Good news for Boris, the right is might again
The Prime Minister rather enjoys his rugger: indeed, he attended last month’s England-Wales fixture, the final Twickenham act of this season’s Eton Mess of a Six Nations Championship, thereby signalling to the organisers of the Cheltenham Festival that the cramming together of 250,000 racegoers in the teeth of a global health emergency was a spiffing idea.
As he surveys the Covid-19 carnage from the stately surroundings of Chequers, which is comfortably big enough to stage a Gold Cup meeting of its own, Mr Johnson will be overjoyed to read of a right-wing resurgence in his favourite team sport. Yes, the right is rampant once again after decades of leftie domination.
We are not talking rugby politics, of course: there are precious few Corbynites in Lenin caps to be seen in any of the boardrooms dotted across the union landscape. The action is out there on the field in the contrasting shapes of Cheslin Kolbe of South Africa, Damien Penaud of France and Kotaro Matsushima of Japan, each of whom is building a case for himself as the “world’s best wing”.
It is not before time. Since the game embraced the inevitability of professionalism a quarter of a century ago – the 25th anniversary of rugby’s belated recognition of what Basil Fawlty would have called the “bleedin’ obvious” falls in August – the left-wing specialists have had it all their own way, starting with a fellow by the name of Lomu, whose performances at the 1995 World Cup were as transformative as they were revelatory.
Jolly Jonah was still running over people at the subsequent tournament in 1999 despite his health being even’ more compromised than it had been in ’95, but the super-intelligent Wallaby back Joe Roff was also in No.11 by then, as was Christophe Dominici of Les Bleus.
The show-stopper wing in 2003 was the astonishing Fijian virtuoso Rupeni Caucaunibuca; four years later, the Springboks brought Bryan Habana to the party. Come the 2015 tournament, Julian Savea of New Zealand and DTH Van der Merwe of Canada were the main men. Throw in one or two other half-decent operators, from Joe Rokocoko and Sitiveni Sivivatu (“the most talented player I’ve ever coached,” says Warren Gatland) to Shane Williams and Semi Radradra, and you begin to understand the scale of the discrepancy. Even front-rankers with substantial experience of life in the No.14 shirt, like Jason Robinson and George North, performed their most celebrated deeds on the other side of the pitch.
Back in the dim and distant, the playing field was flatter. For every David Duckham there was a Gerald Davies; for every Rory Underwood, a Ieuan Evans. The French may have wheeled out Eric Bonneval and Patrice Lagisquet and Philippe Saint-Andre as unusually potent No.11s, but the All Blacks could always answer with a Stu Wilson or a John Kirwan. And then there was David Campese from deepest New South Wales. He could play a bit. More than a bit, actually.
How do we explain the fact that over the last decades, only a couple of prime All Black right wings – Jeff Wilson, Doug Howlett – have had a serious claim to the “world’s best” tag?
According to Brian Ashton, the former England coach and philosopher king of attacking rugby, there is an explanation of sorts. A simple one, but convincing nonetheless.
“For the vast majority of players, it’s just easier to pass the ball right to left,” he said this week. “If there’s another reason, it’s not obvious to me. I’ve seen some outstanding right wings in my time: I remember playing against Alan Morley of Bristol back in the 1970s – he was a wonderful ‘finisher’, as they call it today – and when I coached
Bath, we had Tony Swift on the end of things. He knew his way to the line. But when you look at that list of No.11s, the numbers certaindes ly tell a story.”
The most eye-catching left-to-right passes of recent years – the bullet-like delivery from the Argentine full-back Juan Martin Hernandez in the World Cup play-off match with France at Parc Princes in 2007; the floated gem from Finn Russell in the 2018 Calcutta Cup game at Murrayfield – live in the memory precisely because of their rarity. Such passes going the other way are two-a-penny.
So let’s hear it for Kolbe’s footwork, Penaud’s running lines, Matsushima’s instinctive finishing – each one a diamond in the desert.
There may be more to come from Radradra, while the try tallies of Jonny May of England and Josh Adams of Wales will soon be off the scale if they continue on their current trajectories. But at least we have a fresh contest between right and left, and for the first time in forever, the result is not a foregone conclusion.
“For the vast majority of players, it’s just easier to pass the ball right to left”