ian glover
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Re: Neil Fox[quote="admin"]Share your memories and thoughts on Neil Fox
Since Fox was so brilliant, I'd like to think about what the best British RL back division, including him, since the 1940s, meaning in living memory for all under about 70, would look like.
He was incredibly strong and powerful for 6 feet tall and 15 to 16 stones, very brainy and skilful, not very fast but faster than most and always capable of making 30 metres even against the Aussies, a wonderful disributor with the best possible partner outside him, the wiry and extremely fast South African Alan Skene, who ran like an elusive hare and who was just as good as Fox and the perfect complement to his different style. The best centre pairing I've ever seen. The perfect bludgeon and rapier combo! (When they faced Eric Ashton ands Alan Davies of Wigan in the early to mid-1960s, they outplayed them).
The ONLY caveats to this are that Billy Boston was as good in the centre as Fox - faster and just as brainy, and just as strong - but he was more use on the wing (he could have outplayed the less brainy Jonah Lomu, though I suspect neither could have got the full measure of Brian Bevan!) - and he didn't kick goals, whereas Fox was an all-time great kicker. And second, Reg Gasnier was probably as fast as Skene, and marginally cleverer.
If you accept that Boston could be better used on the wing than in the centre (but see below) this makes the best RL centre pairing since the 1940s Fox and Gasnier, and the best British RL one Fox and Skene (who was as good as Eric Ashton skills-wise and a little faster and more used to Fox).
Bevan was not a small man - I suspect he was over 14 stones and about six feet tall - and I can't see past him as the best right wing to play in the British rugby league. Yet Boston was a right winger too. (Offiah was never in the same class as either by the way. He was merely a sprinter with a decent swerve who could catch and hold a rugby ball - watch his tries on You.Tube and see! As a skilful all-round rugby player he was marginal and lucky to play for very good/wonderful teams like Widnes and Wigan).
I'd have Bevan on the right wing and Skene and Fox in the centre in my British RL team. On the left wing it would be an impossible toss-up between the equally brilliant Clive and Mick Sullivan(s)! They were probably equally fast. Clive was five eleven and 12.5 stones (maybe a bit more) and Mick was smallet at five ten and about eleven and a quarter stones. Both were superb defenders with very high tackle counts. Mick made up for his lighter weight by playing like Vince Karalius on speed in defence - to put it very mildly!!! Both were very superbly precise and elusive runners/sprinters. Clive was not a successful captain of GB for nothing. They were both very special players and as I said at the start about them, they were equals with slightly different attributes.
And Boston? How can you leave out oner of the two best of them all (him and Bevan)? He was amazingly light on his feet for a man the size of Fox, with incredible surging changes of pace - fast to slow and vice-versa - and direction, oozing class, power and pace on an industrial scale.
The answer? Play him at full-back. Stand-off could be another option but although he played in that position very well on various occasions, you really need a specialist distributor/general there, rather than the amazing broken-field runner that Boston was. Millward, Murphy, Edwards, Schofield, possibly the wonderfully idiosyncratic but possibly too individualist Hanley, Hardisty, Bolton, Topliss, Frank Myler and several others come to mind as all-round stand-offs. Boston could be wasted there, and sometimes a misfit, too big and fast and limited by the role. But at full-back he'd be free to use his pace, power and varied skills to the full, in a position where the British RL has tended to lack all-time great as opposed to merely world-class players. Of the players just listed as stand-offs, four (Millward, Murphy, Bolton and Edwards), were also either brilliant regular scrum halves or capable of filling the position and being brilliant. I'd choose Millward and Murphy and let them alternate! (Or rather, given their strong wills - quietly stubborn Roger and bossy albeit couthy Alec) have a forceful captain who ordered them which positions to fill and when!).
My best British RL back division of the last 60 or so years would therefore be:
Boston; Bevan, Skene, Fox, Sullivan (C or M); Millward, Murphy (or Murphy and Millward, it doesn't really matter)
Reserves/thge A team could include Lewis Jones, Eric Ashton, James Leuluai, van Vollenhoven, Sean Edwards, Alan Hardisty, maybe Garry Schofield, not Offiah or Robinson, Tony Iro, Arthur Keegan, one of the aforementioned Sullivans of course, NOT Martin Offiah, sadly not Jason Robinson, possibly Ellery Hanley...
Back on Neil Fox, his biggest asset was certainly not speed. He was faster than he is remembered as being and his acceleration and positioning and vision were all great, and extremely strong (upper body, hips, legs, hand-off), like a very strong prop, taking up to five men to stop him, but his main assets were his elusive and clever running, his superb distribution, and last but not least his goal-kicking (a cross between a metronome and a railway gun).
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