When England ran out in front of a packed Millennium Stadium on the first Saturday of February 2005 history was made before the ball had even been kicked off. Leading his men into the cauldron against a Wales that would win its first Grand Slam since 1978 was Jason Robinson, the first black player ever to captain England.
This in itself was remarkable. Apart from Bristol’s Jimmy Peters, who played five times for England between 1906 and 1908, the first black England rugby union international had been Chris Oti who made his international debut in 1988. But unlike Oti, who had been educated at Durham and Cambridge, Robinson had been born to a single mother in south Leeds and attended a local comprehensive. For him to become captain of England showed just how much rugby union had changed in little more than two decades.
But Robinson embodied much more. His prodigious rugby skills had been honed not at Old Deer Park, Welford Road or any of the other traditional grounds of English rugby union, but at Central Park, Wheldon Road and all points north. Jason Robinson had been born and bred a rugby league player. And for a black ex-professional international rugby league player to lead the England rugby union side was as unthinkable as anything could have been just a decade earlier.
He was not the only league player who found himself in demand by the 15-man code. When he had lined up to face Australia in the 2003 World Cup final, he had come face-to-face with three other league internationals, Mat Rogers, Wendell Sailor and Lote Tuqiri. In the quarter-final against Wales he had come up against fellow league international Iestyn Harris. Even the All Blacks had recruited lock Brad Thorn from the Brisbane Broncos. And the coaching booths of almost all the major nations contained at least one coach who had been trained in league.
The oval world seemed to have flipped on its axis.
A world in union
If the RFU’s decision to oppose professionalism in 1895 was a game-changer, the IRB’s decision to support professionalism exactly one hundred years later was no less momentous in its consequences for the game.
As in 1895, the path to professionalism was not straightforward. Indeed, the plans of the southern hemisphere giants, who had come together to form South African, New Zealand and Australian Rugby (SANZAR), ran into problems even before the IRB made the decision to abandon amateurism. Flushed with their own self-satisfaction in reaching a deal with Rupert Murdoch, SANZAR failed to consult their players or notice that Ross Turnbull’s World Rugby Corporation (WRC), backed by Kerry Packer, had already secretly signed up most of the cream of rugby union talent from under their noses.
To what extent Packer was genuinely interested in Turnbull’s WRC rather than simply poking a sharp stick into the eye of Murdoch is open to question. As players like Welsh captain Ieuan Evans discovered, signing with WRC entitled them to nothing more than a promise of a down payment three months later and the responsibility of paying for their own match insurance. The WRC’s plans finally collapsed when Murdoch’s general, Sam Chisholm, personally persuaded Springbok captain Francois Pienaar to switch sides and Ross Turnbull was publicly humiliated on South African television by the Murdoch-supporting Louis Luyt.1
Having despatched its rival, SANZAR set to work organising its two flagship competitions. The Tri-Nations international series between the three countries was modelled on the northern hemisphere’s Five Nations while the Super 12 competition would be a regional tournament, comprising five New Zealand sides, four South African and three Australian, with the Australian Capital Territory Brumbies from Canberra joining Queensland and New South Wales.
When they kicked off in 1996 the Tri-Nations and the Super 12 were greeted with huge enthusiasm. Both tournaments were initially dominated by New Zealand with Auckland’s Blues and then the Canterbury Crusaders lifting the first five Super 12 titles. Indeed, the two sides dominated the first 13 years, with only the Brumbies and Pretoria’s Bulls interrupting their run of successes.
The defining team of Super Rugby, and the backbone of the equally successful All Blacks side, were the Crusaders. Over two generations of players, from Justin Marshall and Reuben Thorne to Richie McCaw and Dan Carter, the side dominated the game, playing open, attacking rugby that most teams found almost impossible to defend against. Indeed, in 2002 they went through the entire season unbeaten, including an epic 96–19 win over the NSW Waratahs.
The All Blacks shared much of the philosophy of the Crusaders’ free-flowing game. Despite Australia and South Africa’s better World Cup records, New Zealand won ten of the 16 Tri-Nations series up to 2011 and then a further two following the inclusion of Argentina in the tournament and its rebranding as the Rugby Championship.
