Chris Ashton is famous for performing the swan dive during scoring attempts. Credit: PA/Clive Gee
Three Premier League titles, two Heineken Cups, 44 caps for England, national league records in England and France; The hit list of Chris Ashton, who announced his retirement at the end of the season on Wednesday, deserves attention.
Leicester's wing will retire in '98 as the Premier League's top scorer and the league's best wing in history, but when rugby players gather to discuss his legacy a few years later, the image will remain indelible. in their mind: Ashton leaps into the air, hips on his hips, with the ball between his hand and wrist, and catches the star on his way to another score.
The Ash Splash, it has become known, could be sent to the grave with Ashton's move to Leicester — the club where the striker will end his career — but no player in history can do that. to claim such a distinctive scoring action, with a name and concept more suited to a WWE finisher than rugby pitches in England.
Ashton said in a 2022 BBC interview that he wished he had never invented diving with a swallow, but in addition to its spectacularity, it means something much deeper.
🗓 On this day in 2010: Chris Ashton did it against Australia. pic.twitter.com/daEl1RZxvK
— Planet Rugby (@PlanetRugby) November 13, 2020
Ashton may regret his design — of course, under Stuart Lancaster with England, «Ash Splash» became controversial and controversial — but we hope that among the regrets of the wing there will be at least a little consolation that at least English rugby will remember him for what he did the best.
The main memory — the mental picture — of Ashton's career will undoubtedly be his Splash; and therefore by default it counts the attempt.
Ash Splash turned Ashton from a seedy northerner into a household name, particularly after England's 2012 win over the All Blacks when Ash and his Splash were in full swing.
Premier League rugby fans will remember a wing of tenacity and intelligence whose intuitive understanding of rugby union — thanks in part to his nascent career days with the Wigan Warriors and England in the fraternal code — led him to become one of the most instinctive and menacing auxiliary wings on planet. Ashton sniffed out attempts like a pig hunting for truffles.
"Chris is a game changer, to put it bluntly" said Richard Wigglesworth, Lester Tigers' Ashton's interim head coach and former Saracens teammate, commenting on the winger's retirement.
But Ashton was no braggart. A Wiganese by birth, the wing had all the strength and courage that is synonymous with the region.
If Splash was Ashton's trademark, then perhaps his most iconic loneliness moment was during the Northampton Saints. 2011 Premier League semi-final at Welford Road. Manu Tuilagi, Ashton's future co-star in England, unleashed a ferocious barrage of fists on the wing's head.
How Ashton stayed on his feet remains a mystery to this day; as well as the yellow card he received as a victim of a violent attack.
Manu Tuilagi (right) was banned for five weeks for his hit on Ashton in 2011
The only English team Ashton has never scored against is the Saracens, the club with which he has won two of his three Premier League titles and two European gongs.
However, there would be a certain rounded beauty in Ashton that would add two more tries to his Premier League tally this season, taking him to 100, maybe even against the Saracens — the club that had eluded him for so long – to this season's domestic finale. With the North Londoners currently in the lead and the Ashton Tigers in third, such a scenario is not out of the question.
I still can't believe that rugby gave me all this. ;
Ashton's journey through those 98 tries included not only Leicester, the Saracens and Northampton Saints, with whom he broke the record for league scoring attempts, but also Shark Sale, Harlequins and Worcester Warriors.» Wing would retire with 41 attempts in Europe and 20 for his country.
With all that, however, perhaps Ashton's most outstanding accomplishment came in his one-season stint in Toulon. . Wing wasn't about to storm the top 14 when he arrived on the Côte d'Azur in 2017, but he left those shores behind only Johnny Wilkinson in the ranks of the English who won the French domestic game.
Ashton broke the French record for most tries in a single season with 24 tries in 23 matches.
"I still can't believe all this The Rugby Union gave me " Ashton said as he announced his impending retirement. Well, there are many who will never believe how much the Premier League's best wing has brought back, including that famous surge.
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