Times Column 22/01/05

Horse racing is the sport of kings, football the beautiful game.  In Australia and New Zealand, in a phrase less often heard over here, rugby is ‘the game they play in heaven’.  It’s also the game they play in Chile and Pakistan, and the best way to keep up to speed with rugby in the Moroccan championship, or the Nigerian national squad, is via heavensgame.com.

This non-profit making website was set up in 2002 with the brilliantly simple idea, not yet on the IRB’s agenda, of treating each rugby nation equally.  A 6-Nations clash between England and France was deemed no more important than a review of the second round of the Spanish Cup.  Each story as it arrived became the main story until the next one came along.

Heavensgame soon had a global audience, attracting over 1.7 million people in 2004.  News from Guam and Slovenia was only the half of it.  There were interviews with the Danish Ladies coach and a Brazilian referee and the Kazakhstan left wing.  The site also offered a unique service for putting players in touch with suitable clubs wherever in the world they intended to travel.  For props with itchy feet or wanderlusting wingers, of whatever standard, rugby and heavensgame.com provided a passport to instant community and friendship.

The views, features and information were provided by a network of volunteer contributors, but co-ordinated in his spare time by one man, 32-year-old Jeremy Beynon.  In a previous life, Beynon had been a full-back from Llanmorlais on the Gower.  He played for Penclawdd, Vardre, and finally Bonymaen, before re-imagining himself in his late-twenties as a systems contractor on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

It was Beynon’s brief stint with the Beacon Hill club in Boston that gave him a ‘real insight into the passion that exists for rugby outside the established rugby countries.  Each Saturday morning, the whole club (3 teams) would turn up to mark out a rugby pitch, put up the goal posts, and generally perform all the other tasks I used to take for granted in Wales.’

Beynon takes his evangelism seriously. As heavensgame grew in popularity, he bartered advertising space against kit for developing rugby nations.  The referees in Finland, Hungary and Bosnia are now all wearing jerseys provided via the site.  The Bosnian RFU and Mexico will be receiving more kit soon. 

This is the kind of game they’d truly play in heaven: not the grasping and repetitive global telesport of the Tri-Nations and the IRB, but inclusive, diverse, and based on the rich interchange of like-minded people with a shared and consuming passion.  Unfortunately, Beynon’s generous impartiality was about to land him in trouble.

By combining the three words heaven, USA and Israel (rugby in both countries was covered by heavensgame) some limited-interest hackers arrived at a truly dim-witted conclusion.  They attacked heavensgame.com, destroyed the database and back up, and splashed out a spew of spam e-mail about Iraq, Afghanistan and the tribal injustices of the Israeli state.  Important though these issues are, they may well be absent even from religious ideas of heaven, let alone a rugby one.  The last attack was on Christmas day, when every feature and story on the site was lost. 

Down-hearted but not defeated, Beynon has re-launched with more secure software.  It will take a little while for the glory of heavensgame.com to re-accumulate, the sheer variety and charm of the information and people his site has mined from the lesser-known corners of the rugby world.  The new era begins in earnest from February, with opinions already scheduled from the the captain of the Arabian Gulf national team, a capped member of the Malta squad, and the Tongan Rugby Union CEO.

As for that original quote, which may have caused offence to the hackers.  It doesn’t promise everyone a game of rugby in heaven.  Only ‘they’ will be playing, the people who actually get there.  The saintly Jeremy Beynon can therefore look forward to a runabout with Inga Tuigemala and Jason Robinson.  Everyone else will just have to wait, and hope, whatever their politics or religion, that rugby’s heaven is as tolerant and welcoming as its version of earth.

Times Column 8/01/05

The New Year in the Zurich Premiership kicked off with a sell-out.  At Worcester, Bath, Gloucester, Northampton, Harlequins and Newcastle, 64,000 supporters watched live club rugby on January 1st and 2nd.  This followed excellent attendances in Christmas week, when Leeds Tykes doubled a previous record crowd to over 14,000 for their clash with Jonny Wilkinson. 

Jonny won, with three penalties and a drop goal, but Leeds are getting closer to that impressive Headingley capacity of 18,000.  To help get them there, it can’t hurt that later this month the England team will be training with the Tykes’ sister club and current Super League Champions, the Rhinos.  So it’s all aboard the England charabanc to Leeds, because if Andy Robinson hopes to learn something from Rugby League, he has to travel to the heartlands. 

Elsewhere, Rugby League isn’t much in evidence.  The BBC still covers the odd match, like the recent Tri-nations series, but the game’s presence in the national consciousness is as hazy as a memory of Eddie Waring on the Mike Yarwood Show.  For an accurate indication of how far the profile of Rugby League has slipped, imagine Alistair McGowan on Christmas prime-time in the role of Ray French.  Or Exhibit B, for those in need of further persuasion: a rugby league player as BBC Sports Personality of the Year.  Not even J.K.Rowling could imagine that one.

