Great expectations will hinder Sam Burgess’ England World Cup push

Many have preceded Sam Burgess down the same pot-holed road from league to union. None, Burgess included, have embarked knowing how their odyssey will end. The pitch is the same size and the posts are a familiar shape but union’s culture and law book are distinctly alien. Success in league does not automatically translate to “rah-rah” genius, any more than baseball does to cricket.

It is difficult, therefore, not to admire those prepared to risk high-profile failure at the peak of their powers. Burgess’s YouTube greatest hits may be spectacular, his ball-carrying ferocious and his competitive spirit legendary, but he is entering a parallel universe in which nothing is done quite as he is used to. The league code-breakers who have made the biggest impact – Jason Robinson and Israel Folau to name the most obvious examples – have almost always been outside backs. None have blazed a trail in the back-row, where Bath reckon Burgess has the best chance of thriving.

So the burning question remains the same as when he signed last February: will Burgess prove the exception to the prevailing rule? Anyone who stays on to help his team win an NRL Grand Final after smashing his cheekbone and eye socket in the first minute is clearly a special case. At 25 he is also the right kind of age and, physicality-wise, the two codes are growing closer. Burgess’s mission is not impossible, but how long will it take before the Bath owner, Bruce Craig, feels a similar inner glow to South Sydney’s Russell Crowe?

Because what no one can predict is how many months will pass before union is second nature to Burgess. Opponents – and team-mates – are scarcely going to hang back and wave him through. Let the dogs see the Rabbitoh, and all that. When he does eventually make his Bath debut – an A league game or two in December would appear the soundest bet – he will find union defences more congested. Hitting rucks will be a whole new ball game and, perhaps most significantly, he will be required to revise his trademark tackling style. Whacking people north of the breast bone is treated more leniently in league than union and a few yellow cards may materialise before that not-so-subtle distinction becomes clear.

Then there is England’s continuing desire to play him in the centres while Bath see him as a back-rower. Whatever happens, it would be to insult every other centre in the national squad – Mike Ford, Bath’s head coach, has described the notion as “pie in the sky” – to visualise him skipping straight into Stuart Lancaster’s Six Nations starting midfield in February.

“Stuart’s big on culture, isn’t he?” said Ford, keen to spell out the reality of the situation with Burgess seated right alongside him. “The last thing he wants is someone from outside who has not proved himself to come in and basically take a shirt. He is keen for Sam to do well, to get in the Bath team and for Bath to do well. But if we are still there or thereabouts at the end of the season and Sam is a big part of that, then I am sure Stuart will pick him in the wider World Cup squad. He’d be stupid not to.”

Yet, as Ford also made crystal clear beside the river Avon, Bath see Burgess as a back-rower. The club already have loads of top-notch centres but their resources at flanker and No8 are stretched. Yes, it is fun to imagine England fielding Burgess and Manu Tuilagi as a gruesome central twosome, skittling opponents to all parts and making England’s midfield a no-go area for anyone not hewn from sustainable granite. But what happens when, say, Dan Carter chips over the top and Burgess is required to turn on a sixpence, chase back to recover the ball and find a safe touch 40 metres upfield? He will feel like any other union novice: uneasy, uncertain, unnatural.

Which is why everyone needs to take half a step back and set realistic initial targets. Burgess’s leadership and warrior credentials are self-evident but the timescale from a 2015 perspective is ridiculously tight. It is only natural that Lancaster will ideally seek to fast-track him into the wider England set-up, perhaps with the Saxons in the new year, with a view to squeezing him into England’s preliminary World Cup squad in June. That leaves virtually no margin for trial and error.

Who, furthermore, would Lancaster end up having to drop from his World Cup 31 to accommodate his new arrival? Tom Wood? James Haskell? Ben Morgan? Tom Croft? Luther Burrell? Brad Barritt? Having made such a virtue of the squad ethic, parachuting Burgess into the back-row ahead of Steffon Armitage, the reigning European player of the year, would also be a huge call.

It is worth remembering, too, that even Sonny Bill Williams, someone who has played way more union than “Slammin Sam”, is far from guaranteed to be starting for the All Blacks at next year’s World Cup.

Everyone in the game wants the big man to prosper in his new surroundings, but those pronouncing Burgess will single-handedly win England the Webb Ellis Cup in 12 months’ time are getting dangerously ahead of themselves.