The Investec Champions Cup is a tournament renowned for its generosity at the pool stage. Two thirds of the original 24 clubs are destined to qualify for the knockouts, and some of those will lose more games than they win.
A more cutthroat intensity only really manifests in the final round of the group stage. Only then does it become live or die. No second chances, no repechage, no back door entry to the knockout stage of the competition. You either live to fight another day, or you go home empty-handed.
There was a sharper edge, and a more personal meaning to that mantra for two of the number 10s involved in the game between La Rochelle and Harlequins. The 48-year-old Ronan O’Gara has transitioned into the world of coaching and built a cathedral of rugby worship in the Bay of Biscay, but his days in Le Vieux Port are numbered.
Marcus Smith will be 27 in a few weeks, and he has reached a crossroads in his playing career. He stars for a club which has fallen behind the curve in the Gallagher Prem; now he is ranked no higher than third in the England pecking order at his preferred position of fly-half, having been hailed as a generational teenage talent.
O’Gara and Smith have arrived at a turning point in their fortunes. They have reached that critical juncture when somehow the Irishman’s two Champions cup winners medals, and the little magician’s 46 England caps and two Lions tours, no longer seem to matter so much. However successful it was, the promising past has paled and the present choice is all.
La Rochelle only needed one point from the game against Quins to secure their passage into the round of 16, but they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the dying embers of the match. The word ‘unacceptable’ was ringing around the head of the Munsterman after the game, ricocheting from one chamber of the mind to the other.
“It’s not an easy night. It’s a huge disappointment. I take my job very seriously. What is this, tonight? The club, me, everyone: we’ve lost big tonight. It’s unacceptable. It’s not possible, especially when you look at the number of opportunities we have to stay in the competition. That’s why I’m even more frustrated.
“You have no idea of ??the frustration, the disappointment, the rage in my head seeing this in front of our fans who pay a huge amount of money to be here on a Sunday. It’s unacceptable.”
O’Gara has reportedly been in discussions about his future with the club, having previously name-checked several Test nations he would like to coach in the future. The end in the Charente-Maritime is coming, and it is coming fast.
The man who set the seal on La Rochelle’s demise was none other than Smith, who potted a last-gasp penalty to sink the home side and bring down a dark curtain of bewildered silence over the Stade Marcel Deflandre. It was a rare highlight reel moment in a season which has seen rather more snakes than ladders.
Eddie Jones’ career as head coach of England ran in parallel with Smith’s emergence as a teenage rugby sensation. The Australian first crossed paths with Smith in 2015, with the Brave Blossoms based on the south coast at the World Cup while Smith was playing for Brighton College. When he was appointed by the RFU after the tournament, he lost no time including the mercurial youngster in the England senior squad as an apprentice, polishing his own infant x-factor and other people’s boots.
Six years later there were dire warnings about the pitfalls of celebrity after 18-year-old Emma Raducanu had won the US Open in women’s tennis.
“There’s a reason why the young girl who won the US Open hasn’t done so well afterwards,” Jones said. “What have you seen her on? The front page of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar or whatever, wearing Christian Dior clothes. All that is just a distraction around her.”
That sense of inner tension in the development of Smith never left Jones’ media pronouncements. The view of endless potential – “there is no ceiling to how good [he can be]” – after a man-of-the-match performance against Italy in 2022, was always balanced by a cautionary warning – “if he keeps wanting to get better and having a learning mindset, then he could be an outstanding player at Test level by the World Cup.”
By the time that World Cup arrived 12 months later, Jones had been dismissed by England and Smith had been pushed out to full-back. Jones still had time to reiterate his double view.
“He is not a superstar yet, he’s a promising young player,” the coach said. “Marcus is 24, he has got a lot of learning to do – but unless he plays [at 10], he never gets that learning. At Test match level instinctive players, particularly when they are in high decision-making positions, they take time to mature.
“I think we will see over the next two years whether or not Marcus Smith has what it takes to go as far as his potential suggests he can. At some stage, you have got to take a bit of pain if you play a guy like him. He is a good player, a very good player, but he is not a full-back.
“That is up to [Jones’s successor] Steve Borthwick, but if you want to develop him as a player? Of course, he has got to play 10.”
The advance of Fin Smith at Northampton and the resurgence of George Ford at Sale have relegated Smith to third-string 10 and a bit-part player who can cover outside-half and full-back since then. His talent has yet to be either fully developed, or fully trusted at national level.
A statistical comparison of the run-pass-kick balance among the three main contenders helps illustrate why that is still the case.
Some 88% of George Ford’s involvements come via the pass or the kick, so he can be described as a facilitator and a territory controller. Then 81% of Fin Smith’s actions are ball in hand, either run or pass, and the lower number of overall involvements shows he works best in a collective, with others such as George Furbank and Rory Hutchinson or Fraser Dingwall at Franklin’s Gardens.
Marcus Smith falls somewhere between the clarity of the other two stools. He is probably the best pure runner of the three but he kicks almost as many times per game as Ford. He passes almost as much as Fin, but in a team which creates the fewest clean breaks of any club in the league bar Newcastle Red Bulls. When you ask the question, ‘what does each 10 deliver as an England fly-half?’, two of the answers are clear but the other remains stubbornly opaque.
The game between La Rochelle and Harlequins gave ample indication just why that is still true with Marcus Smith in the prime of his footballing career. Let’s start with the shorthand, a simple wide attack from scrum.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 19, 2026
Scrums from positions inside your own half are often excellent platforms for attack, with the defensive open-side wing caught in a no man’s land: uncertain whether to hang back for the kick in behind or come up in line for a wide passing play. Smith’s first two steps make the decision easy for him: he takes two steps away from the north-south axis, and across field towards the far corner flag. That means he cannot kick and he cannot run. It turns the shoulders of the defensive centres outwards to follow the ball and makes the wing’s choice a straightforward one.
The longhand was writ in two other sequences, one in each half.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 19, 2026
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 19, 2026
With a pod of three forwards in front of him, Smith is receiving the ball with his weight on the back foot, and the first step always takes him further towards the corner flag rather than straight ahead; going right to left or left to right, the likelihood of an effective run or kick diminishes with every step he takes. Compare and contrast this run by Smith’s namesake Fin.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) December 12, 2025
Fin Smith’s first step with his back foot is north-south and that naturally straightens his running line thereafter. The upshot is when Marcus Smith finally kicks, it is often a 50/50 because all the options with ball in hand have been exhausted.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 19, 2026
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 19, 2026
Why is Smith increasingly seen as a full-back rather than a 10 by England? Because in the wide open prairie the running lines do not matter so much, and the magician can ‘run to daylight’. The Quins attack straightened automatically when Jarrod Evans came off the bench and Smith moved to 15.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) January 19, 2026
O’Gara and Smith may have been sitting on opposite sides of the fence last Saturday afternoon, but they have reached a common crossroads moment in their careers as coach and player respectively.
O’Gara’s time at La Rochelle looks to be all but done and a new coaching challenge, perhaps on the international stage, awaits. Smith has remained a prodigious talent for far too long, and he has slipped down the snake of Borthwick’s England pecking order at number 10. With Owen Farrell’s return to Saracens he may slide even further. Less butterfly cross-field float, more straight-up bee-sting. Rumble young man, rumble!
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