Major teams: Harlequins, Leicester
Position: Openside flanker
Country: England
Test span: 1920-27
Test caps: 31 (31 starts)
Test points: 18 (6T)

Rugby’s Greatest: Wavell Wakefield

Nowadays administrators devise the laws and players just play, but there was a time when the lines were blurred. Wavell Wakefield was challenging the status quo long before he hung up his boots as England‘s most capped player – a record he was to retain for 43 years.

An RAF officer, Wakefield played in three Grand Slam-winning teams in the 1920s, including the 1924 side that he captained. At 14st, he was England’s heaviest forward and he was quick with it, as befitting a former 440 yards champion.

More formidable still was the no-nonsense aggression he brought to the field. He once wrote that “it is one of the glories of rugger that you can put your shoulder into a man with all your strength and bring him down with a crash, knowing that if you stave in a rib or two of his he will bear no grudge against you”.

He could play at lock, No 8 and even centre, but he makes our list of flying breakaways by virtue of his pioneering influence on the role of the loose forward.

Wakefield brought a new athleticism and tactical element to back-rows. He got them to handle like backs in attack and cover the ground so effectively in defence that the English game was briefly threatened by a try drought.

The man was a paradox, staunchly upholding the RFU’s amateur principles whilst adopting a quasi-professionalism in terms of training, fitness and analysis. He abolished the ‘first up, first down’ scrum dogma forever, giving forwards specialist roles and so greater expertise.

Legacy: the RAF savour winning the Wavell Wakefield Cup, named in honour of an England great (Getty)

At Leicester Tigers, he experimented with a four-man front row and three-man second row. Whilst at Cambridge, where he studied engineering, he introduced numbers to players’ jerseys for the annual Varsity Match.

“He was the rock from which every subsequent back-rower was carved,” says social historian Tony Collins, and Wakefield’s influence didn’t end there.

The long-time Conservative MP was Harlequins president for 30 years and served the RFU and IRB (now World Rugby) with distinction. One of his suggestions was the rescheduling of the Five Nations to the spring so it could be played in better conditions.

Follow Rugby World on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.