The Lord Mayor's Show, and After, 2003-

‘Players willing and able to travel were very few on the ground – for whatever reason - even though the consensus of opinion has it that Chard is not a million miles away.’

Somerset Guardian 05/02/2004

Back.  Look back.

It is, once more, the knock-out stage of the Rugby World Cup.  England are playing Wales in Australia for a place in the semi-finals, and it’s an early start.  Annoyingly, there seems to be some fault with the TV transmission, because the England team look cumbersome and slow.  The picture is so poor their shorts seem very tight.  Amazingly, the interference then gets even worse, with the match going horribly wrong and England made to look useless at rugby.  Oh no!  They are useless at rugby.

Sports coaches often refer to muscle-memory, which enables athletes to repeat habitual actions without thinking.  Spectators have it too, and as the match progresses I adopt the once traditional posture of the English rugby supporter, eyes wide, jaw dropped in disbelief, hands grimly clasping the back of my neck and elbows covering my ears.  One of the buffoons in white drops the ball, then collides with his own team-mate, and I sink to the floor, on my knees, curling up in the brace position for yet another crash landing.  This is the worst game of rugby ever televised, and England lose.  We’re out of the World Cup, comfortably dispatched by Wales.

I sigh, stand up, uncrick my neck.  I brush myself off, put the kettle on.  I’m disappointed, of course I am, but hardly surprised.  England are hopeless at rugby.  Always have been, always will be.

            Or so I believed in 1987, after England’s pathetic exit from the inaugural World Cup in Australia.  It was so long ago that I watched that quarter-final against Wales in the front room of my shared student house at 6.30 in the morning, on my own.  Everyone normal was still in bed, and would be for the next 16 years.  Hard to imagine, now, but in those days watching rugby before breakfast was a deviant activity: ‘Shhh!  Keep the noise down, someone might hear.’

In many ways, the faithful in 1987 were lucky to have any rugby to watch at all.  The Twickenham blazers had originally opposed this upstart notion, chortling and snorting at the World Cup as a flashy colonial fad, like barbecues.  It would never catch on, at least not in Surrey.  A tournament to discover the best rugby team in the world was even slightly vulgar.  Then it turned out that the other nations were going to Australia anyway, with or without us.  So the RFU sent the English, with the forwards in their super-economy seats laying bets on how long Dean Richards would keep on his rubber Ronald Reagan face-mask.  Everyone lost.  He was still wearing it as he left the plane in Australia.

            In the competition itself, we blundered to victories against Japan and the USA, which in that other world nearly twenty years ago went largely unnoticed.  There were no celebration magazine supplements, or pubs thrown open at dawn with festive one-off licences, which was perhaps just as well.  The crash position is always more hygienic to assume at home.  In the pool stage we lost to Australia, and then capitulated to the Welsh in that shambolic quarter-final in Brisbane. 

            Hopeless.

            If only we’d known.  Hold tight, do not adjust your set.  Simply wait 16 years and the quality of your picture will improve.  Give the TV a little slap, settle back into your armchair, and suddenly it’s 2003 and in smart grey suits and tan shoes our boys are arriving First Class in Sydney.  We’re the number one team in the world.  The best player on the planet, Englishman Jonny Wilkinson, leaves the plane wearing a Jonny Wilkinson mask.

How did that happen?

The rugby history books have it all explained, though they neglect, I feel, my own not insignificant contribution.  Australia 2003 was Martin Johnson’s third World Cup, but it was my fifth.  I wasn’t getting picked for England when Johnson was a teenage centre-forward in Market Harborough, and no larger than the average grown man.  Players at the lower levels of the game, disparaged as rugger-buggers, misunderstood as oafs, had kept the faith.  In 2003, by winning the World Cup in Australia, England repaid the true believers.

Before the tournament started, I couldn’t find any English rugby player who’d dare say the fateful words: ‘we might actually win this.’  To voice this hope, especially in public, was asking for trouble from the god of sporting failure.  In England, in my lifetime, one of the busier gods.  Fearing the worst, looking away, hiding behind a cushion, I went to live in Japan. 

As if that would help: there was no escape.

            The time difference between Tokyo and Sydney is only an hour, so England’s evening matches were screened in Japan at pub-time, and in Tokyo you can believe yourself wherever you’re themed to be. For most of the World Cup I was in English pubs, each one the model of a public house in any English town from Penzance to Carlisle.  And yet I was still in Tokyo, Japan: it felt both right and wrong, like drinking in The Flag’s Head, or the King and Hounds.

