Play hard and party hard... the Maori way is so exciting!
Brendan Gallagher traces the history of the great Maori team the British Lions will face on Saturday
New Zealand Maori take on the Lions again on Saturday at Hamilton – scene of their famous win in 2005 – and will surely seize the opportunity to fly the flag vigorously for Maori rugby, and indeed, culture. Maori rugby is different to the New Zealand mainstream, it just is, and it’s their former hooker ‘Storman Norman Hewitt’ who probably explains it best.
“Something strange and rather wonderful happens when you play for Maori,” says the former All Blacks hooker. “Your body does things that it has never done before, not even with the All Blacks. You run faster, get to the breakdown quicker, hit rucks harder. You find yourself in odd positions and you can feel ever so slightly out of control, which is why we can be brilliant one moment and not so great the next. There’s a direct link between the culture we represent and how we play on the field. You definitely have a licence to thrill.”
The Maori are flamboyant and most of their rugby heroes tend to be no different: George Nepia, Waka Nathan, Mac Herewini, Billy Bush, Wayne Shelford, Hika Reid, Norm Hewitt, Zinzan Brooke, Carlos Spencer, the late Norm Berryman. Rugby players who stand out from the crowd.
Waka Nathan concurs. The ‘Black Panther’ remains one of the Maori’s most revered players, a flanker of pace and athleticism and no little panache. “Being a Maori rugby player is as much a state of mind as anything else. It’s about expressing yourself. We’re not unlike the French in approach. Our natural instincts are to play with flair and off the cuff. We love running and handling but can be very physical and aggressive. We can be brilliant one moment and away at the races the next. We’re rarely boring.”
Although their record against the Lions is surprisingly modest elsewhere they have compiled wins against Australia, Argentina, England, France, Ireland and Scotland and drawn with the Springboks. They have won the old Churchill Cup twice and although fortunes ebb and flow there have been occasions when you fancy, had they competed as a nation, they would have stood a decent chance of reaching the knock-out stages of the World Cup.
In modern times maintaining their identity outside of the Super Rugby structure is difficult but they have the goodwill of platoons of accomplished players from all the big teams and still undertake tours, the most recent being last autumn when they played the USA, Munster and Harlequins in quick succession. They were deprived of their All Blacks then – Elliot Dixon, Rieko Ioane, Tawera Kerr-Barlow and Damian Mckenzie who were called up by New Zealand – and just one week ahead the likelihood is that they will again be without some of their bigger names.
Nehe Milner Skudder, on the comeback trail after serious injury, might be available.
But the Maori have always been more than the sum of all the parts. They rise to the challenge and enjoy overturning long odds. Modern-day Maori teams are, after all, proud descendants of the New Zealand Natives side that undertook the greatest tour in rugby history, between 1888 and 1889.
The 26-man Natives party played 107 games, of which they won 78, drew six and lost 23. They started with a nine-match internal tour of New Zealand, their first game being against Hawke’s Bay at Napier on June 23, 1888. They transferred to Australia for two games against Melbourne in August before sailing for Tilbury and an extraordinary 74-match tour of Britain where they won 49 of the games.
The tour party included some of the early greats of Maori rugby – Tom Ellison and the five Warbrick brothers – but also contained a few ‘passengers’ hurriedly recruited to make up the numbers. They averaged a game every 2.3 days, on three occasions played matches on consecutive days and once played three matches in three days. Burn out clearly didn’t exist in those days although the official tour log does record that for one match they were down to 11 fit men.
Days off were spent travelling to the next destination by train. In fact the British leg could be undertaken only because of the excellence of the existing train service – it would be virtually impossible now – while the hospitality was lavish but tiring.
Some of the squad enjoyed Lord Sheffield’s spread so much before the match against Middlesex that they were found asleep in nearby bushes when it was time for the team photographs. The Natives’ play that day was ‘void of combination’ according to the official tour report. Later in the tour, the game against Oxford was lost because ‘festivities at Cambridge the night before had not done our boys much good’ and after a banquet in Belfast a team member involved in an altercation was left to sleep in a cell overnight.
