IT is a long way from The Northern Echo Arena to the Tokyo Stadium, the host venue for the opening game of next year’s Rugby World Cup, but for Darlington Mowden Park back rower Matt Heaton, the hope is that regular rugby at one ground will lead to a landmark appearance at the other.

Heaton will play in the biggest game of Mowden’s season this afternoon when he lines up in his side’s National One encounter with runaway league leaders Coventry hoping to halt the Midlands club’s seemingly unstoppable march to the title. However, in nine months’ time, the 25-year-old will tackle a series of international games that could lead to even bigger and better things.

Having failed to book a place at next year’s World Cup through the North American qualifying programme, Heaton’s native Canada have a final chance to make it to the tournament in Japan when they compete in November’s World group repechage.

Eight teams will lock horns, with one finals place up for grabs, and while he freely admits that Canadian rugby is not in a great position at the moment, Mowden’s number eight is determined to make it to the pinnacle of the global game.

“We didn’t make it through the Americas 2 World Cup qualifiers, so now we have to go through the World Cup repechage tournament,” said Heaton, who is set to line up in a summer Test against Scotland as the Canadian national team attempt to get as much top-level experience as possible ahead of their final qualifying showdown. “That’s the last one, so it’s make or break.

“We don’t know who we’re up against until after the summer Tests. It’s really complicated in terms of who might drop in, but we need to win either three or four games, and there’s only going to be one team that gets through to make the World Cup. There’ll be one or two traditionally strong teams in there.

“It’s been a bit tough lately for Canada. The game is changing, and I don’t think we’re quite where we need to be at the minute. We definitely have the physical attributes within the guys, I think we’re just a little bit behind in terms of the infrastructure of getting guys through and playing top-quality rugby.”

Canada is hardly renowned as a rugby hotbed, but the North American nation boasts a reasonable pedigree in the sport, having made it to the quarter-finals of the 1991 Rugby World Cup, thanks to wins over Fiji and Romania.

Nevertheless, it remains unusual for a young Canadian to find himself on the rugby field, and Heaton stumbled into the sport more through luck than judgement when he initially took it up as a teenager.

“I played 101 different sports,” he said. “I played everything, but the (American) football coach at my school also coached rugby. I wanted to play football as early as possible, but you were only allowed to play rugby before you could play football, so I thought I’d try that to get in the coach’s good books.

“I played rugby, and still remember starting out to this day. You’re trying to learn a sport that you’ve never even seen before. I had no idea what rugby even was. I showed up and was 13 at the time, and was watching the older high school students who were maybe 17 or 18. They were scrumming, and I was going, ‘What the hell is that?’ But when you find out you can run into people, then as a 13-year-old boy, that’s pretty cool.”

It did not take long for Heaton to earn his first representative cap, and by the time he was leaving the collegiate system, he was on the brink of Canada’s senior team.

He could have remained in his homeland, playing for some of the amateur outfits that are strung along Canada’s west coast, but fearing his development could be stunted by a lack of meaningful competition, opted to head across the Atlantic in search of a new rugby-playing home.

“I had mates in Wales who took me in and let me coach surf to get on my feet,” he said. “They’d been over to Canada and played club rugby at my club, so they said I could hang out with them and get sorted.

“I was in Bridgend in south Wales for four or five months, but my coach from over in Canada put some feelers out and, at the time, Dan Temm was leaving Otley to join the Falcons. Otley needed a number seven, so that’s where I came in. I moved to Leeds and played at Otley for a couple of seasons.

“When the season ended after the World Cup, I said I wanted to make the Canadian squad for the next World Cup. I knew I needed to move up the food chain, and I knew Mowden would be a good step for me with my career. I came here, absolutely loved it, and decided to stay another season.”

Today’s game provides an opportunity for Heaton and his team-mates to test themselves against the best team outside English rugby’s top two divisions, and while promotion to the Championship looks an unlikely ambition given the 21-point gap currently separating them from Coventry, a top-two finish would still represent a considerable achievement.

“We set goals when we had a team meeting at the beginning of the season, and my group said straight away we wanted to be in the top four at Christmas,” said Heaton. “Then when Christmas came we said, ‘Right, that’s it, we want to at least be in the top four at the end of the season’.

“We’ve raised the bar again now, though, and said that we want to finish at least second. To have that drive in the squad is great.”