Ronan O'Gara might be loathe to claim full credit for the maturation as a player of the 28-year-old former Springbok winger Raymond Rhule but there's little doubt that La Rochelle's head coach and soon to be director of rugby was a key figure in not only helping to address the player's perceived shortcomings but transforming him into a key figure for the French club.
O’Gara gave him a chance, plucking him from the roster of Pro D2 club Grenoble at the start of last season, identifying in Rhule a player who would thrive under the auspices of the Irishman’s ‘Keep Ball Alive’ (KBA) coaching philosophy; it was a prescient judgment with the player handsomely fulfilling his end.
The Ghanaian-born wing first came to prominence on an international stage at the 2012 Under-20 World Junior Championship, scoring three tries for South Africa in a tournament in which the country claimed outright success on home soil. The only match that the junior Springboks lost was a pool game against Mike Ruddock’s Ireland team, going on to beat New Zealand in the final.
Rhule was joined by players like centre Jan Serfontein and future 2019 World Cup winners in outhalf Handre Pollard and flanker Pieter-Steph du Toit, current French international secondrow Paul Willemse, an his La Rochelle teammate Dillyn Leyds, in that underage title-winning side.
His performances caught the eye of the senior Springboks coach at the time Heyneke Meyer who named Rhule in the squad for the year-ending tour to the northern hemisphere. He didn’t play in any of the Test matches and it would be another five years before he made his South African debut, against France in the summer of 2017.
He had scored bucket-loads of tries for the Cheetahs in Super Rugby, his footwork, pace and lines of running catching the eye, but unfortunately so too did his defensive lapses. He won seven successive caps for the Springboks that year but the razzle dazzle wasn’t enough to blind the coaching team to the mistakes.
His seventh and last cap was against New Zealand in September 2017, coincidentally the only time he had been on a losing team in Springboks colours. Rhule moved from the Cheetahs to the Stormers but after a lacklustre impact, making just 15 appearances, he accepted an offer to join Grenoble in 2018, then a Top 14 club in France.
In his first season at the club Grenoble were relegated to ProD2 and his career looked like sliding if not into obscurity then to the status of journeyman. O’Gara and La Rochelle saw enough potential/talent to offer him a contract for the 2020-2021 season and Rhule emphatically grasped the opportunity.
It’s interesting to note that in this season’s Champions Cup, La Rochelle boast three backs as top try scorers with three apiece, Rhule, fullback Leyds and centre Geoffrey Doumayrou. The trio are emblazoned across the top of various statistical categories, beneficiaries of the hardcore efforts of the pack, but it’s their work ethic and willingness to pop up in less orthodox running channels that in particular makes Rhule and Leyds so hard to defend against.
Rhule is especially effective when sneaking from the blindside wing to pop up in the midfield channels or in taking an inside pass from his outhalf. It makes him much more difficult to chaperone. Fijian breeze-block Levani Botia is at the nucleus of the French club’s attacking strategy.
Leyds is also fluid in his positional play and part of that comes from the fact that in a previous incarnation he spent time as an outhalf. It’s his ability to read the play as much as his pace that makes him a lethal broken-field runner.
He links well with his wings, hardly a surprise given the fact that he and Rhule go back to not only the South African Under-20s’ success in 2012 but they also won their first senior Springbok cap – Leyds won the last of 10 caps in 2019 - in the game match against France (2017) and both joined La Rochelle in the summer of 2020.
One statistic that underlines Leyds’s threat with ball in hand is that he has beaten 15 defenders in the three tournament matches so far – Rhule has a mere eight, the same number as Leinster’s best, Hugo Keenan and Rhys Ruddock – six more than anyone else taking to the pitch at Stade Marcel-Deflandre on Sunday.
Playbooks and patterns, structures and parameters of play are important considerations for any coach but so too is the ability to be able to mine talent, to be a good judge, to spot what others might overlook. O'Gara and Jono Gibbes did exactly that in bringing Rhule to La Rochelle and in the process restoring him to a former glory.
