FACING up to Jonah Lomu on the pitch felt like being in the path of a steam train as it came hurtling towards you. Nobody relished coming up against him. When it came to tackling him you could do little more than aim low and hope for the best.

I played against him twice, the first time being in the quarter-final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in Pretoria. No-one had known that much about him going into the tournament - he had made a big impact at the Hong Kong Sevens, but was still a relative unknown at 19 - but by the time of our match against the All Blacks, everyone was talking about him.

Before that game we talked about tackling him low and hoping that would bring him down - and within a minute of the game started I had a chance, if that’s the right word, to turn theory into practice as he came racing down my channel. I managed to go low, and tried to wrap my arms around his ankles, and thankfully he did go down.

The second match was a testimonial for Ieuan Evans, the Welsh winger, at Stradey Park in LlanellI. Jonah was playing for a World XV against a Welsh/Scottish team, and I remember Jonathan Griffiths, a really tough little scrum-half who had gone to rugby league, bringing him down a couple of times with a similar kind of tackle to the one I tried in 1995.

The funny thing was that Jonah was a lot easier to tackle when he was going at full tilt - you can imagine how someone that big, moving that quickly, could be thrown off balance. But when he was standing still, or moving slowly, getting to grips with him was altogether harder.

He was the first of the big, physical backs, but, crucially, he was extremely quick as well. He had good feet, and a great hand-off too, and was just a phenomenal athlete with fantastic skills. He was certainly the best winger in world rugby at that time, if not of all time, and there was simply no-one who could touch him in those early years.

Back when he was unleashed on the sport at the 1995 World Cup he was a young player with no inhibitions. It was all natural ability - he had been running over and through people since his school days, and simply continued doing the same thing in senior rugby.

It was a year or two after that tournament that he was diagnosed with a kidney illness, but he kept battling on. From that point on through the rest of his playing days, you just wondered how good he could have been if he had enjoyed full health.

The funny thing about him was that when you saw him walking around in jeans and a T shirt - when he visited the Scotland team hotel after our quarter-final, for example - he did not look at all scary. But once he was kitted out in a tight black jersey - or a tight white jersey, as it was in the quarter-final against us - he was an altogether more imposing figure.

He once did a photo session for kids when I was at Worcester, and my own children met him. My son Sam was scared of him, but he was actually great with kids, and such a nice guy. He was very family-oriented, and one of the most poignant things I have read about him since the news of his death broke was an interview from earlier this year in which he said he hoped to stay alive long enough to see his own children reach the age of 21. His two boys are aged six and five.

It is simply a sad, sad day for rugby. You can tell how much he was appreciated by all the tributes that have been made - not just to Jonah Lomu the rugby player but to Jonah Lomu the man.

He changed the game forever. He was box office – people everywhere wanted to see the mild-mannered superstar that was Jonah Lomu. He brought rugby to a new level in 1995, and a measure of of his impact is how those tributes have come from every part of the world