Festive fun as Henson overcomes Fearns KO
An escalating class action lawsuit over concussion, a European Champions Cup bent out of shape by the pandemic, a low-rent bunch of administrators who disappeared up their own contradictions long before arriving at their current state of paralysis: truly, the Ghost of Christmas Rubbish is having its malevolent way with us.
If the mighty Dickens, who knew and understood “bleak” when he saw it, had summoned all his imaginative and descriptive powers, he might just have found a way of concocting a happy conclusion to this sorry saga of apathy, greed and vicious circumstance. But Dickens isn’t with us, alas. We have World Rugby instead. Alas.
Yet there is only so much doom and gloom a single sport can take, so to hell with it. Let’s remember some of the good times – or at least, the less bad times – by inviting the Ghost of Christmas Past to spin a seasonal yarn or two.
Of course, not everyone shares the same definition of “good times”. Take James Haskell as an example. Only 99.999 per cent of the union community fell about laughing when the England flanker, playing club rugby in Japan, had to turn out for the Ricoh Black Rams on Christmas Day in 2011 – an away game involving travel on Christmas Eve and a bus home straight after the final whistle. The 0.001 per cent who didn’t think it hilarious? That would be James Haskell and his vanity mirror.
By the same token, generations of rugby-loving Christians failed to detect much in the way of religious resonance in the fact that the late Frank Oliver was born during the time of goodwill to all men. A four-match New Zealand Test captain in the late 1970s, the South Island-bred, sharpened-studded lock came rucking into the world on Christmas Eve 1948 and showed not the slightest mercy to the enemy during a 14-year senior career.
Frank was an “enforcer” before the e-word entered the rugby lexicon: not even the All Blacks’ own website pretends otherwise. “Any opponent who valued his hide dared not ruffle the Oliver feathers”, it says in its potted biography.
Gavin Henson was rather less of an enforcer on the evidence of his celebrated split-second bout with the flanker Carl “straight right” Fearns during a pugilistic Bath “bonding session” in the Pig and Fiddle pub, footage of which continues to entertain legions of voyagers through cyberspace.
Yet the tanned tantaliser from reality TV land was well capable of making the “drink and be merry” season go with a swing – or in his case, a swinging elbow. Two days before Christmas in 2005, he copped a ten-week suspension for busting the nose of the Leicester prop Alex Moreno while playing for Ospreys in a Heineken Cup fixture.
There was a more positive contribution to the holiday period five years later. Our Gav ended 20 months of sporting invisibility by making his debut for Saracens off the bench in a Boxing Day victory over Wasps. At Wembley, no less, in front of almost 40,000 spectators. You might consider him a lost talent, but he sure had a sense of occasion.
Heading further back in history, does anyone out there remember the game
“Flanker Tony Shaw punched lock Bill Cuthbertson full in the face during a break in play”
between England B and…er…the Soviet Union a couple of days before Christmas in 1989? The England side, coached by Dick Best, won the match at Northampton while losing the crowd, who, according to contemporary accounts, could be heard singing Come On You Reds from the Franklin’s Gardens terraces.
According to that tell-it-straight-ornot-at-all rugby chronicler John Reason, who was nobody’s idea of a Lenin-capped Bolshevik, the tourists scored two blinding tries in the second half but were hammered by an unsympathetic referee and fell short by eight measly points.
Any chance of a return match was
quickly buried under the rubble of geopolitical upheaval. Two Christmases later, the hammer and sickle flag was run down for the last time, a slightly less revolutionary tricolour was raised in its place and Soviet Union rugby became Russian rugby.
The current side might be hard pressed to register a single-figure defeat against an England secondstring today.
As for full internationals of the more traditional variety, Christmas weeks have seen the French return from prewar isolation (1945), a Welsh triumph over the All Blacks (1953), an English victory over the Springboks (1969) and a Scottish win over a Wallaby side led by the flanker Tony Shaw, who
punched the lock Bill Cuthbertson full in the face during a break in play (1981).
In deciding against dismissing Shaw from the field, the referee Roger Quittenton proved that he, at least, had read his Dickens. It was one of the more charitable acts ever performed by a member of the whistling fraternity.
So there we have it: a digest of festive stories to warm the cockles at this moment of bitter cold.
And by way of leaving the best until last, we remember the England wing Ted Woodward, who, on December 20th 1952, had to cry off from a Probables v Possibles trial match because of business commitments. Which made sense, Ted being a butcher.