Arresting sight of Coulman’s solo gallop
AT Twickenham more than 50 years ago, Mike Coulman did something that had not been seen there before or since: a prop galloping ‘fully 30 yards’ for a solo try. That it proved just enough for England to retain the Calcutta Cup on a spring day in 1968 made his stampede all the more significant. The Moseley loosehead went careering over as if he had flicked a turbo-charger into overdrive, leaving the Scots so far in his slipstream that, according to Dan Stansfield’s The Who, When and Where of English International Rugby, ‘nobody laid a finger on him’.
Who was Coulman, this supposed donkey who dared to find the gas and the imagination to impersonate a centre-threequarter? He was at least 30 years ahead of his time, a British Police sprint champion, that’s who.
No criminal ever got very far running away from Coulman.
The Lions were sufficiently impressed by his explosive power in scoring the only try of the England-Scotland match to pick him the next day in their 30 for that summer’s tour of South Africa.
Someone else had also been struck by Coulman’s thunderbolt, a businessman with the financial clout to have a more profound effect on the then 24-year-old policeman from Stone. Brian Snape, watching at home in Cheshire, had seen the prop flash across his television set and began to make inquiries.
A Manchester businessman then in the act of transforming Salford Rugby League club, Snape made a name for himself on both sides of the divide the previous year, prising Wales captain David Watkins from Newport for a world record fee of £16,000, worth more than £300,000 today.
Now Snape wanted an English Lion to join the Welsh one for the glory of Salford as immortalised in the song Dirty Old Town composed by one of its most celebrated sons, Ewan MacColl.
“I was standing outside my house cleaning the car,” Coulman told Salford’s historian, Graham Morris. “It was a beautiful summer’s day and I was wearing just a pair of shorts when this ruddy great Jensen rolled up.”
A few months later, Snape had got his man, at a price. The signing-on fee was reported as £8,500, unheard of for anyone from the most humble of Union species derided as incapable of pushing and thinking at the same time.
Salford saw Coulman as a prize asset for two reasons: his explosive power and the fact that his new employers were never going to use him as he had been used in Union, as a set-piece specialist, not least because League didn’t waste much time on scrummaging.
Unlike the vast majority of Union players who ‘went north’, Coulman’s relocation cost him his job. In moving a little further north, he fell foul of the police rule barring serving officers from employment outside the force.
Snape, who died in 1996 at the age of 81, solved the problem by finding the new recruit a position in one of his restaurants, a first step towards a successful career in the catering industry.
Within months of unleashing their new tour de force at The Willows, Salford finished up at Wembley in the 1969 Challenge Cup final, losing 11-6 to Castleford. Coulman’s typically forthright dismissal of his own performance would become perhaps the only regret of his block-busting career at Salford.
“I had an awful game,” he said. “I was slightly concussed early on but that was no excuse. I didn’t play well. I felt as if I lacked aggression.’’
Nobody would ever have dared say that about a player who ran riot for the next 14 years, his weekly impression of a one-man demolition unit smashing every try record for the club: 135 in 463
PICTURE: Getty Images games, putting him third in the alltime list behind Watkins and another ex-Newport player from pre-war, Bert Day.
Coulman would always attribute his impact to another Welshman, Colin Dixon who went to the same South Church Street school in Tiger Bay as Billy Boston and played for the famous dockland club, the CIACS.
Dixon played almost 700 matches during a 20-year career in League, more than half of them for Salford. “He was my best pal throughout my whole time at the club,’’ Coulman said. “He was such a great help, not so much for anything he said but in his actions.”
When the Welshman died on a summer’s day 30 years ago at the age of 49, his English protégé marked the occasion in his own special way. “I planted a tree in the middle of my lawn in memory of Colin,” he said. “I owed him so much…”
For every season at Salford bar one, Coulman had been reunited with another Lion from the 1968 tour, Maurice Richards. Another of Snape’s snipes into Union territory, the most modest of Welshman from the Rhondda played even more matches than Coulman (498) and, naturally enough given that it was his job, scored more tries (297).
“Mike wasn’t just a great player, he was a great fella,” Richards said. “He was someone you could depend on, a formidable player with terrific speed as you’d expect from a sprint champion. I had nothing but the greatest admiration for him.’’
Coulman went the distance and beyond, his last match, at Bramley, falling only days before he turned 40. In an often brutal environment, he won an enviable reputation. As Robert Gate, the noted League historian, says: “Mike was so well respected that I don’t ever recall any animosity towards him. He was a good ‘un.’’
Mike Coulman died last weekend at the age of 78. He deserves to be acknowledged as arguably the most multi-dimensional of all English tight forwards.
Who else rose to the top in Union via Stafford, North Midlands, Moseley, England and the Lions, then rose to the same heights in League via Salford, Lancashire, England and Great Britain?
“The Lions were so impressed, they picked him the next day for the summer tour of South Africa”