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The Breakdown | Just for kicks, the top 10 rugby union sharp shooters of the past 30 years

As the season finale draws near, we nominate 10 goal-kickers you can count on when the pressure cranks up It is approaching that time of year. Big games hinging on increasingly slim margins, the pressure on goal-kickers intense. Check out Marcus Smith’s conversion attempt after Cadan Murley’s try for Harlequins against Sale on Saturday. The ball struck the right post, the crossbar, the left post and then the crossbar again in a classic “What happened next?” moment that captured perfectly the agonies of the tortured marksman’s art. But the old maxim still holds true: goal-kickers don’t lose games, they win them. So if you could pick one individual from the professional era to kick a goal for your life, who would it be? Unfair, perhaps, to nudge aside the deadliest kickers of the amateur era such as Naas Botha, Don Clarke, Dusty Hare, Grant Fox, Ollie Campbell et al – imagine how good some of their stats would have been without heavy, muddy pitches, heavy leather balls and no tees – but for the purposes of this exercise let’s focus on the sharpest shooters of the past 30 years. Continue reading...