Truth behind the dirtiest match in Lions history
Legends of 1971 tour reveal inside story of infamous Battle of Canterbury in our book extract
The Lions arrived in Canterbury having won all eight games of their tour in New Zealand, but the locals – already notorious for their physical approach – were already preparing a special welcome.
The day before the game, I met up with a group of Canterbury referees at their usual Friday night gathering point at Coker’s Hotel in Christchurch. The hour would have passed pleasantly enough had it not been for conversations with several people, which, for the first time, indicated that all was not to be plain sailing the following day. The story was consistent and unsettling. ‘Things’ would happen in the first 10 minutes, I was told, that I would not be able to see and which it was best that I did not observe.
I gotta tell you, they were mean hombres. Back then we didn’t have television replays or TMOs or anything like that, and if you played in Canterbury you knew you were going to be stomped on and you were going to be kicked and all the rest of it. People just accepted it. That was the Canterbury style.
I knew the Lions would be pulled up at Canterbury. They got away with murder in [the previous tour game at] Wanganui, just lying all over the ball and slowing it up. Try doing that against Canterbury and you’ll soon know what they think about it.
That’s a load of bull----. The violence in the Canterbury match had nothing to do with us killing the ball. Fergus Slattery got whacked at a line-out, Sandy [Carmichael] was taken out in the scrum – no one was lying on the ball in those situations. Gareth [Edwards] got whacked in open play and that had nothing to do with our rucking.
Canterbury just went out to kick the s--- out of us.
It was the big game going into the first Test, and Ray and I were on the pitch, so it looked like we were going to be the props in the Test side. They decided to target us.
Carmichael was one of the players who suffered most, taking multiple punches and kicks which left him with a fractured cheekbone.
I couldn’t see any of it because I was on the other side of the scrum, but I heard Sandy shouting. There’s not much you can do about it when you’re on the other side of the scrum. We didn’t know at that stage that he had a couple of broken bones in his jaw.
It wasn’t just in the scrums, I got kicked in the head at a ruck. You can see it on film. There’s a ruck and I go to ground and someone kicks me in the face. is like boxing. You don’t need to go out and fight dirty, but if somebody is going to punch you, then you’ve got to lay into them. It’s like bullies all over the world. I was on the bench when Sandy came off injured. I was ready to go, but Sandy wanted to go back on. Travelling 12,000 miles to get the s--kicked out of you is not my idea of fun. Sandy never retaliated. Some saw it as a flaw in his character, others saw it as a great strength. He was a rugby player, he wasn’t a boxer.
They went out with this thuggish attitude. Gareth was running across the pitch and Alex Wyllie came up behind him and punched him in the back of the neck. Gareth and somebody else went to the referee and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And the ref said, ‘I’m only refereeing what I can see.’
You know, I hate knocking referees. They picked a guy for that game that was good, but he was young and he was inexperienced at that level. It took off straight away and he wasn’t able to handle it. But the two teams were. I remember the referee saying that he was going to referee the game and let the brawling go. Which was a shame because we were two very good teams and it could have been a cracking game.
Before he tried to take my head off, Grizz (Alex Wyllie) warned me. I’d beaten him off the base of a scrum and he said, ‘Hey, scrummy, you do that again and I’ll break your neck’. Ray was our pack leader and he saw it all. He went up to Grizz and caught him a real good one. I remember the blood spurting out of Wyllie’s cut eye and onto my jersey. I’ve only ever been scared twice playing rugby. Once was playing for Cardiff against Neath and the second was that Canterbury match.
I remember a moment when I was of the view that I should just call all the players together, walk to the touch line and get Carwyn James to call the whole thing off, because it was no longer a rugby match. I remember thinking that if I did that, we’d look like chickens and that would affect morale, but at the same time it was also important to put it out there that we had come to play rugby, not engage in boxing matches. At one point, there was a melee going on and as part of it I charged in and proceeded to hit Wyllie. I was pulled by my jersey as I did so and ended up hitting the side of his head with my thumb and chipped a bone.
The Lions tried to claim that Ray McLoughlin’s broken thumb was our fault. That’s almost funny. The punch-up when that happened was started by Willie John McBride. Hamish Macdonald was walking back to a line-out and McBride hooked him. There was no doubt about it. All the players, including the Lions, knew it.