League has suffered from shifting its elite season to the summer, when the floating TV fan has sunnier satellite sports like cricket.  There’s also the lack of genuine international competition, with three teams able to compete but only Australia allowed to win.  Add to these obstacles an absence of stars who transcend their sport, a perceived bias in the media, and a geographical stubbornness that one hundred years of sincere effort has not much managed to budge.  And now the imminent arrival of Andy Robinson.

Union has already plucked some of the tastier morsels from the living body – the finest home-grown coaches like Phil Larder and Dave Ellis, and stand-out individual performers like Jason Robinson.  Now the vultures are circling above Headingley eyeing the technical lifeblood – the tactics and strategies that make the two codes different, and therefore attractive in different ways. 

Intent on the pitch, Union risks missing a much more valuable lesson, and one which is infinitely harder to stow in the swag-bag.  Twenty-four hours before the record-breaking Leeds Tykes vs Newcastle Falcons, Leeds Rhinos attracted 13,238 for an out-of-season friendly against Wakefield.  The Rhinos have an average attendance at Headingley of over 16,000, and these Rugby League fans keep on coming despite their game’s ongoing difficulties, not least England’s unmissable victory in last year’s World Cup. 

Nationwide, the League supporters are many times fewer, but consistently they’re twice as vocal.  Earlier this season, for example, Stephen Jones of the Sunday Times did a webchat after the resignation of Clive Woodward.  There were surely a great many Red Rose supporters with questions for that madcap Clive of ours, but the organised and loyal League fans indisputably arrived firstest with the mostest.  Ninety percent of the questions were about the urgent League issues of the day.  The Sunday Times had asked for questions about rugby, and that’s what they got. 

In the tiny Union grounds, many of them more saucepan than cauldron, the RFU and the Premiership would do well to nurture cores of support as fiercely loyal and organised as these.  As it is, nobody yet knows whether the current upsurge in attendance is permanent, or as prone to deflation as a Jonny Wilkinson bicep. 

What is certain is that 13,000 people will turn out for a Leeds Rhinos close-season kickabout while Union hyper-ventilates about attendances half that size among the elite of the Zurich Premiership.  Never mind the angles of running, this is what Union should be learning from League – how to embed a club in its local community, how to attract families, and how to inspire the same phenomenal loyalty in bad times as well as good.

Only then can we be sure that the numbers currently turning up for the Zurich Premiership will be back.  Not just once or twice during the holidays, but game after game, season after season, into a bright sporting future where an ageing Alistair McGowen does a cracking John Inverdale.

 Times Column 18/12/04

Not so long ago, Christmas would have been easier for everyone if rugby players had hung up their boots and taken up golf.  Finding a present for a golfer is easy.  You can spend less than 10 pounds for the next thirty years and still not reach the second shelf of pitch-mark repairers.  A rugby-player, on the other hand, needs a gum-shield.  Best get that from the dentist, not Santa. 

And that’s it.  Until recently, there was simply nothing to buy.  Rugby union was a game first, and a set of values second.  And to protect those values, it was sincerely believed that rugby couldn’t survive Bill Beaumont putting his name on a book.  Commercialism would wilt rugby’s soul, which ought never become a commodity for profit.

So much for a hundred years of harrumphing.  The RFU now has the Rugby Store at Twickenham, and England Rugby Clotted Cream Fudge has not led directly to the downfall of the sport.  It has, however, made Christmas presents for rugby-nuts that much easier to find.  Take your pick from the full range of branded gifts and souvenirs – a Champions souvenir plate, England fridge magnets, a ceramic lion fly-half in the pose of Jonny Wilkinson. 

The novelty of using rugby to sell product seems to have led to some confusion about what rugby as a brand might actually signify.  A Christmas-shopper at the Rugby Store will find a glass decanter costing one hundred pounds.  That same shopper, in the same shop, is then offered a box-set of Twickers Knickers, containing one pair of lady’s white briefs and one red thong (£3.40).  For the larger supporter, these are possibly a reminder of how hard it is to get in to Twickenham.

The RFU is not alone in wondering quite where to pitch its new-era products.  Christmas in Australia, for example, will this year be brightened by a special edition yellow and green George Gregan sponge-bag. Discounted merchandise is also still available from the 2003 World Cup, and every Official Licensed Product carries the IRB’s clumsy attempt to bridge the past and the future.  On the back of every label, the IRB claims that the purchase of this particular key-ring or baseball cap is ‘assisting to develop and promote the game of rugby around the world.’  More like a donation, then, as if rugby was a slightly more brutal version of the World Wildlife Fund. 

