Rugby: it’s a different game

Wednesday evening I felt myself slowly going downhill and headed off to bed soon after 2200 shivering and fearing the worst. I had a restless night and spent Thursday generally on auto-pilot with little ambition to do anything.

Although feeling a tad better on Friday I took myself off to the doctor and was seen by an excellent Kiwi lady doctor. She gave me a proper ‘old-fashioned’ GP’s once over, concluded that it was probably a virus and told me to take it easy for a couple of days. So that means my Bonfire Burn ambitions are probably done for this year but it also meant that I watched a bit of daytime TV and on a Saturday that means rugby.

I caught two games, I watched the last 20 minutes of both and felt the heartache of the Sale and Australia fans as Munster and the All Blacks beat them with the absolute last kicks of each game.  Both were incredible to watch. They were played with amazing intensity and the Australia/NZ match was an examplar of committed attacking rugby from both sides.

I got to thinking about the rugby I played some years ago. It was different.

I didn’t go to a rugby playing school so my early years contact with rugby was limited to watching the internationals on TV with my paternal grandfather who was a big fan of Welsh rugby. His enthusiasm for the game and for Welsh rugby has stated with me. Fortunately Wales has won a few games and championships over the years and this allegiance has rewarded more often than it’s disappointed.

My first playing experience was in 1966. I’d been working for Shell at the Thornton Research Centre near Stanlow before going to Uni and like most big employers in those days one of the perks of working for them was having access to an excellent sports club. I trained with them before the start of the 1966/67 season and played a couple of games, probably for the third team before heading off to Cambridge. I wasn’t then, and am no more now, the typical build of a rugby player so I was stuck on the wing  and ran as fast as I could to stay out of trouble.

I played rugby at Churchill, for the second XV, and the pattern continued. I played on the wing and in those days and because you could kick for touch from outside the 22m line (it was the 25 yard line in those days) most scrum halves/fly halves/inside centres did just that so wingers never got a pass. I would play entire games without a sniff of the ball! They changed the rules in 1970.

After Uni I went to work for Shell in London and played my rugby at the company sports club again, this time at Lensbury, west of London. My rugby playing went through three big changes. First I diversified and began to play elsewhere in the backs and where possible at fly half. Second I found that I could kick goals so began to take up kicking duties. And third I realised that I could guarantee changes one and two by being captain so started my specialism of being a ‘professional second team captain’. In my last year at Shell I captained a motley group of good guys who weren’t interested in playing for the first team but were keen enough to commit to working hard for the second team so we won more games than we lost. And I got to score tries and kick goals!

From London I moved to Jakarta via New York where I played for the International Sports Club (ISCI, pictured above). I was again a utility back but for some reason got to play scrum half which I always found a rather too vulnerable position. But when we played the Royal Bangkok Sports Club on tour I was on the wing again and was credited with a try in the Bangkok Post which I hadn’t scored.

After Jakarta came Hong Kong where I joined Valley, a sort of anti-establishment club which did as well as it could given the basic superiority of the resources available to the Police, the Army and the Hong Kong Club. I played a couple of times for the first team, heady days, before once again captaining the second team. At the end of my time there the club went on tour to Taipei. I was injured so did not play but witnessed a heavy defeat at the hands of the Tapei Giants on a pitch without a blade of grass and, because it had rained all day, a uniform 6 inch surface of mud.

I was also secretary of the club and a member of the Hong Kong Union where I took a major role in organising what was in those days the Rothmans Cathay Hong Kong 7s. That was of course the first big international 7s tournament and forerunner I guess of today’s global circuit. I also spent some time coaching a Chinese team as we tried to diversify the sport away from its expat base.  And there was one other notable from my rugby playing in Hong Kong: I spent one night in hospital with concussion. Maybe that’s affected me ever since.

I left Hong Kong in 1979 and didn’t play rugby again until about 1986 or so when I turned out for Zurich. After game number 1 I suffered incredible muscle pains having used muscles which had been effectively dormant for a decade. Somehow I played a second time and I see to recall scoring a try but I think it was the end of the season and I never played again.

In between the above I played once in Japan, I registered with but never played for a club in New York and I did sign up for a session of touch rugby when on holiday at Club Med in Bali in the mid 1990s.

It’s a different game now at the top level. The expectations there for all levels to be different but are they? Is coarse rugby still played?