Top 10 hybrids in rugby: The man nicknamed after a horror film sets the template while Springboks’ ‘blunt instrument’ changes the game
Top 10 hybrids in rugby: The man nicknamed after a horror film sets the template while Springboks' 'blunt instrument' changes the game
In the 2020 Six Nations, Eddie Jones moved Tom Curry to number eight and Jonathan Joseph to the wing, and was told for his trouble that he had lost the plot.
Neither switch would qualify for this list, because both stay inside a unit, but the reaction told you how little appetite there was for a coach who treated a position as a job rather than a birthright.
What he said next matters.
He predicted that squads would get smaller, money would get tighter and multi-skilled players would stop being a curiosity, naming Jack Nowell as a wing who could play flanker and Ben Earl as a flanker who could play wing. That autumn John Mitchell had Ollie Thorley running as a flanker in training and described the plan as creating a hybrid position in the starting selection rather than waiting for the bench to solve it.
England reacted as England usually does. English rugby likes its players shrink-wrapped and labelled, one position per punnet, best before printed on the side, and anything that arrives without a barcode gets sent back to the depot. A tighthead is a tighthead. A wing is a wing. A man who might be both is a gimmick, and probably foreign.
Six years on, the sides doing it are in Pretoria and Paris; the man who was going to be England’s centre-cum-flanker has finally been given half an hour there, and Rassie Erasmus has built a selection philosophy on the idea that a bench is a set of jobs rather than a set of shirts.
A word on what counts. The crossover has to be between units, so a forward doing a back’s job or a front-rower doing a back-rower’s. Lock to flanker is out, because half the second rows in the world cover six and it says nothing about anybody. The straight fly-half to full-back swap is out for the same reason, though a back who genuinely covers four shirts across the line is a different animal and stays in.
Three near-misses worth the mention. Thomas du Toit scrummages on both sides, the rarest crossover in the game, and only misses out because a list of ten cannot carry everything. Jamie Osborne has played five positions for Ireland but duplicates a man already here.
Jan-Hendrik Wessels covers hooker for the Bulls and is waiting on a Test to prove it.
10. Jordie Barrett (New Zealand)
Full-back, wing, inside centre and fly-half cover, with a goalkicking boot that makes any of the four viable rather than theoretical. Barrett has spent his career being moved to wherever New Zealand’s problem is that week, and the Leinster sabbatical confirmed what the All Blacks already knew: that a 12 who can play 15 changes what a side can do with its back field.
He has also packed down on the blindside on a good number of occasions, at the end of Tests and through yellow card periods, which is a crossover between units rather than a shuffle along the back line and puts him in the same bracket as the forwards further up this page.
What keeps him at ten is that it has always been a repair job rather than a plan. New Zealand reach for him when the numbers are wrong, not because somebody sat down on a Monday and decided a 12 should be in the scrum on Saturday, and that is the difference between the nine men above him and the tenth.
9. Juan Cruz Mallía (Argentina)
Four positions across the back line, including the wing and outside centre, separate him from the fly-halves who fill in at full-back and get called versatile for it. Mallía is a genuine 13 rather than a full-back who can stand there, and Toulouse have used him wherever the fixture demanded without any drop in what he offers.
Argentina have leaned on that flexibility through a period when their back three has been unsettled, and their midfield has been rebuilt around Chocobares and Cinti. Mallía has been the constant, and the fact that nobody can tell you his best position is a compliment rather than a criticism.
8. Ben Earl (England)
The man Eddie Jones was talking about in 2020, and the clearest illustration of how slowly the idea has travelled in England. Jones named Earl as a flanker who could play wing. John Mitchell said he was an option at centre. Five years later, Steve Borthwick gave him half an hour in the midfield in Cardiff, in a match England won 68-14, which is the English way of taking a risk.
Borthwick has since said out loud that Earl is the designated centre cover, and there were cameos there against Japan, New Zealand and Italy before that. He has the passing range for it and the fitness to survive a defensive shift he was never built for.
The caveat is that he has won every cap in the back row. This is a player England talk about as a hybrid rather than one they have committed to using as one, which is a distinction the seven men above him do not have to worry about.
7. Oscar Jégou (France)
The current French version, and unlike the man above him, it is happening now rather than in the archive. Jégou spent thirty-four minutes in the midfield against Ireland having come on as a replacement flanker, and did the job well enough that it was not the story of the match afterwards, which is the highest compliment a hybrid selection can be paid.
He is an openside who covers eight in the ordinary run of things, and that alone would not get him near this list. The centre cover is what puts him here, and at 23 he is the one most likely to make it a habit rather than an emergency.
6. Sekou Macalou (France)
The most extreme thing anyone has attempted in this category. In November 2022, Galthié sent a Stade Français back-rower onto the wing after twelve minutes against South Africa. Danty went off, Moefana moved in from the wing to cover midfield, and Macalou spent the rest of the afternoon at 11, carrying, chasing kicks and putting men into touch as though he had never done anything else. No coach has gone that far since, and the fact that it worked has not made anybody braver.
