SPIRO: Sam Burgess is a league great and rugby journeyman

The decision by Sam Burgess to return to league is a win-win-win result.

It is a win for Burgess and league in that one of the great players in that code returns to a game that he can play superbly.

It is a win for the South Rabbitohs who have lost their way, on and off the field, without his inspirational presence.

And it is a win for the rugby game if – and it is a crucial if – leading coaches finally rid themselves of the nonsense that great league players will automatically be great rugby players.

This nonsense might have cost the Wallabies a third Rugby World Cup title in 2003 when coach Eddie Jones decided that league great Wendell Sailor was a better choice on the wing in the Australia-England final than a genuine rugby great, Joe Roff.

England scored their crucial try down Sailor’s side of the field. Roff, two years before, had saved the series against the British and Irish Lions with a timely intercept at the start of the second half of the second Test at Melbourne.

Jones also destroyed a great Wallabies side he inherited from Rod Macqueen by his insistence that the players go to ground immediately in contact. Why? Because the multi-club league coach Brian Smith had somehow convinced him that fast ruck-ball could be obtained by using league play-the-ball techniques.

Smith wasn’t to know that rugby involves a constant contest for possession unlike league, especially at rucks. But Jones should have known this.

This same ignorance about the difference between the two games infected the Bath and England rugby coaches in their pursuit of the willing (kerchunk, kerchunk) Burgess.

When you look at the way Burgess played league it was obvious he was made for that game, and not for rugby.

His league greatness is built around his fearless and relentless charges up field, with only the occasional offload. His surging power made his lack of pace irrelevant for a game that is built around no mistakes and the attritional use of possession and territory.

His tackling, too, was relentless and often intimidating. He showed a total disregard for his own body in making the tackles, and for the heads of his unfortunate victims.

The coaches of Bath and England should have understood that these talents that have made Burgess such a legend in league were talents that would make him a journeyman at rugby.

To begin with, where would you play someone like Burgess in rugby? He was too slow for the backs and he had none of the rugby skills needed by a dominating loose forward.

He was too leaden-footed to be a leaper in the lineout. He was coming too late to rugby to master the art of the clean-out at the ruck. His tackling was too head-high to conform with the laws of the rugby game. He was actually too slow around the field and had none of the rugby nous required to be an effective No.6.

And we haven’t mentioned his lack of knowledge in handling the requirements of the lineout and the scrum.

You could multiply these loose forward inadequacies for what Burgess lacked to be a dominating rugby inside centre. Can anyone in league seriously argue that Burgess showed any potential to be the England equivalent of Ma’a Nonu?

In all his rugby matches, did Burgess make even one run to match Nonu’s burst after shortly half-time in the 2015 Rugby World Cup final to take the All Blacks out to a 21-3 lead against the Wallabies?

Did he ever, even once, do the sort of offload in contact that Sonny Bill Williams did to unleash Nonu on his fabulous run?

Talking about Williams, for all his great qualities as a league great turned rugby player, he has never been a first choice All Black in the centres in his time in rugby. And I would argue that Williams had a vastly superior set of rugby skills in comparison with Burgess.

Also, by growing up in New Zealand Williams was exposed to a deep rugby culture, something that Burgess never experienced.

Why did Burgess make the switch?

There is more money in rugby than there is in league for the big-name players. That would have been a consideration, probably. But there was also the challenge to conquer a seemingly similar code that is played out on a much bigger stage.

Let’s face it, league is a relatively minor code around the world. It is big in Queensland, NSW, Papua New Guinea, a couple of counties in England, obscure parts of France, and Auckland.

By way of comparison, the Romania-Ireland match at the 2015 Rugby World Cup was played at Wembley Stadium in front of a crowd of more than 80,000 spectators.

Twenty million television viewers in Japan watched the Brave Blossoms play at their subsequent matches at the World Cup after their sensational defeat of the Springboks.

