A tribute to unlucky Rory...
ANOTHER week ends with another player forced to accept the grim reality that he has played his last game. Rory O’Loughlin’s premature exit from Exeter following shoulder surgery will reinforce widespread disbelief that Ireland got round to picking the 30-year-old Dubliner just once.
Picking him in a team of OCW’s (One Cap Wonders) is the very least that can be done in the circumstances, not as a sop but as a tribute. O’Loughlin’s inclusion in a threequarter line featuring a pair of grossly under-used England wings ought to leave him in no doubt about that.
Red Rose followers of a certain vintage still wonder how someone as good as Andrew Harriman, born a prince in his native Nigeria and duly rechristened ‘The Prince of Pace’ at Harlequins, played one Test for England, against the Wallabies in 1988.
A quarter of a century later, in Salta,
Christian Wade introduced himself in a thumping English win over the Pumas. More than ten years later, he has long abandoned hopes of ever being picked again.
This OCW XV is not meant to be the best although it does include the best one-cap wonder I have seen, David Bishop of Pontypool who scored Wales’ solitary try in a lost cause against Andrew Slack’s 1984 Grand Slam Wallabies.
ONE CAP WONDERS
15 Mark van Gisbergen (England v Australia, 2005)
14 Andrew Harriman (England v Australia, 1988)
13 Rory O’Loughlin (Ireland v Japan, 2017)
12 Sean McCahill (Ireland v Fiji, 1995)
11 Christian Wade (England v Argentina, 2013)
10 Stephen Myler (England v Argentina, 2013)
9 David Bishop (Wales v Australia, 1984)
1 David Milne (Scotland v Japan, 1991)
2 Wayne Hall (Wales v Western Samoa, 1988)
3 Mike Knill (Wales v France, 1976)
4 Olly Kohn (Wales v Ireland, 2013)
5 Billy Holland (Ireland v Canada, 2016)
6 Robin Copeland (Ireland v Georgia, 2014)
7 Ibrahim Diarra (France v Italy, 2008)
8 Ben Skirving (England v South Africa, 2007)