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In one of his final acts as a Bath player before heading into the Six Nations, Finn Russell produced a try for Tom Carr-Smith that left his usually stoic coach Johann van Graan open-mouthed in awe.
“I have a saying: ‘Talent needs a target that nobody else can hit but a genius hits a target that nobody else can see,” Van Graan said. You could easily produce a reel of top-10 plays that Russell – and only Russell – could envisage yet alone execute. He is the ultimate showman who has built a level of adulation that crosses club and country divides.
Even the great former Wales scrum-half Gareth Edwards, considers himself a big fan. “I’d love to play with him,” Edwards told the BBC last year. “It’s as if you can see that’s what an outside half should do. You can see him thinking. ‘how do I open these doors?’.
“He reminds me a bit like Barry [John] and Phil [Bennett], Mike [Gibson]. They were what I call a ‘footballing outside half’. Particularly in today’s game where everybody wants to be a huge physical presence, whereas you can see him engaging his brain all the time and looking for the weakness in the opposition.”
Genius, magician: this is one way that Russell is viewed. But there is another way he is perceived too. When asked who he would select as his Lions fly-half this summer, Johnny Sexton immediately picked Owen Farrell but made sure to throw Russell under the bus on the way.
“Who do you want in there when the going gets tough?” Sexton said. “Test-match animals. I know who the media would want: Finn Russell, Marcus Smith, the flashy.” He later retracted Smith from the “flashy” equation, but not Russell.
In truth, Russell takes issue with both stereotypes, even if he much prefers Edwards’ assessment. “It’s always nice to have compliments like that” – than Sexton’s withering critique, although he takes both in his stride. “Nah, it doesn’t annoy me at all,” Russell, 32, told Telegraph Sport.
“I have never really got to know Johnny. I was out on the 2017 tour but apart from that we have never really had any crossover even in that short time. He was getting ready for the Tests and I was getting ready for the midweek games. I really don’t know him that well.
“When you play against someone, there’s obviously a competition and a kind of rivalry. He’ll have his opinion of me and I’ll have mine of him. If he has any comments on me, I am not too stressed about it.”
What Russell takes greater issue with is the idea that he is a maverick who simply produces his party pieces off the cuff. ‘Off the cuff’ to him is an insult; the idea that he just clicks his fingers and magic suddenly appears, when in fact the apparent improvisation is based on hours of hard work on the training pitch and studying his opponents.
‘It is not always off the cuff and sort of lucky’
“I think that saying that it is off the cuff, it is not always off the cuff and sort of lucky,” Russell said. “These things that you are seeing in the lead up to the game, skills that I will have practised on the training on the pitch, there’s lot of skills that you practise and the more you watch and study the more you pick up on the different body languages and skills and signs of where to put the ball.
“It might seem off the cuff for a lot of people, but that’s the images I see on the pitch. I don’t see it as off the cuff. I don’t see it as risky. That’s my style of play. Off the cuff to me is building knowledge of the game, building those partnerships with your team-mates and then with the stats you can get when you are analysing the opposition you can see that the thirteen miss 70 per cent of their tackles on their left shoulder, versus 95 per cent on their right.
“There’s such fine details now and these all come into the account when you’re in the moment and you have done the work. When you get to that moment then you are not thinking, you just have to react.”
Again it does nothing to help the stereotype of Russell as the chilled guy who just rocks up a game with only a can of Irn Bru as his matchday prep, that he is actually a bit of a stat nause. “There are quite a few stats I look for, particularly in terms of the number of phases it takes to break teams down,” Russell said. “That’s quite a big one for me.
“As a 10, you are constructing a plan to break teams down but if they have got exceptionally good defence when it goes over three or four phases then that’s when you start to have a look at the probability shift to restart that count and go again. That’s one I always have in the back of my mind on how the attack is going.”
Six Nations a testing ground for Russell’s Lions prospects
Russell is open in his ambition of being the Lions starting 10 this summer. He was part of the infamous “Geography six” in 2017 in New Zealand and four years ago the tour in South Africa was played behind closed doors because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither felt an authentic experience.
“I have not spoken to [Andy] Farrell but I imagine he will be looking at the Six Nations coming up and he will make decisions off of that,” Russell said.
Looking back to his 2017 self, Russell sees a fly-half who played with absolute freedom, unafraid of the consequences of a mispass being intercepted. Now, he says, he is older, wiser and even, whisper it, more pragmatic. “As I have grown personally, becoming a father, becoming a dad, that changes you and means your life is a bit different off the field,” Russell said.
“Then having time at Racing over in France, coming back to the UK with Bath, being exposed to those different styles and different game plans has made me a different, more rounded player.
“When you break through, no one really knows what to expect from you and now everyone is expecting all these offloads and chip kicks but then I could have a game where I don’t do that and people will say I have had a quiet game. In the past people will say I have had a poor game or I haven’t done much whereas now he is controlling it.
“Whereas in the past that sort of stuff would get me in trouble either from the coaches or the media saying why’s he trying that now? You can never win in this game. I think my style probably has changed a bit, I think it is more pragmatic and the way I view the game and knowing that you can just build pressure, whereas before my mindset was kind of attacking, wanting the ball and going at teams.
“Now there’s a bit more of an element of how you manage a game, how you turn pressure on to them and you can’t just score off every phase. That changes team to team and year to year, it is something I have learnt when to put the brakes on.”
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