Care still shines in list of the finest 9s

ON THE face of it, the easiest way to get noticed in big-time rugby is to bag a contract with Harlequins, which gives you automatic access to a shirt that resembles a bad chemical trip at a Grateful Dead concert and might have left Van Gogh fearing that his sunflower paintings were insufficiently vivid.

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There again, how do you stand out from the crowd when everyone else has been to the same outfitter?

Danny Care certainly found a solution: namely, by being better, for longer, than at least 95 per cent of all the Quins in living memory. He could have been the most monochrome half-back in history and still justified the ovation he received before, during and after his final home appearance for the Londoners last weekend, but one of the defining characteristics of a Stoop career full of ridiculous numbers - almost 400 first-team games across 19 years - was a complete absence of humdrummery. Here was a scrum-half incapable of doing anything by halves.

Some will accuse your columnist of damning him with faint praise. Just the 95 per cent, they'll be asking? Didn't the esteemed broadcaster Nick Mullins go close to anointing him “the greatest Harlequin ever”? Indeed he did, and he's entitled to his view. But it is surely a stretch to rank Care above Jason Leonard, or Peter Winterbottom, or that chap Carling. Or, come to that, the much-decorated Wavell Wakefield (although you'd have to be older than Noah to provide a first-hand account of that unusually grand personage's baronial qualities).