It would be easy to see Chris Oti, who turns 50 on June 16th as a more recent version of Alexander Obolensky.

Like the former Russian prince, who scored two extraordinary solo tries in England's victory over the All Blacks in 1936, his fame rests on a single shining day at Twickenham - a hat-trick in the defeat of Ireland in 1988 which is credited with inspiring the adoption of 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' as England's rugby anthem. Each also had, in rugby terms, a touch of the exotic. Of Nigerian descent, Oti was England's first black player since James Peters more than 80 years before.

But, while injuries stopped him fulfilling his potential, Oti was much more than a one-match wonder. Like Obolensky, still a student at Oxford in 1936, Oti came to notice via the Varsity match. England's selectors had by the 1980s got out of the habit of regarding it as a second final trial, but it was enjoying a late - perhaps its last - upturn on the back of a brilliant Cambridge generation and the resurgence in the City of London following the Big Bang of 1986. If nothing else, it tested the ability of players to cope with larger crowds than anywhere else in English club rugby.

Oti passed that test. He scored once in 1986 then twice - before being forced off with an injury - in the 1987 match, which saw Cambridge shock an Oxford team hotly favoured because of the presence at scrum-half of New Zealand's David Kirk, only a few months earlier the first ever World Cup-winning captain. That put Oti firmly into selectors' minds, but for positions for which there was no vacancy.

England's incumbent wingers were Rory Underwood, a fixture for the previous four seasons, and Mike Harrison, the captain. But England failed to score a try in losing to France - a 10-9 heartbreaker in Paris whose end saw tough but emotional hooker Brian Moore slumped face down in misery on the Parc des Princes turf - and Wales, who won 11-3 at Twickenham. Harrison, rather cruelly, was axed and Underwood switched from the left to the right wing to accommodate Oti.

His debut in the Calcutta Cup match at least brought a change in fortunes, as England won 9-6 at Murrayfield, but they still went into the final match at home to Ireland without a single try to show for their Five Nations campaign.

It was still that way at half-time, when Ireland led 3-0 and England had lost their captain Nigel Melville, whose injury immediately before the interval ended a once hugely promising international career. He was replaced by Richard Harding, a 34-year-old veteran who, like Oti, had attended Millfield School and Cambridge.

Sat on the sidelines, Harding had noticed something less obvious to players caught up in the on-field action - that England had a clear edge in pace and moving the ball rapidly would pay dividends. The following 40 minutes were extraordinary, with England scoring six tries for a 35-3 win. Gary Rees, a Nottingham clubmate of Oti's, scored the first. Oti claimed a classical hat-trick by scoring the second, third and fourth, becoming the first England player to score three at Twickenham since Herbert Jacob in 1924. Trevor Ringland, a fine Irish winger, was run ragged. Underwood added the last two tries.

Twickenham was unbelieving, and delirious. Reports vary as to whether it was Oti's second or third try which prompted the first chorus of 'Swing Low'. It is usually attributed to a group from Douai School, but a group from Market Bosworth rugby club, Leicestershire has made a counter-claim, saying they started it in response to the first of Underwood's two tries. This matters more than is immediately obvious. Was the Twickenham crowd responding with warmth, if slightly clumsy racial politics, to the brilliance of a pioneering black Englishman by signing a negro spiritual associated with slavery, or simply striking up a song familiar from clubhouse drinking sessions, where it was often accompanied by crude hand gestures?

What was not in doubt was that the song stuck, and that England had a new star - Oti was on the cover of the following season's Rothmans Rugby Union Handbook - and potential it had not previously suspected.

"I think my career took a nosedive at that moment. My confidence went." Chris Oti

Oti played the whole of the 1989 Five Nations without scoring, but not without impact. France were so terrified of his running that a none too brilliantly executed dummy scissors with Will Carling gave England's new captain ample time and space to run to the line. And it was Oti's surge which set up the position from which Dean Richards scored the only try in the victory over Ireland.

That summer's Lions tour was prefaced by England's visit to Romania, a faded force compared to earlier in the 1980s. Oti scored four tries in a 58-3 win, but this time was overshadowed by a hat-trick from debutant Jeremy Guscott. Theirs was clearly a tricky relationship - Oti gets two mentions, both personally critical, in Guscott's memoirs.

As the Lions tour of Australia started Oti was a serious challenger to the more experienced Underwood and Ieuan Evans for the test places, but was injured in the match against New South Wales.

He played no more on the tour, and would not appear again in the Five Nations. But he clearly remained in the thoughts of selectors - going to Argentina in 1990 and scoring in a Test otherwise remembered as the beginning of Jason Leonard's record-breaking international career.

He missed much of the 1990-91 season, but six tries in Wasps' last four league matches confirmed he still had plenty to offer and helped him regain his England place at the beginning of the following autumn's World Cup.

England played the All Blacks in the opening match, pitching Oti against John Kirwan, perhaps the toughest marking assignment - give or take David Campese - in world rugby at the time. Oti let him escape once, and Michael Jones scored the only try of a tough contest.

Oti would later recall: "Looking back, I think my career took a nosedive at that moment. My confidence went. The whole point was that this was the sort of thing I was supposed to be doing to other people. Now it was happening to me."

Chris Oti leads the way against Romania in 1989 - his relationship with Jeremy Guscott, left, appears to have been fractious Russell Cheyne/Allsport

He was dropped after the following match against Italy and never reclaimed his place. He continued to play for Wasps until 1994, retiring when still short of his 30th birthday. He was to tell Independent journalist David Llewellyn that "I don't think I ever fulfilled my potential. I felt I could have done a lot better".

Thirteen matches and eight tries is an international career that might nowadays be completed within a single year. But Oti is recalled every time England fans sing 'Swing Low'. The song, or at least the two lines which are sung, retains its currency 27 years on as England's answer to Wales's 'Cwm Rhondda', Scotland's 'Flower of Scotland' and Ireland's 'Fields of Athenry'. It was so well established as early as 1991 that a version was released as England's official World Cup record, while the victorious team of 2003 returned complete with trophy on a British Airways jet repainted and renamed Sweet Chariot for the journey. It may, though, have lost something of its popularity with the Welsh choirs such as Morriston Orpheus for whom it was once a popular mainstay.

Llewellyn found Oti modest about his great day, preferring to talk about the brilliance of Underwood's second try. But he did also say: "I think that I contributed something else that day. That was a self-belief among the players. When we started scoring tries they came so easily and England certainly went on to greater things."

Underwood, who had scored four tries in 22 matches to that point, began a run of nine in six, en route to an all-time England record of 49. And 1988 represented a step change in English fortunes. For the previous quarter-century they had rarely been better than mediocre, and often worse. Since then they have never been worse than mediocre, and usually very much better.

Nor is that the end of Oti's significance. He also marks a crucial stage in rugby's adjustment to Britain's multi-racialism, an early step in the shift from when it was a surprise to see a black face in an England team to the present day, when it would be surprising if there were none.

So while the song remains the same, there was more to his career than a single great day. Many Happy Returns....