NFL agent in town to find next stellar code-jumper

Jack Bechta, American sports agent. Photo / Supplied

If you hear someone behind shouting "first down" at Twickenham tomorrow it will probably just be Jack Bechta confused in all the excitement.

Bechta is an American football agent in England to scout talent at the Rugby World Cup. Rugby is advised to take him seriously. For Bechta is the man who has transplanted Jarryd Hayne from the league side Parramatta Eels to the San Francisco 49ers - and has done so in five months.

Bechta made this fantastical switch a reality; and not just as a place-kicker as Paul Thorburn believed was possible in the 90s, but as an actual player - as a running back in Hayne's case, who appeared in the 49ers' seasonal opener on Monday. His contract has opened a channel from league to the National Football League.

Is rugby next and will this World Cup be viewed as a watershed in the ending of the great transatlantic divide?

There have been union-NFL crossovers before but as yet not a big name. Bechta says that "Jarryd is a one-in-10,000", "a visionary" and warns that it would be tough for any other "rugby athlete" to emulate his feat.

Bechta knows who to look out for and where they might fit. Israel Folau would be an ideal safety; George North could be a tightend as could Eben Etzebeth, and perhaps Manu Tuilagi could find redemption as a running back.

Bechta will certainly spot many familiarities in modern rugby. The introduction of HawkEye demands that "plays" will be rewound for interminable analysis by officials, meaning that minutes after cheers have gone up, the score is ruled out and so, too, is that quaint old notion of sport being all about the moment. Then there is the removal of individualism with the experts up in the box directing the moves.

Okay, the coaches do not have a direct line to the outside half as with the quarterback in the NFL, but the game is so scripted nowadays that any maverick who dares to sidestep the game plan - in the early stages at least - faces oval-ball Siberia. NB: The men with the clipboards do the thinking.

And then there is the burning issue of concussion. Bechta might have read the headlines about poor Jonathan Thomas, the Wales and Lions forward, who has been forced into retirement due to epilepsy related to multiple head traumas. Bechta might wince as he sees this as the tip of the iceberg and imagines the lawsuits to follow, just as they did in the United States when the NFL had to pay out US$1 billion ($1.6 billion) to concussed "victims".

But then, that is the cost of union resembling gridiron, with its 120kg-plus man monsters who run 60 metres in six seconds, with its shift from being a contact sport into a collision sport. Union never was like that; it was only freaks like Jonah Lomu who were even linked with NFL (as he was in 1996).

Now they are all Lomus; massive, muscle-bound chess pieces being plotted from above. Of course, there is room for creativity off the cuff, but the spectacle is unrecognisable from what it was in the first World Cup in 1987. That is why Bechta is coming and why more will follow.