To avoid this daftness, and if you have a rugby player to please this Christmas, you may think clothes are a safer bet.  You’d be wrong.  At one end of the market, there are screen-printed XXL T-shirts with ho-ho slogans such as Beer was Invented to Keep Props from Taking Over.  Or in Argentina: Rugby Players Eat Their Dead.

At the other end of the scale, looking to spend a bit more money, you could drive to an airport, fly to Paris, get a cab to the 6th arrondissement and buy a formal shirt with oval buttons from Franck Mesnel’s Eden Park boutique.  Mesnel, a former French centre three-quarter, has also moved into bedspreads, but even he seems a bit confused about what values rugby as a brand can bring to the world of consumer goods.  His clothes are described as élégants and  sophistiqués, yet he once used Keith Wood as a model. 

This contradiction of marketing messages comes from the breathless speed with which rugby has transformed itself into a fully functioning commercial entity.  Before 1996, the brand known as rugby union existed, and the values it stood for were fiercely protected.  However, they were never tested in the market-place, and the result has been both unexpected and revealing.  The rugby brand adds value to a vast range of diverse products, from Franck Mesnel’s Collection Femme to the skimpy red thong of a Twickers Knickers two-pack.  

This is rugby’s greatest strength, not as a brand but as a game.  It moves freely between the earthy and the exalted.  It doesn’t mean style on the boulevards of Paris, but it doesn’t mean humorous underpants at £3.99 a pair, either.  It means both together, and everything in between.  What an amazing, contradictory, inclusive sport it is. 

So Happy Christmas to one and all, with or without the knickers.

 Times Column 4/12/04

The Oxford-Cambridge match was once Twickenham’s landmark pre-Christmas fixture. It hardly mattered if it wasn’t very good, because any rugby at all was better than none.

As it happened, the game sometimes lived up to the optimism of its regular 50,000 light and dark blue supporters.  When Cambridge undergraduate Rob Andrew could be judged against Oxford undergraduate Stuart Barnes, the match still had meaning as an elite contest.  Some of the nation’s brightest young players would be scrutinised as they negotiated the pressures of a heaving Twickenham.

Tuesday’s 123rd Varsity match is unlikely to offer a glimpse of tomorrow’s stars.  There are only four undergraduates in the starting line-ups, and Cambridge have 30-year-old Johnny Ufton at full-back.  Ufton played one hundred games for Wasps, but won’t be adding to that number, and he’ll share the Twickenham pitch with a smattering of graduates similarly fading from an almost-glorious past.  The match increasingly resembles a terminus for the game’s further-educated journeymen.

Any student with a genuine rugby future will be spending the afternoon elsewhere, involved in a professional set-up.  A good example would be Nick Wood, England under-21 prop and one-time Oxford undergraduate.  On Tuesday he’ll be at the other end of the M4, making himself available for the Heineken Cup, when Gloucester visit Cardiff.

For more evidence of decline, look at the traditional warm-up matches against invitational sides.  These used to sparkle with international talent, but ten days ago Cambridge beat a Steele-Bodger’s XV whose highest scorer was David Humphrys’s brother.  One week at Twickenham we have the zing and blam of Josh Lewsey against Lote Tuqiri.  The next, a bunch of not very young blokes fresh from a scratchy win against a pick-up team inspired by the brother of Ireland’s second-choice fly-half.

All the Blues who run out on Tuesday will be good players.  But unlike in the past, they’re nowhere near the best the game has to offer.  Not unconnectedly, last year’s attendance dropped to 41,000, and this year’s early ticket sales have been slow.  No wonder the sponsors, MMC, prefer to draw attention to ‘the vitality and competitiveness of amateur rugby’.  If this was genuinely what we wanted to see, then Tuesday should be cleared for North Walsham versus Halifax.  Respectively, these two flourishing amateur clubs top National Divisions 2 South and North.  The standard of rugby is much the same, though with fewer mature scholars from the southern hemisphere.

At some point, the Universities have to stop racing about playing nearly the same game as professionals, only not quite so well.  After a particularly dire Varsity match in 2001, ‘informal discussions’ were held between the two university clubs, aimed at reaching a consensus on the urgent need for entertaining rugby.  Nevertheless, last year’s game ended in a low-scoring draw, with both teams terrified of fluffing their season’s only match of any significance.

It’s about time Oxford and Cambridge re-opened discussions, and recognised the one-off nature of their fixture as its biggest strength.  Just as an example, the clubs could announce that neither team was going to kick the ball from any position in open play.  There’s no league to lose, no next round of a cup to reach.  The clubs could instantly restore the value of this unique match by using it as an annual experiment, in the service of rugby research and discovery.  Make the result academic, and set the students free.

