Shane Geraghty: England's forgotten man

Cast your mind back to 11th March 2007, England vs France, Twickenham.  Yoda was still in charge of England and they were in with a decent shout of winning the Six Nations if they could defeat the French at home.  With the match on a knife edge after 58 minutes at 15 -18, a 20-year-old blonde lad replaces Toby Flood at outside-half and his first action of note is to slot a nerveless penalty to take England into a narrow lead.   10 minutes later he executes a scintillating midfield break, slaloming at pace past a number of players before being hauled down short of the line and Mike Tindall scores to make the game secure.  The young man was Shane Geraghty of London Irish, and this was a year before Danny Cipriani made his much vaunted debut.

Fast forward nearly two years and it is as if he never existed at international level.  The press and the public fawn over Cipriani, or discuss the return of Wilkinson after the boy wonder's latest failure to meet the ridiculous expectations, but seldom do you hear mention of the boy from Coventry's name amidst much gnashing of teeth regarding the lack of young English five-eigths. 

Geraghty is of course at a disadvantage to Danny in that he is not particularly handsome and is also not presently making the beast with two backs with a busty tabloid-friendly celeb.  Instead, since his return from injury at the beginning of October, he has decided to focus on silly things like playing for his club every week and guiding them to the top of the league.  Fool.

Assuming New England wish to stick with Cipriani and Flood, the failure of Flutey at 12 means the most obvious place for Geraghty to slot would be in the first centre channel - his regular club position - where his kicking game could take some pressure off whoever is at 10, and his running game has the potential to do something akin to that day at Twickenham 18 months ago. 

London Irish are no doubt pleased the spotlight is off their young potential star, but we for one hope it will not be long before his profile is raised significantly beyond his current elite squad also-ran status.

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