Richard Wigglesworth has been answering a lot of phone calls lately. The messages from friends and family were less out of concern for the hip injury he has just recovered from and more about the north London club’s recent poor run of form that saw them register back-to-back defeats in Europe to Clermont, as well as three consecutive Premiership losses.

“Everyone was ringing me, ‘what has happened? what are you doing?’,” says Wigglesworth. “It is amazing how many more phone calls I’ve gotten and how many more questions I’ve been asked in the last few weeks. You can win as many games and titles and no-one will ask about it but if you lose a few games on the bounce everyone wants to know what is going on, what is happening. We are a miserable lot in England! We do like that sort of story but I suppose it makes it all the sweeter when you pull out of it and you can do something.”

There were similar calls made after Wigglesworth’s first Saracens appearance back in 2010. “My first Saracens cap was against London Irish at Twickenham and we lost,” he recalls. “There was an ‘ah, no what have I done?’ type moment. Saracens had been beaten in the Premiership final the year before I came, we had put a strong squad together but then we turned up for that first game and we were rubbish.

“Then there is that doubt in your mind, but we sorted it out a week later. We won at home to Sale, I had to play my old club pretty quickly. I have not thought about that one in quite a while because you try to erase the losses as best you can.”

Richard Wigglesworth (left) training with Saracens credit: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY

Now on the cusp of making his 200th appearance for Saracens, Wigglesworth believes that it is during the darkness of defeat that future victories are forged, and that the difficult spell at the end of 2017 could be their making in 2018.

“No-one has it easy all the time and it is the tough parts that make the season. No season you go through is easy. You have to go through the tough bits to learn how to grow and to have something to hang on to like, ‘we were there, so let’s get to a better place’. Hopefully, when we look back at the end of the season, that will be a positive that we had to go through it.”

With wins over the festive period against Leicester Tigers and Worcester Warriors, Saracens look to be returning to something like their best and the positive outlook continues as Wigglesworth, along with Billy Vunipola and Maro Itoje, makes his injury comeback against an in-form Wasps at the Ricoh Arena on Sunday afternoon. Wigglesworth’s return is about a month ahead of schedule.

Richard Wigglesworth's return is a month ahead of schedule credit: GETTY IMAGES

At 34, and now in his eighth season with Saracens, he is a much-changed man from the one who journeyed south from Sale with his wife Lindsay, then expecting their eldest child Matilda. Before his move to London, Wigglesworth considered only what happened on the rugby field as important, not thinking too much about club culture. It was former Saracens CEO Edward Griffiths, and director of rugby Brendan Venter, that altered his perspective.

“I’ll be honest, when I came down to look at the club, they were selling me this vision of off-the-field and I wasn’t bothered. I believed in what they were doing on the field but I got here and I got way more than I could have hoped or bargained for, they just understood that off-the-field side of it so well, how they treated people and how positive they were and what an impact it had around the squad.

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“They were a force of nature, in bringing positivity to work every day and how important it was to be happy. That changed my outlook a lot on certain things, like how to run a rugby club. I never had that before, I had never known anyone else to do it like that. They were only six months into the project when I signed, so it wasn’t the Saracens it is now, in terms of everybody knows about it.”

Perhaps the best endorsement of Wigglesworth’s time at Saracens is his admission that he had never planned to stay so long, “I initially said I would do this for a maximum of three years and go back north. But here we are, eight or nine years later, and we’re still here and very settled.”