            The English team looked determined, predatory, nervous.  Against Georgia and Uruguay, I was reminded of football fans nostalgic for a big fish England rampant in a pool amongst minnows.  That’s where we are with rugby, and we should treasure this time, because for us the golden age of the Home Nations is now.  In World Cups to come, against a genius Moroccan fly-half, or an astonishing Kazakh pack, it suddenly won’t look so easy.

            So I enjoyed all the phoney wars of the pool stages, in particular the battle to see which team could take the field looking most like a band of superheroes (France, because superheroes don’t wear white).  I admired the Scots, who in the absence of playing power revived the old trick of using under-sized numbers to broaden their shoulders.  This might have worked, only the All Blacks went for huge numbers, and still looked huge.  I also enjoyed the way the kickers tried to love the ball over the posts.  Their eyes were pleading yet intense, anxious, hopeful.  All except Jonny, of course, who in his new stance looked like a potter.  He was creating the perfect kick, shaping a collectible artefact between his hands.  By the final it wasn’t so much a pot as the last intricate piece in a sixteen-piece dinner-service, special-occasion kicks to display in a row in the trophy cabinet.

On the afternoon of the final, my colleagues at Tokyo University had planned a seminar: The Myth of Britain.  I explained to them, with all due respect, that I couldn’t contribute because I was incapable of rational thought (it’s the World Cup Final, for God’s sake!).  They didn’t appear to understand.  I suggested that this one rugby match was as culturally significant as the Coronation.  No?  The moon landing, if the British had managed it first (led by Martin Johnson).  Look, I have to leave now.  Mumbling my apologies (bowing deeply many, many times) I headed off at a run for The Blue Lion, The Rose and Bear.

            Just as well I ran.  Most of the one billion TV audience tuned in for the final had got to the pub before me, and they were right to have made the effort.  There was the rain, for a start.  Brilliant.  After more than a century as patron weather of British rugby, the clouds were never going to miss England’s appearance in a World Cup final.  And even in Sydney, where the basic rules of life don’t always apply (Bondi beach was supposed to be a punishment) a mixture of rain and rugby means mud.  And where there’s mud and rugby, there are oafs.  There’s the music-hall double-act of Dawson and Kay, fluffing an easy try with nothing to overcome but their own elation.  Half a billion people went into the first stage of the crash-position, but there was still something heartening about that early calamity.  I could have dropped the ball like that.  We all could.

As the match went on, it increasingly resembled Saturdays from closer to home.  Technique receded and guts counted, blood told.  Both teams launched heart and soul into the sporting battle, finding out the measure of previously unmeasured reserves, of will-power and courage, qualities that no professional testing will ever chart in advance.  Forget the heroic shirts, this was heroism in the raw.

 We all know what happened next.  The lads went to London, where the streets were paved with gold on their way to meet the Queen.  English rugby players were snapped at 10 Downing Street, and treated in the popular press like starlets, like Cliff Richard.  Or maybe not, in the case of Jason Leonard.  They deserved every second of it, as reward for the boredom of all that training, the conditioning, those years of agonised explosion back and forth across an over-scuffed pain threshold.

            For at least as long as the homecoming, the nation decided to forgive the deranged rugger-bugger, locked away safely in an attic, and warmed to these yeoman English heroes.  Men like Hill, Tindall, and Vickery.  They were hard nuts, but gentle too, as if off the field they’d been dipped in tea.  They made us all proud.  What’s more, they were world champions, our champions, of the same earth, the same island.  Wherever they went, we should surely follow.

            Taking the hint, I could have followed Martin Johnson into retirement.  But was that the spirit which made us champions of the world?  I think not.  This was no time for complacency – we needed to concentrate on building towards the next World Cup in 2007.  I therefore went looking for a club in Japan.  I wanted to join a Japanese team, but quickly came across the most obvious problem.  I left my name and address with a club captain (on the back, as it happens, of a signed Danny Grewcock postcard).  They didn’t reply: nobody in the team could read it.

            Feeling more pragmatic, I scouted the internet.  In Japan there are international banks, and therefore English bankers and brokers.  This means ex-pat teams with players called Rhino and Scrotum, and website-photos of lardy white men with women’s pants on their heads.  From the national attic, at full moon, that old manic cackle can still sometimes be heard.

