Forget the past, this will be cleanest Lions tour ever
The All Blacks will be painted as thugs as normal but those days are over.
THIS will be the cleanest Lions tour ever, despite the inevitable attempts to paint the All Blacks as thugs.
When there were no television match officials, and assistant referees were just touch judges, who couldn’t alert referees to foul play, what happened on the field largely stayed on the field, unless it came off on a stretcher.
Players sorted things out themselves, and it would be a lie to say the All Blacks were without men who acted as judge, jury and close to executioner.
But everything changed with professional rugby.
As an All Black of the 1990s once told me, with just a hint of nostalgia, ‘‘You can’t hit anyone now. The buggers catch you on camera.’’
That the All Blacks are smart enough to know we now live in a world where the new fist in the face is usually a dirty look, or the grab of a collar, may not be the impression you’ll get on this Lions’ tour. It won’t be anything new. History shows that the dangerous upending of 2005 captain Brian O’Driscoll was far from the start of northern hemisphere objections to how the All Blacks play the game.
By the way, I’m one who thinks there should have been a hearing about the O’Driscoll incident, and that if there had been it’s likely, at the risk of offending two top men in Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu, there would have been suspensions.
Instead coach Clive Woodward and his publicity supremo, Alistair Campbell, worried more about scoring points in public and less about the tedious business of applying promptly for an official review, waited until it was too late.
But that was almost nothing compared to the heat applied in 1971, when the Lions actually won the series.
There was a massive brawl in the ninth game of the tour, against Canterbury.
Rugby News magazine ran a front page photograph of prop Sandy Carmichael with two terribly blackened eyes, above a story saying Canterbury’s play ‘‘ought to be confined to a psychiatric ward.’’
Carmichael was invalided home, with a fractured cheekbone, and so was the other Lions’ prop, Ray McLoughlin, with a broken thumb.
Star first-five Barry John called the Canterbury players ‘‘thugs’’.
Not so much was done to explain how McLoughlin broke his thumb. Aiming for another Canterbury player, who ducked, his fist smashed into the unforgiving head of Alex Wyllie, and McLoughlin’s thumb snapped.
‘‘To say the Lions didn’t hit back,’’ Canterbury captain Ian Penrose told me in 2004, ‘‘is a nonsense.’’
The oddest controversy of the ‘71 tour came early in the last game, the fourth test at Eden Park, when All Black lock Peter Whiting, a man normally about as physically thuggish as John Campbell, was castigated for punching Gordon Brown.
At the time a test lineout wasn’t so much an athletic contest as a dockside brawl.
Whiting, whose career I watched from the time he played for the Auckland Grammar first XV, was never a scrapper.
An intelligent, thoughtful man, wasn’t being disingenuous when he told author Bob Howitt, ‘‘Not being a naturally violent man, I didn’t enjoy fighting.’’
But his ‘71 marker pushed him too far. ‘‘He was the worst at draping himself over me I ever struck.’’
Whiting did punch Brown, and there was more British outrage that he wasn’t ordered off. Press Archives
A decade later, talking with Howitt, Whiting addressed the dichotomy he faced on the field, ‘‘If I didn’t retaliate I was a softie. If I did I was branded a dirty player.’’
To be fair it would be a mistake to suggest that every All Black from the ‘‘sort it out for yourself’’ days would have made the short list for a Nobel peace prize.
As one example, 1970s All Black lock Frank Oliver wasn’t called ‘‘Filth’’ by his team-mates as a wry joke because he had an obsessive compulsion to keep his hotel room spotless.
After several seasons as a punisher, Oliver’s reputation alone was often enough to calm down opponents.
In the first lineout of a trial match in Pukekohe in 1979 he obstructed newcomer Mike McCool. At the second lineout McCool punched him hard in the side of his face.
Oliver didn’t lift a finger in anger for the next 78 minutes.
Talking with him after the match I raised the issue of his restraint.
Oliver smiled. ‘‘No. I didn’t touch him.
‘‘But he was looking behind him for the rest of the bloody game wasn’t he?’’