The reason he is sixth rather than first is that the international rugby stopped. He has not played for France since coming off the bench in the 2023 World Cup quarter-final, last season brought four starts in eighteen appearances in Paris, and the hip that has troubled him for years now dictates an adapted training load. Stade Français denied the retirement stories in July and confirmed he will see out his contract to 2027.
Ranking him at all is a judgement that the idea he proved is worth more than the twelve months of evidence he has not been able to provide.
5. Deon Fourie (South Africa)
Nobody else on this list has won a World Cup final by going back, after years in another position, to the specialist front-row job he started his career in. Fourie began as a hooker, spent the bulk of a long professional career shuttling between there and the back row, and went to France in 2023 as a loose forward who could cover two. When Malcolm Marx was ruled out during the pool stage, South Africa called up a fly-half rather than a hooker, leaving Fourie and van Staden to cover the number two shirt between them. The final was a 7-1 bench and he was the man held back in case something went wrong.
Something went wrong after three minutes. Frizell landed on Mbonambi’s standing leg, the hooker went off with a knee injury, and a man who had spent recent years as a flanker played 76 minutes at hooker in a World Cup final with a badly damaged shoulder, throwing into the lineouts and scrummaging against New Zealand. South Africa won 12-11. He has said since then, that he did not realise he had also been made captain.
The recall this week is the postscript. Erasmus brought him back for the four-Test series against New Zealand on the strength of a first match in thirteen weeks in which he scored, won two turnovers and made three tackles inside fifteen seconds, and SA Rugby called his value as a hybrid flanker and hooker invaluable. Thirty months of surgery and rehabilitation sit between that final and this squad, and the 2023 final remains his 13th cap and his last.
4. Marco van Staden (South Africa)
Openside, number eight and hooker is the widest spread of jobs in this ten, and it is not a theory. Van Staden wears the 6 shirt because that is where South Africa put their fetcher, which catches out plenty of people reading a team sheet from the northern end. Erasmus started him at eight against Italy in Turin with no specialist hooker on the bench, on the reasoning that it made no difference whether he began in the back row and moved to two or the other way round.
He trains at hooker every week with Daan Human, which is the part that matters. Throwing into a Test lineout is not something a flanker can improvise on a Saturday, and the fact that South Africa are willing to put the set piece in his hands is the difference between a hybrid and a man wearing an unfamiliar number.
Last season he started six Tests on the flank, one at eight, and covered both loose forward and hooker off the bench.
3 Levani Botia (Fiji)
The longest-running version of this in world rugby, and the one that came before anybody thought to give it a name. Fiji have picked Botia at openside and at both centre positions across a decade, and La Rochelle have done the same, without either ever treating it as an experiment.
He turns 37 this year, scored his 50th club try in December and was still starting in the Top 14 last season. There is no reinvention here and no coaching philosophy either. Botia simply plays a game that works in the pack and works in the midfield, and both parts of the field have taken what they were given for ten years.
Fiji named him in their extended squad for the Nations Championship, which at his age tells you the versatility has outlasted the legs of most of his contemporaries.
2 André Esterhuizen (South Africa)
Erasmus describes Esterhuizen and the man above him as a single selection idea, a forward who can cover a back position and a back who can cover a forward’s. Esterhuizen is the second half of that, and his version has rescued Test matches rather than decorated them.
It began against the Barbarians in June 2025 and then became serious. When Jasper Wiese was sent off against Italy, Esterhuizen moved to flanker so South Africa could scrum with him in the pack on their own ball and use him at centre on Italy’s, a solution no other side in the world had available. He did the same job in Paris after Lood de Jager’s red card, and scored.
A 12 of his size packing down is a blunt instrument on paper. In practice it is the reason South Africa have twice turned a red card into an inconvenience rather than a defeat.
1 Kwagga Smith (South Africa)
The template, and the man every coach reaches for when explaining the idea. Smith covers all three back-row positions, and the sevens background means the wider channels are a real option rather than a panic. When South Africa went 7-1 in the 2023 World Cup final, they had him training at scrum-half and wing in case the bench ran out of answers, which is the sort of contingency no other side would even attempt.
isiXhosa commentary has long called him Wrong Turn, after the horror film, on account of a nose that has been rearranged more times than anybody has bothered to count. It is said with enormous affection, and it is a fair summary of a career spent taking the jobs nobody else in the squad wanted.
What puts him top is that it has never been a gimmick with him. He has been used this way for years, across World Cups, through 6-2 and 7-1 splits, in matches South Africa were winning comfortably and matches they were hanging on to. He is quick enough to chase, small enough to move and hard enough to stay in a Test back row, and the reason he is not a specialist in anything is that South Africa have never needed him to be.
Eddie Jones said in 2020 that this would become the norm. It has, in one country more than anywhere else, and Kwagga Smith is the reason it works there.
READ MORE: Nick Mallett: Two areas where the Springboks were ‘poor’ which Rassie Erasmus can normally bank on