Fortunately, the Japanese don’t need rugby as an excuse to fall down drunk in the street.  That’s what after-work parties are for.  Of the more enticing clubs in Tokyo there’s All-France, a kind of rugby foreign legion: nationality is less important than attitude.  Or the Tokyo Gaijin, always a presence in the cup and the East Japan leagues, a ragged band of Australians and New Zealanders, Samoans, Fijians, renegade Japanese.  The Gaijin allow me to play at number 10, which puts the club beyond reproach, and rugby turns out to be as rewarding in Japan as it has been everywhere else.

I wouldn’t have wanted to miss, for example, the big Argentinean Mauro Sauco, who took up rugby in the month I arrived and currently plays two games a weekend.  Or Haldre Rogers from Guam, a professional snake catcher who plays at scrum-half for Guam rugby club.  ‘Rugby players are like snakes,’ she told me.  ‘They look intimidating, but you soon get used to them.’  There are the grassless pitches, and the pre-match fingernail inspections made by fastidious referees.  There’s paper-scissors-stone, played before every game by the rival captains.  This doesn’t determine who chooses ends, which would be hasty and therefore most impolite, but who gets to toss the coin.  In Japan, when a player is substituted, he turns at the sidelines and bows; to his team-mates, to the opposition, to the pitch itself – our large open-air dojo, the location of the challenge, the struggle. 

The samurai spirit is alive and well, not in Hollywood films but in the sport of rugby.  The samurai ideals of bushido have been grafted onto rugby’s imported sense of manliness.  On the field, in every physical collision, a tension is created between the inner being and the outer body; the pitch becomes an arena where the human spirit must overcome the weakness of the flesh.  Of course they bow when they leave.

Otherwise, the locals revel in aggressive contact and the maintenance of high-speed play.  If this makes the Japanese sound like they fit the stereotype of super-fit kamikaze loonies, then they’d be only too pleased to hear it. The joke when I first arrived was that I’d be playing lock forward, as the tallest person on the pitch.  Not funny.  There are some big units out here, and uncompromising tackles are highly valued.  Getting bashed in the Tama valley doesn’t feel much different from getting bashed in Chew Valley.

At the end of the World Cup, RFU Chief Executive Francis Baron wrote: ‘We intend to use this success as a platform for growing and revitalising our game at all levels.’  Personally, I did feel revitalised, and used England’s victory as a platform for having a haircut like Jonny’s.  But every Monday morning, aching a little from the weekend’s rugby, I was also waiting for news of the invigorating effects of World Cup triumph in England.  Jim Dando, reliable as ever, was sending me the Midsomer Norton match reports.  On one level, these made for highly gratifying reading.  Norton were having a dog of a season.  Steve Penny, the new number 10, was insensitive enough to be scoring tries and kicking the ball regularly over the posts, but all the same there was clearly something lacking. 

There was also a worrying pattern emerging from the reports on the 3rd and 4th teams:

‘Optomists Captain Martin Dury was again at his wits end trying to forge a Team. Broken promises and absenteeism had decimated his squad even though Norton’s 3rd XV had been called off.’

This was in February 2004, three months after the Webb-Ellis trophy had landed in England.  Perhaps the World Cup was a separate rugby entity, a sporting achievement detached from the earth and mud of England?  Seeking the truth from the horse’s mouth, I contacted Ian Tiley, Norton’s captain.  Had the World Cup victory saved the game?  Was rugby in Somerset growing and revitalising, as the RFU had hoped?

‘Well, Rich,’ Ian said, ‘it hasn’t made much difference among adults.  Even when we get 70 players out, it’s hard to find opposition.  But the kids enjoyed it.  We still have hoards of them coming up every Sunday morning.  Did you hear about Robin?’

If those kids are lucky, and they carry on playing into adulthood, they too will be easily distracted by stories of how Robin became Rhodri, why people go mental after joining the police, and how Hairsy nearly lost a leg.  At Midsomer Norton, they loved England’s win on a Saturday morning far away in Australia (‘grown men jumping around like little boys.’)  But in the afternoon they still went into Bristol to get thumped by Old Reds.

The effect of winning a World Cup, at ground level in the old country, remains unclear.  However, the tournament itself is still the game’s best recipe for global success.  In 2007, France will add the garlic.  In 2011, for the first time, the IRB has a chance to demonstrate that spreading the game is more than suited blab and a reality in the future of rugby.  Japan is bidding to be the first nation outside the eight founding unions to host the Rugby World Cup.  They have the tradition, the pedigree, and the fourth largest rugby-playing population in the world (after England, France, and South Africa).  It seems an entirely feasible proposition, and Japan should be given the tournament because they have the stadiums, the experience from the 2002 football World Cup, the security, the infrastructure.

