Conrad Smith: Great trophy room, average player

First of all I need to warn everyone, particularly our more sensitive neighbors from across the ditch. This article is a troll. It is an enormous troll sitting under the harbour bridge waiting for unsuspecting kiwis heading over to North Sydney.

However, enough is enough. I’ve tried to work it out in my head and failed so I need to get this off my chest. A final warning to the kiwis: you aren’t going to like this and I recommend that you stop reading here, let’s be honest though with the Lordy-style headline I’ve chosen you’re probably going to read on and abuse the hell out of me in the comments.

That’s okay. I’m prepared to cop that because I need to cleanse my soul of this issue and move on with my life.

Conrad Smith is by far the most overrated player in my time of watching rugby, which is from around the mid-90’s through until today.

I can understand why the Kiwis regard him so highly, because off the field he is obviously a great guy and nobody ever has a bad word to say about him. On the field however, he is an average player at best and possibly the worst successful sportsman in history after John O’Shea for Manchester United.

Conrad Smith has reached the level where it is sacrilege to say anything except that he is the best outside centre in world rugby.

I think it’s at a point where people just say it because they are scared that someone will turn around and ask them if they are stupid, or enquire as to what planet they’ve been living on. It reminds me of when Braith Anasta first bust onto the scene in league. Everyone was saying how good he was and nobody wanted to knock him, and then the NRL players voted him most overrated player in the game and everyone turned around and said, “yeah, he’s actually not that good at all”. This is my watershed moment for Conrad.

I watch most of my rugby with a very good Kiwi mate who comes from Crusaders territory on the South Island. For the first six or seven years of Conrad Smith’s career he was a running joke between us.

We had so many good laughs watching Conrad put his head down and just have a good old-fashioned, head down, crack at the opposition! “Rip into ‘em Connie!” was our catch-cry.

In fact to this day, after the Waratahs, I find myself watching more Hurricanes games than any other team simply because I love to watch him play to see what he does.

Then, I first came to realise how much Kiwis loved Conrad Smith at the 2011 World Cup, and to be fair to Conrad, he played his best rugby that year. In fact, it was approaching something deserving of a black jersey.

I still couldn’t believe, however, that in the midst of the All Blacks winning the World Cup with McCaw, Reid, Kaino, Nonu, Dagg, Jane and all the other superstars playing so well that nearly everyone I spoke to was talking about Conrad Smith in the same light. In fact they were talking about Piri Weepu as well but don’t get me started on that.

I came back home after that and spoke to my mate and relayed what I’d seen and he didn’t bat an eyelid.

“You knew they loved him?” I asked. He told me that he thought I knew, to which I was appalled because obviously I hadn’t. It was a very strange and confusing feeling and one in which I still haven’t found peace.

To go over to New Zealand and have so many good rugby chats with people who know and love their rugby was awesome and a highlight of my life so far. Then to have some of these people look you straight in the eye and tell you that Conrad Smith is the best outside centre of the modern era was just flat out bizarre. I said to my mate, “Well he did play pretty well in the World Cup,” to which my mate refused to respond. He feels even stronger than I do about Conrad.

The next time this conversation came up was during last year’s Lions series when Warren Gatland dropped Brian O’Driscoll for the third game. The Roar forums were packed full of Kiwis saying that Conrad Smith was better than Brian O’Driscoll. That is when I lost my temper and first wrote this article before deleting and rewriting it several times over the last 12 months.

It again has been simmering for the last month with Adam Ashley-Cooper’s great form for the Wallabies and the Waratahs at outside centre has been causing the Kiwis to get a bit edgy, as they usually do when someone is in better form than one of their demi-gods. And so here we are.

My issues with Conrad Smith being considered a ‘great player’ stem mainly from the fact that he offers absolutely zero threat in attack. I mean come on, here is a guy that has played outside Ma’a Nonu his whole career. Nonu could make me look good with the space he provides, and Conrad doesn’t do anything except catch and pass.

He is too slow to beat a man on the outside, he doesn’t have a step (its just a series of steps that result in a gradual change of direction), and he isn’t strong enough to fend anyone off or run over or through anyone. Yes, I’ll admit that he is a very good support player, but that is only because he never takes a hit-up and so is always on his feet to keep running and take the last pass before the try.

