Left field

Colin Meads, regarded by most New Zealanders as the greatest All Black of them all, delivers a diverting after-dinner speech in a self-deprecating “aw shucks” hill farmer’s style with a bottle of beer firmly clutched in a large fist.

It is only after the laughter subsides that the listener realises with a twinge of unease that the majority of the anecdotes involve Meads using one or both of his large fists to thump a member of the opposition. Illegal then and illegal now, it’s worth recalling now amid all the hot air spouted over the Harlequins fake blood scandal.

The saga of a Harlequins winger biting on a fake blood capsule in order to get a goal-kicking replacement on to the field in a Heineken Cup quarter-final has gripped the English media.

It follows revelations that young men who happen to play rugby for a living can be tempted by recreational drugs (see the Justin Harrison story), not unlike their contemporaries in other walks of life.

A mystifying aspect of the outrage is the underlying assumption that rugby players inhabit a universe where men play hard but fair adhering to the stern dictates of an unspoken code.

Which is, and has always been, nonsense.

Hard, certainly. Fair? Hardly.

Long before Meads took matters into his own hands during the 1960s, rugby union at all levels often seemed like legalised thuggery. In those amateur days touch judges had strictly limited duties, the two front rows played under their own set of rules, lineouts were a free-for-all and often only blatant foul play in open play got reported or even noticed.

Meads, tough, durable and skilled, was a wonderful rugby player in a decade ruled by the All Blacks. But even diehard New Zealand fans were troubled by the overt violence which to the late Terry McLean, doyen of New Zealand rugby writers, ruled him out a contender for the title of greatest All Black.

“Great player, yes. Greatest, no,” McLean concluded.

The not-so-fine line between brilliance and brutality of the French and the concerted physical attacks touring teams in South Africa routinely faced from provincial teams while local referees turned a blind eye were also features of the amateur age.

In response to the latter the 1974 British and Irish Lions instituted the “99 call” when all members of the Lions side piled into the opposition on the correct supposition that the referee could not send an entire team off.

After the mayhem, there was often genuine camaraderie, the mutual respect of warriors after the battle had been won and lost. But no one would seriously argue that professional rugby with its increased powers for the touch judges, neutral referees and video cameras highlighting foul play is, if not necessarily a superior game, far cleaner and all the better for it.

Winning at any cost, which appears to be the basis of the Harlequins affair, is hardly new.

In 1956 New Zealand recalled former Commonwealth heavyweight boxing champion Kevin Skinner to a front row which had been sorely tested by the South Africans. Skinner swapped from tighthead to loosehead prop during the match. The result was two battered Springboks and no more trouble for the home side.

And yet no less a figure than Rob Andrew, the Rugby Football Union’s director of elite rugby, has suggested that the onset of professional rugby is responsible for its present ills.

“You begin to ask whether there was an element of self-policing with regard to those values in the amateur game…we must impress on everybody that our core values need to be upheld,” he told the Guardian.

Core values? The law of the jungle prevailed in Andrew’s time, Meads’s time and now in Jonny Wilkinson’s time.

“What we do is play a game in which the laws, although they may be written down, are open to interpretation,” Wilkinson wrote in his column in the The Times. “Players often sail as close to the laws as they can and, when they go over or beyond the letter of the law, they are taking calculated gambles.

“This is a passionate game and will remain so. As a player you learn to play on the rules, to hand on the ref’s interpretations, to get away with what you can. That is how rugby players operate.”

Photo of Colin Meads, then New Zealand team manager, at the Wanderers in May, 1995. REUTERS/Juda Ngwenya