In November 2025, England produced one of their best performances of the autumn to beat Argentina at Allianz Stadium in Twickenham, and at the centre of it was a 21-year-old Bath centre named Max Ojomoh. Winning only his second cap, Ojomoh was named Player of the Match after scoring a try and setting up another. Six months later, he has not seen another minute of England rugby, has not been called into a training squad, and Squidge Rugby has decided that the silence on his omission has gone on long enough.
"A man of the match performance not enough to get him back in the team," the channel host noted in a deep-dive video published this week. "It's incredibly puzzling for a lot of people, myself included. I'm sure every Bath fan out there is feeling exactly the same way that not just one of their guys has missed out, but this guy could really offer something different to England."
The investigation was framed around Steve Borthwick's documented preference for data, with Ojomoh's numbers compared head-to-head with the three inside centres currently in favour: Fraser Dingwall, Bernhard Janse van Rensburg, and Seb Atkinson. The picture, the host conceded, does not flatter the Bath man on volume metrics. "If you color code the graph and put whoever wins each set of stats as it were in green, and whoever comes last outright in red, interestingly Janse van Rensburg has the greenest graph. The person who comes out on the bottom the most is sadly Ojomoh."
Atkinson, in particular, dominated the defensive numbers — 11.3 tackles per 80 minutes against Ojomoh's 4.9, and a 90 per cent tackle success rate against Ojomoh's 73 per cent. "Atkinson with the two defensive stats so far sits at the top. Extremely vindicating," the host said. Janse van Rensburg led on tackle dominance, dominant carries, gain-line percentage and evasion. On every defensive metric, Ojomoh sat mid-pack or below.
There is one stat, however, that Squidge Rugby believes the data-driven case for omission cannot easily explain away. "There is one stat I've not talked about that's quite important and that is try involvements. Janse van Rensburg sits bottom with 0.3, Ojomoh more than double on 0.7. That doesn't sound like a lot but trust me it is a lot. Per 80 minutes that is they are setting up a try. It basically means that Ojomoh is setting up a try more times than he isn't in a game."
The other defence of Ojomoh is qualitative. The try he set up for Manu Tuilagi against Argentina, and the try he scored himself, were both produced from broken-field reads and a crossfield kick — the kind of play, the host argued, that the other three centres simply would not have attempted. "Dare I say those other three players wouldn't have attempted that. The try he scored on that game was from kick chase, from Argentina spilling a ball backwards, him reading what was going on and getting an intercept, picking it off and scoring."
The argument for keeping a less-rigid centre in the squad, the host suggested, is precedent. Borthwick was happy to carry Henry Arundell through the Six Nations as an X-factor outlier and reshaped Alex Mitchell and Manny Feyi-Waboso to fit his template at England without obliterating their natural game. "If this was a World Cup that was happening tomorrow, I think I would really understand it because Borthwick has left behind the guy who the stats favour the least. However, it's not a World Cup tomorrow, and Ojomoh's last performance for England was sensational. Do you not want to give him another go and see what you can do with that?"
The verdict was deliberately not absolute. Squidge Rugby acknowledged that Dingwall's leadership and Atkinson's tackling effectiveness both deserved their place in the conversation. But the channel left open a sharper question for Borthwick: at a moment when the media spent the Six Nations criticising his style as boring, why omit the one centre on his radar capable of ripping up the playbook on a single touch?
