What’s More Important to a Rugby Winger, Speed or Skill?

By
at Internationaled.org

Published: April 29, 2016

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It's long been held that backs are seen as the glamorous bunch in rugby, the scorers and finishers who regularly butt heads with forwards, but there lies another debate within their ranks—and it relates to the wings.

Speed and skill are seen as two foundations of any winger's locker, but there will inevitably be those who fare better in one department more so than the other; the question is, which attribute is more important?

Of course, we have the fortunate few who stand out as elite hybrids of the two. Any player would seek to showcase as much of each trait as possible, but ask them which they'd want more of if they had to choose, and we may get a different answer.

Rugby is evolving at a meteoric pace, and players now are bigger, stronger and faster than ever before, but are the wide men focusing their development in the right area?

 

The Ups and Downs of Speed

To illustrate the point of how useful speed can be in a game of rugby, we'll head straight to the source and examine one of, if not the fastest man to ever grace Test-level rugby: Bryan Habana.

The 32-year-old speedster boasts a record of 64 tries in 117 games for South Africa and has built a career almost exclusively on his ability to beat his opposite man should things boil down to a foot race:



At the end of the day, this is the goal of most wingers, to open up and exploit that half-metre or so of speed necessary to mow down the touchline. Even better, they'll have the space opened up for them.

But that's where the debate comes in. A winger will have to occasionally open up their own space, and when up against a defensively competent marker or cohesively built team, such a task can be difficult, to say the least.

Habana is an unfair example in this sense, due to the fact he possesses an extremely high amount of skill as well as speed. In order to properly test pa...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Rugby Union

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