Read leads fight against rise of the machines
“It almost creates a nostalgia for the old days when subs referred to underwater boats”
Kieran Read stands out in a land of giants for a reason other than his status as leader of the best team on the planet. His name springs to mind over the chorus of international coaches babbling on about the Test arena having escalated into a 23-man game. In that event, nobody has told the captain of New Zealand... and nobody will.
The obsession with substituting around five-eighths of every pack in every international does not apply to Read. The Global Positioning System (GPS) may have been behind Ross Moriarty’s absurdly early exit against England but no machine will ever tell the All Blacks to give their skipper the shepherd’s crook.
In a Six Nations where coaches talk of “emptying the tank” as if certain players in certain positions are not fuelled to go the distance, Read stands apart – the supreme 80minute man, the one who never runs out of gas.
At a time when more and more forwards seem programmed for no longer than an hour at most, the double World Cup winners assume that their totemic No.8 will be there from start to finish, and at every point in between.
Since August 2015 the All Blacks have played 25 Tests. Read has played every minute of every one, except for the last five against Argentina in Buenos Aires last summer when, the game safely won, they hauled him off to give Elliot Dixon the briefest of runs.
No European player has made a better fist at keeping up with Read than Jamie Heaslip. The Irish Lion, as durable as ever at 33, confronted France yesterday having missed fewer than 40 minutes over the course of his last 19 Tests.
A coterie of other second-cumback row players are in the habit of lasting the full 80 more often than not – Maro Itoje and Billy Vunipola from England, Ireland’s Devin Toner and CJ Stander, the Scotland lock Johnny Gray, his French counterpart Yoann Maestri and the Springbok Eben Etzebeth.
Despite recent events, Wales can add two of their own to that list. Taulupe Faletau was positively Read-like until his transfer from the Dragons to Bath coincided with a few dents going into his aura of indestructibility.
Ross Moriarty is the other, ironically so given that Wales now say that the data from the GPS gadget tucked into his jersey showed an empty tank. And this from a player who played every minute of all three Tests in New Zealand on successive Saturdays last summer.
It begs a nagging question about who makes the call – the coach or the machine?
Over the past 12 months, only four players have completed ten or more Tests without being bothered by an official raising their number in neon on a touchline board. Heaslip and the Kiwi lock Sam Whitelock have ten to their game, the redoubtable Wallaby flanker Michael Hooper has 11, one behind the untouchable Read.
Over those same 12 months, front row forwards putting in 80 minutes can be counted on the fingers of two hands.
Dan Cole, the England tighthead, and Ireland’s loosehead Jack McGrath have done it three times each, Gethin Jenkins, Tomas Francis (both Wales), Zander Fagerson (Scotland), Scott Sio, Sekope Kepu (both Australia) and Werner Koch (South Africa) once.
Even fewer hookers have managed it – Adriaan Strauss (South Africa), Steven Moore (Australia), Rory Best (Ireland), Guilhem Guirado (France) and Dane Coles (New Zealand). It almost creates a nostalgia for the old days when subs referred to underwater boats and teams finished exactly as they had started.
England, glory be, did manage that once during the professional era, against Argentina in Buenos Aires in June 2002 when their reserves won, 26-18. Despite picking five new caps (Michael Horak, Geoff Appleford, Ben Johnston, Phil Christophers and Alex Codling), Clive Woodward refused to use any of the seven subs.
It could never happen again, not now that the game has been taken over by heartless computers with the capacity to tell the coach when someone’s time is up.