Why ‘out of position’ is rugby punditry’s laziest cop-out that should be embarrassed into retirement
Ben Earl ran out at number eight for England over the weekend.
Selection is skill-based blending, not shirt-number conformity. The coaches who actually win worked that out years ago.
Every time Steve Borthwick names an England team, the same lazy statement appears within minutes; they’re playing players out of position again!
It arrived on cue after Ellis Park. Ben Earl again selected at eight despite the continuing argument over whether he is really a seven. Debates about whether Henry Pollock should start or finish. A midfield that has, at various points, contained wings, fly-halves and even a back-row forward.
It is the laziest line in rugby punditry, an observation dressed up as insight. It tells you a player’s experience and his assignment may not match. It tells you nothing about whether the selection actually works, and that question demands analysis, which is precisely what the phrase exists to avoid.
The best coaches in the world stopped thinking in jersey numbers years ago, and one round of the Nations Championship supplies enough evidence to embarrass the phrase into retirement.
What Scotland’s ‘mistake’ on the wing actually proved
Start with what the weekend just taught us. Scotland‘s decision to start Jamie Dobie on the wing in Córdoba was widely filed under selection mistakes before a ball was kicked, the criticism resting on his limited experience there compared with Duhan van der Merwe’s pedigree. 80 minutes of actual rugby later, Dobie had done everything his coach asked of him, releasing Kyle Rowe down the touchline in one of the moves of the match before Ben White’s offload sent Scott Cummings over on his 50th cap.
Scotland scored seven tries, posted their highest points total on Argentine soil and won 47-38. Gregor Townsend had not misplaced a scrum-half. He had added a second distributor, a kick-chase organiser and an extra set of half-back hands to a game he expected to be played at pace and in space. The jersey number did the analysis; nobody asked what the selection was for. Townsend selected a skill blend, the critics reviewed a shirt.
Selection is a portfolio problem, not 15 separate ones
Here is the deeper flaw in the out-of-position charge. It assumes selection is 15 separate problems: find each player’s optimal position, put him there, repeat. But no coach fields 15 individual optima, because the optima collide. Selection is a portfolio problem. The task is to get the best possible blend of skills into the 15 starting shirts, and then the 23, that delivers your strategy against this opponent on this weekend.
Within that frame, a great player’s second-best position routinely beats a lesser player’s best one, and a player’s theoretical optimum is worth nothing if it duplicates what you already have and leaves a capability gap elsewhere. You could argue endlessly about where Earl’s personal optimum lies, at eight, at seven, even at 13 in an unstructured game but it is the wrong argument. The right one is whether the 15 shirts, taken together, contain enough lineout height, gainline power, breakdown menace, distribution, kicking and pace to execute the plan, and whether Earl’s particular cocktail improves that blend or unbalances it.
The Ben Earl equation: differentiation versus insurance
Earl himself proves the point in both directions. At his best he offers genuine differentiation at number eight: he carries like a centre, hits the edge like a winger, gets through an openside’s phase-count workload and has covered midfield in Tests. Against tiring defences he is a mismatch generator of a kind England rarely possess, and the numbers remove any doubt about pedigree: since September 2023 he has ranked among the top two or three number eights in world rugby on virtually every output metric, and even with Tom Willis available, Borthwick preferred Earl on more occasions than not.
This is no fringe experiment. By the numbers, he has earned the shirt many times over. But he is not a primary lineout target and not a gainline enforcer in the tight exchanges, so his profile only functions if the unit supplies what he does not, a big blindside at six offering lineout presence and collision power, and ideally a seven who lives over the ball. Give him that platform and his point of difference becomes a weapon. Deny him it and the same player, in the same jersey, looks lightweight. Nothing about Earl changes between those two sentences. The blend does.
So the honest critique of England is not that Earl is out of position; it is that England have sometimes selected his differentiation without buying the insurance that makes it work. That is a blend failure, not a positional one, and fixing the label matters because it points to the actual solution.
The Freeman test and the aerial gap
The same test works in England’s backline. Take Tommy Freeman at outside centre. Asking whether he is really a 13 gets you nowhere, so ask what he can do instead. Can he attack the 13 channel? Yes, and with a razor’s edge; he is one of the very few players available to England who bends that channel out of shape. Can he defend the fold? Not naturally, and that is the honest cost of the selection. But it is an insurable cost, manageable through the blend around him, a 12 who reads the fold, an openside who sweeps, a kicking game that keeps the exposure upfield. It is the Earl equation again, transplanted into midfield: differentiation plus insurance. Whether England have paid the insurance premium is the legitimate debate. Whether Freeman is in the right jersey is not.
Now flip it, because Ellis Park showed the same logic failing in the other direction. The pundit version of England’s aerial mauling was that they lacked a recognised full-back. Watch the tape and the diagnosis is different. England’s kick-receipt structure had the wings starting high and then tracking back, chasing the ball over their shoulders, when the moment demanded the player at the back of the three-man pod, whoever he happens to be, stepping forward into the catch. Stuart Lancaster saw it from the studio: England persisted with the winger going back to contest rather than the deep man coming forward.
