What a fine old mess it was: Lineout tales from the bad old days

We agonise over even one stolen lineout on our team’s throws. Post-mortems are conducted when that number is three. Hookers are deemed a liability, jumpers’ timing is scrutinised, and the caller is dropped.

Kiwi coaches insist on having two loosies be options at lineout time. Saffa teams often have three jumpers over two metres tall, with another lifter nearly two metres, so that a giraffe is being lifted by two industrial cranes, and the hooker has to work out geometrical forces factoring in the curvature of the Earth.

It’s all so technical and precise.

At top levels, 85 per cent is a sort of baseline for keeping possession on throw-in. But in the 1980s, even in Test matches, it was more of a 60-40 proposition, and in schoolboy rugby in the Western Cape, even at Craven Week, it was a 50-50 crapshoot.

In 1999, the legislators of rugby morality memorialised a practice long permitted tacitly or merely expertly hidden: lifting.

For about two decades, the accepted ethic was ‘you can’t lift them higher than they jumped, but you can keep them at that height’.

Some people said it was the Saffas who lifted more, and others said it was the Kiwis, but when I played in the ’80s in South Africa, we lifted (we also punched, elbowed, kneed, undercut, jumped across, held down, and headbutted, but that’s just semantics).

Lineouts were a bloody mess the world over.

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There were a lot of them, too. Because you could kick to touch on the full from anywhere, so rugby football was very footy.

The blindside winger or the hooker threw the ball in; and those often wobbly, one-handed tosses seemed like wishful prayers – provisions thrown into a pit of refugees without a system, a mob of rabid dogs baying over meat.

First of all, we all stood on top of each other. The two lines were shoulder to shoulder. No referee could ever monitor 14 separate fistfights. The trick was to catch your opponent (who had received the laughably easy-to-decipher codes, but really were just ‘throw to the tallest guy who can jump’) with an elbow just as he was springing off the ground. Just on top of the shoulder; as you were pretending to jump.

The throw was always skew. It wasn’t even close to being straight.

Some throwers wound up like javelin tossers. Some rocked back and forth and threw a googlie.

There were few clean catches in the middle of the melee. If you had a good jumper at No.8, you could see some athletic grabs and quick moves to the backline. But mostly it was slap-back ball and a holy nightmare for the wee scrumhalf.

I should mention the ball – the only ball – was heavy. Lineouts deep in the game could sprain your wrist.

So it was like water polo down low, with shorts pulled and knees in thighs, and jerseys pulled down; and up high it was wild, waving arms with so many knock-ons, the refs just let it go.

Lineouts were extremely unattactive.

Not so the old scrum, which had a strange, wobbly beauty.

Lineouts were nasty and amateurish and gave backlines terrible ball; winning the ball could often be a negative outcome, leading to dribble-kicking charges and tries conceded.

An American expatriate who landed at our school for two years and played wing because that’s the easiest position in rugby, could NFL a lineout throw almost from wing to wing; so that was an entertaining relief.

I saw Morne du Plessis so the same from a lineout ball he caught; he stopped, pivoted, and rifled a perfect Tom Brady-like strike to a Western Province wing.

But most throwers were inept. And the jumpers were just guessing and enduring foul play. And mauls were so confusing, nobody bothered with them as scoring plays, at least from a lineout.

Lifted lineouts are a big improvement, but too few teams get jumpers in the air, to contest. I noticed one season, in Super Rugby, that Eben Etzebeth and Pieter-Steph du Toit each had more lineout steals than the entire Australian conference. I think. Don’t look it up; but it was close.

The All Blacks conserve their energy in contesting lineouts for moments and matches that matter.

The good old days in lineouts are right now; the old old days were bad.