But what really mattered was winning the World Cup. Whereas once New Zealanders valued their rivalry with South Africa above all else, the desire to be the world champions now focused on the World Cup – and the Tri-Nations was seen ultimately as preparation for it. So by the time New Zealand hosted the World Cup in 2011, the fact that it had not lifted the trophy since the very first competition in 1987 was weighing heavily on its collective sporting consciousness.
The extra-time loss to the Springboks in 1995, the inexplicable collapse against the French in the 1999 semi-final, and then the smash and grab win by the French again in the 2007 quarter-final seemed to suggest that the All Blacks might have a World Cup hoodoo. The All Blacks were a team of champions, but were they a champion side?
The answer would come on 23 October 2011 when the New Zealanders lined up against their nemesis France in the World Cup final. They had already beaten the French in the group stages but their opponents’ form had been so erratic – Tonga had also defeated them in a group match – that the outcome seemed to defy logical prediction. It turned out to be a final of move and counter-move, an attritional battle of position with each side probing to find that decisive weakness.
Both sides scored a single try but the decisive score was Stephen Donald’s 46th minute penalty which would ultimately give the All Blacks an 8-7 victory. Twenty-four years after winning the first cup final, New Zealand were once more the undisputed world champions. No more talk of hoodoos.
The South Africans had no such concerns about superstition. The triumph of 1995 had been followed by a narrow extra-time loss in the 1999 semi-final, thanks to Wallaby Stephen Larkham booting his first ever international drop goal from 48 metres. In 2003 no one expected much of coach Rudi Straeuli’s weak Springbok side and the team unsurprisingly bowed out at the quarter-final stage.
But under Jake White, who had been appointed in 2004 to modernise Springbok play, the South Africans had been almost unstoppable in the 2007 group and knock-out stages. In the final they suffocated England to win 15-6 and lift their second World Cup in four attempts.
Professionalism had little direct impact on South African rugby. For most of the top players, the changes of 1995 were largely about putting informal agreements on a contractual basis and abandoning the need to use the language of amateurism. South African rugby had always been organised on a top-down basis which meant that the provincial structure of the game was able to absorb the impact of professionalism without the inconvenience of club owners seeking to impose themselves on the direction of the game, something which would bedevil the English and, to a lesser extent, the French games.
The strength of South Africa’s domestic game also meant that the Super 12 did not command the same importance as it did in Australia and New Zealand. The Currie Cup was not diminished by Super Rugby, as had happened to New Zealand’s National Provincial Championship, and the fact that South Africa commanded the biggest market for sponsors and television networks meant that it held most of the aces when dictating the terms of the competition.
This lack of fundamental change was reflected in the racism that still affected South African rugby. Controversy broke out shortly before the 2003 World Cup when Geo Cronje allegedly refused to share a room with Western Province’s black lock-forward Quinton Davids. In 2006 Jake White had claimed that he had been forced to pick non-white players for political reasons. And despite the political rights now enjoyed by South Africa’s majority non-white population, the 2007 World Cup-winning team including just two non-white players, J. P. Pietersen on the right wing and the wonderfully talented Bryan Habana on the left.
This was an increase of precisely one over the number of non-white players in the 1995 World Cup-winning side. That player was Chester Williams, who had no illusions about his experiences at the highest level of Springbok rugby: ‘the one-nation factor lasted about a week after the [World Cup] final before South Africa, its society and its rugby lapsed back into racism,’ he told the Sunday Times in 2002.2
The fact that South Africa won the Tri-Nations only three times since it began highlighted how the World Cup has changed the focus of international rugby. Now that there is an official rugby World Cup, Test matches against the All Blacks no longer occupy quite the same position in the South African rugby pantheon. The unquenchable thirst of television networks for live sport has also diminished the rarity value of Springbok versus All Blacks clashes. In the 50 years following their first meeting in 1921 the two sides played each other 30 times – yet between 2000 and 2014 they played 31 matches against each other. Familiarity often breeds indifference.
