Loose with the cash for a top tighthead

Kees Meeuws

Cast an eye over any top European rugby side and who do you think is the best paid? Maybe that wing, with the dazzling sidestep and a kit bag full of hair gel? How about the first five-eighth with the boot of gold and a smile to melt your mother's heart?

Think again. Think the tighthead prop, the best of whom are earning a cool £250,000 ($716,000) a year.

Based on their rarity and specialist skills, props - and particularly tightheads - have been the subject of almost every significant tug of war in this year's transfer market.

And when the player on the end of the rope is, say, the 1.82m, 120kg tighthead Kees Meeuws, it takes quite a tug.

Meeuws quit French club Castres in June after a fall-out with the coach and Harlequins, desperate to sign big in the tight five on their return to the English Premiership, offered £130,000 a year for the 32-year-old veteran of 42 All Black tests.

They were not even close. Meeuws could name his price at more than £200,000 a year, including a house and a car, and another French side, Agen, paid it.

"There's no doubt a tighthead prop is more valuable than any other player because there's fewer of them of the right quality," says Mike Burton, a leading player agent and veteran of England's front row of the 1970s.

"A prop of the right credentials starts at £150,000, going up to £250,000."

Says Quins team manager Mike Scott: "A top quality tighthead is so scarce, it's frightening.

"The best are getting £180,000 or £190,000 a year, which is more than a top fly-half."

The England No 10, Charlie Hodgson, is reckoned to be on a basic £160,000 a year at Sale.

Wasps' forwards coach, former All Black prop Craig Dowd, agrees that a good prop is hard to find, using the recently signed England front rower Phil Vickery as an example.

"Before we got Phil we'd turned over every rock in world rugby to try and find a decent tighthead. Whenever we found one he'd be gone before we had a chance. The tighthead is the cornerstone of your pack and you build a team around him. He's the plug: take him out and everything else goes gushing down the hole."

Burton says there are few players in the right size range to play prop and fewer with the right mental approach.

"You need someone who's a gunslinger. If I've got a young prop I rate highly I'll make sure he's not on a long contract. Because as soon as he goes in and holds his own in a big game his value will shoot up."

And therein lies the downside for this newly rich breed formerly known as stomachus rotundus: they have to wait until their mid-20s before they can cash in.

Quins' London rivals Saracens have secured Taranaki tighthead Census Johnson, 25, who is due to arrive in November next month. Johnson played for super-rich Biarritz last season and gave them a verbal promise he'd be back, until Saracens made him an offer he didn't care to refuse.

"We're very fortunate," said Alan Gaffney, Saracens' director of rugby. Very generous, too, in all likelihood, although Johnson's exact deal is undisclosed. For their pains, the front-row monsters are having a ball.

- INDEPENDENT