Burgess is winning battle of hearts and minds
WHEN Sam Burgess arrived in Bath with a fractured eye socket and no rugby union experience, only a handful believed the former league star could make the World Cup grade in time.
Eleven months later, Burgess is a serious contender to start against Wales next Saturday in a game Stuart Lancaster’s side must win to be viewed as credible World Cup contenders.
Game by game, the doubters are receding as the 26-year-old transports his own brutish brand of muscularity, which saw him labelled the world’s best rugby league player, across to the union code.
On Friday night at Twickenham, Burgess impressed again in a 20-minute appearance off the bench that brought focus and direction to England’s midfield against a physical Fiji.
With Brad Barritt enduring a miserable night at inside centre, the real possibility of Burgess is a tantalising one. ‘Sam’s got a skill set of hitting, carrying, leading and having a presence and it’s a skill set Stuart and I both want,’ said Bath director of rugby Mike Ford, one of the few
who backed ‘Slammin Sam’ from the beginning of his union journey. ‘It’s phenomenal what he’s achieved. What he does off the field, with the confidence he gives others. Stuart and I can both see he’s going to make a difference.
‘You saw it in Paris in the warm-up when the team got confused and needed that presence on the field of someone who’ll say, “Don’t worry about anything else, for the next five minutes just give me the ball”.’
While England have settled on Burgess at inside centre, Bath will continue to play him at blindside flanker after the World Cup. ‘The key with a rugby league player is to figure out what their skill set will look like on a rugby union field,’ Ford, himself a former Great Britain league international, added.
‘That’s why I’ve not wavered with Sam being a six. In league he makes 50 or 60 plays a game. He won’t do that in rugby union but he got up to 57 in one game and he’s now consistently in the 40s. At 12, you’re going to be in the teens or low 20s. He’s doing double the work a centre would do.’
Wherever he plays, Burgess is slowly winning over those who believed he would fall by the wayside as so many league converts have before him. But after nurturing former Bradford Bulls star Kyle Eastmond, Bath believe they have a workable model to bring ‘leagueys’ across.
In Burgess’s first days at Bath he concentrated on union’s unique contact skills at the breakdown, completely alien to his former code. The notorious ‘padded cell’ — a 10 metre by five metre room attached to the gym at their Farleigh House base and lined with protective foam — provided the perfect training environment.
An eye injury suffered in the first minute of the NRL Grand Final, his last appearance in league, allowed time for more technical work at the start of his transition. ‘When he turned up with his fractured cheekbone it gave me five weeks to spend a lot of one-on-one time with him,’ said Bath forwards coach Neal Hatley. ‘We’ve got a little padded cell in the gym and we were able to put in a lot of time there.
‘The good thing about working with rugby league players is it’s a real blank page. They’ve got no bad habits to unlearn. You can start from scratch and drill things home. Sam’s very receptive so the learning process was very quick.’
Flanker Matt Garvey said: ‘There was all this hype about Sam but a few of us don’t know that much about rugby league. We had a look on YouTube and he was obviously a fantastic player but we wanted to see how he’d turn out. ‘From day one he looked to get the respect of his team-mates and the way he was willing to learn had a massive impact on that.’