Cup of life
Bruised by the fallout from the 1981 Springbok tour, the rebel Cavaliers’ visit to South Africa and a rampant rival football code, rugby was revived by the All Blacks’ inaugural World Cup triumph 30 years ago.
The All Blacks’ inaugural World Cup triumph 30 years ago revived a bruised and battered game.
The first Rugby World Cup, which culminated 30 years ago this month in an All Blacks-France final at Eden Park, meant different things to different people. For the public and media, it was a curiosity; for conservative Northern Hemisphere administrators, it was a Trojan horse that threatened everything they held dear; for South Africans, it was a non-event, as they weren’t invited to the party; and for New Zealand rugby, it was a godsend.
Those who opposed the concept believed it would lead to professionalism by placing an unreasonable playing load on amateur athletes. A secondary concern was that rugby would end up emulating the football model: the World Cup would dominate the landscape at the expense of traditional tournaments and rivalries. These misgivings were well founded but somewhat academic, given social and cultural change was rendering amateurism increasingly unsustainable.
For the game here, the tournament was an opportunity to re-engage with the wider public alienated by the New Zealand Rugby Football Union’s (NZRFU) head-in-the-sand determination to preserve the great rivalry with South Africa, regardless of the discord it created and the damage it did to our international standing. With the encouragement of an equally bloody-minded Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, this destructive and self-destructive obsession duly deliv- ered the traumatic 1981 Springbok tour. As Muldoon protégé and our 35th Prime Minister Jim Bolger later observed, the tour was “a mistake that had reached into – and often divided – families, friends and communities throughout New Zealand, perhaps more than anything else in our recent history”.
And as historian James Belich noted in Paradise Reforged, it brought the middle class, particularly women, out on the streets for the first time. Rugby would pay a heavy price for getting offside with many of the nation’s mothers. The All Whites’ feel-good 1982 Fifa World Cup campaign made football an attractive alternative for sports fans and parents whose patience with rugby was at an end.
The civil strife of 1981 wasn’t enough to make rugby kick the habit of ignoring the issue. Although legal intervention scuppered the 1985 All Blacks’ tour of South Africa, the following year the bulk of that team slipped off to the republic behind the NZRFU’s back. Most Kiwis, though, had moved on: the Cavaliers, as the rebels called themselves, got scant support.
In his autobiography, David Kirk, one of two All Blacks – the other being John Kirwan – who opted out of the rebel venture, wrote, “The public didn’t see the Cavaliers as honourable. How could they be fighting for our honour when they had their back pockets stuffed with cash? Perhaps the memory of angst and violence from the previous tour had an effect. For all that grief and moral self-examination to be reduced to a mercenary exchange – it hit the wrong note.”
With the rebels banned for two tests, Kirk captained the so-called Baby Blacks to a popular win over France. But after New Zealand’s one-point loss in the opening test against the touring Wallabies at Athletic Park, a number of Cavaliers were rushed back into the team for the second and third tests, but the series was lost nonetheless.
“There is a cumulative power in attacks from your teammates. After a while, I couldn’t take any more and I ended up sobbing in my room.”
SIMMERING ANIMOSITY
For the end-of-year tour of France, the captaincy was handed to Jock Hobbs, who’d led the Cavaliers after an injury to tour captain Andy Dalton. Aware of the simmering animosity towards him harboured by some teammates who’d been Cavaliers, Kirk was a reluctant tourist.
When the tour ended in defeat at the infamous Battle of Nantes, the animosity came to the boil. “A drinking session started around 10am,” wrote Kirk. “The sourness of defeat crystallised the larger anger of the rebel failure. And when alcohol had loosened people’s tongues, some of them found it easier to be direct with me about my part in the fiasco and what an inadequate individual I was.
“There is a cumulative power in these sorts of attacks from your teammates: they know you intimately; you trust them at an important level; their attacks have the power to damage you that enemies’ don’t have. I was surrounded. And the long and short of it was that, after a while, I couldn’t take any more and I ended up sobbing in my room.”
Not surprisingly, there was a desire to draw a line under this ugliness. The approaching World Cup was the catalyst for change, beginning with a shake-up of the All Blacks selection panel. John Hart (Auckland) and Alex Wyllie (Canterbury), the outstanding selector/coaches in provincial rugby, replaced Stan Hill and Colin Meads, who’d pushed his luck by coaching the Cavaliers. Hart’s and Wyllie’s teams had played a style and standard of rugby that the national team had matched only fitfully and they persuaded coach Brian Lochore to make a step change in the All Blacks’ approach.
AGENT OF CHANGE
While Hart and Wyllie brought new thinking and a sense of urgency, Lochore was the key agent of change: he saw the others as resources to be used rather than potential rivals to be sidelined. As a former great All Blacks captain, an icon and a man of principle at ease in his own skin, he was too big a person to succumb to the paranoia that has afflicted some All Blacks coaches. Not only did he welcome Hart’s and Wyllie’s input to the game plan and selection, but he used them as assistant coaches, even though the very concept was anathema to some NZRFU board members.
The shift to a high-speed game based on superb physical conditioning, a high level of ball skills, forward mobility and pace and strength out wide, where continuity would be created by players standing in tackles and offloading to supporting loose forwards, made personnel changes inevitable as some of the incumbents lacked the athleticism and/or skills required in their
positions. A potentially tricky situation was averted when concussion forced Hobbs to call it quits. Hobbs and Lochore had developed a close relationship in France, but the former’s retirement took loyalty out of the equation and rendered moot the debate over his experience and leadership versus Michael Jones’s extraordinary potential.
Another unfortunate development with a happy outcome was the injury that ruled captain Dalton out of the tournament. It opened the way for the young bull Sean Fitzpatrick and led to Kirk’s restoration as captain and subsequent emergence as poster boy for new-age rugby. The square-jawed Dalton oozed earnest intent but was in the traditional mould – taciturn, serious to a fault – when it came to interacting with the media and public.
