THE SIZE ISSUE
Nick Easter had just turned 17 when rugby union became an open sport in August 1995. His career has spanned most of the professional era and even though he is closer to 40 than 30, he is an ever-present in the Harlequins pack – the last time he did not play in a league or European match for his club was in January 2013, starting every one since then – and a player who uses his experience profitably.
He was quoted this week as saying that he feared that young players coming into professional rugby were becoming too big for their bodies, heavier than before after spending a considerable amount of time in the gym and consuming protein shakes. He warned of physical consequences in retirement and if you shove a three-litre engine in an old-style Mini and race it constantly at top speed, the bodywork will start to suffer.
One of Easter’s contemporaries, the Wasps’ fly-half Andy Goode, lamented that far more time was being spent in the gym developing bodies than on the training field honing skills. “It seems to be about how much you can lift,” he said. “That’s the big difference between us and the southern hemisphere.”
Easter felt he would not still be playing at the age of 36 had he started out the same size as young No8s today. There is always a danger in delving back into the past of falling into nostalgic regret, pining for a time that was more illusory than real.
Back in 1983, the sociologist Geoffrey Pearson wrote a book called Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. He aimed to show, and it will not be required reading for Ukip candidates in the run-up to next year’s general election, that tradition was largely a myth. “For generations, Britain has been plagued by the same fears and problems as today.”
He quoted from an article written on football that condemned its commercialisation, the sensationalist reporting on it in newspapers and the adoption of foreign coaching methods that had corrupted its values. “The old English (sic) feeling for ‘sport’ and ‘fair play’ has receded to thinly-populated or remote districts where athletes cannot be exploited for money,” reflected Ernest Ensor in 1898.
A former Lions coach wrote of the declining skills levels among backs, condemning the rise of the crash-ball centre and cursing a growing inability of backs to pass the ball all away along the line to the wing in one movement. It was Carwyn James in a book published shortly before he died in 1983, Focus on Rugby, that was a plea to coaches not to bind players with instructions.
“This new midfield ‘crash-ball’ is a disaster – hunks of manhood with madness in their eyes, battering-ram bulldozers happy to be picked off on the gainline by just-as-large hunks from the opposing side. For what? Just to do it all over again. We are breeding robots. Is it the drudge and monotony of training sessions where everything’s done by numbers? Fly-halves even call moves before the scrummage forms – ‘miss one’, ‘dummy scissors, ‘high up-and-under’ and so on, regardless of the quality of the emerging ball. Coaches treat players like puppets on a string. Back play at speed is becoming a pathetic apology, an insult to those who have graced it for a century. Flat-footed forwards now stand at centre.”
Flat-footed forwards are now to be found standing on the wing, but a book written more than 30 years before by another former Wales outside-half, Cliff Jones, was also a lament to a bygone era and a tut-tutting of what the game had become. The past, it seems, is always a better place.
Which is not to say Easter and Goode do not have a point, but are they saying anything much different to those in their positions a generation ago when they were starting out? In his book, Pearson quotes a delegate at a Conservative Party conference in a debate about crime. “Is it not a fact,” he said, “that our wives and mothers, if they are left alone in the house at night, are frightened to open their doors?” He was speaking at a time some would like to return to, 1958.
A difference between then and now is money. James said he feared the day when rugby union became a trade, but it has become an occupation, and a well-paid one for those at the top end. The gym culture flourishes as those coming into the game strive to hit targets, in more ways than one. A sport that used to be a succession of set pieces interrupted by a break or two now revolves around the contact area with the ball-in-play time some three times higher.
It is not just players who are becoming bigger. Unions and clubs have grown appreciably in the last two decades: when the Premiership started in 1997, a five-figure crowd was a rarity. Today, the majority of clubs attract crowds of 10,000 plus, and while no country can match the 104,000 attendance that squeezed into Murrayfield in 1975 to watch Scotland defeat Wales, gate receipts are appreciably higher in real terms and next year’s World Cup is expected to generate a record profit for the International Rugby Board.
The modern playbook may have more in common with American Football than James’s era, but crowds are not put off by what they see, or the prices asked of them. Rugby union has always had a gladiatorial element to it: the big hits of yesteryear tended to be punches rather than the tackles or charges of today.
Sport, like society, evolves but change is rarely revolutionary. Reset scrums were as much of an issue in 1980 as they are in 2014, more so as there were far more of the set-pieces then. And so the common complaint that the game has become less nuanced with teams tending to resemble each other in terms of style.
A newspaper columnist, writing about what he saw as a decline in Welsh rugby, worried that originality had become exhausted and that teams who were similar merely cancelled each other out. He was writing in 1909.
“If we are to understand the present and build the future,” wrote Pearson at the end of his book, “it will help first to repossess the past. Historical realism is a sobering companion for those who wish to set the world right.”
• This is an extract taken from the Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly rugby union email. Sign up here.