They also have Koji Tokumasu, Secretary of the Japan Rugby Football Union, and Vice President of the World Cup Preparation Committee.  As the Japan RWC 2011 bid gets under way, Koji is at the enthusiastic heart of the JRFU office in central Tokyo.  How he arrived here is a rugby story worth telling.

It begins in 1975, when dinosaurs roam the earth and Wales are uncrowned world champions.  Koji is 23 years old, and working as a staff reporter on the Nishi-Nippon Shimbun. On Saturdays he plays flanker for the Broadcasting Club, and on Sundays he coaches the juniors.  His mum is probably relaxing, thinking the difficult days are over, but then his mum knows nothing of the corrupting influence of Edwards and Bennett.  After 21 September 1975, for young Koji, nothing will ever be quite the same again.

The touring Welsh are about to take on Japan at the Hanazono Rugby Stadium in Osaka.  Wales, with a team containing many of the ‘74 Lions, jink and dart to a fifty point victory.  The spectators leave the stadium, chattering and excited, all except one: Koji Tokumasu sits dazed on the concrete of the terrace.  His head is bursting with the Welsh exhibition of speed and guile, of their joyful finesse of space.  Sitting alone in the empty stadium, he has a brainstorm: these are the only skills on earth worth learning.

Koji quits his job. He then realises he doesn’t have enough money to get to Wales, the promised land.  Two years later, frozen stiff from packing seafood at minus 40 degrees centigrade, Koji still doesn’t have enough money.  He decides to go anyway, with Pakistan International Airlines on a one-way ticket to Copenhagen (four stopovers).  It takes a day and a half. He catches a train and then the night-boat to Harwich, and steps off the ferry young and rugby-loving and Japanese, penniless on the east coast of England.

First stop: London.  He tours the parks, aching under his heavy rucksack, confounded to see no-one playing rugby.  In search of a simple explanation, he looks in at the RFU.  He explains that he’s from Japan (probably unnecessary), that he’s very keen on rugby and wants to learn to coach.  The RFU ask Koji if he has a letter of introduction.  As if he was stalking Jane Austen, with the most indecent of intentions.  Koji doesn’t have one.

‘Sorry,’ says Don Rutherford, gathering up the skirts of the RFU, ‘we can’t do anything for you.  Welcome to England.’

Koji is on the next train to Cardiff, with no letter of introduction but a useful book called Where To Stay in Wales.  At £1 a night, the cheapest answer is Cardiff University Dormitory.  It’s at this point that events conjoin in a second fateful date, which Koji remembers quite clearly: 13 September 1977.

Opposite the dormitory, as at the end of a rainbow, he sees a school sports-field.  Boys are playing rugby.  Koji’s long journey has not been easy, and it’s a while since he last slept, but he lurches out from under his rucksack and runs to the pitch.  At this emotional moment, a national reflex overwhelms him.  He starts taking many photographs. 

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing!’  A Welsh roar, well-used, tempered on hymns and unruly flank-forwards. 

It is Mr Lesley Gauntlett, PE teacher at Lady Mary High School, Cardiff, looking out for the welfare of his Under 12’s rugby.  Koji falls to his knees after many miles of desert.  All he wants are some crumbs from the bread of heaven. ‘Rugby,’ he manages to say.  ‘I want to learn to coach rugby.  Please.’

‘In that case,’ Lesley Gauntlett says, rocking back on his heels and studying Koji more closely, ‘why didn’t you say so?’

Mr Gauntlett drives Koji down to the Cardiff College of Education.  It seems like a good place to start – the College has produced 14 British Lions and Mr Gauntlett knows Mr Aaron, head of PE.

Mr Aaron considers Koji’s request to watch Welsh rugby being coached in a Welsh College by Welshman Leighton Davies.  ‘A very good choice,’ he says, ‘though on one condition.’  Within a week, Koji is both learning rugby and translating Japanese text-books on gymnastics, Syd Aaron’s personal area of interest.

In this way, another rugby destiny begins.

Koji joins the College rugby club, plays on the wing for the second team, and becomes a part-time student by proudly wearing his club jersey in the photo for an unauthorised ID card.  He stays in Cardiff for the next two years, paying his way, this graduate and former journalist, by starting work at six in the morning as a cleaner.  It’s worth it.  The rugby enthrals him, and the locals are friendly.  Sometimes, if he listens closely, he can even understand what they’re saying.

