Keith Duggan: Rugby Union stands accused of not having Sam Burgess's back

Was Sam Burgess chased out of rugby union? And will there ever be a lonelier World Cup career in English rugby union lore? Maybe the blurry memory of Marcus Rose – whose New Romantic name, impeccable jawline and Cambridge credentials left him morally compelled to either tread boards with Hugh Laurie or play fullback for England – departing the field concussed and dazed just five minutes into his World Cup debut against Australia in 1987 for what proved to be his last time in the white shirt comes to mind.

But that was just a tough break in the carefree amateur era. Burgess’s experience, which saw him transformed from the toast of Australian rugby league to one of the scapegoats of England’s doomed World Cup campaign, leaves a bitter aftertaste to deal with, and the suspicion that English rugby let down one of its own.

As Paul O’Connell proved last month, you rarely get the ending you deserve. But Thursday’s news that Burgess has decided to retrade Bath for Sydney and rugby union for league is another reminder that rugby’s sister games are different worlds.

Russell Crowe, the patron of the South Sydney Rabbitohs, was one of the first to declare his delight that Burgess had repatriated to league, while England's 2003 World Cup-winning coach, Clive Woodward, wrote a scathing indictment of the state of English rugby, stressing that he felt Burgess was not to blame for what he terms "one of the most embarrassing points" in its history.

To blame for nothing

Too right. Burgess is a 26-year-old professional athlete, who is to blame for nothing except seeing how far he could take his game. A little more than a year ago, he was awarded the Clive Churchill Medal for his man-of-the-match display for South Sydney in the NRL Grand Final, despite playing most of the game with a fractured cheekbone.

Crowe may be an actor through and through, but he has an impresario’s eye for sport, realising his vision to have all four Burgess brothers – George, Luke and Tom joined Sam – play for his beloved Rabbitohs. In August 2013 they became the first family of four to play on the same team in a century.

Just like that, the Burgess boys were household names. Sam's feats thrilled English union coach Stuart Lancaster into imagining the Yorkshireman as England's answer to Sony Bill Williams, a league convert with strength and athleticism, superior handling skills and the ability to draw contact and make an accurate pass.

Burgess was rushed into the England squad as a centre despite the preference for playing him at six at Bath. He started at inside centre for one of the emotive and historic high points of the Rugby World Cup: England v Wales at Twickenham. England blew it. The reservations which had been expressed about Burgess before the game exploded afterwards.

An unforgettable evaluation was offered by Gordon D’Arcy on these pages on the Tuesday after the match, with England’s rugby heartland in a tailspin. His dissection of the game was fair and precise. Perhaps because it was written by an inside centre who made an exceptional career out of quick thought and quicker feet, it inevitably focused on England’s deeply inexperienced inside centre.

‘Naivety’

One sentence about Burgess in particular – “His naivety embarrassed those around him and severely damaged England’s chances of reaching the quarter-finals” – made for wincing reading. One can imagine it piercing the inner sanctum of Lancaster’s war room. With England suddenly facing the appalling vista of group elimination. Lancaster admitted his gamble had failed by dropping Burgess to the bench for the critical game against Australia. England lost 33-13 anyway.

It will soon be lost in the small print that England led Wales by 22-15 when Burgess left the field in the 69th minute of that infamous match. The actual losing of the game originated in the visionary infield chip-kick by Lloyd Williams and England’s collective failure to cope with the pressure of the last 10 minutes.

In an interview with the Guardian not long after the Wales defeat, Burgess's brother Tom, coincidentally enjoying a much happier time in the parallel world of the international rugby league dressingroom, offered this opinion on his brother's dramatic fall from grace: "I don't know a great deal about union, but from what I saw it didn't look like Sam did much wrong. But there are a lot of upset people in union because England didn't do as well as they should have done. They like to point the finger at someone and the easiest option is to point the finger at the new feller."

Omission

In omitting Burgess for the next game, Lancaster and England implicitly did that. Lancaster has been coaching rugby for 15 years. He must have seen enough of Burgess in training to convince him that he could add to England’s three-quarter line. He certainly saw enough in him to rush him into the international ranks. At that moment, he needed to ignore the madding crowd and back his player.

Maybe Burgess had made his mind up by then: he said this week that he was missing his family and life in Sydney. Having gone through the experience as an 18-year-old of watching the deterioration of his father – a builder and part-time league professional – due to motor neurone disease, Burgess has had his character tested before.

Public pronouncements of support for Burgess were not exactly deafening from the England camp during or after the Rugby World Cup. As the tournament thinned out into semi-final pairings from the southern hemisphere, Burgess had a chance to reflect.

He is now mid-career in a brutally punishing professional sport (in either code). He faced the choice of returning to a place and to a game where he knows he can thrive or persevering with union and England after what must have been an extraordinarily lonely few weeks.

Some £3 billion was the figure offered as the financial cost of England's failure to progress in its Rugby World Cup. The cost for Burgess is harder to evaluate. Had he soldiered on, he would surely have played Six Nations for England and perhaps in the seasons ahead may have become what Lancaster believed he could already see. But his departure leaves him indelibly associated with a humbling few weeks for England rugby.

Little wonder he left, and with his departure has come the vaguely guilty acknowledgement that Burgess was not all that well served by England during his short time; that the union boys never had his back. Back to league, then, at Russell Crowe’s signal to unleash hell.