Hare’s world record keeps on growing
Dusty Hare retired more than 30 years ago and yet his world points record keeps going up. The latest revised figure raises his tally from 7,337 points to 7,461 from all matches.
The former England and Lions full-back played 725 of them, the vast majority for Leicester and Nottingham. He also played for 10 other teams – Notts, Lincs & Derbys in the county championship, Midland Counties East, England U23, Midlands, The Rest, The Probables, North & Midlands, plus a trio of invitational teams named after Sandy Sanders, Major Stanley and Micky Steele-Bodger.
Hare's towering career has been put together like a work of art by Stuart Farmer, official statistician for Premier Rugby, the Six Nations, the Lions and other organisations. As a “labour of love”, he has unearthed details of Hare's 24 matches for his first club, Newark.
The 198 points accumulated there can be accorded first-class status is debatable but their inclusion in Farmer's exhaustive breakdown takes Hare's career goal total from his first match, for Newark on September 20, 1970 to his last for Leicester almost 20 years later, to 2,696.
That nobody else in Union at senior level has topped 2,000 makes the number all the more staggering. Jonny Wilkinson's 1,908 goals stand as an all-time high in the professional era, eclipsing Neil Jenkins' 1,856 for Pontypridd, Celtic Warriors, Cardiff, Wales and the Lions.
“Another incredible aspect of Dusty's career is often overlooked and that's his remarkable endurance,'' says Farmer. “It was rare for him to break down with injury. Going through every season match by match I found only one period when he was absent for any length of time, when he had 37 days off in the late autumn of 1980.''
