Rugby: Setting Itself Up For A Fall?

There has been a growing trend in recent years for rugby fans to portray their sport as morally superior to other sports, specifically football, whenever a scandal breaks in the round ball game. Players don’t play act, there is respect for referees, no crowd trouble, players who are responsible and well-behaved, all part of the sport that provides real role models.

This is what has come to a head this summer. Rugby was never that sport, and never will be. It does have some advantages over football in the attitude to referees, and the way fans behave, but it clearly also has a less savoury side.

Eddie Butler made some very astute comments on 5 Live on Saturday (49 mins in, also alluded to in his column in The Observer), observing that only in England does rugby has this “nobbish” image, that in the rest of the rugby world, it is known as a sport full of skulduggery and “cheekiness”, and that the fans love it for that. If one thinks about it, he’s right. Even in this country, if one thinks of amateur rugby, one thinks of on-field dirty tricks, boozy nights out and all kinds of misbehaviour. Fans still revel in the tales such as the off-field exploits of the 1974 Lions, and Dean Richards damaging the Calcutta Cup in 1988.

The problem for rugby is that the professional era has coincided with the age of celebrity. What started with Will Carling has moved on via Lawrence Dallaglio to Danny Cipriani and Gavin Henson. There is more media scrutiny on its players at a time when they will find themselves with more money and more free time than ever before (no more balancing top-flight sport with real jobs). Meanwhile, there is more pressure on coaches and players to win now that livelihoods are on the line, more pressure on club administrators and owners to stay afloat, and more financial investment in the game by its fans than ever before. Now even middle-ranking players, such as those in the Bath drugs scandal, are targets for the tabloids.

The result is that that old-fashioned cheekiness that still exists in the amateur game is going to draw headlines at the professional level. When a player in the amateur game stands up on a team bus to extol the benefits of recreational drugs, so long as none of his teammates are policemen, no-one is likely to care. When a professional does it, are repercussions. When a professional coach wants to get a player, who has already been substituted, back on the field, he thinks back to his own playing days, when the law of the jungle applied, and acts accordingly. This is not to defend Dean Richards, nor to suggest that faking injuries goes on at the amateur levels. The point is that rugby has never been a clean sport, and in portraying itself as one for the last decade, it has done a great sales job. But it was setting itself up for a fall, and that fall came this summer.