In prudish, pious times
Modern professional sport has a problem with mavericks. It just doesn’t want them in the room. The strange case of Finn Russell, the mercurial magic man who runs the cutter for Scotland, is a sign of these prudish and pious times. Russell has been exiled from Scotland and all but thrown out of the Six Nations for reasons that are as much about control as decency.
New Zealand is not entirely clean at this sort of thing. Jesse Ryder was sat on the naughty step and then all but turfed out of cricket after Black Caps management eventually decided Ryder was a bad boy. He had to go because good men make good All Blacks and presumably good Black Caps, blah, blah, blah.
Whatever happened, I wonder, to the old notion sport can be a tremendous social saviour for kids going off the rails. Boxing was always quoted in this context and boxer Anthony Joshua is just one of thousands over the years who have been redeemed from a life of criminal damage.
Look at Dennis Rodman, aka, ‘the Worm’, perhaps the greatest defensive player in NBA history. He was out there and, today, that would mean he was out of there. We live in strangely intolerant and even unloving times.
Now the wild boys are no longer welcome unless they can conform to an inordinately long set of regulations drawn up by sponsors who have done a lot of market research into what Mr and Mrs Housewife expect of their heroes. It’s all bunkum of course, and particularly curious in these areligious days, but them’s the rules.
Ronnie O’Sullivan and Nick Kyrgios are regularly thrown out by teacher and those guys are playing supposedly individual sports. Yeah right, you can be an individual so long as you conform to our middle class morality.
In team sports the prudishness is even worse. There seems to be a paranoia that the troublemakers will turn into a super carrier and infect all the good boys in the room.
This is effectively what happened to Russell and it is as sad as it is laughable. The story goes pretty much like this. Russell had been playing for Racing 92, his club in France, and turned up on Sunday evening at the Scotland camp, later than most of the local boys. He had a couple of beers with his dinner and then thought a third one might slake his soul.
This caused moral pandemonium. The leadership group had decided earlier that afternoon on a limit of two beers on the designated drinking day. Russell thought that was a joke. Particularly as he was part of the leadership group and hadn’t been consulted.
You can see his point. If an old All Black or British Lion had downed two beers on the Sunday and left it at that, he would have been fined for dereliction of duty. A keg was a minimum requirement. I do not say whether that is a good or a bad thing, I merely note that morality seems to swing with current fashions as much as the width of a trouser leg.
There followed a complete stand off and Russell ended up leaving the team hotel. He didn’t fancy being controlled like a schoolboy. So he rang his parents to pick him up, which is kind of ironic if he didn’t want to be treated like a schoolboy.
There was history here also. A couple of years earlier father Keith had won a six figure compensation for unfair dismissal against the Scottish Rugby Union. Some say that is why the SRU, always a body to hold a grudge, did not make a counter offer to keep son Finn in Scotland when Racing made a bid for his services.
And then there is Russell’s relationship with coach Gregor Townsend. I don’t know Townsend well, but I have always liked him when I have had the chance to talk. But I fear he is losing control through his efforts to control.
Townsend, an instinctive first five-eighth himself, wants to bring more structure to Scotland’s play. Russell wants to play what he sees. At last year’s Calcutta Cup Scotland were being buried by England at halftime, trailing by over 30 points, having tried to play Townsend’s kicking game.
The coach and the first-five had a barney at the break. Gordon Reid, who played prop in the game, recalled: ‘‘Finn and Gregor just kind of having a big domestic. It was more about tactics. I think we kicked a lot in the first half, it didn’t really work and we needed to change it. Gregor wasn’t really happy.
‘‘You’ve got some people who say things just to be heard, for their voice to be recognised. But when
Finn says something, he’s saying it for a reason. You’ve got one guy who’s out on the park getting eaten up and spat back out. Then you’ve got another who’s just angry. These two guys come head-tohead.’’
The embarrassment for Townsend was that Scotland ripped England up in the second half and scored 38 unanswered points. Russell scored an interception try and set up another when he gave the eyes to his support runners out the back and then popped a no-look short pass to his No 12.
He is that sort of talent. Well, he would be, because he came on a rugby scholarship to New Zealand. He remembers that every aspect of his game improved. His mentor in New Zealand, John Haggart, described Russell as someone with the speed, skill and instinct to play flat.
Haggart also said that Russell was polite, laid back and ‘‘just loved to play’’. And when Vern Cotter was coach of Scotland, Russell could just play. The 27-year-old remembers ‘‘a very simple game plan but you could play anything off it’’.
That is New Zealand coaching at its best. And you can’t imagine for a moment that Russell would have fallen out under a Wayne Smith or a Razor
Robertson. Indeed I’m guessing he would love the Crusaders’ current environment. It’s not as if Russell is a complete freak. He had the graft to work as a stonemason before his rugby took off.
But sadly Russell has no sort of relationship with Townsend and claims he doesn’t even know him after eight years. He said: ‘‘This whole situation with Scotland has been made out to be about me wanting to have a drink, when in actual fact, it’s about control, respect and trust, on and off the pitch.’’
How strange that Russell should fall out with Townsend, given that over 20 years ago it was Townsend himself who fell out with the Scotland coaches. He thought that the game plan of John Rutherford, another former Scotland No 10 who many a fan here will remember, was too restrictive. Gregor wanted to play his own game, but Rutherford wasn’t having it.
And I see a little too much of that with the All Blacks over the last four years. Too many rigorous plans and not enough liberty for the playmakers. Steve Hansen became way too controlling in his final years. And when the next, new ‘genius’ plan didn’t work, the players were adrift.
It worried me when Stuart Hogg, a wonderful fullback and the new Scotland captain, said of Russell as part of the Six Nations preview: ‘‘When you’ve got a guy like Finn Russell at 10 who just wants to chuck the pill about the paddock all the time, you’ve got to rein him in every now and then. We can’t score points in our own half unless it’s massively on for us to chuck the ball about, and for us now it’s about when to play and when to kick.’’
Wow. Talk about undermining your playmaker. And talk about undermining yourself. Hogg, in the opening match against Ireland, dropped the ball over the line with no-one near when he was just touching down for a try. In the second game he again bumbled a simple ball back over his own line, which led to England’s winning score.
The new Scotland hashtag is reportedly ‘no-one is bigger than the team’. Yawn. It’s a fact of rugby that some players are bigger than others. Barry John, aka the King, was bigger than the rest. His coach Carwyn James knew it and so did players as great as Mike Gibson. So they might ask John to do something on the pitch occasionally, but they would never presume to tell him how to do it.
Johan Cruyff was bigger than the rest of that brilliant Dutch side. And he was certainly bigger than Ajax at the time.
Let Cruyff play, and Christian Cullen and George Best and Waisale Serevi and all the other bewildering mavericks.
There is an undefinable, unconfinable joy in what they do. That joy is both theirs and ours.
Set them free and let them live.