Gopperth leads the way for old boys

YOU can’t keep a good man down. Or an old one, for that matter. Jimmy Gopperth, a couple of months into his 42nd year, will be turning out for Provence in the French ProD2 this season, alongside some equally familiar, if rather younger, Premiership faces: George North, Tomas Francis, Teimana Harrison.

Meanwhile, there is similar example of long-in-the-tooth-evity a million rugby miles away in the North Island of New Zealand, where the 36-year-old Hadleigh Parkes has suddenly re-materialised in deepest Manawatu, where he began his senior rugby career when the All Blacks were still wondering if they would ever win a second world title.

Remember Hadleigh? After spells in Super Rugby with the Auckland-based Blues and the Wellington-rooted Hurricanes, interspersed by a South African sojourn in Port Elizabeth, he moved to Llanelli and played dozens of games for the Scarlets. As it turned out, he played them well enough to catch the eye of Warren Gatland, who picked him for Wales on residency in 2017 and subsequently lauded him as one of his better selectorial brainwaves.

Manawatu aren’t quite what they were in the 1980s, when NPC Championship titles and Ranfurly Shields were within their compass and All Blacks as good as Gary Knight and Mark “Cowboy” Shaw were chucking their weight around, but Parkes will still find himself squaring up to the likes of Otago, Taranaki and Bay of Plenty as he winds down his career.

You have to applaud the man, along with all the other senior citizens who reject retirement as the worst career move available to them. Rugby is as demanding a team game as it is possible to find, but it is not exclusively the preserve of the young. Who knows? If Jordie Barrett loses his way in the New Zealand midfield…