Alex Cuthbert - real deal?

First topic message reminder :

Before the 6N, he showed great promise but had some flaky moments. However in the red shirt of Wales he has looked a class act and hardly put a foot wrong in a spectacular tournament. Fast forward to last Friday night against the Scarlets, he showed some class at times but far too many errors to be considered top class.
Will he eliminate these errors as he gains experience?

Watching the sevens and we have a few more young quick lads coming through to push Cuthbert next season. Keep an eye on Owen Williams, Aberdare and Blues.

maes, do you know where I can catch any highlights or read some reviews of the latest 7's tournament?

Morgannwg wrote:maes, do you know where I can catch any highlights or read some reviews of the latest 7's tournament?

highlights on here

http://www.rugbydump.com/

Or you can try the irbsevens website

Well done beat me to it..!

We had a tough draw next tournament looks like a more favourable pool draw for us..!

SA and NZ in the pool, yeah that was always going to be tough!

Morgannwg wrote:SA and NZ in the pool, yeah that was always going to be tough!

Next is Argentina, Kenya and Russia in our pool.

dont want to scare anyone but Toulon is rumoured to be looking at Cuthbert

whocares wrote:dont want to scare anyone but Toulon is rumoured to be looking at Cuthbert

i'd hate to see what you were going to say if you did want to scare us !!!

He did have a good 6 nations but loses focus in games. If I were behind him in the reckoning I wouldn't give up the ghost by a long stretch. If I was behind him in the cinema I would have to move

From Paul Ackford


There’s no respect in rugby anymore. “Some of the lads settled on Road Runner initially because I can run and run and run, but it’s Horse now,” he says, as self-effacing a 21 year-old as you could ever hope to meet. “It’s partly to do with the time I spent show jumping as a kid, but also because I still run and run and run. I don’t do the show jumping these days. That stopped when I was 17 when the family sold the horses.”
Not that it bothered the picture editors much. A 104kg super-quick rugby player on a horse? That’s an arresting image right there, even if it was last relevant four years ago when Cuthbert first turned seriously to rugby. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

There’s another misrepresentation out there too. When Cuthbert set off on that beguiling run, 21 minutes into last Saturday’s climactic encounter against France, twitching past Julien Bonnaire before wrong-footing Clément Poitrenaud to score, he didn’t know he was about to pay off his student loan with the £85,000 bonus each of the Welsh squad received for winning all five of their Six Nations fixtures. He still doesn’t, even though it has been widely reported that that is his intention. “I never said anything about paying off a student loan,” he snorts. “It’s true I want to buy a house but that’s all I said. I don’t know where the rest of that came from.”

Grand Slams, you see. That’s where they come from. Grand Slams spin their own narrative, which often only has a tenuous link with reality. Like, Wales won because they had some of the biggest backs in the tournament (George North, Jonathan Davies, Jamie Roberts and Cuthbert averaged 105kg a man) and those big guys played, well, big.

It’s true up to a point, but what wasn’t fully acknowledged was the fact that it is not how big these guys were which was important, but how balanced, how agile, how quick, how dexterous they were. The fascination about Cuthbert, a modern day monster at 1.98m and 104kg, is that, like his mate North, his size is his least remarkable feature.

This is a man (we’re stretching it here. He’s still only 21) who came to rugby late following stints at football, on the back of a horse and plenty of lung-bursting outings on the 400 metre track. He had played rugby at school, but it was at Hartpury College, Gloucester, following an invitation from a lecturer there, where he properly embraced rugby. “Someone asked me to play in a sevens tournament just for a laugh and then other teams asked me and eventually I ended up at the Middlesex Sevens at Twickenham. My pace was what got me noticed in tournaments. I used to get the ball, run round people and score. That’s all I’m used to doing really. I don’t want to sound big-headed, but I don’t know anything different.”

Big-headed? Fat chance. This is the guy who is one of the quickest, if not the quickest, in the Welsh squad with a 40 metre sprint time of 4.6 seconds, yet is unaware of how that compares with track sprinters. The guy who, when asked about ambitions over the next two seasons, requested not to be associated with the Lions because “that’s a long, long way from where I am at the moment. I’m still young. I’m still developing. It’s a year or so away and there’s the Wales summer tour to Australia which I need to keep working hard to get on.”

It’s not false modesty either. The thing about Cuthbert is that he doesn’t seem to understand that just some of what he has – his pace, his balance, his endurance, his composure, his strength, his speed – is given to few, and that the confluence of all those elements is extremely rare. Big men are two a penny in rugby. Think Matt Banahan and Ben Cohen. But big men who are way more than muscle? Think hen’s teeth.

Maybe he doesn’t get it because a felicitous set of circumstances has brought him to this point. The horse-riding and football has accounted for his balance, and the sevens and the 400 metre training for his speed and speed endurance. In motion he doesn’t seem particularly big, or quick, just natural. I asked him about this. “At my running club they taught me how to run and glide,” he said. “It comes easily. It’s quite hard to explain.” Was he ever clumsy as a gangly teenager? “I’m probably still in that clumsy stage now, but I don’t show it as much.”

There’s another piece to Cuthbert. How was it that a player with only five caps on the day could deal with the pressure of a Grand Slam decider with such equanimity? “I speak to Shane Williams by text and ask him the odd thing now and then, what to expect, what the atmosphere’s going to be like, stuff like that. In training I’m one of those guys who ask a lot of questions. But I’m not too disorientated by it all.”

Indeed not. When the pivotal moment came there was no disorientation whatsoever. “I remember Dan [Lydiate] chopping [Thierry] Dusautoir and we somehow got the ball. I thought it’s on here if we can get it wide quickly. Somehow Priest[land] gave it early and I saw the space before I had the ball. I thought I’m definitely going to have to step, so I stepped off my right, and just saw the gap, and did a little jink, and Poitrenaud sort of fell on the floor, and I was through. It felt like it unravelled in slow motion. It was so surreal.”

Except it wasn’t. It happened. And he had made it happen.