Planet Rugby’s Greatest Professional XV: Inside centre
As professional rugby reaches its 25th anniversary and with time to reflect on those incredible years, we decided it’s time to look at the greatest players we’ve seen grace the pitches and screens of the world.
Over the next 15 days, we will give you our take on the four best players in each position, together with our choice for the Planet Rugby Professional XV.
You’ll have the chance to vote for yours and we will publish the readers’ team on the 16th day, together with some of the opinion comments from our readers and on social media.
The players will be listed traditionally, starting at 15 to 9 then 1 to 8.
The players are judged on their contribution to the pro era only. As a default we have only considered players that played 50% of their time or more in the professional era.
We have also taken into consideration the success they enabled for their team together with individual records, leadership skills, and overall contribution to the wider ethos of the sport and rugby in their home country.
We are well aware some greats haven’t made the cut but believe us when we say the debate needed around the office to get to this shortlist was exhaustive and not without some heated emotion!
Planet Rugby’s Greatest Professional XV: Inside centre
Nominees:
Ma’a Nonu (87 caps, 31 tries, 2 World Cups)
Scott Gibbs (58 caps, 11 tries)
Tim Horan (80 caps, 30 tries, 2 World Cups)
Yannick Jauzion (73 caps, 20 tries)
Another glittering line-up of talented players sees two giants of southern hemisphere rugby tussling with the best the north has to offer. Again, our shortlist inspired debate galore, with the substantial claims of Matt Giteau, Jean de Villiers, Damian de Allende, Jamie Roberts, Gordon D’Arcy, Brian Lima and Mike Catt all considered. But our shortlist offers contrast and completeness in every sense, with power, pace, passing and perception evident in all four candidates.
Ma’a Nonu is one of the most complete footballers the number 12 shirt has ever witnessed. One of the most destructive carriers in the game, his ability to offload and commit defenders to create space for others, coupled with an uncanny knack of finding the whitewash in a sea of defenders gained him two World Cup winners medals.
Starting as a direct running centre in 2001, he developed into one of the best midfielders in the game, with passes behind the tackler and an educated touch kick becoming key weapons in his armoury. In the biggest arenas, Nonu’s win ratio is remarkable; he’s never lost a single World Cup game and in 22 Bledisloe Cup appearances, he’s been on the victorious side 20 times. Add in his career win ratio of 89.32% and you can see why the wizard from Wellington is one of our four nominees.
Scott Gibbs was a rumbustious centre who played with the ironic smile of a Bond assassin. Given that his nicknames ranged from “Car Crash” to “Fastest Prop” to simply “Scotty Fatty Gibbs” you may glean, correctly, that the Welshman’s game was somewhat direct. A dual code master, he is immortalised in both British and Irish Lions, and Welsh folklore, his performances in South Africa in 1997 have become the stuff of legend and it says a lot about his style that to this day hardened Springbok supporters remember the Bridgend Bomb with such huge affection and no less respect.
His greatest day, however, was at Wembley in 1999 where his try in a dramatic finale saw Gibbs slice back against the grain for a score that’s been voted the greatest in Welsh rugby history and ultimately cost their arch-enemies England the Grand Slam. However, Gibbs’ life took a dramatic turn soon after retirement, when in 2016 a car accident left his wife Kate with permanent brain damage. He continues to care for her and the couple are currently writing a book about coping with the type of neural damage that Kate has suffered.
Tim Horan played with two different centre partners when winning World Cups in 1991 and 1999. His first cohort, Jason Little remarked in 2000: “When Timmy and I played together, we were the best centre partnership in the world; when Daniel Herbert and Tim played together, they were the best centre partnership in the world. There’s only one common denominator and that’s not me or Dan. Go figure.” Debuting in 1989, Horan finished the top try-scorer with four in the successful 1991 World Cup campaign.
Overcoming a serious knee injury in 1994, Horan embraced professionalism with vigour, his secondary distribution and deep passing behind the phase play characterising a complete skill-set. Named as Player of the Tournament in 1999, he made his final appearance in the green and gold in 2000 against Argentina in Brisbane and then joined Saracens, replacing another great centre, Phillipe Sella, and staying two seasons at the North London club before pulling down the curtain on a stellar career. In 2009, he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and was named as a Wallabies Statesman by the Australian Rugby Union.
Yannick Jauzion, a tall yet graceful footballer, played 73 Tests for France. His physical size was deceiving as the Toulouse stalwart was all about skill, whether that be in distribution or the trademark offload out of the tackle behind the defender’s back. Pivotal in getting France to a World Cup semi-final in 2003, the next three or four years were frustrating for the big centre as injuries and the fickle nature of French selectors saw him in and out of the international game until the 2007 World Cup, where he broke All Black hearts in the quarter-final with a 69th minute score that dumped the favourites out of the tournament.
The next two season heralded a stunning return to his very best form and allowed Jauzion to inspire France to a Grand Slam triumph before playing a pivotal part in Toulouse landing a record breaking fourth Heineken Cup. It says everything about Jauzion’s vision that former England coach Brian Ashton once observed: “Yannick plays rugby that others can only dream of, even the All Blacks.” He retired in 2012.
With our quartet providing riches of pace, power, punt and pass in abundance, our choice for inside centre is the man that combined all of those qualities to win two World Cups, Tim Horan.