Just for kicks, my top 10 sharp shooters of the past 30 years

As the season finale draws near, we nominate 10 goal-kickers you can count on when the pressure cranks up

It is approaching that time of year. Big games hinging on increasingly slim margins, the pressure on goal-kickers intense. Check out Marcus Smith’s conversion attempt after Cadan Murley’s try for Harlequins against Sale on Saturday. The ball struck the right post, the crossbar, the left post and then the crossbar again in a classic “What happened next?” moment that captured perfectly the agonies of the tortured marksman’s art.

But the old maxim still holds true: goal-kickers don’t lose games, they win them. So if you could pick one individual from the professional era to kick a goal for your life, who would it be? Unfair, perhaps, to nudge aside the deadliest kickers of the amateur era such as Naas Botha, Don Clarke, Dusty Hare, Grant Fox, Ollie Campbell et al – imagine how good some of their stats would have been without heavy, muddy pitches, heavy leather balls and no tees – but for the purposes of this exercise let’s focus on the sharpest shooters of the past 30 years.

Just a couple of ground rules. This isn’t strictly about overall career stats, more the absolute belief that, in the 79th minute of a titanic Test with the scores level, a certain individual will step up and win you the ball game from the touchline (nb for pedants out there we are talking conversions, which removes kicking to the corner as an option).

Here goes …

10) Diego Domínguez (Italy) Among the sweetest strikers of a ball in the game’s history, up there with Argentina’s Nicolás Sánchez among the soft-shoe shufflers. Sánchez retired this year having registered an impressive 902 points in 104 Tests. For comparison’s sake, Domínguez scored 983 in 74 Tests for Italy, mostly with the nonchalant ease of someone knocking the top off a soft-boiled egg. Which means no place – gulp – for Sánchez, Emiliano Boffelli, Melvyn Jaminet, Chris Paterson, Ronan O’Gara or Johnny Sexton. Savagely harsh but there we go.

9) Dan Biggar (Wales) The 35-year-old Biggar is retiring at the end of the season and can walk away with his kicking tee held high. For a while he seemed to have the yips when preparing to kick for goal: twitching the shoulder, patting the hair, pulling at the shirt. But to see him consistently front up as Wales’s main man in a packed stadium in Cardiff was to witness a perfectionist with colossal mental strength.

8) Thomas Ramos (France) Yes, Ramos has had a couple of high-profile failures, not least against Toulon this month and courtesy of Cheslin Kolbe’s chargedown in the 2023 World Cup quarter-final. But to be the top points-scorer in the past three Six Nations championships is not a fluke. When Ramos sticks the ball down on the tee and surveys the distant posts there is generally only one outcome.

7) Dan Carter (NZ) We tend to remember the unstoppable Carter for his brilliance with ball in hand and all-round assurance. When it came to curling over left-footed kicks from all angles, though, he was just as outstanding and he sits way out in front in the men’s scoring charts with 1,598 points in 112 Tests. Playing in a great team did give him plenty of target practice but, like Domínguez, he made it look deceptively simple.

6) Owen Farrell (Eng) The loftiest praise you can give England’s former captain is that, for a while, he was even more of a cold-eyed assassin than Jonny Wilkinson. The slow tilt of the head, the familiar side-eye towards the posts … for ruthless competitive edge there have been few to match him. His haul of 1,271 points in 119 Tests – second only to Carter – in addition to the mountain of points he scored for Saracens, outweigh his slightly reduced reliability in recent times.

5) Handré Pollard (SA) Ask England where Pollard should sit in this exalted list. They would probably put him higher up, haunted as they are by the Springbok’s late long-range penalty in the 2023 World Cup semi-final. His record in South Africa’s back-to-back winning finals is little short of extraordinary: 22 points in 2019 when he finished the match with a fractured eye socket, and all the Boks’ points in their 12-11 win over New Zealand in 2023. Definitely a man for the big occasion.

4) Neil Jenkins (Wales) The godfather of modern goal-kicking, so good in his day that the entire stadium would be mentally adding two or three points to Wales’s score even before he positioned the ball on his heap of sand from Tenby beach. The British & Irish Lions selected him at full-back in their 1997 series triumph against South Africa for a reason and his final kick to help Wales beat England at Wembley in 1999 sealed his place in rugby folklore.