As well as the World Cup there was one other exception to the seemingly never-ending diet of international matches and tours. That was the British and Irish Lions. When the game went professional many questioned the future of the Lions. The demands of clubs and national unions on players seemed to suggest that the new age of rugby would have no place for a concept from Victorian times.
But the 1997 tour to South Africa demonstrated the continuing power of the Lions. Bolstered by the return to rugby union from league of Scott Gibbs, John Bentley, Alan Tait and Allan Bateman, the Lions defeated the Springboks two Tests to one. The public interest generated by the tour removed any doubts about the future and in 2001 the Lions went to Australia. Captained for the second time by England’s Martin Johnson, the Lions lost the series, despite the emergence of Jason Robinson on his first tour since switching from league, but the huge crowds and impressive rugby played by both sides captured the imagination of rugby followers around the world.
Led by former England coach Clive Woodward, the 2005 Lions went to New Zealand with hopes as high as Woodward’s back room staff was large. Forty-four players were selected for the tour and 26 coaches and advisers accompanied them. Such hubris seemed to be inviting trouble and it all came crashing down once the Test matches began and the All Blacks’ whitewashed the Lions 3-0. Ian McGeechan took the Lions back to South Africa in 2009 and, although they lost 2-1, the tour went down as one of the greatest, with the second Test earning a place in posterity as one of the most exciting, and for the players most physically punishing, ever played.
The triumphant 2013 tour of Australia highlighted how the Lions could evoke much deeper emotions in the rugby and sporting community than were generated by tours from the individual nations of the British Isles. Part of this was due to the fact, for obvious reasons, that the standard of play of the Lions was usually much higher. But for the three former dominions of the British Empire who hosted Lions’ tours, the opportunity to test themselves against their former colonial British masters kindled their sense of national identity and historic grievances like nothing else. Professionalism had altered many things in rugby, but the game’s deeper connections of community and continuity remained largely unchanged.
The importance of the World Cup and Lions’ tours was even more pronounced for Australian rugby union. The triumphs of 1991 and 1999 had raised the game in Australia to new heights and the Wallabies had become Australia’s most important national winter sports team, rivalled only by the dominant run of success of the national cricket side in the 1990s. The smooth transition to professionalism and the rise of the ACT Brumbies, led by the Wallaby playmakers of George Gregan and Stephen Larkham, meant that Australia had become a rugby union superpower in its own right.
The success both on and off the field of the 2003 World Cup seemed to promise even more success. But the euphoria did not translate into domestic expansion. Rugby union found itself competing for third place in the football hierarchy, as both league and Australian Rules signed huge television deals. In 2005 soccer launched the ‘A-League’ on the back of a golden generation of Australian-born soccer players and the success of the ‘Socceroos’ in qualifying for three successive World Cup tournaments meant that they replaced the Wallabies as Australia’s leading national side.
The only expansion that the game was able to sustain was the addition of two more Super 14 franchises, Perth’s Western Force in 2006 and the Melbourne Rebels in 2011. The reality was that rugby union’s roots were still embedded deeply in the Australian private school system and the worlds of business and the professions. It could not compete with the mass appeal of rugby league or Australian Rules – and nor did many of its supporters want it to.
Twenty-first-century league
The mass appeal of rugby league in Australia was nowhere more apparent than on Sunday 12 November 2000, when 80,000 people marched the two miles from the inner-city Sydney suburb of Redfern to Sydney Town Hall at the heart of the city’s business district. It was the biggest demonstration that the city had seen since the protests against the Vietnam War 30 years earlier. Yet the demonstrators were not protesting about war or peace, or any other political cause.
They were demonstrating in support of rugby league and in particular against the plan of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited to remove South Sydney Rabbitohs from Australia’s National Rugby League competition. If anyone doubted the ability of sport to move people, both figuratively and literally, the thousands of men, women and children who turned out that Sunday afternoon proved otherwise. The passions generated by the Super League war brought to the surface the game’s deep emotional resonance with supporters and their communities.
