Misery of the long-suffering substitutes is thing of past

Andy Simpson sat on England benches from Buenos Aires to Auckland over a period of six years during the Eighties and never got his cap. The Sale hooker’s luckless lot as a perennial non-playing reserve dogged him over the majority of the decade, spanning 21 matches during an era when reserves were called replacements, a snobbish euphemism for substitutes as in soccer.

In those amateur days, the lawmakers decreed that the maximum of three reserves were there to replace a team-mate only in the event of an injury. They were most definitely not to be used for tactical reasons, a ruling which teams duly bent for their own ends with a wink and a nod.

The advent of the 60-minute front row forward has made Simpson’s misfortune seem all the harder to believe, never mind endure. Substitutes come and go at such an absurdly late stage of most Test matches that one England player, Elliot Daly, has the equivalent of four caps, some going considering he has racked up a total game-time of 29 minutes. Simpson is not complaining but if you ask him whether he felt cheated and robbed of his cap, his answer leaves no doubt. “Definitely,’’ he says. ‘’There were opportunities for the selectors to cap me, not as a substitute but by being chosen in the starting XV. It does stick in your craw a bit.’’

What sticks there most of all is England’s opening Test against New Zealand at Wellington on June 8, 1985, the day when the gods conspired to deny him a long overdue debut in place of the stricken first-choice hooker, Steve Brain.

“He was concussed,’’ Simpson, a retired schoolmaster, says. “Kevin Murphy (England team physio) tried to take him off but Brain refused and spent the rest of the game wandering around like he was lost.

“When you see the rollon, roll-off substitutions, with players coming on in the last 30 seconds and getting a cap, it makes you think. I’d probably have had God knows how many caps.”

Simpson, who missed England’s 1984 tour to South Africa due to the birth of his daughter, does not qualify for the ex-international’s right to buy two tickets for England home matches despite having given the national cause more of his time than some capped players. That Daly is credited with four caps in next to no time is not his fault. Nor is it a criticism of his ability as a centre with a penchant for kicking goals from inside his own half.

Had Simpson been around today in the era of the 50-60 minute hooker, his England appearances would have comfortably topped half a century, not that Simpson was the first hooker condemned to spend his best years kicking his heels. Llanelli’s uncapped Roy Thomas sat through 26 matches for Wales.

Like Thomas, Simpson arrived as a Test contender on the strength of a win over the All Blacks, in his case 21-9 for the North at Otley in November 1979, a win revered every bit as much as the one Thomas helped Llanelli achieve seven years earlier.

While Thomas spent most of his time playing second fiddle to Bobby Windsor, Simpson saw five England hookers come and go without getting a second of gametime. Peter Wheeler, Steve Mills, Steve Brain, Graham Dawe and Brian Moore made sure of that.

The emotions Moore felt towards Simpson did not extend to sympathy. He took delight in prolonging his rival’s misery, recalling in his autobiography a Nottingham-Sale match when Simpson took an early strike against the head.

“‘That was a good one, that was a good one,’ he (Simpson) kept rabbiting. ‘It’s one more than the number of caps you’ve won, too,’ I pointed out helpfully. People said I would have stayed on the field with a broken leg rather than give up a cap to him and to others waiting for me to come off injured. They are right.’’

International matches are always inflated in World Cup seasons, the one that finished last month all the more so given there were more so-called Tests than in any season before. Even allowing for that, the number of substitutions made during the last five minutes are high to say the least.

Ireland made ten, Scotland nine, England eight, Wales seven and France six. Of the 40 involved, 25 per cent made their entry in the lastminute or the second last-minute.