This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
There will be few better tries in international rugby this year. Ten minutes in, 30 yards from the opposing line, the full-back picks up the ball from a ruck and, seeing the defence poorly set, decides to barge straight on and go for a gallop.
He cuts left, he jinks right, making his opponents look foolish and slow. At 20 yards out he pushes hard off his left foot to leave their fly-half clutching at dust then glances quickly to his right. Aware of who is in support, he jags left, looking that way, moving his shoulders to give every indication that is where he will pass — then nonchalantly flips his wrists in the other direction, sending the ball over his right shoulder into the hands of his unmarked scrum half. The try is scored and the home fans wave their flags, white with a red cross, in jubilation.
This was not Twickenham but Tbilisi; the fans were Georgian, not English, and the hero with a swashbuckling D’Artagnan moustache was the 22-year-old Davit Niniashvili. This summer he will move clubs from Lyon to La Rochelle, twice European champions. They have got a bargain.
Georgian rugby was once known for huge forwards, hard to shift; now they produce maestros with flashing feet and a nose for space. Niniashvili is not the only one: Akuka Tabutsadze, a wing who they call “The Bullet”, has scored 44 tries in 46 internationals.
Wales will remember Niniashvili. When they met at the 2023 World Cup, he ran in a jinking try from 40 yards out, ending with a swallow dive over the line, then got himself sent to the sin-bin for ten minutes after a brawl with Taine Basham (his name as well as his style of play). Georgia lost the match, but Niniashvili showed they were not there to make up numbers.
Rugby formally arrived in the caucasus in the late 1950s, brought by Jacques Haspekian, a Frenchman of Armenian descent who taught it to his students in Tbilisi. Georgians had played their own bruising game called Lelo Burti (or “field ball”) for a thousand years. Their version involves the men of two villages fighting, quite literally, for control of a ball that weighs 7kg (about 14 times the weight of a rugby ball). Whoever manoeuvres it over the boundary is said to get the better harvest.
The Georgia national team, known as the Lelos, played their first test in 1989. They trained for scrums by pushing old Soviet tractors and claimed to own only two balls. Thirteen years later, after a bit of investment and toughened by many of their squad playing in the lower French leagues, they qualified for the World Cup in a mighty grudge match, beating Russia 17-13 in front of 50,000 spectators in Tbilisi. At the next World Cup, they gave Ireland a scare, losing 14-10, after which their players started to attract more offers from Britain and France.
In 2018, Eddie Jones, the England head coach at the time, invited a group of Georgian forwards to train in London with his squad. It was not altruism. “They’re the biggest, ugliest, strongest scrum pack in the world,” Jones said. “Why wouldn’t we want to scrummage against them?”
Now they have pace, as well as heft. For all the political turmoil in Georgia, with disputed elections last year and unrest on the streets, they are growing in credibility as a rugby power.
That superlative try-creation by Niniashvili on 8 February helped his side to a 40-7 win over the Netherlands in the Europe Championship, the level below the Six Nations, which Georgia have won in 11 of the past 12 seasons. Following a 110-0 victory over Switzerland in their opening match, it moved them to twelfth in the world rankings, overtaking Wales, and qualified them for a seventh World Cup.
Last time, in 2023, they pushed Fiji close in the pool stage, losing 17-12 to a team who had beaten Australia, but they are yet to beat one of the top-tier nations at that tournament. They are getting closer, however. In 2022, they won friendlies against Italy and Wales and last summer won away to Japan. A clamour is growing for them to be given a chance to play the big boys regularly.
At whose expense could that be? Wales are the current whipping boys, but Italy have come bottom in the Six Nations 19 times since it was expanded to include them in 2000. Scotland have come last four times. And when Wales are not being horrid, they can be very, very good: they have won the grand slam, beating all their opponents, four times since 2000, a tally matched only by France.
A straight promotion and relegation between the Six Nations and the tier below is never going to happen, but it would be wrong for the top-flight to stay a closed shop. Perhaps they could consider a play-off, home and away, between the bottom side in the Six Nations and the winner of the league below. At the least, Georgia must be given more friendlies against top sides to show what they have. Italy were upgraded after beating Ireland, France and Scotland in 1997–98.
“We’re twelfth in the world, why won’t someone give us a chance?” pleaded Richard Cockerill, Georgia’s head coach and a former England hooker. “We don’t want charity; we want an opportunity. We think we’ve earned that right.” Perhaps it is time to adapt an old rugby anthem? “Swing Lelos … ”