That same fervour was aroused wherever rugby league was played in the decade after 1995. The sport had been in turmoil ever since negotiations between Murdoch and the Australian Rugby League collapsed in February 1995. In 1997 both sides staged their own competitions, complete with grand finals, State of Origin representative matches and international Tests. At the 1995 Rugby League World Cup, held to coincide with the sport’s centenary, Australia sent a team comprising only those players who had refused to sign with Murdoch’s Super League.
When British rugby league in Britain aligned itself with Murdoch’s Sky TV in the UK thousands of people protested in the streets and stadiums of the north of England against Murdoch-inspired plans to merge clubs. ‘They’ve taken our jobs, now they want to take away our leisure,’ one demonstrator argued, and the strength of the protests was so fierce that ultimately no mergers took place.3
But the price of the civil war proved to be far too high. In Australia, the two leagues survived as separate entities for just one season, as neither side could afford the continuous haemorrhaging of millions of dollars. A compromise was reached and the National Rugby League (NRL) formed in 1998. But it would take the best part of two decades for the bitterness between the two factions to subside. In Britain, there was no split but the high-handed and undemocratic imposition of Super League created a well of resentment that was at least as deep as that which existed in Australia.
The focus for opposition was South Sydney. The club had been excluded from the NRL as part of the peace settlement between the warring factions. But the loss of the Rabbitohs touched a deep nerve in the sport and in Sydney itself. The fact that the club was also the traditional team of Sydney’s indigenous Aboriginal community made the loss even more profound. But the campaign paid off and finally, following a legal appeal, South Sydney were readmitted back into the NRL in 2002. The civil war was almost over, but it had cost Rupert Murdoch an estimated A$560 million, lost untold hundreds of millions of dollars for Kerry Packer’s rival media empire and almost robbed the game of its soul.4
Unsurprisingly, the fractured landscape of rugby league in both Australia and Britain led to many outside the sport, and some inside, to claim that it was dying. In 2001, the Guardian’s leading sports journalist Frank Keating confidently predicted that league would be dead by 2006: ‘it is only a matter of time before rugby league in Britain is forced to merge with a voracious union. I give it five years, and that is being generous.’5 Many other rugby union writers in both hemispheres made similar prognoses.
Yet this was to profoundly misunderstand the nature of rugby league, and indeed the appeal of any sport. The intricate web of communal, cultural and emotional ties that bind a sport to its supporters is far stronger than it may appear to an outsider, stretching across time, space and generations. Sport connects friends and families, grandparents and grandchildren, allies and acquaintances, and offers a profound sense of belonging and kinship. Forged over decades, such deep bonds are not easily broken or lost.
And so it proved with rugby league. The first decade of the 21st century became one of the most successful in the history of the sport. The NRL recorded the biggest aggregate crowds in its history, the leading British clubs saw attendances rise to levels not seen since the early 1960s and even French rugby league, thanks to the entry of Perpignan’s Catalans Dragons into the Super League in 2006, saw a revival of fortune after decades of decline. On the pitch, a new generation of New Zealand league stars, such as stand-off Benji Marshall, finally put an end to Australia’s 30-year domination of the World Cup with a thrilling 30-24 win in the final of the 2008 tournament, the first time in 54 years that the Kiwis had lifted the trophy.
The final was held in Brisbane, home to the Queensland State of Origin side, arguably the most dominant side of either rugby code since the mid-2000s. From 2006 to 2013 they won the series against New South Wales eight consecutive times, thanks to five of the most gifted players ever to pick up an oval ball. With the exception of Johnathan Thurston, all played for Melbourne Storm, a side created by Murdoch’s News Limited to expand rugby league into Australia’s second biggest city in 1998. The wily hooker Cameron Smith, the cerebral half-back Cooper Cronk, the rapier full-back Billy Slater and the majestic centre Greg Inglis, who would later move to South Sydney, created a dynasty in Queensland and Melbourne.
After winning the NRL title in only their second season, the Storm’s inspirational quartet steered them to win a further three grand finals up to 2011. Even a salary cap avoidance scandal in 2010 that resulted in them being stripped of two of those titles did little to slow their momentum or the elegance of their rugby. The rise of Melbourne was symbolic of the recovery of Australian rugby league as a whole. By the start of the second decade of the new century the game had never been healthier, as highlighted in August 2012, the NRL announced that it had signed a five-year television deal worth $1.025 billion, a record for the rugby codes.