The jersey was never the issue. The issue was that England did not field a true aerial specialist anywhere in the back three, and a craft nobody in the unit possesses cannot be shared around, whatever the numbers on the shirts. Meanwhile the sky over Johannesburg belonged to Damian Willemse, South Africa’s hybrid-in-chief. The fix for England was never a recognised full-back, it was a genuine aerial specialist, wearing whichever number he likes.
How France solved this years ago (left and right, not open and blind)
France stopped having this argument years ago, structurally. French back-rows are not organised around openside and blindside at all but around left and right, a distinction François Cros described when discussing his adjustment to partnering Jack Willis at Toulouse, admitting he had never learned the open and blind distinction because the French system simply assigns him a side of the scrum. His job flows from the unit, not the number. Willis dominates the floor and carries, Alexandre Roumat rules the air, so Cros fills the holes they leave, once going five matches without a carry and caring not one bit, because the success of the unit outranks the success of the individual. He has made the wider principle explicit, observing that a great back-row is about balance and that the skill blend matters far more than the shirt numbers.
The philosophy scales through the whole French back five, and the caps data makes the point better than any theory. Charles Ollivon has started Tests at four, six, seven and eight. Thibaud Flament has started at lock and flank. The purest expression is Mickaël Guillard, a converted lock who started at number eight against the Springboks in November, wore five through the Six Nations and was listed among the back-rowers in Fabien Galthié’s squad, one player occupying three jerseys because his blend of lineout height, carrying and workrate fits wherever the unit’s ratio needs it. These are rugby players, not produce graded against some EU standard for positional appearance. Ask a French selector whether Guillard is out of position and you get a shrug. The unit needs jumpers, carriers, jackals and tacklers in a workable ratio. Who wears which number is settled last.
Doctrine in green and gold
The world champions have turned the same idea into doctrine, and again the jersey numbers tell the story. Rassie Erasmus has spent years engineering hybrids: André Esterhuizen, a Test centre redeveloped as a flank option across five months of deliberate planning; Marco van Staden, capped across two, six and eight; Kwagga Smith, who covers six, seven, eight and the wing in the same 23. Willemse is perhaps the sharpest proof of all, because with him versatility has delivered rather than covered: two Test match-winning performances, one at inside centre and one at full-back, from a player who has also worn the 10 jersey in World Cup knockout rugby.
Nobody watching either performance asked where his optimal position was, because he was too busy winning the match from the one he was in. The experimental selection of Quan Horn at fly-half against the Barbarians followed the same logic; availability created the opening, but Erasmus did not promote the next nominal 10, he selected a full-back season built on ten line breaks, 44 defenders beaten, nearly 1,000 metres and elite 50-22 numbers. He picked line-breaking, distribution and a long kicking game, and gave the blend a number.
And when Eben Etzebeth and Siya Kolisi withdrew hours before Ellis Park, Pieter-Steph du Toit, a double world champion and twice World Rugby Player of the Year, moved to lock and the Springboks put 45 points on England. The usual accusation largely disappeared, because his profile has always covered four jerseys.
Where the line sits
The strongest objection deserves a straight answer. Positional craft is real, it compounds over thousands of hours of specialist practice, and nobody is suggesting Marcus Smith should pack down at lock. When versatility fails, it fails in a specific and predictable way: a coach asks a player to supply a craft he does not possess and the team cannot cover elsewhere, and no amount of athleticism papers over a lineout throw that will not function or a scrum going backwards. The critics are not wrong that these disasters happen, but they are wrong about why.
Because the rule is not about positions at all. Flexibility works only where the essential demands of the role are already present in the player or can be redistributed elsewhere in the side. Front-row scrummaging cannot be shared around. Neither can lineout throwing, nor a scrum-half’s craft passing off the floor behind unstable ball. Goal-kicking must exist somewhere in the XV, but it need not belong to the 10. Where the technical requirement cannot be redistributed, judge the craftsman. Everywhere else, judge the blend.
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Glue and lightning
Eddie Jones has been making this argument, in his own vocabulary, for the best part of two decades. His formula for a Test side has never been 15 specialists in 15 optimal positions. It is a team of glue players and X-factor players, roughly 13 of the former and two of the latter, the glue supplying the cohesion, workrate and positional intelligence that holds a system together, the X-factor supplying the moments that win Test matches. The categories operate above the jersey numbers: the question is what each player contributes to the collective, glue or lightning, and whether the ratio is right. Too much X-factor and the team has no spine. Too much glue and it has no edge. And the coaches who think this way, Jones, Erasmus, Galthié with his left-and-right back-rows, are the ones the out-of-position brigade never manages to second-guess.
So, are England playing players out of position? It is the wrong question. Selection is skill-based blending, not shirt-number conformity. The task is not 15 optimal players 15 optimal positions; it is one optimal team.
Rather, ask which capabilities each pick adds, which it costs, and where the missing work will be done. The coaches lifting the trophies already audit their teams that way. Count the blend, not the shirts.
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