HEADING INTO the World Cup, Garry Ringrose boasted the kind of winning stats that every player on the planet would sign up for in a heartbeat. Of his previous 23 games for club and country, he’d won 22 of them going back to the summer of 2022. Success, right? Well, it’s not that straightforward.
The one he lost was the Champions Cup final to La Rochelle, a single-pointer at the Aviva. A game he didn’t get to play in was the Grand Slam win against England at the same venue. Another that he didn’t get to play in was the momentous third Test against the All Blacks in Wellington. Two seismic victories and he was injured for both.
This has been the way of it for Ringrose, one of the game’s pre-eminent outside-centres. The highs of winning (and scoring) against England in the 2018 Grand Slam decider followed by victory in his first Champions Cup final and a defeat of the All Blacks soon after. Then the lows of a lost ChampionsCup in Japan, before missing out on a British & Irish Lions tour and another lost Champions Cup final in 2022.