As had been the case since the 1960s, British rugby league invariably lagged behind its Antipodean cousin. The restructuring of the game into a summer sport and the creation of the Super League led to a consolidation at the top – only four clubs, Bradford, Leeds, St Helens and Wigan, have won the Super League title since 1996 – but also an expansion of the game at grass roots level around Britain. By 2005 every county in England had at least one rugby league club, something that would have been unthinkable in the 1970s, and there were now domestic competitions in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
This expansion was partially due to rugby union’s turn to professionalism in 1995. Union had abandoned its draconian sanctions against league, allowing players to change or alternate between codes without fear. But it was also a reflection of the way in which the switch to a summer season had helped the game move away from the stereotypical image that it was a game played in the mud of the grim industrial north of England. Hard grounds and the warmth of a summer sun gave players a greater scope to display and develop their skills, the perfect stage for performers such as Leeds Kevin Sinfield or Wigan’s Sam Tomkins.
Yet there remained one unavoidable problem for British rugby league. Its national side could not consistently compete with Australia. The Great Britain side did not win another Ashes series against the Kangaroos after 1970 and did not reach another World Cup final after narrowly losing in 1995 to the Australians. Indeed, England, as the national team had been rebranded, clearly ranked third in the rugby league world after Australia and New Zealand.
Despite this international imbalance, the 21st century also saw league played in more countries than ever before. Fourteen sides contested the 2013 World Cup, ranging from the Cook Islands to the USA, and the matches attracted record crowds for the competition. Taken as a whole, the sport had never been stronger, commanding crowds and an international presence that would have shocked and surprised its administrators of the 1970s, let alone the founders of the game in 1895.
Britain and Ireland face-to-face with the future
It was not just rugby league that was wracked by civil war in the years after 1995. Almost immediately after the legalisation of professionalism in 1995, a three-sided war broke out in England between the RFU, its grass roots clubs and the professional teams, most of which had been taken over by multi-millionaire businessmen who wanted to run them like soccer’s Premier League clubs. Only a series of negotiations that would have taxed the patience of even the most seasoned Foreign Office mandarin eventually led to agreements that allowed peace to break out.
But the market logic of the new era had a brutal impact on the English club game. Richmond, now owned by millionaire Ashley Levett, signed England forward Ben Clarke in what was reputedly rugby union’s first £1 million transfer. Yet by 1999 Levett decided that he could no longer continue to underwrite the club and it was ‘merged’ with London Irish. Other former powerhouses of the game, such as London Scottish, Orrell, West Hartlepool, Moseley and Nottingham were simply unable to compete financially. Even Bath, the flagship of the pre-professional era, found it financially impossible to continue its dominance of the game.
With the exception of Harlequins, London’s surviving elite clubs no longer played in their historic locality. London Irish played in Reading, London Welsh in Oxford, Saracens established themselves in Watford until moving back to London in 2012 and Wasps became High Wycombe’s club before moving to Coventry in December 2014. Leicester Tigers, buttressed by the club’s deep social and business roots in the East Midlands, came to dominate the English Premiership and won the Heineken Cup in two of its five appearances. Eventually, a degree of equilibrium in the club game was reached by the mid-2000s, underpinned to a great extent by rising attendances in the Premiership and the success of the England side.
England’s World Cup victory in Sydney in 2003 was crucial to the successful transformation of English rugby union. The success that had begun under Geoff Cooke continued under his successors. Jack Rowell, the architect of the dominant Bath side of the 1980s and 1990s, won a Grand Slam in the last season before professionalism and picked up the Triple Crown the following season. But in between, England had a disappointing World Cup campaign in South Africa, failing to build on the promise of their 1991 final appearance, and crashed out heavily to New Zealand in the semi-finals.
