The 1967 All Blacks lit torch for attacking play
Fred Allen’s tourists had a reunion at Eden Park last weekend to celebrate their feats.
BEVAN READ/FAIRFAX NZ erhaps if we’d had the chance to be the first All Blacks to win a grand slam,’’ said Chris Laidlaw, at the reunion he’d organised of the 1967 All Blacks who toured Britain and France, ‘‘we’d be in the pantheon of the all-time greats.’’
Around the room at the Barbarians club at Eden Park on the day of the first Lions’ test, 12 of the 30 players who made that tour, legends like team captain Brian Lochore, Ian Kirkpatrick, Ian MacRae, and Sid Going, quietly nod.
Modesty dominates the DNA of men of their generation, products of the old school Kiwi attitude that, in the brilliant phrase of the late John Clarke, ‘‘New Zealanders didn’t so much win as have the other men in the race finish behind them.’’
Their late coach, Fred Allen, would have applauded their reticence, but privately he might have snorted, ‘‘Just have a look at the bloody record.’’ Without question this was one of the greatest All Black teams.
When it came to the style of play, Allen thought as one with his manager, Charlie Saxton, himself a former All Black and a team-mate of Allen’s in a brilliant, running, try scoring, New Zealand Army Kiwis team after World War II.
With the ‘67 side they proved it was possible to not only play exciting, attacking rugby, but also to win.
Four tests, all won. Thirteen test tries to three against. Twelve of those 13 tries scored by the backs. This was rugby today’s young stars like Beauden Barrett and Rieko Ioane would recognise and love.
Black and white video of the games show how Earle Kirton, a first-five who had been in the All Black wilderness for two years, considered too free thinking for his own good, was fast enough to double round his second-five Ian MacRae, to suddenly create an overlap out wide.
At the reunion Kirton was limping, after a fall that ‘‘smashed my knee’’, but in ‘67, he conceded, he was ‘‘pretty fit’’ and played with a freedom that came from a coach in Allen, who believed wings ‘‘had to be allowed to do a bit more than stand on the sidelines and freeze to death’’, and a captain, in Lochore, who believed backs deserved the chance to show their skills.
Intuitively picking up on attitudes may have been crucial, because long discussions about playing philosophies were apparently about as rare (even if the tour was just after the summer of love in Britain and America) as shoulder length hair was on the players.
Gerald Kember, a 21-year-old law student in ‘67, laughs when asked how he was treated by Allen, a famously stern taskmaster, who once told the All Black forwards they were doing another series of exhausting sprints at training because one of them, Kel Tremain, ‘‘called me a bastard.’’
Kember says, ‘‘Fred didn’t really say much to me. There were no such things as training camps then. I was picked as a second- five, but I knew, because they’d only picked one fullback, Fergie McCormick, I’d probably play a bit at fullback.’’
In fact, five of Kember’s seven games on tour were at fullback. ‘‘You might have thought I’d have been told to get some training at goal kicking in, but I didn’t hear a word. Before we went I did buy a pair of boots suited to kicking.’’
Like the All Blacks at Eden Park last weekend the men of ‘67 had flyers in the backs, and forwards, like Colin Meads, Sam Strachan, Ken Gray and Lochore, who were strong and fit enough for Lochore to give openside flanker Graham Williams the nod to range out in the backline.
They didn’t put any faith in the effete idea that if you played on a Tuesday you’d be too exhausted to play a test on the Saturday. Seven of the 15 All Blacks who whipped England five tries to one at Twickenham on a November Saturday afternoon had played in Bristol the previous Wednesday.
Rehydration mostly came out of beer bottles, and Sunday involved team court sessions, where the fines often involved more drinking.
Laidlaw was usually the judge on a Sunday, and wryly recalls how he once blearily teased famed journalist Terry McLean, who ‘‘told me he’d never really forgive me. I don’t know that he ever did.’’
The reality is the ‘67 side deserve to be on the golden dais shoulder to shoulder with the Originals of ‘05, the Invincibles of ‘24, the first grand slam team of ‘78, and the triumphant 2005 side.
The heroes of ‘67 only missed a grand slam because a foot and mouth outbreak stopped them playing a test in Ireland.
Speaking at Eden Park Lochore said a further regret he carried from the tour was that coach Allen was gone by the time the All Blacks toured South Africa in 1970.
Years after the ‘67 tour Allen, who died in 2012, told me had resigned because he’d been tipped off that he was about to become a victim of the political intrigue so prevalent in New Zealand rugby then.
He quit, unbeaten with the All Blacks after three seasons, at the end of 1968, ‘‘before the buggers got the chance to fire me.’’
We’ll never know what might have happened in Africa with Allen at the helm. What we do know is that the 1967 side lit a daring, attacking torch that has been picked up and is carried by the All Blacks of today.