Rugby – transcript
Rugby has always been a contact sport, but the pace has been transformed in recent years, now far harder, faster and more punishing than ever before. Watch old footage of amateur international matches, even as recently as the 1980s, and you see men playing the kind of slow, open, graceful game that is more akin to modern women’s rugby than today’s thunderous professional stuff. Amateur internationals of yesterday admit freely they could not compete in today’s world.
Plainly, everyone sees that the sport has gone too far. I was talking recently to a former good amateur player who hoped fervently that his sons would not attempt to become professionals. He was quite happy for them to enjoy school rugby and have fun playing at university, but wanted them at all costs to avoid the car-crash, high-level professional stuff.
So this is the rarely admitted story behind the scenes: one told in long hours on physiotherapy benches, in the waiting rooms of consultants who specialise in rebuilding shoulders; in the lists of promising teenagers who disappear off the radar; and in the diminishing numbers of rugby clubs and schoolchildren playing.
And it is written, too, in the names of the professional players whose careers flare, briefly, gloriously, like night beacons, then fade from view.
Consider James Lofthouse, the boy who at 17 kept Jonny Wilkinson out of the England team. Lofthouse captained the England under-18s but then his career stalled. He shattered his shoulder and eventually had to give up. In a moving interview in the Guardian which I read, he said that even though he had loved the physical side of the game, he is shocked to see the high impact contacts of today. He said: "Nobody knew the ramifications of doing weights from an early age, of training twice a day, of kicking 300 balls every day, and the wear and tear on the body. Now it’s glaringly obvious to me that the boys are picking up a lot of injuries."
Rugby is far too precious to fall victim to the health-and-safety culture, but soon no-one but freaks will be able to play it. In that sense the World Cup, and the flair with which the French are presenting it as a supreme contest of indestructible titans, is doing the game no favours at all.