The tour was essentially the invention of two men, Joe Warbrick and Thomas Eyton. The latter had served in the Armed Constabulary before joining the civil service and while visiting Britain for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 he had attended a number of rugby matches and noted that “the play I saw was not vastly superior to that I had seen in New Zealand”.
The original idea was for the entire party to be Maori although ultimately, they had to recruit five Pakeha (white) forwards to ensure they were competitive as the Times editorial proclaimed soon after they arrived: “The colonising race that can imbue the aboriginal inhabitants of the colonised countries with a love for its national games, would seem to have solved the problem of social amalgamation in those countries.”
Right from the off the Natives challenge their opponents with their haka, a much more animated version that rather self-consciously adopted by New Zealand whose early sides were dominated by those with Anglo/Saxon and Celtic precedents.
They were a physical team, criticised for being thugs in the south but much admired by the harder physical types in northern England and Wales. And, of course, there was controversy not least when they played England who saw fit to let the Test match be refereed by Rowland Hill, secretary of the RFU.
On two separate occasions Native players clearly touched the ball down in goal – Harry Lee and Bill Warbrick – only for Hill to allow tries by England players who had followed up and then touched the ball down a second time.
Uproar from the Maoris but imperial and racial sensitivities had been ruffled and the RFU demanded an apology, to be dictated by Hill himself.
It left a bad taste for the rest of the tour and the Natives were not granted any kind of official send off despite remaining popular in the shires. But they had made their mark, not least at home and within five years Maori women were granted the vote.
That tour concluded with a 3-1 win over the Southern Counties at Leyton on March 27, 1889, and, after another six weeks at sea, they turned their full attention to Australia with a 24match tour. Finally, they worked their way up New Zealand from Invercargill with eight games in August 1889, arriving back in Auckland 14 months after they left. The New Zealand film industry should bring that epic to the screen.
The Maori tradition of music and partying was enshrined during that world odyssey of a tour and all the best singers and musicians in New Zealand rugby are still invariably Maori.
The eligibility process governing those who can play for Maori is thorough. Those wishing to be considered have their credentials examined by the kaumatua, or cultural advisor, who will trace the players’ whakapapa or genealogy. Waiting for the green light can be a tense business. Christian Cullen, - with largely Tongan and Anglo-Irish antecedents, was deemed to have no chance but the kaumatua found him to be 1/64th Maori and he duly got the call. Given all of the above the Maori record against the Lions is surprisingly poor, possibly because they themselves are effectively an occasional invitation side and also perhaps their slightly free-booting anarchic style is a departure from the norm in New Zealand and has often brought out the best in the Lions. Officially the Lions have won seven of the eight games but there were two unofficial games in the early days when the Maori were still a marginalised culture and team within New Zealand. In 1904 the Lions accepted a last minute invitation right at the end of the tour and found themselves in a mighty battle at Rotorua which they eventually won 8-6 the day before they sailed. Welsh- man Rhys Gabe described it as the toughest game of his career.
It was much the same story four years later when the Lions agreed to play the Maori, again in Rotoru, in a midweek game before the third and final Test. Not a great idea. The Lions did beat the Maori 24-3 but were beginning to hit the wall and, after travelling back to Auckland, got put away 29-0 by New Zealand three days later.
Thereafter the Maori have featured in official matches in every Lions tour bar 1983 with Wellington Park or Eden Park, Auckland the normal venues. The Maori went close and usually found themselves up against the Lions Test XV but for the first seven of those games they came away empty handed.
The closest they came was in 1993 when they fielded a particularly strong line up packed with All Blacks and stormed into a 20-0 half-time lead. It looked bleak for the Lions but, captained by Stuart Barnes, they were a different proposition after the break and scored 24 unanswered points to claim a famous win.
The drought was finally broken however in 2005 at Hamilton – right in the middle of the Maori heartland – when a massive performance from a Maori pack lead by Johnno Gibbs and featuring Carl Hayman at the peak of his powers paved the way for a more comfortable victory than the 19-13 score line suggests with a late try from Brian O’Driscoll adding a little respectability.
“The best singers and musicians in New Zealand rugby are invariably Maori”