Good, but Hogg not quite top of the list

WHAT are we to make of the Strange Case of Stuart Hogg? The scorer of more international tries than anyone in the annals of the Scottish game, he will, unless events take a really grim turn, join Ross Ford and Chris Paterson on the podium of cap-winners at some point over the coming seven months.

And yet, and yet, and yet again. Leaving aside the impressive numbers underpinning a decade or more at the top level, there is something oddly insubstantial about his Test career – a suggestion that for too long, there was just a little less to his rugby than met the eye.

When the 30-year-old full-back from the border country announced his intention to pack it in after this autumn’s World Cup in France, there were plenty of kind words. Quite right too. Those of us who stood more chance of being awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics despite being scientifically illiterate than they did of winning a single Test cap are not obviously in a position to dismiss out of hand a player good enough to have harvested a hundred of them.

But you sense a reticence about placing Hogg at the very top of rugby’s batting order, to confuse sports for a second. This is understandable. For all the glittering prizes – the Lions tours, the flashes of free-running grandeur at a packed Murrayfield, the title-winning medals with Glasgow and Exeter – a cold-eyed reading of the ledger must also take into account the significant errors under pressure, the too-regular lapses of judgement.

Hogg has been box office, no question, but there are many, your columnist among them, who would have elevated the heir presumptive, Blair Kinghorn, some time ago.