10 Juan Smith

Age: 27
Position: Flanker
Franchise: Cheetahs
Country: South Africa
The former former Bloemfontein bouncer guards the fringes of rucks like he used to run his door - turning would be attackers away like underage kids with dodgy IDs. His performances against Wales and Scotland this autumn - before missing the slaughter of England with a concussion - earned him yet more rave reviews for his link play, pilfering and all-round brilliance. The unsung hero of the formidable Springbok back row, yet there is not a better blindside flanker in world rugby.

9 Schalk Burger

Age: 25
Position: Flanker
Franchise: Stormers
Country: South Africa
‘A threshing machine’ was how former Springbok coach Nick Mallett described Burger. He has been the most physical, intimidating flanker in the business for the last four years, since being named the 2004 IRB Player of the Year. What makes that statement even more remarkable is that he spent a good chunk of that period battling back from a career threatening neck injury. His physicality sometimes overshadows the deft skills that he possesses but Burger added another dimension to his game during the 2007 World Cup as a link man in attack, rather than a head down charge into the nearest defender. A study in perpetual motion, Burger is a destructive tackler and a genuine crowd pleaser.

8 Bryan Habana

Age: 25
Position: Wing
Franchise: Bulls
Country: South Africa
So, he raced a cheetah and so, he was the IRB player of the year for 2007. This, we know. That the Springbok wing runs like ordure off a spade we – and many provincial and international coaches, to their considerable cost – also know. That he’s also an intelligent ball-player and a cautious but courteous diplomat in a difficult rugby culture is perhaps less widely accepted. Hell, he’s even something of a man of the people, threatening to strike unless his mate, Bakkies Botha, was allowed to go north to Toulon. Well, sort of. And he stands out in a provincial side, the Bulls, Blue or not, who spend most of their time in the forwards. Habana effectively won South Africa’s World Cup semi-final against Argentina on his own - at least, the Pumas couldn’t match his pace, if they could match the Boks’ bruisers’ up front. Then, in a tourniquet-tight final, he had less chance to shine, rather like his predecessor as a wing, hero and national role model, Chester Williams, in 1995. But his boys won and they did so, in the long (and very fast) run, largely thanks to him. 2008 has been less glittering for Bryan Gary Habana. Perhaps he’s lining up the Lions - cheetahs being passé, and all.

7 Shane Williams

Age: 31
Position: Wing
Region: Ospreys
Country: Wales
Officially, the best player on the planet according to the esteemed judging panel for the IRB, whose shortlist declined to recognise Richie McCaw at all - much to Graham Henry’s chagrin (who, incidentally, was the man to give Williams his first cap). Not that Williams didn’t deserve the acclaim. He scored 14 tries in 12 Tests in the 2007-8 season, two of them vintage efforts against Bryan Habana, and claimed the Welsh try-scoring record in the process. His shimmies and swerves lit up the 2008 Six Nations as Wales marched to the Grand Slam and at 31 he still has plenty left to give. Lions supporters will be hoping he is in the mood next June and July.

6 Matt Giteau

Age: 25
Position: Fly-half
Franchise:Western Force
Country: Australia
Would it be churlish to say Matt Giteau is the player Danny Cipriani wishes he was? Well, we’ve said it. As the most expensive player in the world, this baby-faced, streaky-haired imp is under constant pressure to perform. He rarely fails to live up to the task. Giteau has the happy knack of consistently delivering world class
performances. His low-slung centre of gravity allows him to dart through gaps in drift defences at will, even when the opposition know damn fine well what he’s about to do and his kicking game has become accurate in front of the sticks and long from hand. Watch and learn, Danny Boy.

5 Sergio Parisse

Age: 25
Position: No.8
Club: Stade Français
Country: Italy
How good could Parisse be if he played at the back of a better pack than Italy’s? But there hardly are any better packs than Italy’s, and Italy’s pack is largely so good because it has Parisse at the back of it. So, what if he had sharper halfbacks and three-quarters to work with? A look at any Stade Français game provides an answer – living in Paris, dating a former Miss France and Miss Europe, he’s in the pink. In more ways than the one involving the worst kit in rugby, obviously. Big and strong, he’s also got hands to die for, a brain for the game and an absolute refusal to bend the knee. More and more, it is proving harder to make Italy do so, and Parisse’s power and panache is at the heart of it all. The best No.8 in the world by a distance.

