TAKE a bow Neil Fissler and Adam Hathaway – much respected members of this parish – for completing a definitive Who’s Who of English rugby just in time for next month’s Six Nations. The sheer joy of having this mighty and attractive tome within easy reach over the coming years is one to relish.
God knows how two of the busiest journos in the business found the time and energy in these testing times but where there’s a will there is usually a way and both concerned have a love and reverence for the game’s history, the pertinent facts and figures of those who have represented England and a nose for those little biographical nuggets that bring such characters to life.
This is a labour of love and, frankly, that’s the only way you get such books across the finishing line. Hathers, as you might have noticed from his tweets, spends considerable chunks of his weekends on broken down or late trains crisscrossing the country covering matches. Very frustrating but the only upside of long delays is that they could be spent fine tuning his contributions to this book. No time is wasted when you are writing a book. The Fizz, meanwhile, spends endless hours camped by the phone waiting for his many contacts to tip him the wink re yet another exclusive – Louis Rees-Zammit and the NFL was his latest – and that otherwise dead time has been spent endlessly revising and correcting entries.
Essentially what we have here is 1,455 eminently readable pen pics of everybody who has ever represented England in a senior international, an exhaustive and comprehensive look at the glorious eclectic mish mash of characters who have worn the Red Rose.
Rather than go through the roll of honour alphabetically, the authors have taken a chronological approach, following the official England cap numbers as decreed by the RFU. We therefore start with cap number one John Bentley – no not Bentos of Lions fame – but John Edmund Bentley from Merchant Taylors’ School Middlesex and the Gipsies club who played half-back for England against Scotland at Raeburn Place in 1871, rugby’s first international game. The final entry for now is Tom Daniel Willis, the last capped Englishman, with the Saracens and former Wasps back rower making his debut in England’s World Cup warm up match with Wales last summer. Who will be 1456? My best bets would be Fin Smith or Exeter wing Immanuel Feyi-Waboso sometime in the coming weeks.
One of the advantages of this chronological approach is that you automatically get a feel of who a given player was appearing alongside, who his contemporaries and mates were. They are all lumped together and you notice certain trends such as to which schools and clubs are dominant at the time, those who had fought world wars and survived – and those who didn’t – those who straddled amateurism and professionalism.
The authors have also avoided the e