3) Jonny Wilkinson (Eng) No goal-kicker has been ever more widely imitated than Jonny. The clasped hands, the serious gaze, the quasi-religious faith in the outcome … it might have been a drop goal with his “other” foot that won England the 2003 World Cup but Wilkinson’s obsessive dedication to his craft was most obvious in his place kicking. Still in third place on the all-time Test scorers’ list, still kicking them in his sleep.

2) Morné Steyn (SA) For British & Irish Lions fans it was like rewatching a Hammer horror movie when Steyn kicked the winning penalty from the back of beyond to clinch the 2021 series in Cape Town. What made it even more incredible was that he had done something similar to clinch the series against the same opposition 12 years earlier. Neat and unfussy, he was also top-scorer at the 2011 World Cup. If you want a long kick nailed at altitude, even now he has turned 40, look no further.

1) Leigh Halfpenny (Wales) Hundreds of kickers have come and gone but ‘Pence’ remains the gold standard. The last time the Lions won a series was in 2013 and Halfpenny’s goal-kicking in Australia was as laser-sharp as anything this correspondent has seen. He was deservedly crowned player of the series, broke the Lions series points record previously held by Jenkins and also set a new Lions record with 21 points in the final Test. Not bad for someone who, as an 18-year-old, was released by Ospreys for being too small.

Keeping up appearances

How does rugby union wish to be perceived? As a sport that is refreshingly different or one that simply follows the herd. If it is the former then this is an increasingly pivotal period in its history. Feigning injury (the latest case study is the French international Nolann Le Garrec who went down like a sack of frites having barely been touched while playing in the Top 14 for Racing 92 against Perpignan); players persistently putting on-field pressure on referees; look-at-me individual try celebrations; introducing “away ends” in the Premiership that erode the family friendly, social vibe … none of it has traditionally been part of the rugby experience and yet is fast becoming commonplace. Anything that attracts younger fans is much needed but there are smarter ways of doing it than simply cutting and pasting football’s least edifying aspects.

One to watch

Congratulations to the aforementioned Johnny Sexton on his appointment as a British & Irish Lions assistant coach. It will also be fascinating to see which fly-halves also make this year’s tour to Australia, particularly in the light of the unflattering comments Sexton made about Finn Russell in the Times last year. The gist was that Russell was a “flashy” player and not necessarily the type of fly-half you could rely on to win a major series. Then again, perhaps Russell being picked ahead of a disappointed Sexton for the last Lions tour in 2021 has slightly shaped the Irishman’s opinion. If the talented Russell is ignored this time, consequently, it will launch countless conspiracy theories, particularly if Owen Farrell and Sam Prendergast are chosen instead. Either way, it would be a major deal if the most creative attacking playmaker in Britain stays at home. Better, surely, to pick Russell and invite Sexton to help develop the Scot into an even better player. If Sexton is the innately gifted coach that Andy Farrell already believes him to be, that should not be a problem.

Memory lane

On this day 90 years ago Dick “Red” Conway was born. He would grow up to be a tenacious tackler from No 8 or flanker for the All Blacks, gaining 10 Test caps, and made a sacrifice that might shame any of those vying for Lions or Australia selection this year. Repeated injuries to the third finger of his right hand had been causing him problems due to a host of knocks sustained while playing softball.

In 1960, his most recent finger break left it with a precarious, fragile bend that was highly likely to give way under the strain of Test rugby. With a massively controversial tour of apartheid-era South Africa looming – where no Māori players were selected despite huge public outcry – corrective surgery would not have seen it heal in time to make the plane to Johannesburg. An alternative kind of surgery, however, would mean a much quicker recovery … So it came to pass that Conway took his place in the squad, one digit lighter after he voluntarily had the troublesome finger amputated. Post-tour, he dropped out of the All Blacks reckoning, which might have given him cause to reflect on the wisdom of his decision. However, after switching from Otago to Bay of Plenty in 1962, he managed to force his way back in for his final four Tests in 1965. “Red” finally left us in 2022 at the age of 87 in his beloved Whakatāne, where as well as coaching rugby he also worked as a carpenter. Nails, indeed.

Still want more?

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