At the end of the 1997 season Rowell was replaced by Clive Woodward who, in keeping with the new professional ethos, transformed the management and coaching of the squad into something resembling a corporate structure. But although it was Woodward’s managerialist approach and rigorous planning that caught the headlines, his biggest asset was that he inherited a squad that was reaching full maturity and was continuously refreshed by young talent forged in the increasingly competitive environment of the English Premiership.
Players like Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio and Jonny Wilkinson were among the finest English players ever in their positions. Woodward even had a wildcard unavailable to any previous England coach – rugby league international winger Jason Robinson. As capable of flair as they were, this was a side that paid meticulous attention to the game plan and based its success on its ability to control every facet of the game. In 2003 they completed a Grand Slam in the spring and then strode confidently into the World Cup final in the autumn.
So when the clock ticked down to the last minute of extra-time in the final with England drawing 17-17 with hosts Australia, everyone watching knew that England’s forward drive aimed to create the space for a Jonny Wilkinson drop goal. The Wallabies knew it as well, but there was little they could do to prevent the inevitable as first Dawson, then skipper Martin Johnson took the ball closer and closer to the Australian posts.
Eventually the ball was released and flung back to Wilkinson standing just outside the 22 metre-line. With just 29 seconds remaining of extra-time, he stroked the ball through the Australian uprights with his unfavoured right boot to win the World Cup. It was undoubtedly England’s greatest-ever victory.
Woodward left the following year, and by the time of the 2007 World Cup, Brian Ashton, the son of a Leigh rugby league player, had taken charge of England, and they once again reached the final. This time they met a South African side even more skilled at controlling a game and were suffocated 15-6 in a tryless match of gruelling intensity.
By then the great side of 2003 had begun to fade away. In the following years England seemed to revert back to an earlier time, recording just a single Six Nations title since 2003’s Six Nations and World Cup triumph. World Cup glory had unified the English game, yet the tensions between club rugby and the national side continued to simmer under the surface.
In Wales, a country where obsession with rugby politics often seems to rank as high as the national passion for the game itself, the post-1995 landscape was even more complex than that in England. The expectation that the clubs in the Welsh Premiership league would continue as before but with players simply switching to professionalism immediately fell victim to the adage that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, the enemy was the deindustrialisation of the Welsh economy and the simple fact that South Wales possessed neither the population nor the wealth to sustain nine professional premiership sides.
By the turn of the century the Welsh game was on its knees, at both club and international level. The professional era coincided with one of the worst slumps ever for the Welsh national side. Victory in the 1994 Five Nations was followed by disappointment, frustration and occasionally abject humiliation. Something had to be done. In 1998 the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) appointed New Zealander Graham Henry as head coach of the national team. Hailed as the Great Redeemer, a reference to the first line of ‘Cwm Rhondda’, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’, Henry was also an advocate for restructuring Welsh rugby on a regional basis similar to the provincial system in his native New Zealand.
Although the redeemer departed early in 2002, the WRU unveiled its plans to restructure the game into four regions. To no one’s surprise, uproar ensued but eventually WRU chief executive David Moffett, a serial CEO who had been at the helm of the NSW Rugby Union, the New Zealand Rugby Union, Australia’s National Rugby League and Sport England over the course of the previous decade, brokered a deal that created five regional teams. With the exception of Llanelli and Cardiff, the other three regions were formed through club mergers.
Things did not go to plan. Celtic Warriors, the merger of Bridgend and Pontypridd, folded at the end of their first season, leaving the Welsh Valleys with no senior club side, and Ebbw Vale pulled out of their joint venture with Newport. That left three of the historic clubs of Welsh rugby union – Cardiff, Llanelli and Newport – rebranded as regional sides, with the Ospreys, the child of Swansea and Neath, as the only survivor of the original regional plan.
The new structure did little to solve the financial problems of the clubs or bring success in the Heineken Cup. With the exception of Cardiff in the very first tournament, no Welsh side has ever reached the final, let alone won it. Yet for the national side, the era was one of the most startlingly successful periods in Welsh history. Wales won three Grand Slams in just eight years between 2005 and 2012, emulating the glorious side of the 1970s that won three Grand Slams between 1971 and 1978.
