Waugh's battle is going to be tough

WHO has the toughest job in rugby? It certainly doesn’t belong to the loadsamoney establishment lawyers plotting a course across the courtroom minefield as the player welfare class action gathers speed. Still less to the speak-your-weight machine charged with gasping “one at a time please” while plummeting towards the earth’s core under the tonnage of Posolo Tuilagi.

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As for Twickenham committee types who must explain to the corduroy-trousered species known as Surrey Man why they even dreamed of selling the stadium… nope, not them either. It’s not even Gonzalo Quesada, the latest poor sod to be appointed head coach of Italy.

This column’s hot favourite, in a one-horse race, is Phil Waugh, the 79-cap flanker from Sydney who, since June of last year, has been fighting one fire after another as chief executive of the Australian Rugby Union. He may be the first CEO in the history of team sport to trade in his business suit for a set of flame-resistant coveralls with added thermal protection.

Waugh was a brilliant player whose brilliance would have been more widely recognised had he not spent his prime competing for the same Wallaby shirt – or, occasionally, operating in the same Test back row – as a certain George Smith, who, whenever the generations of dial-shifting Aussie opensides come up for discussion, is invariably ranked above the Simon Poidevins and David Wilsons, the Michael Hoopers and David Pococks.