Ross Rennie: the Lion who never had a chance to roar

Last May, I asked a Bristolian as to the progress of former Edinburgh flanker Ross Rennie at his new club in the south west. “Immense,” he replied, “I’ve never seen so many turnovers”. This was a particularly satisfying response. Rennie had also scored six tries in his first seven matches.

As a Scot living in England at the time, I had endured years of heated discussions with English and Welsh rugby supporters who bluntly insisted on placing the likes of Chris Robshaw and Sam Warburton higher up their Lions’ open-side pecking orders. It was understandably difficult for those outside of Scotland – and perhaps even outside of Edinburgh – to appreciate fully Rennie’s talent. Indeed, taken at face value, his international record – 20 caps, nine as a replacement, between 2008 and 2012 – suggests he was a bit-part internationalist in an inconsistent Scotland side.

Rennie’s injuries – and more significantly, the small number of Six Nations games he played – meant that he was rarely hyped in the British media in the manner of his back-row contemporaries. Tucked away on BBC Alba’s Gaelic-language broadcasts, and with Edinburgh drawing only two to three thousand a week, few would have seen him play frequently. Had Sky’s admirable publicity machine reached the PRO12 earlier, things might well have been different.

What his number of caps doesn’t relate, however, is the story of his outstanding play in spite of ongoing battles with injury and several years spent out of the game. When fit, Rennie was a sensation, a thoroughbred open-side flanker who read games intuitively and mixed intelligent running lines and footwork with soft hands, huge ability at the breakdown, and an uncanny habit of acquiring possession from opponents through an array of mystifying ripping techniques. It was therefore all the more disappointing to read news a couple of weeks ago of his retirement on medical grounds at the age of 28.

Edinburgh supporters – who haven’t had too many reasons to talk up their own players in the last few years – regard him as the foremost talent to emerge from Scottish rugby since the game went professional. Many former team-mates rank him among the world’s greatest open-sides. Jim Telfer described him as “a Lions-quality flanker […] the best link player in Britain”.

Naturally, non-believers will question the empirical basis of such claims. Hard evidence is difficult to come by, but what there is, is telling. Stats compiled by Opta for the BBC at the end of 2012 reflect the impact of Rennie’s all-round game. Playing fewer games than both, he carried more metres and won more turnovers than Chris Robshaw and Sam Warburton, and made more clean breaks and offloads than all other starting home nations open-sides combined.

In fact, this was a career with several notable highlights. In his debut season 2006-07 with Edinburgh, Rennie seemed to receive the man-of-the-match champagne on an almost weekly basis. Within a minute of his first international appearance in 2008, he had unceremoniously upended Brian O’Driscoll, although he was later to suffer a knee injury in the same match.

After a lengthy lay-off, Rennie made the Scotland World Cup squad in 2011, and formed part of a well-balanced Edinburgh back-row with Netani Talei and David Denton during the side’s pioneering run to the semi-final of the Heineken Cup in 2012. In the Six Nations fixture against France, the flanker kept Scotland in the game with a number of critical interventions, and was named the match’s outstanding player in a losing side. He also played in the unbeaten tour of Australia, Fiji and Samoa in the summer of that year.

Whilst most comments surrounding his retirement have naturally been coloured with regret, Rennie’s play during his career provided much for followers of Edinburgh, Bristol and Scotland to recall fondly. More widely, in an era so freqently characterised by brute force, Rennie’s play is a timely reminder that pace and guile remain the most valuable of assets.

By Charlie King
Follow Charlie on Twitter: @CharlescpKing

Photo by: Patrick Khachfe / Onside Images