LIST: The Five Best Centre Partnerships Of The Professional Era RANKED!
Rugby NewsWednesday, 02 January 2019 at 14:34
There have been many fantastically talented centres since rugby turned professional, but having a centre partnership that works together effectively and with a balance that benefits the side as a whole is something that has eluded many teams over the years.
However, we take a look back at the five best centre partnerships of the professional era.
#5 Jean de Villiers and Jaque Fourie
One of South Africa’s best ever centre partnerships, De Villiers and Fourie were two particularly powerful centres with both silky handling and superb all-round skills sets to go with their traditionally Springbok-style physicality.
#4 Tim Horan and Daniel Herbert
This was the partnership that stunned the world in the 1990s. Horan and Little met when they were 13 years old, rooming together for a rugby league representative team. They partnered each other for 17 more years until both their Test careers ended in 2000.
#3 Gordon D’Arcy and Brian O’Driscoll
These two heroic centres played alongside each other for Leinster and Ireland for a whopping 15 years. O’Driscoll and D’Arcy extended their world-record centre partnership to 56 caps against France in O’Driscoll’s swansong. BOD will go down in history for his 141 caps and his 46 tries as well as Six Nations try records.
#2 Will Greenwood and Mike Tindall
Ever since the days of Carling and Guscott England had struggled to find a centre combination that worked so effectively together, that is until Clive Woodward combined the brilliant rugby brain of Leicester and Harlequins inside centre Greenwood and the ferocious physical power of Bath and Gloucester outside centre Mike Tindall.
Together they were at the heart of everything good about England’s most glorious of periods and were both central to the World Cup triumph of 2003.
#1 Ma’a Nonu and Conrad Smith
When the two players combined they were consistently and constantly lethal; a mixture of pace, power, beautiful dancing feet and silky skills sets that saw both players lift two World Cup trophies in their careers. It will be a good while before New Zealand find a centre partnership to rival the legacy of this pair.
MORE RUGBY NEWS:
TRENDING
LATEST NEWS
LATEST COMMENTS
Loading