The answer to this conundrum was perhaps that Welsh rugby could provide enough players for one exceptionally strong squad but no more – but without the vibrant club rugby that had been the rock upon which Welsh rugby had traditionally built its national side, there was the merest echo of hollowness about the roars that greeted these triumphs in the Six Nations.
The Scottish Rugby Union was more prepared than the Welsh for the coming of the professional era. It realised that the existing club structure could not support fully commercialised rugby and in 1996 launched four regional franchises. Two were based in the traditional hotbeds of Edinburgh and the Borders, but the other two were in Glasgow and in northern Scotland, where the Caledonia Reds played out of Perth and Aberdeen. But the Reds did not survive and, despite a number of attempts, professionalism could not be sustained in the Borders. By 2008 only the Edinburgh and Glasgow teams remained.
But unlike in Wales, the concentration of Scottish talent did not result in international success. Scotland narrowly won the final Five Nations’ tournament in 1999 – Italy were included to make it Six Nations the following season – but it was a solitary diamond in two decades of rocks. Part of the problem for Scottish rugby was self-inflicted. The redevelopment of Murrayfield in the 1990s had saddled the SRU with a debt of around £20 million, which meant that the new regional clubs had to be largely self-reliant in their difficult early years.
But there was also a deeper structural problem in Scotland that professionalism had exacerbated. Scottish rugby union had a very narrow playing population. Even at the height of its popularity it never had more than 15,000 adult players, around half the number of players in Wales and Ireland and barely 10 per cent of those in England.6 In the days of amateurism when all players had jobs and couldn’t train full-time the numerical advantage did not translate into a massive skills gap between nations. But professionalism was a ruthless master that discarded all but the very best players. The Scots simply didn’t have the playing capital to match their rivals. Outside the small Borders towns, rugby was unknown in working-class areas and soccer reigned supreme. With no new native stocks of players to replenish elite rugby, Scotland increasingly came to rely on players born abroad, especially the so-called ‘Kilted Kiwis’. It would be the central issue that would face the Scottish game in the 21st century.
If Scotland’s prescient move to regional teams was not rewarded with on-field success, in Ireland the opposite was true. For the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU), despite its initial opposition to the game going professional, 1995 heralded the start of Irish rugby’s greatest ever era. Indeed, professionalism could not have come at a better time, as it coincided precisely with new vitality of the Irish economy.
As with the economy itself, the tremendous growth in the popularity of rugby was fuelled by overseas investment, this time in the form of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports whose millions had underwritten the move to professionalism across the English-speaking world, and facilitated by the wholesale dismantling of corporate controls, in this case the ending of amateur regulations. In Dublin especially, rugby became closely associated with the huge wealth that was now available to the privately educated professional classes.
The traditional school powerhouses of the game – Blackrock, Belvedere, Terenure and Clongowes Wood – not only provided many provincial and international players, such as Cian Healy, Luke Fitzgerald and the incomparable Brian O’Driscoll, but also a revivified and expanding audience for the game. The many thousands who followed Irish sides across Europe in the Heineken Cup were symbols as well as beneficiaries of the growing globalisation of rugby union and the Irish economy.
It was also an era when the fruit machine of genetic luck paid out a jackpot. The cohort of players who represented Ireland in the late 1990s and 2000s were a golden generation of Irish rugby. O’Driscoll himself stood alongside Mike Gibson, Bleddyn Williams and Gwyn Nicholls as one of the northern hemisphere’s greatest centre-three-quarters. Ronan O’Gara rivalled Jonny Wilkinson in the modern pantheon of fly-halves and bore comparison to Jack Kyle, while players like Geordan Murphy and Gordon D’Arcy would walk into any hall of fame. The depth and quality of talent in Irish rugby could be seen in the fact that the Lions took 12 Irishmen with them to New Zealand in 2005 and 16 to South Africa in 2009.
Lions’ selections were icing the cake on a decade and a half of overwhelming success. Irish teams won the Heineken Cup six times between 1999 and 2012. The 2012 final was an all-Ireland affair, between Leinster and Ulster. Only Connaght, rugby’s outpost in the Gaelic football hotbed of the West of Ireland, failed to lift Europe’s ultimate prize.
