The romantics will picture a fairytale ending for Dan Cole and Ben Youngs as the Leicester legends prepare to play their final games of rugby this weekend. If their beloved Tigers – the only professional club either of them has ever known – lift the Premiership trophy, they will bow out as champions of England.
As a piece of career choreography, it would represent perfection. One last dance, one last medal, one last glorious moment in the sun.
The cruel truth of pro sport though is that when it comes to their exits, few players get to write their own script.
Twenty years ago the greatest Tiger of them all, Martin Johnson, was presented with the exact same scenario – a Twickenham final for his last game.
A more cussed winner English rugby has never produced. Yet his dream turned to dust on the same field on which he had enjoyed so many glorious moments for club and country. Wasps did not read the memo. Or rather they did.
Distinctly unimpressed at being written out of the storyline, it was Wasps rather than Leicester who channelled the emotions of the day better. Lawrence Dallaglio led the defending champions to a convincing win.
The last feeling Johnson would experience as a player was that of the emptiness of defeat. His exalted status in the game, as the only Englishman to lift the World Cup, in the end counted for nothing.
It was, he acknowledged afterwards, “a nasty feeling.” Of course the big send-off can conclude as a player dreams it.
Three years later Dallaglio contested his last game for Wasps in another Premiership final against Leicester and came out victorious. The jut-jawed gunslinger sidled off the stage in triumph.
Jonny Wilkinson’s full stop was the 2014 Top 14 final for Toulon against Castres at the Stade de France which Toulon won to win the Bouclier de Brennus for the first time since 1992. Wilkinson kicked 15 of his side’s 18 points, including a drop goal, and God Save The Queen played out on the PA system after the final whistle. That was a pretty cool mic drop moment.
The farewell for Leicester’s ancient warriors will have many neutrals bending their allegiance towards the Tigers.
However Will Carling’s swansong was a second-tier European group game in Treviso in front of 3,500 people which Harlequins lost. There are no guarantees.
The farewell for Leicester’s ancient warriors will have many neutrals bending their allegiance towards the Tigers.
But they have played in enough big games to know that however much you yearn for a particular outcome, heartache can lurk around the corner. Both of them started the 2019 World Cup final when England lost to South Africa. You cannot get much bigger than that.
The loss in Japan took a lot of getting over for both of them – particularly Cole who was made the scapegoat for England’s scrum woes and jettisoned by Eddie Jones. But get over it they both did, going on to play in another World Cup four years later.
That said a lot about their resilience, fortitude and staying power but it also underlined an eternal truth about the game. However bad things feel at the time, there is always next week. Except this time there isn’t. What happens on Saturday at the Allianz Stadium marks the finishing post.
In one sense Cole and Youngs have already triumphed just in reaching this send-off moment. So many players have their goodbyes taken out of their hands, either through injury, selection or circumstance, that for England’s two most-capped men’s players to finish at a final should be a cause for joint celebration.
Their goodbye tour, which began with the win over Newcastle at Welford Road that nailed down their play-off spot in the last game of the regular season, and then took in the semi-final win over Sale, has the end date the pair deserve.
What they should know is that win or lose this one game, it will not define them as rugby players. Their contribution to Leicester and England has been too deep.
When they are long retired this final will be just another stop on their incredible shared career journey.
There is a danger, as for any player in this situation, that they will be too desperate and that the enormity of the moment in personal terms detracts from their performance.
All the same though they will be desperate to depart on a high. To do a Dallaglio rather than a Johnno.
There is a danger, as for any player in this situation, that they will be too desperate and that the enormity of the moment in personal terms detracts from their performance. There will be a long line of lasts to deal with. The last bus journey to the game, the last time they pull on their match kit, the last time they lace up their boots… and there will be a mixture of emotions associated with that.
When their moment comes to be called off the bench though, vastly experienced pros that they are, they will be in game mode.
The heart may be beating a little faster, the ears may be ringing a little more from the ovation they are guaranteed but, having been able to compartmentalise their way to this point, they can be relied upon to be able to do it one time.
It must have been a curious sensation on the home straight, not knowing where the stop sign would be placed. Their own minds were made up on retirement – Youngs’s before Cole’s – but that still there was uncertainty surrounding the end point.
Leicester left their play-off move quite late. When they lost at home to Saracens in late March, a top-four finish looked in serious doubt but six wins in their last seven league games elongated their season.
Landing Sale as play-off opponents – a bogey team of theirs in recent years – did not make things any more straightforward, even with the Welford Road factor at play, but they prevailed to go the distance.
For two players of such longevity, whose combined careers, stretch out beyond 1,000 senior matches that is the way it should be. Twickenham – where they have made so many memories – is a fitting final destination too.
They know now for sure when and where their story ends. Just not how it will end.
