Willie John’s just writing a horrible history book
Willie John McBride was rarely mistaken for a happy-golucky sort, partly because of his default expression at the heart of the forward struggle – think Colin Meads, chewing a mouthful of tin foil – and partly because of a deep-rooted, granite-faced conservatism that put him on the dodgy side of the argument, followed by the wrong side of history, when it came to sporting relations with apartheid South Africa.
Yet even by his own standards, the Ulsterman’s mood has grown unusually stern.
It is devilishly difficult to imagine McBride sharing an opinion with the late Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha, but if his most recent contribution to rugby literature is anything to go by, he certainly associates himself with one of the pitiless old dictator’s more infamous statements: the one about “this year being harder than last year, but easier than next year”.
McBride’s analysis, in the foreword to Ross Reyburn’s Saving Rugby Union, is unremittingly bleak, delivered in a tone that makes Hoxha sound like Billy Connolly.
In no particular order, his targets include the ruck (or absence thereof), obstruction, defensive organisation, crooked scrum feeds, substitutions and injury replacements, international eligibility rules, the dire influence of Rugby League, the malign influence of American Football, physical conditioning regimes, the wrecking of the Lions – as opposed to the wrecking of Lions hotel rooms back in the wild days of the 1960s and 70s – and Twickenham’s mishandling of the transition to professional rugby in 1995.
Oh, almost forgot. He doesn’t have much time for money, either. An interesting perspective for a career banker to take, but there we are.
It would be asinine to argue that the man doesn’t have a point. He has several, truth be told.
The abolition of the ruck as players of his generation understood it was among the worst acts of vandalism ever inflicted on the game, being directly responsible for the reduction of space and attacking options and the growth of one-size-fits-all tactical uniformity.
McBride is absolutely on the side of the angels here, although he pushes things a bit far when he writes: “Referees blow up for a scrum when the ball is buried in a pile of bodies. This simply wouldn’t happen in a ruck situation when I played.”
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper: in McBride’s time, there were plenty of “unplayables” at what we now call the breakdown.
As for his claim that “there were never any serious injuries in rucks because you really had to release the ball and get away to avoid being raked back”, how does he account for the facial rearrangements suffered by the likes of his old Lions mucker JPR Williams, or the England centre Phil de Glanville, after finding themselves on the jagged end of some All Black footwork?
“Other assertions bear as much scrutiny as the hapless Matt Hancock’s test and trace bulletins”
But you get his general drift. When boots on bodies were considered a legitimate deterrent rather than an imprisonable offence, the ball changed hands with far greater frequency and fluidity.
However, other assertions bear about as much scrutiny as the hapless Matt Hancock’s test and trace bulletins.
“I believe every player should be playing for 80 minutes unless he has to leave the field injured,” McBride opines, implying that the game has gone soft. “I played for 14 years and never left the field in my life.”
He would struggle to go 14 matches these days, the concussion protocols being what they are. Does he want those protocols abolished? Is he of the view that the problem being exaggerated by a callow governing class fearful of condemnation by the medical establishment and scared witless by the prospect of class action law suits?
McBride reveals himself most fully when he complains that “rugby today is nothing like the game I played”. Indeed.
And the game McBride played was nothing like the rugby of 40 years earlier, when Wavell Wakefield and George Nepia were running around in their bloomer-sized shorts, being jolly good chaps and apologising profusely for scoring too many points.
Undeniably, the game lost something of the best of itself when pay-for-play was finally sanctioned by senior figures on governing bodies who had spent years in a state of advanced Canutism, although it is by no means clear that the word “best” covers the destruction of team accommodation, 40-scrum-a-game Test matches and refusals to abide by international agreements discouraging sporting relations with rogue regimes.
Equally undeniably, it gained a hell of a lot. And at this sensitive moment in the history of the 15-man code, the last thing anyone needs is an outbreak of rampant nostalgia (which isn’t what it used to be anyway).
Better to turn a cold, unblinking eye on the present and make the necessary adjustments in the context of how we want the future to be.
Which, to the mind of this columnist, involves tearing down the unfit-for-purpose governance structure currently in place and replacing it with something more flexible, more transparent, more inclusive…yes, more modern.
Willie John McBride was a formidable figure in his time, but now is another time entirely.