4 Victor Matfield

Age: 31
Position: Second Row
Franchise: Bulls
Country: South Africa
There is a theme developing on this page. Matfield and the chap above him are the world’s best players in their positions and they both have other halves that make red blooded males go weak at the knees. We hate them. Matfield steals lineout ball like his life depends on it and seems to cover more ground than a migrating wildebeest. He moves with such speed for a big man that former Australia coach Eddie Jones once suggested he try his hand at Olympic sprinting. His partnership with Bakkies Botha, with whom he has locked the Bok scrum 46 times was recently summed up thus by Botha . “Sometimes I feel we know each other better than we know our wives.” Spend more time at home, lads.

3 Dan Carter

Age: 26
Position: Fly-half
Club: Perpignan
Country: New Zealand
So Perpignan offered him a king’s ransom for six months’ work. Evidently, the All Black flyhalf’s business life isn’t just about modelling pants any more, and the fact that the NZRU are prepared to lease out, as it were, their prize asset for a jaunt in the Heineken Cup and Top 14 in order to have him back in the fold for 2011 says all you need to know about his value to the Crusaders, New Zealand and to the world. A talent so precocious is precious, if not priceless. Let’s keep him happy because as he proved in the autumn, the All Black fly-half has everything - recision, panache, pace and power. Is Carter happy with his current lot? The World Cup was a bit of a letdown, one senses, not just because of what happened - or what, for him, didn’t quite happen - against France but for what didn’t quite happen before. In a dead pool made deader by Scotland and Italy rolling over without a fight, Carter wasn’t even given a bushel behind which to hide his light. It was all just far too easy just as, one senses, the southern hemisphere circuit has become too familiar, too samey, too flat. Law changes haven’t changed that, so he has come north. We should, throwing aside partisan pain, remember what he did to the Lions in 2005, and welcome him

2 Juan Martin Hernandez

Age: 26
Position: Fly-half
Club: Stade Francais
Country: Argentina
Word has it Tigers fans can still be found sobbing into their pint-pots about the one that got away. Juan Martin Hernandez was a work permit away from signing on the dotted line at Welford Road in 2003, but Leicester thought it better to bring him over for a trial on a tourist visa. The authorities smelled a rat and 19-yearold Hernandez got the order of the boot. His cannon-like left foot - and, for that matter, his right when the situation demands it - have been doing much the same to opposition ever since. But his length-of-thefield kicking ability is but a fraction of his vast reserves of outrageous talent. He can sling field-wide passes to within centimetres of their target, break the line like a raging bull and he defends his channel monstrously. Hernandez dazzled at last year’s World Cup and his talents seem so suited to the garish environs of Stade Francais, the club whose overwhelming gain is the Tigers’ cavernous loss. Yet they persist in playing the wondrously talented Puma at fly-half when virtually everyone else believes he should be at fullback. Imagine what he might achieve if he wasn’t played out of position.

1 Richie McCaw

Age: 28
Position: Flanker
Franchise: Crusaders
Country: New Zealand
Not for the first time since 1987 the Kiwis’ leader left a World Cup dogged by questions about his captaincy: did Mr McCaw, by common consent the finest No.7 since Michael Jones and Josh Kronfeld hung up their size thirteens, go missing in last autumn’s quarter-final calamity against the French? Well, unlike other, injured stars at least he was there at the bloody end. And consider those captains with whom he keeps such gloomy company: Gary Whetton, Sean Fitzpatrick, Taine Randell, Reuben Thorne. Not bad. McCaw is far, far, far from any kind of bad; indeed, he’s the modern openside in the mould of the aforementioned Mr Jones, big enough to take the boshes and the bashes around the breakdown, lithe and quick and skilful enough, of course, to link with any of the thousand sets of breathtaking backs the men in black might care to put out. Good enough, even, to dismiss the growing platoon of bleaters who suggest he bends the rules to snapping point at the ruck. If McCaw cheated half as much as his critics claimed, he’d have a rain forest’s worth of splinters in his backside from time in the sin bin. Any summary of the Crusader’s talents is, really, as facile as it is futile – he’s just effin’ good. So good that he rode the wave of All Black heartache and came back just as good if not better. The world’s best? We reckon so.