Cooch not on toughie list? It may get nasty!

Jacques Burger? No arguments there. Colin Meads? Wayne Shelford? Bang on. In compiling his “most wanted” list of rugby bruisers in these pages a week ago, the formidably knowledgeable Brendan Gallagher landed some solid blows, so to speak.

- CHRIS HEWETT

Sure, he might have included Mark “Cowboy” Shaw, the least compromising New Zealand flanker of them all, or Martin Pelser, the one-eyed Springbok back rower placed at the top of the hit parade by Meads himself. But with one or two possible exceptions – these things are always in the black eye of the beholder – Brendan selected proper “toughians” at the expense of mere bullies.

Hence the absence of the Wallaby prop Steve Finnane, the “phantom puncher of Sydney”, and Moaner van Heerden, that Lurch-like South African lock of grim renown. If there was always a whiff of grapeshot in the air when those two were involved, there was often the stench of “cheap shot” too.

Yet there are rumblings of discontent down in the West Country. The Gloucester types cannot fathom how “Iron” Mike Teague failed to make the cut, while in nearby Bristol, they are planning legal action over the exclusion of Mike “The Greek” Fry, a loosehead prop who visualised rugby as a struggle between dark forces and played accordingly.

As for Bath, the city of Jane Austen, Georgian crescents and Liberal Democrats…suffice to say the locals are choking on their teacakes. No Gareth Chilcott? It’s a scandal, pure and simple, and there will have to be a reckoning.

Just recently, none other than Stuart Barnes described his dear friend and long-time colleague Cooch as “the poet of the unseen punch”. It was an evocative line, capturing the demon front rower’s defining characteristics.