It was in Roath Park, not at the College, that Koji eventually discovered the key to Welsh rugby supremacy.  He used to sit and watch the children playing with a Coke-can or an empty milk carton as a ball.  At first there would just be two of them, trying to get past each other, swerving and stepping.  Then another two would turn up, and there would be two against two, then four against four, all of them laughing and spinning the can and dodging each other until the sun inevitably set.

Back in Japan, Koji stepped off the plane as a fully-equipped Welsh-speaking rugby coach.  His enthusiasm had been replenished and rewarded, and he joined a new high school which was thinking of dabbling in rugby.  It was to be nine years before the next auspicious date in his rugby odyssey. 

January 7, 1989, and Koji has coached Meikei High School into the national finals at Hanazono, Osaka, the grand stadium where it all began with the touring Welsh fourteen years previously.  His school-boys play with the flair and guile of Edwards and Bennett, and it’s a fantastic achievement for a new school to have reached the all-Japan final.  

On this particular day, however, the attentive god of rugby has to give way to the more senior Amataseru, sun goddess, and her only direct descendant on earth.  On January 7 1989, after 63 eventful years on the Chrysanthemum throne, Emperor Hirohito re-establishes contact with his ancestors.  The schools rugby final is respectfully cancelled, and with Zen-like wisdom and illogic, both finalists are declared National Champion.

For Koji, despite this disappointment (‘We would have won!’ he whispers, looking over his shoulder), the real victory was to be found in the stadium car-park.  Deprived of their match, two of Koji’s boys start spinning a boot-case back and forth.  They run at each other, stepping and swerving.  Two more boys join in, and soon the case is spinning through many pairs of hands, everyone laughing and dodging, a shuttle of joy in rugby from Osaka to Cardiff and back again.

Koji is now aiming for one last fateful date, Saturday 19 November, 2011.  It is the final of the 7th IRB World Cup, which has been hosted with brilliant efficiency by Japan.  The reigning emperor is in good health, and Mr Koji Tokumasu, 59 years old, 36 years since the revelation of Gerald Davies, is wearing his Japan tie and proudly watching the match-day crowds stream down the broad parade from Shinanomachi to the National Stadium.  His work is done.  Today, in 2011, the centre of the rugby world is here, with Koji Tokumasu, in Tokyo.

Or at least I hope so.  As Koji says, ‘this is the best and perhaps the last chance for the dramatic growth of rugby in Japan and Asia.’

Nothing is predictable in rugby politics, but I hope Koji gets the bounce of the ball.  If I’m still in Tokyo on that November day in 2011, I’ll hurry to the stadium after playing a match in the morning.  I’ll have doggedly pressed on as a player because I’m stupid, as blinkered and irrational as Jean-Pierre Rives with a head-wound somewhere on the high veldt.  Both the doctor and the referee are pleading with him to leave the field.

‘Leave the field?’ he replies, ‘to go where, exactly?’

In any case, I hope that by 2011 more people all over the planet will be taking up this game which inspires in so many of us such a mysterious but enduring affection.  The future isn’t only about audiences and markets, but sharing the joy of playing.

As for the exact nature of that joy, a rugby player may be the last person to ask.  However, there was an occasion in Somerset, just before I left for Japan, when I felt as if I was only inches or seconds from finding the definitive answer.

It was the end of another season at Midsomer Norton, a weak sun blushing through the early spring-time clouds.  We’d trained on a Saturday lunch-time, in preparation for a Wednesday night cup final, and everyone was wandering back to the clubhouse.  Except me.  I stayed out and ran some sprints, did some exercises, negotiated with the dying of the light.

 By the time I finished, the rest of the team was already showered and changed and in front of Leicester versus Harlequins in the bar.  I had my shower, and most unusually stepped out into an empty changing-room, heavy with steam.  Sunshine was flooding through the only window, a flat rectangle of strengthened glass above the hooks in the corner where the front row sits.  I turned off the light, so the sunbeams could catch the grainy angles in the floating shifting steam.  Standing there barefoot on the concrete floor, amid the clots of studded earth and discarded scraps of electrical tape, I allowed myself a moment of melancholy, of poetry, and the soul of the greatest game came almost within my grasp.  And then, as I turned to the clothes on my hook, picked out in a broad and golden ray of sunshine, I saw it.  The point and the pointlessness, the meaning of rugby, of rugger, of the universe and everything.

The bastards had stolen my trousers.