At Cambridge, such a pioneering spirit already exists.  For the last eight years the Director of Rugby, Dick Tilley, has used the Cambridge College Leagues to trial experimental rule changes for the RFU.  Some of these work (the sin-bin) and are subsequently proposed to the IRB, while some don’t (eight points for a penalty).  Either way, Tilley has imaginatively succeeded in reviving Cambridge’s historic contribution to the game.

Without some similar reinvention, the Varsity Match risks following the slide of Varsity cricket.  A once significant first-class fixture is now reduced to a Lord’s inconvenience, with a one-day square prepared between rows H and G of the Edrich stand.

Perhaps the Oxford and Cambridge rugby clubs are alert to the danger.  It would be great to see intelligence take over from imitation on Tuesday, Twickenham a temporary show-home for some sharply innovative rugby.  Once a year, the clever boys have the field to themselves.  They should use the opportunity wisely.

Times Column 20/11/04

Last week, South African coach Jake White supposedly gifted the Irish a winning psychological advantage by publicly criticising the quality of the men in green. This week, the Welsh management have avoided the term ‘All Blacks’ in favour of ‘New Zealand’, helpfully pointing out that the former suggests a rugby superpower while the latter is a ‘poxy little Island in the Pacific.’

Uh-oh. This doesn’t seem a very sound approach, but pre-match psycho-scuffles can actually work   Most famously, David Campese and his big mouth, two of Australia’s all-time great performers, managed to talk England out of their ‘boring’ game plan before the 1991 World Cup final. In the same decade, Brian Moore would annually reduce the French to incompetent frenzy simply by reminding them that they were prone to frenzied behaviour, and therefore incompetent. 

This type of playful provocation fell out of favour after the Lions Tour in 2001, when on the eve of the final Test Austin Healey decided to call Wallaby lock-forward Justin Harrison a plank. This may well have been true, but Harrison went on to play an inspired game and robbed the decisive lineout ball that deprived the Lions of a series victory.

Since then, coaches have preferred a pre-match creed of respect to all God’s creatures, down to and including the opposition kit-man.  Under this camouflaged blanket of respect, the very same coaches can then get to work on the possibly more rewarding task of nurdling the mind of the ref.

So thank goodness for Jake White, putting an end to this hypocrisy by stating openly that he preferred most of his own players to those on the other team. (And New Zealand is a small island in the Pacific, even if it isn’t poxy).  In the lead-up to a major international, players have to discover a fierceness equal to or greater than that of their opposite number.  Ideally, they will then go out and crush him.  It seems unlikely that respect is the dominant mood. 

Even at the highest level, ghosts still drift by from Michael Green’s The Art of Coarse Rugby, a bestseller that set the game back thirty years but which is still very funny.  Green’s Law states that the opposition team will always look bigger, whatever their actual size. 

This autumn’s pre-match psychology has been the coaching equivalent of quoshing the rumour that the other school has a prop with a moustache (in the under 11′s).  Jake White was merely saying, in his opinion, that the South Africans were the ones with moustaches and metal studs, and hoping that after 40 years of Springbok dominance the Irish would quail in their boots.

How else was he supposed to approach this? Aiming to inspire belief in a selection of players, any coach has a limited motivational set.  He can tell his boys they’re the best.  On the other hand, he can try telling them they’re the worst.  In a one-off match involving only two sides, one of these outcomes will almost certainly turn out to be true. 

The trick is to work the territory between the two extremes. ‘You’re the best, but you’ve been playing like the worst,’ or ‘You’re the worst, but you could be the best.’ Or even, to give credit to the influence of the media, ‘Everyone says you’re the worst, but I think you’re the best.’ And so on. 

One of the joys of the period between World Cups is that we never know for sure who actually is the best.  In these glorious days of parity between the hemispheres, the result may well be decided by attitude alone. Which side has the greatest belief, and is therefore the best on the day? 

On last Saturday’s evidence, the answer is France, but it’s not quite so simple. After the old-fashioned psych-up, we now have the new-fangled psych-down. For Jake White, this means a week of blaming the referee, which sustains Springbok morale by deflecting the possibility that South Africa were simply outplayed.  For Australia’s Eddie Jones, it means praising France as the world’s best, justifying his team’s defeat while at the same time getting in a pre-emptive dig at England.

If France are truly the best in the world, then the World Champions are impostors and a far less daunting prospect for Australia in eight days’ time. At which point, just as it will this afternoon at Twickenham, the talk gives way to the walk.