Top 20 wasted rugby talents countdown: No 20-16

In our new Top 20 feature, Brendan Gallagher ranks the players who, for reasons perhaps of their own doing or by others, didn’t quite hit their peak.

Here, we begin our countdown to No.1 by going through 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

20 Howard Marshall – Blackheath and England

Talented fly-half who scored a hat-trick on his England debut against Wales in Cardiff in 1883 but was never capped again. His medical studies and career then took over. Wales was clearly a favourite hunting ground for Marshall as he scored the first Barbarian try in Wales against Cardiff on the their first ever Easter tour down there.

Was his talent wasted or did he just blow out early? The Sedbergh schoolboy was a star player and captain in the England Schools side that included Mike Tindall, Iain Balshaw, Simon Danielli, David Flatman, the Sanderson brothers, Steve Borthwick and Andrew Sheridan. He was picked at fly-half ahead of Jonny Wilkinson and also skippered the side on their all-conquering tour of Australia in 1997. And then he picked up a shoulder injury while training at Worcester. He played a little for Rosslyn Park before quitting the game early and working in the City.

Novak was a huge – by 1970 standards – athletic wing for Harlequins via Eastbourne GS who caused quite a sensation on his debut against Wales by scoring a try and wiping out JPR Williams with a monster tackle. But Novak was also a high-flying young medic and was soon off to Canada where he has enjoyed a distinguished career as a Professor in Medicine.

His talents didn’t go to waste on the Sevens field where he was a phenomenon but such a genius should have achieved so much more at fifteens. He drifted in and out of the Fiji XV, enjoyed a relaxing five-year sojourn with Mont de Marsan and one incomplete season with Leicester Tigers when he largely disappointed although he did score one of the great European Cup tries against Toulouse. The truth is, that in the early years of professionalism he could make much more money at sevens than fifteens and, alas, never turned his full attention to the long form. Our loss.

Won 20 Scotland caps as a flanker and was a Test starter for the 1955 Lions but Jim Greenwood’s main claim to fame was coaching generations of brilliant players at Loughborough University and writing the two seminal coaching books in the canon. A dreadful waste therefore that Scotland would never consider him as their coach because he was not based in Scotland, living away down south in Loughborough, and the RFU would not countenance the prospect of a Scot coaching England.

BRENDAN GALLAGHER