It is approaching that time of year. Big games hinging on increasingly slim margins, the pressure on goal-kickers intense. Check out Marcus Smith’s conversion attempt after Cadan Murley’s try for Harlequins against Sale on Saturday. The ball struck the right post, the crossbar, the left post and then the crossbar again in a classic “What happened next?” moment that captured perfectly the agonies of the tortured marksman’s art.
But the old maxim still holds true: goal-kickers don’t lose games, they win them. So if you could pick one individual from the professional era to kick a goal for your life, who would it be? Unfair, perhaps, to nudge aside the deadliest kickers of the amateur era such as Naas Botha, Don Clarke, Dusty Hare, Grant Fox, Ollie Campbell et al – imagine how good some of their stats would have been without heavy, muddy pitches, heavy leather balls and no tees – but for the purposes of this exercise let’s focus on the sharpest shooters of the past 30 years.
Just a couple of ground rules. This isn’t strictly about overall career stats, more the absolute belief that, in the 79th minute of a titanic Test with the scores level, a certain individual will step up and win you the ball game from the touchline (nb for pedants out there we are talking conversions, which removes kicking to the corner as an option).
Here goes …
10) Diego Domínguez (Italy) Among the sweetest strikers of a ball in the game’s history, up there with Argentina’s Nicolás Sánchez among the soft-shoe shufflers. Sánchez retired this year having registered an impressive 902 points in 104 Tests. For comparison’s sake, Domínguez scored 983 in 74 Tests for Italy, mostly with the nonchalant ease of someone knocking the top off a soft-boiled egg. Which means no place – gulp – for Sánchez, Emiliano Boffelli, Melvyn Jaminet, Chris Paterson, Ronan O’Gara or Johnny Sexton. Savagely harsh but there we go.
9) Dan Biggar (Wales) The 35-year-old Biggar is retiring at the end of the season and can walk away with his kicking tee held high. For a while he seemed to have the yips when preparing to kick for goal: twitching the shoulder, patting the hair, pulling at the shirt. But to see him consistently front up as Wales’s main man in a packed stadium in Cardiff was to witness a perfectionist with colossal mental strength.
8) Thomas Ramos (France) Yes, Ramos has had a couple of high-profile failures, not least against Toulon this month and courtesy of Cheslin Kolbe’s chargedown in the 2023 World Cup quarter-final. But to be the top points-scorer in the past three Six Nations championships is not a fluke. When Ramos sticks the ball down on the tee and surveys the distant posts there is generally only one outcome.
7) Dan Carter (NZ) We tend to remember the unstoppable Carter for his brilliance with ball in hand and all-round assurance. When it came to curling over left-footed kicks from all angles, though, he was just as outstanding and he sits way out in front in the men’s scoring charts with 1,598 points in 112 Tests. Playing in a great team did give him plenty of target practice but, like Domínguez, he made it look deceptively simple.
6) Owen Farrell (Eng) The loftiest praise you can give England’s former captain is that, for a while, he was even more of a cold-eyed assassin than Jonny Wilkinson. The slow tilt of the head, the familiar side-eye towards the posts … for ruthless competitive edge there have been few to match him. His haul of 1,271 points in 119 Tests – second only to Carter – in addition to the mountain of points he scored for Saracens, outweigh his slightly reduced reliability in recent times.
5) Handré Pollard (SA) Ask England where Pollard should sit in this exalted list. They would probably put him higher up, haunted as they are by the Springbok’s late long-range penalty in the 2023 World Cup semi-final. His record in South Africa’s back-to-back winning finals is little short of extraordinary: 22 points in 2019 when he finished the match with a fractured eye socket, and all the Boks’ points in their 12-11 win over New Zealand in 2023. Definitely a man for the big occasion.
4) Neil Jenkins (Wales) The godfather of modern goal-kicking, so good in his day that the entire stadium would be mentally adding two or three points to Wales’s score even before he positioned the ball on his heap of sand from Tenby beach. The British & Irish Lions selected him at full-back in their 1997 series triumph against South Africa for a reason and his final kick to help Wales beat England at Wembley in 1999 sealed his place in rugby folklore.
3) Jonny Wilkinson (Eng) No goal-kicker has been ever more widely imitated than Jonny. The clasped hands, the serious gaze, the quasi-religious faith in the outcome … it might have been a drop goal with his “other” foot that won England the 2003 World Cup but Wilkinson’s obsessive dedication to his craft was most obvious in his place kicking. Still in third place on the all-time Test scorers’ list, still kicking them in his sleep.
2) Morné Steyn (SA) For British & Irish Lions fans it was like rewatching a Hammer horror movie when Steyn kicked the winning penalty from the back of beyond to clinch the 2021 series in Cape Town. What made it even more incredible was that he had done something similar to clinch the series against the same opposition 12 years earlier. Neat and unfussy, he was also top-scorer at the 2011 World Cup. If you want a long kick nailed at altitude, even now he has turned 40, look no further.
1) Leigh Halfpenny (Wales) Hundreds of kickers have come and gone but ‘Pence’ remains the gold standard. The last time the Lions won a series was in 2013 and Halfpenny’s goal-kicking in Australia was as laser-sharp as anything this correspondent has seen. He was deservedly crowned player of the series, broke the Lions series points record previously held by Jenkins and also set a new Lions record with 21 points in the final Test. Not bad for someone who, as an 18-year-old, was released by Ospreys for being too small.
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