The battle of TWICKENHAM
It was 40 years ago — Thatcher ruled, 11,000 steelworkers lost their jobs and England and Wales met in a brutal clash
FORTY YEARS have passed since ‘The Bloodbath at Twickenham’ but it still holds its place as one of the dirtiest matches of all time. Political tensions were high and national differences spilled over to the rugby pitch. England snatched an ugly victory but the game is better remembered for the blood-covered players queuing up for surgery. Englishmen ROGER UTTLEY and DUSTY HARE, Welshmen EDDIE BUTLER and ALAN PHILLIPS, and referee DAVID BURNETT recall their memories of the violent afternoon.
BUTLER: The atmosphere was evil. There was the Welsh steelworkers’ strike which made it more of a social crusade than a game.
UTTLEY: There was all the Margaret Thatcher stuff going on. We weren’t well liked by the Welsh and the media built it up out of all proportion. People were saying it would be the game of the decade. A lot of individual battles were built up: John Scott and Terry Holmes, Graham Price and Fran Cotton.
HARE: In the amateur days, that build up was quite unusual. The noise when we got to Twickenham was like nothing I’d ever heard. It was deafening.
BUTLER: There was something in the air. It was such a rotten day as well, grey and horrible, and it was built up as this battle between the neighbours. The end of the glorious Seventies for Wales… the start of Bill Beaumont for England.
PHILLIPS: There was so much back and forth in the press that week. [ Paul] Ringer ( below) had been getting away with a bit of overzealous play and the media were out for him… saying how dirty he was. It wound us up. Our team talk was all about kicking the s**t out of England. We lost our heads.
BURNETT: I never read the newspapers the week before a match, but there was a very nasty undercurrent. I was blowing my whistle a bit more than usual and a lot of the events happened within the first 10 or 15 minutes. It was the dirtiest match I ever refereed.
PHILLIPS: It was a free for all from the start. There was an anger there. A hatred. When Jeff [Squire] was stamping on Billy’s feet at the first line-out. If you saw anyone in white at the ruck, you stamped all over them. Everybody lost the plot — probably Wales more than England. UTTLEY: The first scrum was like two bulls pulling at the ground and running into one another. It was a point of pride t hat you didn’t go down. We’d all played through the Seventies as Englishmen and it was the most unsuc-cessful decade of English rugby. We felt like we’d been bullied over the last few years and we were going to stand up to them on this occasion.
BURNETT: There were one or two incidents before the‘ fateful incident ’. Wales’ No 6 followed into Du sty’ s back with his knees. That got the crowd going a bit more and it certainly got the English team going. In particular the captain, Bill Beaumont. I had a conversation and then I spoke with Jeff Squire, the Wales captain, and said if there was another incident like this then the player would be sent from the field of play.
HARE: It hurt! The game wasn’t the cleanest in that day. You could do a bit of skulduggery but there was a code of conduct of how far you could take it. This game went past that. Your body received a bit of treatment if you were on the floor.
UTTLEY: There was a thought in my mind that someone was going to get sent off or carried off… in the end we had both!
BURNETT: The ‘ fateful incident’ came from a lineout to England. Maurice Colclough won the ball, tapped it down to Steve Smith, who passed it to John Horton. I was turned with my back to the Welsh team. Horton kicked a Garryowen and the No 6 followed through onto him and took him in the jawbone with his elbow. There was only one decision. I refereed 30 matches a year for 25 years — 1962 to 1987 — and sent four players off in total. One of those was Paul Ringer.
PHILLIPS: A bit of theatrics from England’s outside-half. That was
the instigator of it all. Things got even worse when we were down to seven forwards because our mentality was ‘we need to get a few of their boys off here to even it up’. Ringer did nothing. There were all those ‘Ringer is innocent’ badges being made afterwards. Someone made a bit of money out of them!
BURNETT: I received one in an envelope from Wales not long after the match! I still have it.
HARE: It’s funny because I knew Paul from Nottingham and Leicester. He pointed the finger at Johnny Horton and said ‘right, I’m having you for the day’. That’s not unusual but he took it a bit further than normal. It was fiery.
PHILLIPS: It was a f***ing bloodbath. About 20 minutes in, Terry Holmes went to stamp on John Scott but missed him and stamped on me. It split the top of my gum, ripped it away from the lip and there was blood everywhere. The guys on the side said ‘there’s nothing wrong with you, get on with it!’ I came off and there was a surgeon doing all these stitches. There were four English guys in line so I said that I’d come back later. In the end, I had 27 stitches in my mouth.
BURNETT: In the dark recesses of the scrums and rucks you could see X amount and your touch judges could see Y amount, but there would have been Z amount going on subsequent to all of that.
UTTLEY: I went down on a ball at the same time Geoff Wheel tried to put his boot to it. His boot caught my head and that was it. Geoff, being a big, strapping forward, wasn’t the most adept with the ball at his feet! I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I got stitched up by Leon Walkden, the RFU doctor, and it felt as though he’d used bathing twine on my face. It looked like a casualty room from M*A*S*H. My face had just opened up. It was a rough job to start with — half a dozen stitches down the length of my nose — and I needed plastic surgery afterwards.
HARE: You weren’t going to beat someone with footwork on that pitch so there was a lot more going on at the ruck. The turf was like a soft pudding. It was a leveller. Your standing foot was like sponge when kicking. They had seven kicks at goal and missed all seven. I got three out of seven and thankfully that was enough.
UTTLEY: We came out on the right side but it was a bad day for rugby. Everyone was a little bit aghast and embarrassed at what had gone on. I remember thinking: ‘If this is the state that rugby’s got to, then it’s not worth playing’. We were living in Hemel Hempstead at the time and I walked through my front door to my two boys the next day. They were only young and they looked at me like, ‘Who is this stranger?’ I was swollen, black and blue.
BUTLER: There was a headline in the Mirror afterwards that said ‘Somebody will die!’.
HARE: The most incredible thing was you’d have the dinner at night with the opposition. We went back to the Hilton Park Lane and you’d have a drink with your Welsh counterparts. That was the best thing in the good old days.
PHILLIPS: I told the doctor I didn’t want an anaesthetic injection with my stitches because I wanted to be able to have a beer… I fainted not long after! BURNETT: It was an interesting topic at the dinner table! We had Ringer’s hearing at the East India Club on the Sunday and there was a suspension of eight weeks.
UTTLEY: Fortunately, we had a better game against Scotland and won the title. A lot more skill and none of the unnecessary violence. And we’ve all survived to tell the tale!