In the salons of Bordeaux this week, relatively little attention was paid to Fin Baxter. The Harlequins have more star-studded names on their team on game day and either way it’s their actioning skills that monopolise the headlines. When the great local props consider their 22-year-old opponent, it will be like a quick amuse-bouche before settling on something more substantial.

You will not be the first to make this error of judgment. It doesn’t matter that Baxter looks even younger than his years and has the cherubic appearance of an altar boy waiting for the evening. He could be England’s next big thing if you listen to his captain Stephan Lewies “ ” In my opinion he is a future international pillar. He is ridiculous for a 22-year-old and will improve over time. He is a future leader of the club if he keeps his head down and continues to work. What I think he will do, because he is such a guy. I can’t talk about him enough.”

This is for the first impression. Baxter sometimes finds that this works to his advantage with people who expect the game’s top front-rowers to be unshaven, crazy, and outwardly creepy. “Sometimes people underestimated me. Sometimes it’s a matter of: “Who am I going to run against? He looks like the boy, let’s go to him.”They tend to reconsider it early enough. “I feel like I’ve sent some really good messages about this. I am by no means easy to choose.”

If the Bordeaux Mastodons lick their lips in the absence of the Joe Marler flint, good luck to them. At the starting of this season, when England’s head coach Steve Borthwick asked Marler to recommend all the young looseheads of the Premiership, whom he especially liked, Baxter’s name immediately surfaced. “When you talk to Joe, he talks really positively about Fin Baxter and the potential he has,” Borthwick said.

So who exactly is this baby-faced agent, a decent challenge to go on tour with the national team in Japan and New Zealand this summer? His CV is already extensive-Wellington College, England under-18 and under-20 captain, a European club who was able to play on both sides of the fray for the first time as a teenager – but on a midweek afternoon at Guildford, it’s his mature mindset that stands out. Take, for example, his views on how to deal with more established accessories with hat buckets. “Playing with fear in a contact sport is not good. There are a lot of high-quality accessories, especially in Europe, [but] when I face these guys, I’m not afraid of failure.

“If it’s not going well, I have to be there. And when things are going well, they have played against some of the best players in the world and are almost at that level. Coming so young has made things intimidating and is closely linked to anxiety. But I didn’t want to feel that way. I want to feel safe.”

However, even the best young accessories need to be patient and serve their learning. Baxter was always a reasonably big boy in his early days at Cobham RFC, but not extraordinarily so. There was no rugby in the family either. “The width comes from Mom’s dad, who is actually an artist. He is very stocky, but has never played rugby.”And although he has a brother named Calder, who makes sure that the siblings together reproduce the name of the former Scottish and British and Irish Lions captain Finlay Calder, he insists that there is no massive Scottish heritage either. “My parents had no idea. I turned about 12 and one of the other rugby parents said, “You’re not a Scot, you can’t call your kids that.’”