Force majeure...life is a calculated risk!
Brendan Gallagher recalls other cases when extreme weather or random events have affected sport
THE great and the good, not to mention all the usual suspects on twitter, have been getting their knickers in a twist this week over the cancelled games in Japan at the World Cup but the rugby world – and the sporting world generally – is deluding itself if it believes it can truly insure itself against extreme weather and random events. Occasionally it all goes pear-shaped.
You can get some serious winds this time of year in Japan – like you can here for that matter, anybody remember October 16, 1987? – but the Japanese Grand Prix has been staged in the same time slot since 1963 and has never once been cancelled.
When it comes to tropical storms and typhoons/hurricanes you can’t predict anything as Michael Fish famously discovered. Some years you have none at all and when they do appear they never go where they are initially predicted.
And remember the greater world of rugby voted for Japan to stage RWC2019 ten years ago, I don’t recall too many people voicing many concerns in the interim. Stuff happens and you deal with as best you can while remembering at all times that sport is sport and should never be confused with real life.
I was reporting at the World Cup semi-final at Durban in 1995 when that monsoon – their word for a typhoon – came from absolutely nowhere. Of course the game should never have taken place, the conditions were farcical but equally everybody knows the game had to take place for South Africa to make the final. A cancellation would have seen them knocked out.
One colleague was so hypothermic after endlessly filing copy in the open stand that he spent the best part of £100 to check himself into a swish hotel afterwards. In his room he simply stood under a hot shower for nearly an hour before checking back out and making his way to the airport where SAA had miraculously organised an emergency allnight airlift for those needing to be in Cape Town for the England semi-final the next day.
When I finished working late that evening with Durban awash there wasn’t a taxi to be found for my B&B on Umhlanga Ridge some ten miles away. Eventually after a couple of hours one miraculously pulled over but after three or four miles the driver was so spooked by the Biblical flooding he dropped me off and turned back. I was left to walk the five or six miles in pitch darkness down what was once the M4 but resembled a river much of the way.
People have short memories. Sport is always vulnerable to random stuff. Back in 2001 Six Nations England were at their absolute peak under Clive Woodward. They won 44-15 in Cardiff, beat Italy 80-23, Scotland 43-3 and France 48-19. Beat Ireland and it was Grand Slam time but then, from nowhere, came the Foot and Mouth epidemic. Season over.
When that match was finally played eight months later 20 of the England squad were knackered from Lions duty and Ireland had enjoyed the benefit of two other rearranged Six Nations matches that autumn before facing England. They ambushed the English good and proper and scored a famous 20-14 win but had that game been played in March I would have put my house on an England victory. Instead Woodward and his team had to suck it up. That’s sport.
There will always come a moment when the weather Gods conspire against you. In cricket seven Test matches have been abandoned without a ball being bowled, the last being New Zealand and India in Dunedin in 1998. Even at the recent Cricket World Cup Sri Lanka lost two complete matches to rain and sympathy seemed in short supply for them while there was, rightly, no criticism for the ECB. The organisation does not exist which can control the weather.
For those of a certain age the winter of 1962-63 looms large. The snow started falling on Christmas Eve and lay on the ground for 67 consecutive days in the worst snowstorms since 1881. Temperatures plummeted as the coldest winter since 1740 took a grip – 61 consecutive days of National Hunt Racing were lost, there was so little football for six weeks that the Pools Panel was invented to “guesstimate” the results.
The FA Cup third round took 66 days to complete after 261 postponements. The Lincoln City versus Coventry tie alone was postponed 15 times, a record. More than 400 League matches were postponed and the Football Association had to extend the season by three weeks to clear the backlog. The worst day was February 9, when 56 of the 57 games in England and Scotland were lost, the only survivor being Plymouth’s match against Bristol City.
The only major rugby matches in Britain to survive this period were the Five Nations fixtures with Twickenham covered in a deep blanket of straw before hundreds of braziers were positioned on the pitch when the straw was lifted. The only other playable ground in England was Torquay which bizarrely missed the big freeze. England played their final trial there.
“When we played Wales the weather in Cardiff was so bitter we were offered extra underwear and the use of gloves, which was fairly unusual for those times,” recalled Richard Sharp, the England captain that day. “One journalist described it as the coldest, craziest international ever played but at least we had a win to keep us warm.” Indeed it was England’s last win in Cardiff for 28 years.
Consider also the tragedy of the Christchurch earthquake of February 2011 just seven months before New Zealand hosted RWC2011. A shocking event by any criteria in a nation situated right on the “Ring of Fire”, the shifting tectonic plates that encircle the Pacific and, indeed, make Japan so vulnerable to minor earthquakes and, very occasionally, big ones.
I don’t recall those now criticising the decision to award Japan RWC2019 insisting that RWC2011 be switched from New Zealand and that rugby and cricket tours to New Zealand be banned on safety grounds. Do you stop staging events in Paris or London or New York because they have consistently been seen as terrorist targets? Everything is a calculated risk.