ONE GREAT... BOOK

Inside French Rugby: Confessions of a Kiwi Mercenary (by John Daniell)

‘I AM a mercenary and so are most of my friends,’ John Daniell writes at the beginning of his graphic and irreverent tale of earning his crust as a professional rugby player in France. A teak-tough lock who played for New Zealand at U19 level, Daniell decided to cash in when the game went professional in 1996 and took off for France to carve out a career as a journeyman in one of the globe’s most gruelling leagues.

Through his playing stints at Racing, Perpignan and Montpellier, the Kiwi, in his own inimitable style, lays out the wilderness that was the French professional game during that time. Daniell’s story is punctuated by unscrupulous agents, mentally unstable club owners, even more unstable players and an array of mercenaries fighting tooth and nail for their livelihoods – the next playing contact. Back then, the French game was the Wild West when it came to discipline and off-theball shenanigans. Much of the violence of that era as been cleaned up with the advent of multiple camera angles, citing commissioners and hefty fines. But Daniell writes of the sheer thuggery that was ‘de rigueur’ at that time. For one thing, eye gouging – which has been virtually eradicated in the modern game – was par for the course back then. Daniell’s description of feeling ‘a dirty fingernail scrape along the back of your eye socket’ is particularly harrowing. Having copped plenty of punishment, Daniell decides on one occasion to dish out some himself and gouges the eye of an opponent in a typically no-holdsbarred league encounter. After the game, feeling utterly disgusted with himself, he writes of approaching said player in the club bar and offering an apology for his act of violence. ‘Don’t worry,’ comes the reply from his opponent, ‘that’s just part of the game.’ It really was a different time.