Hooper deserves support from us all
WE are not sure how many of the New Zealand starting line-up actually read the anonymous fax sent to their Cape Town hotel on the eve of the World Cup semi-final with England in 1995, but everyone got the message one way or another. “Rugby is a team game”, it said, “so all 14 of you make sure you pass the ball to Jonah.”
Pass the ball they did, allowing the log-limbed Lomu to spend a boundary-pushing, sport-changing afternoon running round, through and over battalions of white-shirted defenders charged with the thankless task of blocking his route to the goal-line. As far as the multitudes were concerned, Jolly Jonah was a one-man outfit.
Those multitudes were flat-earth wrong, of course. Teams with one proper player never win proper games of rugby: ask Jacques Burger or Mamuka Gorgodze, who could have used a little help while reducing themselves to puddles of sweat and blood on behalf of Namibia and Georgia. Teams with four or five don’t win many either: ask the great Sergio Parisse of Italy, who suffered a century of defeats on the international paddock even though he had a Castrogiovanni, a Bortolami and a couple of Bergamascos to share the load.
Which brings us neatly to Michael Hooper of Australia, who has spent more than a decade epitomising all the things the union game likes about itself: energy and indefatigability, optimism and joy.
That someone like Hooper – Hooper of all people – should have hit a psychological and emotional brick wall at such velocity that he relinquished the Wallaby captaincy and left a mini-tour of Argentina just hours before his side’s opening Test in Mendoza, tells us all we need to know, and probably more than we want to know, about the ravages of modern-day rugby at the very top level.
As far as your columnist is concerned, Hooper has as much claim to “greatness” as Parisse ever did and certainly loses nothing to a Burger or a Gorgodze, who played their rugby in a context even less recognisable to him than the Italian one. There was precious little weight of expectation on Parisse, who, during his time in the Azzurri back row, was the bookies’ outsider 90 per cent of the time. Burger and Gorgodze? Make that 100 per cent.
Australian rugby doesn’t work that way. The country’s union public, such as it is in a land where a bunch of rival sports matter infinitely more, expects victory and with good reason: the Wallabies have made it to the last week of the World Cup six times out of nine and appeared in four finals, winning two of them. If they are ever uncompetitive, they do a cracking job of hiding it.
As for the “one-man team” idea,
“Let’s tell it straight: Hooper was, and remains, up there with the best of the best”
that NEVER applies. John Eales, one of the two or three finest players of the age in any position, was a master of all the second-row arts and could do a hundred other things equally as well (including kicking Test-winning goals and making title-saving tackles at the last knockings), but he was never out there on his Jack Jones.
Yet there have been moments across the last couple of World Cup cycles when Hooper gave every indication of carrying his team – of rescuing the Wallabies, or shoring them up, or minimising the damage being inflicted upon them, through an admirable mix of guts, enthusiasm, force of personality and no little skill, all the while persuading us that he was somehow enjoying himself in spite of things.
Just last month, that mischievous old England prop Gareth Chilcott could be heard celebrating Hooper’s contribution in an episode of this paper’s podcast. “Cooch” went so far as to identify the Sydneysider as his rugby icon, on the grounds that he didn’t know “how the Wallabies ever win a game without him”. And this from a man who played against the likes of Topo Rodriguez, Tom Lawton, Simon Poidevin, Nick FarrJones, Mark Ella and Michael Lynagh.
To learn that Hooper has lost the best of himself and doesn’t know where to look for it – that he is spent, or has fallen out of love with the game, or that the spirit is weak even though the flesh may still be willing – is profoundly upsetting for those who love rugby and yearn to see it played by its most brilliant practitioners. Many are applauding Hooper for his honesty, both with himself and with everyone else, but we must also acknowledge the inherent sadness of the situation.
Will we see him again? There will be no shortage of hopes and prayers. In the meantime, let’s tell it straight: that he was, and remains, up there with the best of the best. Anyone good enough to force a flanker as accomplished as David Pocock into a change of position and repeatedly enter the ring with Richie McCaw as a genuine contender rather than a bum of the month is worthy of our undying regard.