Meet the no-cap wonders, the saddest club of all
Daniel Schofield talks to the Test nearly men who sat on the bench many times but never won a cap
The tension had been building last Sunday before Dan Robson finally became England’s 1405th international. After spending 80 minutes on the bench against Ireland the previous week, the Wasps scrumhalf had to wait a further 69 agonising minutes before he could make his debut against France.
These days it is a rare occasion when all eight replacements are not automatically employed. Turn the clock back a couple of generations, however, and players were only substituted in the most extreme circumstances. A broken limb was the typical threshold. That meant there were dozens of players called up by their country, such as Wales head coach Warren Gatland, who never made it off the bench with the prospect of Test match rugby held tantalisingly out of reach. Like ghosts trapped in limbo, they occupied a strange middle ground deemed good enough to represent their country but without the cap that proves it.
The stories of these nearly men are tinged with melancholy and contain several what ifs. They tended to be front rowers and invariably hookers. Between 1967 and 1984 only three players represented England at hooker: Steve Richards, John Pullin and Peter Wheeler. Thus, no other English hooker would win a cap for 17 straight years including Phil KeithRoach, who would later become the scrum coach to England’s 2003 World Cup-winning team.
Keith-Roach has kept all 25 cards that he was sent by the Rugby Football Union requesting his participation. Looking back, he harbours regret that he did not work harder on his game away from scrummaging and fully accepts that his main rivals Pullin and Wheeler deserved to be selected ahead of him. Yet respect does not equate with cordiality.
“You weren’t friendly with them,” Keith-Roach said. “You saw them as competitors. I don’t get this modern business of shaking hands when a guy gets picked ahead of you. Those guys were in the way of me achieving something that was a quietly held dream since I first went to watch Gloucester.
“Being in that environment for so long, I didn’t like my opponents at all. This was nothing to do with them as humans – you didn’t bother to find out what they were like as humans. You gritted your teeth and got on with it. When you played against them, you were keen to leave a marker.”
When Wheeler moved on in 1984, it should have been Andy Simpson who inherited his mantle. Having made his mark playing in the North side that beat the All Blacks in 1979, he was England’s coming man until he was involved an accident following a match for Sale against Leicester in 1982. Simpson was helping to push a stalled car from the back of a stand at Welford Road when the door slammed, severing the top of his thumb.
Somewhat astonishingly, he resumed playing. While his grip was slightly affected, Simpson believes that the injury was held against him by the England selectors as Steve Brain and Steve Mills moved ahead of him in the pecking order. “Whenever a throw seemed to go astray, I was blamed,” Simpson said. “It was not the jumper or people climbing over them, it was always me.”
Simpson sat on the bench 21 times without coming on. In today’s game, he would have easily totted up a couple of dozen caps, but he does not resent the current generation. “I might have 25 caps today but I don’t envy the fact that they are told what to do all the time, right down to the food they eat,” Simpson said. “My life is my own. If I want red meat then I can have it.”
He came close to seeing action on a number of occasions, most notably on a tour match to New Zealand in 1985. “Steve Brain was at the bottom of a ruck and let’s just say someone tainted him,” Simpson said. “He stood up, blood pouring from his head and was walking around in a circle. The physio was trying to drag him off the field while putting the tape over his head. He just ripped the tape off and tottered across the field. That was the closest point. I was 31 by then and I sort of felt like that might be it.”
Rob Cunningham also remembers the exact moment when he realised that his chance had passed. Just two days before he was due to start at hooker in Scotland’s 1984 tour match against Romania, Cunningham aggravated some scar tissue in training. Despite his protests, the coaches stood him down and Gary Callander made his debut in his place. “I remember I took a picture of myself with the Black Sea in the background and that was when I thought this is it: I am not going to make it.” Growing up in Broomhouse, one of Edinburgh’s most deprived neighbourhoods, Cunningham found most doors shut to him in the city’s club circuit. Even when he moved south, first to Gosforth in Newcastle and then to Bath, a degree of snobbery remained. The greatest barrier, though, was the presence of Colin Deans, widely regarded as Scotland’s greatest hooker. Before a tour match against Australia in 1982, Deans had agreed to fake an injury if they were behind so Cunningham could come on, but the coach got wind of the plan. “This is not a sob story,” Cunningham, who was on the bench for 13 Tests, says. “I have no regrets. The one thing I know is that I was good enough.”
For Keith-Roach that same thought still nags away at him 50 years on. “I never assumed I was good enough. There was always that nagging doubt and the only way you get over that doubt was to get on the international field. That’s the worst part.”