What's More Important to a Rugby Winger, Speed or Skill?

It's long been held that backs are seen as the glamorous bunch in rugby, the scorers and finishers who regularly butt heads with forwards, but there lies another debate within their ranks—and it relates to the wings.

Speed and skill are seen as two foundations of any winger's locker, but there will inevitably be those who fare better in one department more so than the other; the question is, which attribute is more important?

Of course, we have the fortunate few who stand out as elite hybrids of the two. Any player would seek to showcase as much of each trait as possible, but ask them which they'd want more of if they had to choose, and we may get a different answer.

Rugby is evolving at a meteoric pace, and players now are bigger, stronger and faster than ever before, but are the wide men focusing their development in the right area?

The Ups and Downs of Speed

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To illustrate the point of how useful speed can be in a game of rugby, we'll head straight to the source and examine one of, if not the fastest man to ever grace Test-level rugby: Bryan Habana.

The 32-year-old speedster boasts a record of 64 tries in 117 games for South Africa and has built a career almost exclusively on his ability to beat his opposite man should things boil down to a foot race:

At the end of the day, this is the goal of most wingers, to open up and exploit that half-metre or so of speed necessary to mow down the touchline. Even better, they'll have the space opened up for them.

But that's where the debate comes in. A winger will have to occasionally open up their own space, and when up against a defensively competent marker or cohesively built team, such a task can be difficult, to say the least.

Habana is an unfair example in this sense, due to the fact he possesses an extremely high amount of skill as well as speed. In order to properly test pace versus skill, a winger more exclusively built around the former must be selected.

Enter Carlin Isles:

The United States sevens star became a YouTube sensation for his displays of blistering pace in the smaller-team format, and he's been one of the major driving forces behind the Eagles in recent years.

But Isles thrives perhaps too much on his speed. In sevens, one can get by on taking a sideways tangent due to the fact there are fewer defenders before making a beeline up the pitch. 

The American attempted a transition to rugby union and signed with Glasgow Warriors in 2014, but after making just one appearance for the team, it didn't end well; a sign, perhaps, that speed is not king.

Because Isles didn't have a base of knowledge founded on the skills needed in rugby and the tactical grasp of how things work, he was perhaps always destined to have just one half of a winger's game down.

But was it the less important half?

Skill Above All

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Records are there to be broken in sport, and as the 100-metre sprint figure gradually trickles closer to the nine-second mark, our athletes in ball sports also are becoming quicker and stronger; less human and more android, it seems.

On the flip side to speed, there is skill, and no one exuded this attribute in 2015 more than New Zealand and Hurricanes winger Nehe Milner-Skudder, a side-stepping menace if ever there was one:

Milner-Skudder's lightning-quick feet operate in a different way to the Habanas and Isleses of the world. Instead of yardage alone, it's illusion and confusion that he uses to his advantage to get from Point A to Point B.

Skill is a broader term than speed in this sense, however. Side-stepping would be considered one piece of the puzzle, but handling and vision may also be brought into the equation, not things that all speed-based wingers possess in great surplus.

Again, Milner-Skudder could be considered an unfair example due to the fact he, like Habana, is a hybrid of both powers and has no small amount of speed under his hood, as well as twinkling feet.

Of course, just about every elite winger in rugby has some degree of pace, but Ireland's Tommy Bowe can be considered one whose advantage in skill could match his sprinting alone, a major part of his game:

A running constant in many of Bowe's tries is that he often has bodies ahead of him when receiving the ball and is forced to jostle his way through a defence rather than skirting around it.

Another more recent example of skill over speed came from Leicester's Telusa Veainu after he impressed Rugby Tonight pundit Austin Healey in the Champions Cup quarter-finals:

Speed can be found just about anywhere in rugby, but skills are an inherent part of a player, and perception can be a very rare asset in concentrated doses, as opposed to a much more common trait: pace.

One of Bowe's former team-mates, Ireland legend Brian O'Driscoll, said in 2014 that there is too much emphasis on size and physical attributes in the modern game as opposed to skills. Per the Irish Independent's Daniel Schofield, O'Driscoll said players now spend too much time in the gym:

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I never had a huge love or appetite for it, it was just a means to an end. In more recent years I got into it because it was a necessary evil, but I never loved it the way these young guys do. Their technique is phenomenal but it is as if they are winning if they have great scores in the gym. It's not, they're rugby players.

I just came in at a time when not everyone was massively into it. It is an important element of fitness to be able to lift heavy weights and be strong and more powerful, but just not losing sight that it it is only one aspect. You have got to be aerobically very fit and you have to have very good skills. I don't just know if that balance is there at the moment.

I can see that at the academies in Ireland, where there is a huge focus on scores in the weights room, as opposed to whether they can throw a 10-metre pass on the run. They should be rugby players becoming athletes, not athletes becoming rugby players.

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It goes without saying that speed training is a big part of the process these days, and it appears to be working as players are generally getting faster. Just look at the average prop now compared to that of 20 years ago to see how.

But skill, as much to a speedster as any other type of player on the pitch, should be treated as the real decider between a good winger and a great one; one whose game relies upon speed, and the other who merely uses it as one of their many weapons.