SO how was the World Cup for you, Tony? “That’s a low blow,” grins Tony Froggatt. Well, at least he’s used to it. The Australian-born chief executive of Scottish & Newcastle, Britain’s biggest brewer, has spent much of the last fortnight ducking the jibes of his workforce and suppliers about the rugby.

It could have been worse. “Lucky we’re based in Scotland, eh?” he says, with a wiggle of his eyebrows.

And did he catch the game? Yes, funnily enough, he did have pressing business in Australia, so he did attend the main matches. “I had a very important meeting with our Foster’s team,” he says with a straight face. “All I can say is that England deserved to win.”

Is that the sound of teeth being gritted? He laughs. Froggatt, 55, six months in the job, is beginning to relax himself into S&N. Last week he presented his first set of interim results to the City — up to expectation, no surprises — now he’s going to start dealing with the press. It’s what he has been looking forward to, what he took the job for: running a public company, dealing with investors, analysts and press.

It’s also what was missing from a long CV that includes Gillette, Heinz, drinks giant IDV and Seagram. And given that, on first meeting, he comes across as an affable Aussie charmer with a mid-Atlantic accent and a mischievous wit — “yeah, it does get me into trouble sometimes” — you can’t imagine he will have too much difficulty with the public-front side of the business.

But he wasn’t hired for his affability. S&N pulled him out of semi-retirement in Sydney because it wanted a fresh approach in its drive to recreate itself as a global beer giant. The Edinburgh-based company, once best known for its Newcastle Brown ale and slightly fusty management style, has recently dispensed with its leisure and pub interests, and bought heavily into Europe and Russia. It has emerged clutching a fistful of top brands: Kronenbourg, Baltika (Russia’s No 1 beer) to add to John Smith, Beamish and Foster’s. It has also bought Bulmer to bring Strongbow cider to the table.

Next it wants to push these brands into markets with big growth potential. This is where Froggatt, with decades of international brand experience, comes in. He has worked just about everywhere with just about everyone, and he still has a point to prove. Froggatt was pushed out of a top job at IDV when its owner, GrandMet, merged with Guinness to create Diageo back in 1998, and he hasn’t forgotten.

“I’d always worked on the basis that if you worked really hard, you’d be rewarded, and up to that time I was,” he says. But the jobs had to be shared round, and his name dropped off the list. “Yeah, I was really pissed off about it, to put it mildly, but that’s life and you can’t cry about it — we’re big boys.”

Another who witnessed it says it was just “pure politics”. Froggatt, whose first marriage had foundered shortly before, remembers it as the toughest of times. He left eventually for a great job at Seagram (which again was sold from under him last year) but the rejection still hurts.

And five years later he’s back in Britain as a plc boss. And what happened to the guy who got his job? A warm glow suffuses Froggatt’s chubby features. “No idea. Life is full of ironies,” he says.

Medium-height, blond and balding, sporting a good-living tum, he’s sitting with his jacket off at a long polished table in S&N’s quaintly old-fashioned London outpost — a townhouse in St James’s. Froggatt had entered the room with a question on his lips before we’d even said hello.

“Now look, I’ve just read something you wrote where you described someone as a morose gerbil. What the hell are you are going to say about me?” He grins and puts out a hand. That’s his style: informal, direct, but more sensitive to nuance than initial perceptions might suggest. He has, in the past, proved adept at running touchy joint ventures, heading Cinzano out of Geneva for five years when it was co-owned by GrandMet and the Cinzano and Agnelli families.

Sir George Bull, his mentor at GrandMet and now non- executive chairman of J Sainsbury, says Froggatt handled a tough situation brilliantly. “Tony has a great Aussie knack for putting his point of view across forthrightly, but never offensively. He spots what needs doing, puts it in front of people and gets on with it.”