Given what he’d been through, Kirk would have mustered a sour chuckle over former British Lion turned journalist Gerald Davies’ description of him as “a Peter Pan figure” with “a twinkle in his eye which melted the hardest of hearts”. The treacly clichés coated a deeper truth: by giving rugby a youthful, attractive, smiling public face, Kirk charmed and disarmed many who had turned away from the game.
Perhaps the only thing that wasn’t lowkey about the build-up to the tournament was the All Blacks’ preparation. After a methodical trial-and-selection process, the panel came up with a potent blend of youth and experience, explosiveness and technique, X factor and hard-headedness, Baby Black and Cavalier. And the players were ready. At their first training session, they smashed into tackle bags as if they wanted to obliterate them. Having just returned from seven years in Europe and observing the All Blacks’ conditioning and combination of raw-boned aggression and steely intensity, I decided then and there the Northern Hemisphere teams had no idea what was in store for them.
“We had the hunger, the keenness and the pure, uncomplicated will to win the World Cup”, Kirwan said in his autobiography. “We didn’t just want to beat other teams, we wanted to destroy them.”
FULL-THROATED SUPPORT
Eden Park was barely half-full for the opening game between the All Blacks and Italy, which was preceded by an opening ceremony that bore no resemblance to the pyrotechnic extravaganzas, with their casts of thousands, we’ve come to expect on such occasions. Kirwan’s extraordinary solo try, going the length of the field and beating most of the Italian players at least once, provided the special moment that made everyone sit up and take notice, galvanising the New Zealand public into full-throated support for their team.
Australia was co-host of the tournament, but the burgeoning enthusiasm for the national side wasn’t replicated across the Tasman: the Wallabies couldn’t draw a full house to Sydney’s 20,000-capacity Concord Oval, even for their semi-final against France. Perhaps the tone was set by the players treating the whole exercise as nothing to get too excited about. Halfback Nick Farr-Jones didn’t even stop work, going into his office each morning until he made the mistake of answering the phone with “Nick Farr-Jones speaking”. The caller was Wallaby coach Alan Jones.
“We had the hunger and the pure, uncomplicated will to win the World Cup. We didn’t just want to beat other teams, we wanted to destroy them.”
“BADGES OF HONOUR”
It quickly became obvious that the All Blacks were comfortably the best team on show. Of the winners of the seven subsequent tournaments, only the 2015 All Blacks approached their level of dominance. They won their five games en route to the final by an average score of 54-9, scoring 40 tries and conceding three. Their hardest game and best performance came in the quarter-final against a good Scotland team, the All Blacks winning 30-3, two tries to nil. According to the shell-shocked Scottish captain, Colin Deans, the New Zealand forwards “wore their scars as badges of honour” and hit as hard in the 80th minute as the first.
June 20, 1987, was a typical Auckland winter’s day: mild and overcast with squally showers sweeping in off the Waitakeres. World Cup fever had taken hold: 20,000 spectators turned up at Eden Park for the
tournament opener; 48,000 were there for the final. France had made the final via an upset win over Australia, sealed by what was probably the team try of the tournament, a gem to rival the “try from the end of world” that bamboozled the All Blacks in 1993. They had a hard-nosed, proficient forward pack and world-class backs in fullback Serge Blanco and midfielder Philippe Sella.
The All Blacks weren’t as clinical as they’d been against Scotland or as fluent as in their semi-final romp against Wales, but they got the job done in the final with something to spare, winning 29-9, three tries to one. Fittingly, the tries were scored by Jones, the discovery of the tournament, Kirwan, its undoubted star, and Captain Kirk.
Sella felt his team were too hyped-up before the game and too cautious during it: “Some players were overemotional and the final was partly lost before the game had even started. Too much [emotion] is difficult to handle and takes away some of the energy you need for the game. We needed to be more expressive, but instead we played quite tactically. New Zealand were so organised and sharp that such an approach was never likely to succeed. In the second half, we had to defend and didn’t do it very well. The images of the All Blacks scoring those tries are still in my head.”
So Kirk became the first captain to hold the Webb Ellis Cup aloft. His embrace with Dalton seemed to symbolise the rugby community making peace with itself and the nation rekindling its love affair with the national game. For Kirwan, the aftermath of victory “was a return to the old days before South Africa became a divisive issue and other sports competed for people’s attention and support – when rugby was king and the All Blacks were the representatives of all New Zealanders”.
DEEP WOUNDS
But deep wounds don’t heal that easily. The day after the final, Kirk sat down to write an article explaining why he was walking away from the All Blacks. “The need to conform and to accept a system of behaviour and values that were not your own, but those of the rugby culture, is known as ‘discipline’. It is true that discipline is an essential element of success on the rugby field. It too often becomes a tyranny of the majority off the field.” And years later, Andy Haden, the Cavaliers’ ringleader, revealed he was still getting letters from some of the rebels asking “when I’m going to get ‘that little Tory’”. (Kirk unsuccessfully sought the National Party nomination for the 1992 Tamaki by-election.)
The South African issue had finally gone away, but New Zealand rugby would continue to be roiled and divided by parochialism, particularly anti-Auckland sentiment, administrative pettiness and politicking, and acrimonious coaching rivalries. It would take a quarter of a century and the dilution of parochialism brought about by Super Rugby, the introduction of a fully professional – in both senses of the word – national administration that largely eliminated politics and an overdue second World Cup victory for New Zealand rugby to become the seamless, unified, widely envied operation it is today.
By giving rugby a youthful, attractive, smiling public face, Kirk charmed and disarmed many who’d turned away from the game.