With his 132nd Test on Saturday the captain will move within 16 caps of Richie McCaw – and England should expect to be hit by an elemental force
Some statistics in rugby are barely worth collating. The “most carries” column, for example, does not necessarily reveal whether a player had a good or even a moderate all-round game. “Metres made” does not show the speed or subtle angles at which they were covered. The number of passes a team makes matters less than their accuracy, their timing and how often they split the opposing defence.
One list, however, never lies. It remains the original and the truest measure of a player’s ultimate worth: how often was he or she deemed good enough to represent their national side? To play international rugby even once is an achievement; to play it virtually non-stop for well over a decade, collecting more than a century of caps and multiple trophies, is to enter the realms of the superhuman.
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