ANALYSIS It’s often said that it’s impossible to compare athletes across different generations. Nonetheless, it’s a fun and worthy exercise. Would Sir Richard Hadlee be able to do the job against today’s power hitters? (Answer: An emphatic yes.
) How would Diego Maradona go these days? (Very nicely, thanks – particularly with defenders’ misdeeds properly policed.) In the Eddie Murphy film Coming To America , blokes in a barbershop comically debate whether Muhammad Ali could have beaten Cassius Clay in a boxing match. While that’s a tricky one to answer, it’s possibly a tougher exercise when we look at rugby , where players have grown in size and athleticism across the park.
The forwards of the early 20th century would look like mere mortals standing alongside today’s wingers. Maurice Brownlie was a beast of a man who dominated opposition forward packs on the glorious Invincibles tour a century ago and still found time to serve in both World Wars. Brownlie stood 1.
85m tall and weighed 90kg dripping wet – that’s pretty much the same size as fly-half Beauden, the smallest of the Barrett brothers. The great divide came in 1996, with the arrival of outright professionalism in rugby. So that’s where we drew our line.
We asked veteran rugby writer Phil Gifford to put together a list of the top 60 New Zealand players of the professional era. Then we used a highly sophisticated system of AI (Asking Individuals) to rank those players in order: In short, we polled.