London: About 8am on Saturday, David Pocock will wake and turn his attention to the day ahead.

By 4pm he will be playing in the biggest game of his career, rumbling onto opposition ball and fixing himself with immovable force as the Wallabies try to wrest destiny from the clutches of the world champion All Blacks.

There might be blood dripping again from his broken nose, while the calf muscle that almost tore against Wales – threatening to tear in two the collective hopes of Australian rugby fans – creaks and twists beneath him.

But there in his riverside hotel room, mist rising off the Thames, the man lauded as the most influential player of the Rugby World Cup will quiet his mind.

He will think about what's important to him today, what he can work on, and the things that really matter.

"The whole thing of individual achievement is such a myth," Pocock says, defusing the hype as quickly as it pools around him.

"There are obviously exceptions to the rule, but generally people have as much to be grateful for in terms of the support that they have and the sacrifices that other people have made to get them to where they are."

One of the first things new Wallabies coach Michael Cheika did this year was ask his players to think about why they played rugby.

They were all adequate footballers. But few of them were in touch with why the played the game or who they represented when they pulled on the Test jersey.

So in a hotel conference room one Sunday morning during the Super Rugby season, Cheika pulled out reams of butchers' paper, handed out pens, and had the players write down their values. At another meeting later in the season, he asked them to talk about their families.

Pocock sits at the thoughtful end of the footballers' spectrum, but it might be fair to say that after a season under Cheika he has never been more aware of why he will shove his head over ball after ball at Twickenham in front of 80,000 people.

"The sacrifices my family made, for Mum and Dad to move to Australia, if it wasn't about the kids they probably would have stayed there and tried to make a plan, and certainly never would have considered moving from Zimbabwe," he says.

"All the support I've had since then, from all sorts of coaches and people. That's one of the really humbling things, when you run out there with that jersey on, you're not doing it for yourself."

The Pocock family's flight from Robert Mugabe-era Zimbabwe is well documented. As is a young David's struggle for equilibrium as an adolescent growing up in Australia.

His storied physical prowess – the low centre of gravity, powerful hindquarters and Popeye chest, all of which earned him the nickname Bam Bam in his early professional days – is at least partly the product of that early turmoil.

Pocock maintains close links with the country of his birth, and visits yearly to oversee the operations of a charity there he founded.

They are the people he will think about in the morning quiet on Saturday, and again when he pulls over his head the Australian No.8 jersey before kick off. Likewise, he knows they will be thinking of him.

"There's a lot of people in Zimbabwe who are cheering on the Wallabies at the moment and to me, that's pretty special," he says.

"Growing up outside a small town like Gweru – even in Zimbabwe we used to be looked down on as this sleepy little town – coming from a place like that, it's pretty special to represent people from there, who identify with there."

The Wallabies need this thoughtful, driven, gym junkie-hippie, who raises chooks in suburban Canberra and was arrested last year for chaining himself to a coal mining operation in Maules Creek, NSW.

They need him at his destructive best, the combine harvester of the Australian back row, who leads the tournament for turnovers won and is harder to move off the ball than Richie McCaw from in front of last feet at a ruck.

Pocock's presence in London is a minor miracle after two knee reconstructions and a high ankle sprain cost him two years out of the game between the last World Cup and this one.

They were dark years in the rehab wilderness and yet his former Brumbies coach, Laurie Fisher, says they are probably the reason for his imperious form.

"He's outstanding, he's probably better than what he was previously," Fisher says from two hours up the road at Gloucester, where he now coaches.

"He'd been in rugby for a long time and he'd really taken a battering, so as hard as it's been to have two years out of the game it's actually put him in unbelievable physical condition, and that's partly because it's a hard road to hoe."

Pocock admits there were moments after his knee went the second time when he wondered if he was cut out for top flight rugby. But the doubt never lingered long enough to bite, and the Wallabies go into battle with one of Test rugby's great warriors.

A warrior with a heart of gold, who carries on his Popeye shoulders the hopes of a nation, and of a small rural outpost in Zimbabwe.

"It's a weird thing to be able to influence how people feel by the effort you put in on the weekend, or the result that you get or don't get," he says.

"Representing those grassroots, that's what it's about. All the young kids who genuinely love playing rugby and love what the Wallabies represent to them. That's pretty cool, you want to be putting everything in to make those people proud."