Some common phrases I hear from the Conrad lovers include the following.

Great defender.

Great support player.

Reads a game well. Very calm under pressure. Great leader. Great decoy runner – this one’s my favourite! What does that even mean?! He’s fantastic at not getting the ball?

These may be true, but it doesn’t brush over the fact that he is virtually useless in attack and I’m sorry, but that is the primary role of a centre, especially if you want to start throwing out comments like ‘best of an era’.

There are plenty of players around the world that do the things I’ve mentioned, as well as, if not better than Conrad and still manage to offer way more in attack.

Good defence is a pre-requisite of playing outside centre. It’s the hardest position on the field to defend and if you’re not up to it then move to the wing. You don’t go down as a legendary outside centre for doing half of your job well, you need to excel.

His disturbing inability to break the line is what confuses me the most. How can you call a guy a great of the game when you could count the amount of line breaks during his whole career on one hand. And before you go and check the stats let me tell you how line break stats work these days. Every time you make a break it counts as a line break.

Its not every time you go through the line. So all of those tries that Conrad Smith scores where he waltzes over untouched after taking the last pass are not what I’m talking about. Nor am I talking about when the All Blacks forwards have rumbled up the field and there are two backs left to defend against an entire set All Black backline.

I’m talking about an ability to go through a set defensive line using pace, deception or strength. Clever attacker is another phrase I hear about Conrad a lot. Clever attacker? What does that mean? To me, clever sounds like a euphemism for mediocre.

I had a look at Conrad’s highlights on Youtube this week to see if maybe there was something I was missing.

This is possibly the most uninspiring highlights reel of any player I’ve ever watched. I’m not going to sit here and judge a player completely on his highlights reel, but in this case for me personally, the highlights backed up my sentiments perfectly.

The fact that it is someone being touted as the best outside centre of the modern era makes it laughable. I can’t wait for Conrad’s DVD to come out when he retires. It will be 60 minutes in length. 40 minutes of it will be Conrad talking (the good bloke card), 10 minutes of it will be running in tries untouched and 10 minutes of it will be footage of decoy running.

Compare these to the following highlights reels. Again, not because it’s all about a player’s highlights reels, but for those who want to compare, a bit of food for thought.

Brian O’Driscoll

Adam Ashley-Cooper

So why, if Conrad Smith is so vanilla, has he played 77 Tests for the best team in the World? I put it down to two things.

Firstly, the lack of a viable alternative.

New Zealand hasn’t produced any outside centres of real quality for quite some time now. Except for the injury plagued Richard Kahui who, if his body had co-operated, would have gone down as an All Black great and is an infinitely better rugby player than Conrad smith. In fact I think Conrad should rename his trophy room the Richard Kahui memorial room as a tribute to the man who provided him with so many trophies.

And secondly, because Conrad has the easiest job of any centre in world rugby.

It’s quite simple really and is a formula that means that even the most basic of players can thrive. It starts up front where the best forward pack in the world provide the front foot ball. It then flows through to Nonu who does all the hard work by sucking defenders in and taking the tough early phase hitups and then finishes with Conrad sitting in acres of space with oodles of time to decide what he is going to do. He has the easiest job of any centre in World Rugby.

I always try to look at a player from a perspective of a bad team. I particularly find myself doing this at the start of the Test season as a bit of a litmus test to see if Super Rugby players can step up to Test level.

If a player plays consistently well in a bad team it usually suggests he has what it takes to go to the next level. If a player plays well in a good team I ask myself what would he do if you put him in a bad team?

The answer for Conrad Smith is ‘very little’. If you want to make more comparisons with O’Driscoll, then why don’t you think about a straight swap. O’Driscoll at 13 for the All Blacks outside Nonu and Carter and Conrad outside Ronan O’Gara and co. behind their respective packs. Is it still a contest? Then we would really see how good a defender he is.

I was leaving this article until next week so I didn’t jinx the Wallabies but since Prince Symbol already jinxed us on Tuesday with the Kieran Read article I thought what the hell? Everyone loves a spicy Bledisloe!