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England, the proud and arrogant rugby nation that created the great game, had a dreadful 2011 Rugby World Cup on and off the field. Brand England right now is a trash brand. The RFU is in a dysfunctional turmoil.
For the first time there is no English presence on the most powerful committee of the IRB, with Bill Beaumont’s attempt to unseat the IRB President Bernard Lapasset failing in ignominy and acrimony.
With England looking to host a 2015 Rugby World Cup that at least matches those of 1995 in South Africa, 2003 in Australia and 2011 in New Zealand and with its influence on the game worldwide diminishing, all the local rugby writers who have been fawningly indulgent over the weaknesses of English rugby are now insistent that the national side must start to dominate in Europe, at least. And improve its act on and off the field.
That domination has to start next weekend when England play Scotland at Murrayfield in the first round of what is shaping up to be an enthralling 2012 Six Nations tournament.
We don’t need to rehash too much old history from the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
Just a mention of ‘dwarf-thrashing’ is enough to make English supporters cringe and bring back the horrible memories of players getting drunk and, in one notorious incident be absolutely unpleasant to a hotel maid.
The dreadful behaviour off the field was matched with poor play on the field.
We had the talented idiot Chris Ashton diving for tries against weak opponents like a prat while failing to deliver against strong oppositions. Ashton summed the English ethic of flat-wicket bullies, or as I called them during the 2011 Rugby World Cup, the ‘John Bully-boys of world rugby.’
Before the usual suspects feel impelled to indulge themselves in their usual rant about me being consistently hostile to English rugby, I’d remind them that these sentiments are not just mine. They also now are expressed by virtually all the important British rugby writers.
During the 2011 Rugby World Cup, before the finals so England’s chances were still open, Stephen Jones (the scourge of southern hemisphere rugby and all its works and pomps) opined that he wanted the All Blacks to win the tournament. Why?
Because he feared for the game in Europe if, say, England were to win their second Rugby World Cup tournament playing their dreadfully negative game.
When I made this same sort of argument in the 1990s, Jones was so outraged he called me in print “a greasy Greek.'”
This is the same Jones, too, who suggested that if New Zealand pulled out of the Rugby World Cup 2015 then Spain could easily take its place and provide the colour, glamour and brilliant rugby to fill out Twickenham like the All Blacks do.
It says a good deal about the malaise infecting England rugby that even Jones has finally seen through the obstructionist RFU and the sheer boredom and arrogance of the England game.
This week, as if to reinforce Jones’ new paradigm, the UK Daily Telegraph writer Steve James has written a piece on the difficulties facing the stand-in coach of England, Stuart Lancaster.
The heading to the story gives a clue as to its content: England Coach Stuart Lancaster’s Toughest Task Could Be Bringing Chris Ashton Back Down To Earth.
Highlighting the story was a photo of Ashton making his triumphal dive to plant the ball under the posts with an ‘infamous’ one-handed smash.
James started his story this way: “So England’s rugby players are perceived by much of the general public to be among other things, beer-swilling, dwarf-tossing, harbour-jumping, materialistic, coach-slagging, woman-harassing, drink drivers. Put simply, their reputation is in the gutter.”
James then quotes the new coach as conceding that this reputation is deserved and needs to be changed. England need a rugby team that “people at the grassroots level … can be proud of.”
The point here is that a team’s culture and the way players behave on and off the field can’t be changed over-night. England have actually won 10 of their last 13 Tests. They only lost once at the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
But – and it is an important qualifier, as James argues: ‘The trouble is that they played in such a depressing manner on the field and off it some of them acted like idiots. It is a poisonous cocktail in the eyes of the critics.
“England must not only just win: they must win with style and grace. As individual characters they have to become less disliked.”
Ashton and his graceless dive when he scores a try is a case in point. As James points out, Martin Johnson tried and failed to Ashton to stop it: “Maybe Lancaster should ban that mocking Ashton dive … Now, that would be a real statement of intent.”
For a couple of decades now I have argued in books like Ka Mate! Kamate! New Zealand Conquest of British Rugby (Viking Penguin, 1998) and innumerable articles in the SMH and The Roar that the DNA of English rugby was fatally wounded with the RFU’s split with the progressive northern unions in 1895, thereby allowing the creation of the rugby league code.
This split took the flair out of English rugby. The rugger blazers who forced the split and then ran the game, in England and throughout the world (until a couple of decades ago), had a view of rugby union that it was a contact form of soccer, foot-ball with crash tackles and mauling.
England rugby became fixated on ‘hard-men’ and allowed wonderful backs like Poulton-Palmer (the dazzling centre who captained England in its last Test before the 1914-1918 War), Peter Jackson and Horrocks-Taylor (of whom a frustrated tackler said after missing him, “Horrocks went one way and Taylor the other and I was left clutching air) to be one-offs.”
It is a rugby nation that does not have a clue about the aesthetics of rugby and how to win big matches with flair and style that preferred the journeyman kicking machine Rob Andrew (and has allowed to be part of the present administrative shambles) over the pudgy rugby genius (and now excellent television commentator) Stuart Barnes.
As I say, all the time I pointed out these obvious truths I received vicious and often racist criticism from English rugby writers and from supporters.
After some comments in the SMH about England’s stodgy play in the 1999 Rugby World Cup tournament, the SMH published a letter from an irate Englishman living in Sydney in which he literally cried out: “Who the hell is Spiro Zavos …” And then he speculated that I was probably an advocate of the round-ball game.
I suppose I should be grateful that at least the rugby writers like Jones have seen the light on these weighty matters, finally.
I was interested to read this week, too, that Graham Henry has waded into the battle for the soul of English rugby (and presumably for a fat contract to help right matters) by accusing the English authorities of being ‘world champions at wasting talent.’
Henry argued (as I have so often over the decades) that England and English clubs play “a game based on fear and a generation of promising backs are dying on their feet. That has to change.”
He singled out Ben Foden, Chris Ashton and Delon Armitage as potentially great players who will never achieve their best under the current system.
A day or so after this Armitage was suspended from the larger England squad after being arrested for an alleged assault. And Ashton said he would change his ‘attitude’ but not his ‘style.’
Redemption, if it comes, will probably be later rather than sooner if this is the attitude of the senior England players.