James Lowe is a polarising figure but you already know that. It’s a good mark of a player, I think. Any player that’s beloved by his own and hated – in the wrestling heel, way – by pretty much anyone else is usually the preserve of top players. No one bothers to expend too much emotion on guys they don’t rate, after all. Lowe is loud, he can be obnoxious and he wins Leinster big rugby games, often at the expense of Munster, Connacht and Ulster. I think a lot of the relish that some non-Leinster fans took in James Lowe’s poor Six Nations early in 2012 came from the animus generated by James Lowe the Leinster player more than anything else.

I’ve long said that, to get the best out of James Lowe you have to hide what he’s bad at and focus on what he’s good at. For me, the key weakness in his game is his reading of the game on the edge of the defensive line and his acceleration in those edge spaces which increases the “tax” on his reading of the game. Essentially, if he doesn’t make the right read in the first place, he generally can’t adjust quickly enough to compensate and that was a large part of the case against him as a player. That is still true this season but I think the hidden mechanics of 50/22 have reduced the load on his defensive read and given him slightly more licence to roam the backfield edge where he’s an outstanding relief kicker.

On the offensive side of the ball, James Lowe has no real weaknesses and the way that Leinster (and now Ireland) are using him is the perfect expression of proper rolesets making the player.

When we think about a winger, I think we can get trapped in the idea that they operate, well, on the wings. That idea is doubled down on with the concept of “coming in off your wing looking for work” as if a winger just decides to do that off their own back and wingers who don’t somehow lack initiative.

I think that comes down to older ideas of what a winger does polluting the current reality of the game, usually through ex-pros or ex-coaches. I’m sure it was true at some point that a winger could just decide that they were sick of hanging out on the touchline and come running infield to pull themselves up by the bootstraps or whatever, but that isn’t the way the modern winger is thought about at the elite level. What a winger does or doesn’t do during a match is laid out pre-game as part of the wider attacking scheme.

In a lot of ways, wingers are “free attackers” in modern rugby who have the most scope for positional variety. When used correctly they can be finishers, yes, but they can also fly under the radar, so to speak when you use them as looped runners. This describes James Lowe’s role down to a tee.

A looped winger is like finding a third arm in a boxing match – very difficult to defend and likely to come from nowhere. The basic principle is that it takes an attacker from the most heavily defended part of the pitch on any given phase and moves them to a side of the field that is less defended.

At any step along the loop, the winger can be used as a pocket runner or make the entire transition across the field to load up on the far wing as the ball progresses across – be it in one phase or two.

When you’re a player as multi-talented as Lowe, you can also step in as a first receiver (here’s an example of his balanced skillset off a scrum) but the primary aim is to generate number overloads away from the defended launch point. Take an element from one side and use it to overload the other.

You can get a good look at the basic principle on this Leinster try from the second half.

The key is the screen runners picking off and isolating the edge defender so the looped runner can take the pass at the end of the line – assuming each handler doesn’t spot a drift and hits the screen. The looped runner is always there, swimming in the deep waters waiting for the moment to strike. James Lowe has the size, power and handle to take contact, win collisions and offload out of them if needs be while having the playmaking ability to put runners into space.

Leinster are aware that teams know about the loop action too. One of their plays against Connacht was designed to use what Connacht will have scouted about Lowe’s tendencies before the game against them.

That knowledge of their own tendencies is a powerful thing. Leinster get the benefit of Lowe’s versatility and unpredictability while also benefitting from the threat of his lines and the effect it has on opposition defences.

By far the best example of Lowe’s role and the power of his loop running was in the build-up to Garry Ringrose’s try in the first half where he showed up as a traditional wide winger on a transition play before running through multiple looped actions throughout the next sequence of phases before throwing a crucial pass right at the end.

That kind of versatility is why I’ve often described Lowe as an extra midfielder when you consider how often he touches the ball in the middle of the field or away from his wing. This isn’t an accident either – these are pre-called schemes embedded deep into Leinster’s game plan.

Lowe is critical to that game plan as no other player in Leinster’s backline is capable of running plays like this, with the same level of execution. Whoever can manage to scheme a way to stop Lowe’s loop line will go a long way to stemming Leinster’s attacking flow.