When Leicester kick off their European Champions Cup semi-final against Racing 92 at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground on Sunday afternoon we will get the chance to see a master and a rapidly blossoming apprentice face off as the hubs of their teams.
We all know about the excellence of Dan Carter, Racing’s World Cup-winning, former All Black fly-half, but in Freddie Burns Leicester have a No10 who has begun to add the maturity of a real team player to his more entertaining, slightly maverick skills, which I remember well from when I brought him to Gloucester as a youth.
Racing’s form in Carter’s first season in European rugby tells us a great deal about the ingredients needed for a team to do well. All the money in the world does not necessarily buy success if it is not spent on the right players, and this is not just about identifying and buying talented players, it is about finding the key players who will play more for the team than for themselves.
French sides have had an enormous amount of money for some time, from Pau and Stade Français to Toulon and Racing, but that money has not always bought trophies.
Jonny Wilkinson must be one of the greatest team men the game has seen – perhaps lacking the flair of some of his rivals but head and shoulders above them in terms of willingness to sacrifice his own game for those around him. Just ask Toulon fans how the extravagantly gifted Quade Cooper, supposed to be Wilkinson’s successor, has got along this season.
Wilkinson’s signing in 2009 was undoubtedly the catalyst for Toulon’s transition from a team of gilded individuals to a trophy-winning machine and Carter looks like making a similar impact at Racing, who have for some time been an impressive collection of players but now they look an impressive team.
Of course the best team players are among the best players full stop, but sometimes the key character you need is not necessarily the outright best on the pitch in their position. Along with Carter, Racing bought Chris Masoe last summer, a Kiwi back-row who has always been an excellent player, but who is long in the tooth at 36. Masoe, who signed after three successful years at Toulon including two winning appearances in European finals, holds his own on the pitch but more importantly, I am told, he runs the dressing room and keeps those around him on an even keel.
It was similar with Saracens when they signed Steve Borthwick in 2008. They had spent big money on many big names in the preceding 10 years with players such as Francois Pienaar, Michael Lynagh and Philippe Sella keeping the crowds entertained, but without consistent success. Then they signed a great team man in Borthwick, who was soon followed by Brendan Venter as head coach. His approach was very much team first, and it was this era that laid the foundations for the Saracens we see today.
Unlike Saracens, Leicester have always been a club where the team is the star no matter who is on the pitch. When they have been at their best over the past 15 years or so you often barely knew the names of some of the key players – they were just Leicester.
When Burns arrived from Gloucester two years ago he played a naturally individual game and it has taken him time to settle into the Leicester way of doing things. He had been in the England team and gone to New Zealand in 2014 and was flying high as Gloucester’s playmaker. He then moved to Leicester but soon fell behind the more straightforward skills of Owen Williams and struggled to get in the team. About a year ago he looked to be in danger of being spat out of the back.
Since Aaron Mauger, the former Leicester and All Black centre, came to the club as head coach last summer, Burns has blossomed. They have retained the hard edge and team dynamic that are Leicester’s hallmarks but Mauger’s influence seems to have freed them to play a bit more. This has clearly been to Burns’s benefit as someone who has a touch of the maverick about him. That individual flair, though, has been allied to a team-first mentality, which gives Burns’s game a much better balance.
If you watched Burns two or three years ago, you may have seen three or four startlingly clever bits of play, but not always to the benefit of the team, whereas when you look at what Carter does for Racing, there is rarely anything startling to see. He just does all the right things to allow those around him to play. He kicks at the right time and he passes at the right time. It is nothing amazing in itself, but he does it all so well and makes so many good decisions that it allows the team to function as a whole, and that is the key to high-class fly-half play.
It is an approach to the game that Burns is still developing and I look forward to seeing how he goes in Sunday’s semi-final. The paradox is that in what is likely to be a tight game, between two evenly matched sides, a single moment of magic could prove the key. What a time it would be for Burns to show us that, along with those newly honed team skills, he still has that natural spark that can win a game for his side.
