Robshaw took stick for being a team man
It has been widely and inaccurately reported that when W C Fields, master of the Jazz Age one-liner, composed an epitaph for his own grave, he came up with the line: “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Fields may or may not have been a funnier man than Chris Robshaw – the jury is out, although probably not for long – but there is a loose connection all the same.
“On the whole, I’d rather be in California.” The former England captain did not quite say this in the emotionally charged moments after his final home appearance for Harlequins in last week’s penultimate round of Premiership games, any more than Fields said precisely what he has long been quoted as saying, but the message was clear nonetheless.
For a variety of reasons, all of them wholly legitimate, Robshaw feels there are better places to spend what is left of his professional playing career than the Twickenham Stoop, much as he loves the place. Having slogged his guts out for 15 years, well over half of them for country as well as club, and absorbed almost as many emotional batterings as physical ones, he knows there must be a settling of accounts and would rather the settlement take place somewhere a little more seductive than the home counties.
“In your body and your mind, you know when the time is right,” he said after producing a characteristically proud and selfless performance in a losing cause against Wasps on Monday night. “For me, it’s right at the moment. I’m looking forward to another opportunity, another chapter in my life…going Stateside and enjoying a little Californian sun, playing some rugby and having a bit of fun.”
No one blessed with an unbiased eye and a sense of the virtues that lay at the heart of the Union game would begrudge the most honourable of flankers some chill-out time with the San Diego Legion club, beaten finalists in last year’s Major League tournament. He is moving to a city of gifts: a heaven-sent climate, low crime rates, a lively arts scene and minimal support for Donald J Trump. If you set this against life in Premiership land, where money is more scarce than a passive tackle from Owen Farrell, it is not hard to understand Robshaw’s thinking.
Much of the criticism of Robshaw during his testing spell as national captain under Stuart Lancaster was misplaced: indeed, there were so many different shades of wrong in the verbal and written attacks on the back rower’s international credentials that the nay-sayers should have left their microphones and laptops at home and armed themselves with a palette instead. Together with a palette knife, just in case Robshaw passed with his shoulder blades within stabbing distance.
Some journalists fought bitterly against his England captaincy for no better reason than that his Press conferences were “uninteresting”. They pushed the claims of another flanker, the frank and forthright Tom Wood, on the grounds that the Northampton player was more likely to generate some decent copy.
But Robshaw, essentially a shy man
“Much of the criticism of Robshaw during his testing spell as national captain was misplaced”
whose appearances in public session were almost always marked by a steadfast refusal to say something he did not mean just for the sake of a headline, was hardly the first Red Rose skipper to view the Fourth Estate with suspicion. You could count the number of times Steve Borthwick reduced his audience to fits of helpless laughter on the fingers of no hands. Martin Johnson wasn’t a comic genius either. If those two had set themselves up as a double act, it would have been the equivalent of the Wise and Wise Show.
Robshaw’s leadership at Test level was scarred by two or three moments of indecision, but those faults were massively outweighed by scores of error-free performances. Time and again, he was top of the England list for “involvements”, to use the modern word, and he never disappeared from view when the going was bad. When Wales smashed their nearest and dearest 30-3 in Cardiff in 2013, his resilience of spirit was something to behold. Without him, England would have lost REALLY heavily.
That match pretty much did for his hopes of touring Australia with the British and Irish Lions. As Warren Gatland, the man doing the selecting, said subsequently, the Wallabies had specialist openside flankers coming out of their ears. As Robshaw was a “No.6 playing as a No.7, a six and a half at best”, there was no persuasive reason to include him.
But we should remember that Robshaw spent the vast majority of his international career playing out of position because that is what the England coaching staff asked him to do. He made a very decent fist of it, too. He may have been a “six and a half ”, but the “six” part was of a very high calibre and the “half ” was more than adequate against all but the very best.
Confirmation came this week from James Horwill, who skippered the Wallabies in that 2013 Test series before joining Quins for a late-career gallop around the old country.
“Unbelievable player and an even better bloke,” he wrote. “I’m lucky to have played alongside him.”
This from a man who shared dressing rooms with Michael Hooper and David Pocock. Says it all, really.