The Canterbury forwards were frighteningly over-motivated and seemed prepared to stoop to the lowest level of gutter thuggery. With Hopkinson, Wyllie and Penrose in the driving seat, they kicked, punched and elbowed anyone in a red jersey who came anywhere near the ball. It was a wonder that nobody was killed.
Killed? Bloody hell! It was just a bit of biff.
By the time I came off the pitch, both eyes were pretty well shut, so they sat me on the bench and put ice packs on my face. Ian McLauchlan came towards me to see how I was just as I went to blow my nose, but it was blocked, and because the sinus was cracked the air blew into my eye socket, which inflated like a balloon. That was the first time – and probably the last time – I ever saw fear in Ian’s eyes.
Amid all the violence, it is sometimes forgotten that a game was played and a result was posted. The Lions won 14–3, John Bevan and Arthur Lewis getting the tries.
The Canterbury match stands out as brutal. It was a battle all the time, primarily among the forwards. At the line-out there’d be a fight at the start of it, then the ref sorted it out; you’d have the line-out again, and then there’d be a few sly punches as you were running across the field. There was also trouble at the scrums, with their second rows throwing punches through on our props. I respect Sandy for not retaliating, but if he’d said anything to me I would have swung one in. I was not really aware he was being hit, because everyone was fighting their own corner. I was determined that if anything came my way it was going back again. There are pictures of me trying to flatten Grizz Wyllie and vice versa. It carried on between Wyllie and myself a few years later when Canterbury were on tour in the UK.
I got a few knocks, but nothing compared to everyone else. I actually thought I was going to get sent off because I belted someone right in front of the referee, but he didn’t give a s---.
I don’t think there was a ball on the field for the first half-hour. We lost Carmichael and then we lost McLoughlin, so the two props were gone. Slattery got injured, Mick Hipwell got injured and there were others. It was bloody nonsense and the referee was a disaster. There was a premonition that there could be trouble.
I was concussed after about eight or nine minutes and remained pretty out of it until about 10 minutes into the second half. The openside on their team was going off at the line-out to pursue our fly-half, and I decided to try and run in his way each time he did it, to buy Mike more time. I did it about five or six times and you could see that Alex Wyllie was beginning to get f------ irritated with it happening – you know, me getting in the way – so we were having a little bit of a tête-à-tête. Alister Hopkinson came up from the front of the line-out. I didn’t see him, but I got this massive f------ punch in the mouth, completely blindsided. It cracked a bunch of teeth down to the root. I was down on the deck, concussed, but I played on, and after a while the concussion kind of started to drift away, so I’m able to remember all these different things that happened in that game, even though I was f------ away with it.
I can still see it in my mind right now – about five minutes later, running across the pitch, looking towards the goalposts and just seeing this huge crowd of people and thinking, ‘Where the f--- am I?’ I didn’t have a clue. I went to Peter Dixon at the next line-out and asked, ‘Where are we?’ And he looked at me, all agitated, and said, ‘What do you mean “Where are we?” We’re in bloody Canterbury!’ About 10 minutes later I asked him again – but he’d just been smacked and had no idea. ‘I don’t know where the f--- we are. F--- off.’ I only realised where I was in the final quarter of the game.
Hoppy and Grizz got a lot of flak for that game, but fists were flying on both sides and I just think the Lions picked on the wrong guys. When Alex Wyllie was on your side, you couldn’t meet a nicer bloke. But he was not a happy man to meet when he was in the other team.
It was just sheer nonsense. There were two or three thugs on the field. They say it’s part of the game and they get away with that, but I’d seen it all before. We won the battle and we won the match and we won it well and it gave me a feeling of what we had. We had guys who wouldn’t lie down.
The Lions went on to win the Test series 2-1, becoming the only British and Irish touring team to win a series in New Zealand.
‘The Canterbury forwards seemed prepared to stoop to the lowest level of gutter thuggery’
(When Lions Roared: The Lions, the All Blacks and the Legendary Tour of 1971 by Tom English & Peter Burns is published by Polaris and available now)