show the grandkids back in Sydney.

Or he could have stayed forever Young, a dot on the bronzed and isolated agrarian belt in New South Wales, a place where you farm and drink beer and play rugby league and never give too much thought to cities or new things. Williams bolted when he was 16, grabbing the army as his lifebelt.

"I just looked around and felt the opportunities in Young weren't really there so the army was a good vehicle. I got to travel and got my trade as an engineer, got to live in Sydney."

And somewhere down the pecking order, he got to play rugby. Williams was bothered, just not that bothered. To him, life was never just an oval ball. In his 20s, gangling and bursting with untutored ability, he had other things to be getting on with.

In Brisbane, he lived the army rules and you can see it in his deportment still, the regimental grace and the politeness. After he checked out in 1993, he made a beeline for Sydney - not so much a city to Australians as a metaphor for the good life - and found himself a northern club with beaches.

So there he was, a winger of ferocious strength and agility that catapulted him into the Australian Sevens, stuff that was fun to play. But he was still light years away from the truly big time and in a country like Australia, bristling with athletic specimens, it is a wonder Williams wasn't another natural who just slipped off the edge. He certainly danced on the brink enough times.

His rescue from West Hartlepool, where he moved in late 1994, was down to happenstance; New South Wales were touring and Williams just travelled up to Newcastle to say hello to some guys he knew and out of the blue he was offered a contract with his home territory.

Plans to stay in Hartlepool for another couple of years were ditched without many tears and he went back to his native land, thinking of himself in a more solemn and serious light.

But injuries and the end of his stop-start career on the wing kept him on the periphery of the action. Only when he decided to switch to playing wing forward did his career change. And even then it was a close-run thing.

The bones of the story are that, in just nine short months, Williams went from being an all-but-washed-up 30-year-old to a world champion.

A dislocated shoulder injury in 1997 destroyed a peach of a chance for Williams, the late comer, to tour with Australia that summer.

When, after a tough rehabilitation, he resumed playing with the ACT Brumbies again in March of 1998, he ripped a hamstring in the first five minutes of a match against Auckland. Given his age and place in the grand scheme of things, that might have been curtains.

"That was it, I was fed up. My shoulder was still aching and I had other niggling injuries and then this. So I really let myself go, I put on four or five kilos and didn't look after myself."

And maybe it was the angel, but Williams underwent a stunning transformation. Eddie Jones, famously, was the voice. Brash little Eddie, with his scruffy shirt and tie and elfin features, grabbing Jim Williams outside "the dressing-room shed after a club game in Sydney, with families and kids around and everything" and letting rip.

A torrent of home truths hammered home with Eddie's punchy vocabulary and rasping voice. Years later, sitting on a stool while torrents of rain spill across Cork's Musgrave Park, big Jim still grins and blushes at the memory.

"In front of people. Just pulled me outside the dressing-room shed after a club match and there were people standing around with kids and that and he just basically chewed me up. 'You wanna make your mind up - if you don't want another contract, I'll just tear it up in front of you.' I was shocked. Just about everyone in the club heard it. He kept a close eye on me. And it was the right thing to do."

In short, by the pre-season of 1999, Williams had achieved levels of fitness he hadn't even dreamt were possible and such was his shine it was impossible for his country to ignore him, a rough 30-something gem. And then it all travelled at the speed of light.

Williams felt comfortable in exalted company, realised that he kind of belonged there, and then it was poor Owen Finegan's turn to feel his shoulder tear at the joint. Just like that, the green and gold number six jersey was being passed to Williams.

He wore it during the World Cup finals and all through the victory year of 2000, when Australia were untouchable.

Now, at the end of his career, he wears the number six of Munster. Athlone on the first Friday of the New Year was as primordial as sport gets. Biting cold and that peculiarly Irish soft rain that doesn't so much fall as float, soaking everything of substance.

Dubarry Park is new and exposed and the game, a 3-0 win against Connacht, was just about hitting and hitting. Williams won't pretend he loved it, but in a way he did. It was January, all the old faces were on the pitch and the Munster bandwagon was back on the road.

"One of the main reasons I stayed on for another year was to help out when so many of the regular guys were away at the World Cup. And it was a great learning curve for me, playing Celtic League with so many new guys, helping them come through and losing, as we did, four or five games by seven points or less. It was tough, but valuable, and from that perspective, it was good to have all the Irish boys back in the team against Connacht."

All that night, their upcoming encounter with Gloucester was at the back of the Munster minds. This afternoon's match is yet another of those make-or-break days, framed by last year's unforgettable heroics in Thomond Park. Although Williams has played in last-second Bledisloe Cup and Tri-Nations victories, Munster's brazen act of escapology was as thrilling a feeling as he has ever known.

"Definitely. We are not talking about one day, we are talking about a whole week. You have to take into account how disappointing we were against Perpignan the week before. I personally made poor decisions and we just didn't play.

"That Monday morning training was just the lowest of the low. Nobody was up for it. We played a game of touch and the forwards got beaten 30-nil and that never happens. So, at lunchtime, we had a talk and we decided to forget about it and just talk about winning the game. There was nothing said about the four tries or 27 points.

"And then, from then on, it just lifted so that by Saturday, there was a great atmosphere around the place."

Everything about the miracle day reinforced what he likes about life as a Munster player. Living in Cork, he regularly gets stopped on the street just to talk rugby. He is accustomed to the cadences of the accents now.

When he first came, city was indistinguishable from country, Cork from Kerry. Inevitably, people know the Williamses had a little boy, Kieran, in July and they ask after him, ask how the sleeping is going - and then they turn to rugby.

"So it's great, very level-headed chat, and it's all to do with the way the players are treated here, they interact with the crowd so easily.

"Originally, I was probably looking more at an English club - Bristol or Sale were in the picture - until John Langford gave me a call and told me about the lifestyle and the set-up and what the guys are like.

"And that probably had more to do with it than the money you can make in England. It's very cut and dry over there, I think - as an overseas player, you get a hard time off the crowd, that kind of thing. Whereas Ireland, well, John Langford probably opened the door for me."

So when Declan Kidney travelled to Australia in 2001 to meet Williams, it took little to persuade him. Now Cork, and Munster, is home from home. Three days before Munster's first big European Cup game of the year and you find the big man tucked away in a tiny kitchen in Musgrave Park. Nibbling at chicken wings with Rob Henderson.

Outside, it is lashing down, but the mood is good. Saturday, they promise, will be a bright, fine day. Gloucester might have ended it all for Munster last year. Except they didn't and now the dream is on again. For Munster, every year is the year.

Interest in today's game is intense, not least because it brings about the reunion of Ronan O'Gara and Duncan McRae, the Australian who levelled the Irishman with a barrage of violent punches during the Lions tour of 2001.

"I don't think it will be a factor," Williams smiles. "The game is far too big for those two to be bickering. I think they are professional enough not to worry about that. So it's more of an external thing, it won't hold any credit whatsoever. To the crowd it will, but to the players it won't really.

"I know Duncan very well and if you go back to that day, I never saw NSW be so aggressive. It was just a one-off occasion. There were things going on in that game, it just wasn't that incident.

"And Duncan is a fairly fiery character when he gets pumped up for the game. But I know he is a good bloke, he's a nice guy, and I definitely don't think there is going to be any revival of what happened over there with him and Ronan - the game is just far too important for that."