But underlying these aspects, there was a belief at Bath and in the England camp that a league great would automatically be a rugby great because league was somehow a harder (better?) game than rugby.

The coach of Bath is Mike Ford, a former league player.

An assistant coach of England is Andy Farrell, a league great who became a rugby journeyman and played for England in the centres.

We now have Will Greenwood, a former England centre, complaining that “Sam’s mistreatment is a damning indictment of rugby”. What a load of tosh.

Burgess was let down, Greenwood argues, because of “the problem of where best to play him”. Bath wanted him to play in the forwards. Stuart Lancaster, England’s coach, wanted to play him at inside centre.

“I do not think he had a future at six, where the lineout was always going to prove an issue,” Greenwood conceded.

“I do not think that he should have made the final cut [in the England Rugby World Cup squad] and said so at the time … It is just so sad that such a hash could have been made of such an exciting prospect. It is a damning indictment of union.”

Why didn’t Greenwood make the obvious observation that Burgess actually wasn’t much of a rugby player, and never would be?

I don’t often agree with Stephen Jones but he was right to dismiss Burgess’s play for England as “underwhelming” and the follow-up with the assertion that he was “the most controversial England choice I can recall in decades”.

Mick Cleary, the veteran rugby writer for The Telegraph (UK), called the Burgess experiment a “flop”. Also, a correct assessment.

The reason why this was so lies in the difference between rugby and league.

I want to make a warning to league fanatics – please do not read what follows next as any indictment of the league game.

League is a great game. Let me repeat that: league is a great game. Rugby is also a great game. But the games are different. Vive la difference.

Here is Souths coach Michael Maguire explaining why Burgess will be fresh enough for the 2016 NRL season: “He’s still been mixing it in rugby and those ruck and mauls have a lot pf physicality about them. However, the physicality of rugby league is more on a one-on-one basis. You get a lot more contact in rugby league from tackling.”

Essentially what Maguire is saying is that league is a tackling game and a running into contact game. It is, seen in this context, a one-on-one game.

Someone like Burgess, who is so dominating in the contact area, in the one-on-one clashes that are the DNA of league, is obviously a dominating, great league player.

The essence of rugby is to create space and time for a teammate to further enhance the quality of the ball and ultimately score points.

Brad Thorn, the only successful code crossover as a forward, has always explained that the hardest thing he had to learn in rugby was to enhance the ball by passing it rather than take it into contact as he did in league.

A second difference, and league-lovers please note difference and not improvement, is that rugby involves a constant contest for the ball.

This constant contest brings all the players in a rugby team into play during each play. League, as a one-on-one game, is more about the individual contest on each play.

My point here is that league is rimed couplets: neat, narrow and easily understood. Rugby is blank verse: chaotic, often impenetrable, sometimes glorious and always complex.

They are both games of poetry. But different forms of poetry.

This is why I get angry when someone as thoughtful as The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Malcolm Knox invariably bags rugby as a boring game.

It also make me furious when rugby players, enticed across to league (hardly ever now that there is more money in rugby) or when league players coming back to the game after a rugby stint, are forced to acknowledge that league is a better game than rugby.

There is the element in all of this interrogation – and the question will be put to Sam Burgess – of a forced confession from a sporting equivalent of a prisoner of war.

My attitude to Burgess leaving league for rugby was, therefore, exactly the same as when Andrew Johns was being hawked around to rugby clubs by his manager John Fordham.

I wrote in the SMH that great players like Johns should not upset their code’s supporters by crossing over to the other side. I also doubted whether Johns, who was carrying chronic injuries and was in the twilight days in his career, would make a successful transition into rugby.

For my pains I got a arrogant letter from Fordham telling me that Johns on one leg would be a better player than any other rugby player going around in Australia.

Burgess is still a youngish player with his best playing years ahead of him. I am pleased that the fields he will lord it over his opponents will be league fields.

The winner from this Sam Burgess saga is league and rugby, finally.