A jersey number is an administrative convenience for South Africa, New Zealand and France. The world’s top three sides are selecting skill-set fusion whilst England stays stuck in the supermarket aisle.
The top line is that the gap between the top three and everybody else is no longer about talent. It is about what those three do with it. Rassie Erasmus, Dave Rennie and Fabien Galthie have each arrived at the same conclusion, which is that a jersey number is an administrative convenience rather than a job specification.
What all three are selecting is not a position but a blend of skills, and the useful analogy is fusion cooking. A chef working that way does not reach for an ingredient because it belongs to a particular cuisine. He reaches for it because of what it does next to the other things in the pan, and the dish gets named afterwards, if at all.
These three establish what an afternoon requires, a jackal threat, a second lineout option, a distributor at first receiver, and then find the player whose combination of skills delivers most of it at once. The number on his back is the label on the menu, written up once the cooking is done.
The Springbok laboratory
Pieter-Steph du Toit played three Tests in July and did three different jobs. At Ellis Park he packed down as an emergency lock and captained the side. At Loftus Versfeld he produced an all-court shift through the most demanding 80 minutes South Africa faced all month. In Durban he set the defensive temperature for a 43-0 shutout. Three rounds, three roles, no drop in standard, and at no point did anybody in the Springbok camp appear to regard this as unusual.
That is the tell. South Africa made 10 changes between rounds one and two and 10 more before Durban, where they fielded four debutants, and the side that put 43 unanswered points past Wales still looked first-choice. Damian Willemse produced the individual performance of the tournament on his 50th cap at Ellis Park, complete with a 70-metre 50-22 and total command of the air, then started the following week split between 12 and 15 and came off the bench in Durban. Nobody has yet established what Willemse’s position is. Nobody in South Africa seems remotely bothered.
Paul de Villiers found out he was starting an hour before kick-off in round one, then started all three Tests operating as a first receiver from the lineout, which is not a duty most unions hand to an openside on debut. Boan Venter, a prop, hoisted a 116-kilogram lock above his head to claim a restart and then watched him run over half of Scotland.
Erasmus decides who his best players are and then works out where the rugby happens. Everyone else decides where the rugby happens and then goes looking for someone shaped correctly to stand there.
New Zealand did it with a lock
Tupou Vaa’i is a second-row forward. New Zealand had a blindside question, so Vaa’i answered it at six against Ireland at Eden Park, emphatically enough that the question has gone away. The All Blacks wanted Vaa’i on the pitch more than they wanted a specialist six.
Will Jordan scored six tries in three matches and passed Doug Howlett as New Zealand’s all-time leading Test try scorer whilst wearing 14, and the loudest argument in New Zealand rugby remains whether he should be doing it from 15. Jordie Barrett gave three full games of control and defensive authority from midfield, having spent large parts of his career at full-back and on the wing. Damian McKenzie, described as either a fly-half or a full-back depending on which week you asked, produced a masterclass at Eden Park.
France, where it is philosophy rather than policy
France lost Antoine Dupont for all three rounds, and it did not appreciably slow them down, which ought to be the most alarming sentence in northern hemisphere rugby. Dupont is himself the argument in miniature. He closed out a winning Test against New Zealand in 2024 playing at 10, and in Rome in February 2025 he covered both scrum-half and fly-half in the same afternoon, scored two tries and took man of the match in a 73-24 win, because the best player in the world does not have a position either.
Matthieu Jalibert is the purest expression of it. He was the most consistently dangerous playmaker in the tournament across three full games, produced across 10 and 15, because Galthie’s France do not care which of the two a playmaker occupies so long as he has the ball in space.
Charles Ollivon has been a six, a seven, an eight and a captain, spent the 2026 Six Nations packing down at four in a side that won the thing, and could conceivably be handed a 12 shirt tomorrow without anybody blinking. That makes him the precise inverse of Vaa’i. Two of the three best sides in the world are moving forwards across the same boundary in opposite directions, and both are right, because the traffic is following the skills rather than the shirt.
Meanwhile, in the aisle marked ‘blindside flankers’
English rugby discourse, by contrast, still wants its players shrink-wrapped, barcoded and stacked in the correct aisle. The rest of the world has moved to fusion cooking. England are still ordering fish and chips, and getting faintly indignant when the kitchen suggests anything else. A six must be a lineout-jumping six. A fly-half must be a fly-half, and an aptitude for playing at 15 is treated as evidence of a character flaw rather than an asset.
“He’s not a six” is the phrase doing the heavy lifting, deployed as though it settled the matter, offered up as hard-won insight available only to men whose own playing careers peaked at Old Veseyans fourth team and who now watch from an armchair with the certainty of a national selector. It sounds like knowledge. It is a barcode being read aloud by a scanner whose entire dataset is height, weight and where the man happened to be standing at the last lineout.
Meanwhile the sides who keep beating England have quietly stopped believing that specialist number sevens are a category worth organising a team around. Henry Pollock scored a hat-trick off the bench against Fiji, was left out of the starting side in Santiago del Estero, and made it plain he was unhappy about it. In the Springbok system that conversation would be about how to get him on the pitch. In the English one it is about whether he is a six, a seven or an eight, as though settling the label were the same thing as solving the problem. England have their own Ollivon and are busy trying to file him to a CE standard before anybody is allowed to use him.
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None of this is a lament about English coaching, and it is emphatically not a shortage of raw material. Marcus Smith and George Furbank have spent their careers being moved between 10 and 15. Tommy Freeman has played wing and centre. Ben Earl covers the back-row. Chandler Cunningham-South packs down at six, at eight and at lock. Pollock covers all three back-row numbers on his own. What England lack is a conversation prepared to let them be that, one that treats the tidiness of every man doing the job printed on his back as a plan rather than a filing system.
South Africa changed 10 players a week and won three from three. New Zealand played a lock at six and did the same. France managed two from three without the best player in the world.
The Northern Series starts on November 6 and hands each of them a return fixture in somebody else’s weather. Scotland get New Zealand, Italy host South Africa, and France have Fiji before South Africa a week later, by which point Dupont should be back alongside a scrum-half who has just captained the country through a southern tour. Watch what each side does with a problem like that, because November will not settle who has the best six, the best 12 or the best 15 in world rugby. It will settle which of these countries has stopped asking the question in those terms, and which is still standing in the aisle, reading the label.