Cap count is only part of World Cup success
England selection can be so spellbindingly bad when it comes to World Cups, it almost qualifies as a talent. Only the most imaginative of coaches could have backed two piano-shifters like Mike Tindall and Manu Tuilagi to make sweet creative music together at centre, as Martin Johnson did in 2011, or expected Sam Burgess to develop a fresh set of instincts in five minutes flat, as Stuart Lancaster did four years later.
Even Eddie Jones fell victim to the syndrome, just a few months ago in Japan. We know this because he told us so himself, admitting that some of his choices for the final against South Africa could not easily be mistaken for strokes of genius.
All of which appears to underline the importance of a long-settled team – the kind that picks itself, thereby marginalising the selector-in-chief and his bright ideas.
No side picked itself with more authority than the great New Zealand combination overseen by Steve Hansen, driven by Richie McCaw, and raised far above the common herd by a group of master practitioners blessed with rugby IQs best measured in the thousands rather than the hundreds.
They arrived at the 2015 tournament as reigning champions. More strikingly, the team that started the final averaged more than 60 caps a man – a figure significantly reduced, if you can believe it, by the absence of the prop Tony Woodcock, who was invalided out during the Pool stage and took 118 Tests’ worth of experience with him.
The first All Blacks to win a world title, in 1987, did not have 118 caps between them at the start of proceedings. They averaged seven a man. That’s right: seven.
John Gallagher made his Test debut in the opening match, while Joe Stanley, Grant Fox, Steve McDowall, Sean Fitzpatrick. John Drake, Murray Pierce, Alan Whetton and Wayne Shelford were all in single figures. So was the bewilderingly brilliant flanker Michael Jones, who had made the grand total of one international appearance. For Samoa.
Eight years later, Francois Pienaar’s triumphant Springboks were scarcely more seasoned, with only half a dozen of them in the double-digit category.
But the amateur era was a foreign country, and they did things differently there. By the time of the first professional World Cup in 1999, the international fixture list had grown longer than a Canadian forward’s beard and things had changed for good.
Australia, the winning side that year, boasted almost 40 caps a man, as did England in 2003 and the Boks in 2007. That still seems to be the going rate, but if any future contender could emulate the 2015 New Zealanders in raising it by a third, they would do so in a heartbeat.
This goes some way to explaining the widely reported desperation of Jones to prevent Tuilagi from heading abroad after his protracted fall-out with Leicester. The human bowling ball seems to have been around forever and a day, but he will not hit 30 until next
May and has been injured often enough to have kept himself fresh, if that makes sense.
Jones would love to pick him for the next World Cup in France in a little over three years’ time and as it is perfectly possible that two-thirds of the current line-up will still be in business, England could easily pitch up with an elite side boasting more veterans than a Remembrance Parade.
But weight of experience does not always equal success. If it did, England would be world champions. They were a fair bit stronger than the Boks in the cap-count when the two met in Yokohama…and a fat lot of good it did them.
It is not even clear that the more obviously gifted side automatically takes the spoils.
Think back to the 1995 final and ask yourselves how many of the victorious South Africans would have found places in the New Zealand side before kick-off. Joost van der Westhuizen,
below, for sure; Ruben Kruger and Andre Joubert perhaps. And now you’re struggling.
Yet the artisans prevailed over the artists that day, proving that rugby is not, and never will be, a statistical exercise. Which is, of course, the beauty of it.
Coaches routinely declare that they need 600 caps to win the big prize, yet for every Johnson or Carter who won a World Cup final after seeing and doing more than ancient Tiresias himself, there has been a neophyte who struggled to recognise himself in his own mirror.
If Marty Roebuck, Rob Egerton, Chris Rossouw, Kobus Wiese, Trevor Woodman, Richard Kahui and Nehe Milner-Skudder piled their caps on top of each other, they would barely reach Faf de Klerk’s waist. But their contributions back in the day, when it mattered, massively outweighed their fame now, when it doesn’t much matter at all.
Try telling that story through statistical modelling.
“The first All Blacks to win a world title, in 1987, averaged seven caps a man at the start”