Provincial success was magnified by the national team. The Irish side carried off four Triple Crowns in the decade from 2004, and in 2009 O’Driscoll’s men achieved the holy grail: winning Ireland’s first Grand Slam since Jack Kyle’s side in 1948, making them only the second Irish side ever to do it. There had almost never been a better time to be an Irish rugby player or supporter.
‘Almost’ – because there was also a sad downside to the rise of the professional provincial teams. Club rugby went into rapid decline, even in its Munster heartlands. In 1991, 11,000 people watched the Senior Cup final between Shannon and Young Munster but when the two teams met in the 2002 final just 4,000 turned out. Even the All-Ireland League that had been set up in 1991 to promote club rugby was quickly marginalised by the success of the provinces and crowds dwindled.7
As in Wales, professionalism had sucked the life from the club game. Without a vibrant club structure, it remains an open question whether Irish success can be sustained after the gilded generation has taken its final bow and the economic collapse of 2008 has declawed the Celtic Tiger.
A European union
In an increasingly global sports world, it became clear to many that the future of rugby could not be constrained by national borders. The formation of the Celtic League in 2001 was an attempt to bring the regular competition and rivalries of the club game to the new provincial sides of Irish, Scottish and Welsh sides. Although its first season included all nine Welsh Premiership clubs, they were replaced in the second by the new Welsh regional sides, and in 2003 the Celtic League became the single professional league of all three countries. In 2010 it followed in the wake of the Five Nations and added an Italian presence with Benetton Treviso and Aironi, whose spot was taken over by Parma-based Zebre in 2012.
But the league suffered in the shadow of the Heineken Cup and the Six Nations. It changed its name according to each new sponsor and Irish sides in particular had little compunction about fielding second-string sides when major Heineken Cup games were in the offing. It struggled to attract crowds, never achieving a seasonal average in five figures – and even that average was boosted by annual blockbuster crowds for Leinster versus Munster clashes.
The Heineken Cup itself suffered no such problems. Inspired by the popularity and commercial success of soccer’s UEFA Champions League, it was launched as the first major initiative of the post-professional era in the northern hemisphere in 1995 and, despite a low-key first season which was boycotted by English and Scottish clubs, the tournament quickly captured the imagination of the media and the public.
The first final attracted 21,800 to see Toulouse pull off a late 21-18 extra-time win over Cardiff at the Arms Park. Ten years later, 74,534 watched Munster overcome Biarritz 23-19, again in Cardiff but this time at the WRU’s new Millennium Stadium. By this time, the final had become a carnival of rugby, with supporters travelling to the match in their droves and creating a symphony of sound and colour unique in world rugby union.
As well as record crowds, the Heineken Cup helped to forge new rivalries, such as that between Leicester and Toulouse, refresh old ones, such as Munster and Leinster, and take the game to pastures new, with matches in Geneva, Brussels and San Sebastián. It brought an international glamour to club rugby and allowed many of the national feelings evoked by the Six Nations to spill over into the club game.
First among such emotions was rivalry with the French. Partly this was due to longstanding enmities that could be seen every year in internationals but it was also due to French success in the tournament. French clubs contested 13 of the 19 tournaments held up to 2014. They won the H Cup, as it was officially known in France because of the government’s ban on alcohol advertising, seven times. Four of those finals were all-French affairs.
Indeed, the tournament highlighted the fact that France had become the superpower of European club rugby. That rugby union dominated the sporting landscape of southern France – even after the French soccer side’s victory in the 1998 FIFA World Cup – made it the world’s largest single market for rugby. The rebirth of Stade Français and the merger of Racing and US Métro in 2001 to form Racing Métro 92 led to Paris becoming an important and lucrative rugby market. The money available to clubs from television companies and sponsors was significantly higher than elsewhere. In 2011 Toulouse announced a projected turnover of €30 million, placing them comfortably ahead of the NRL’s Brisbane Broncos and England’s Leicester Tigers as the richest rugby club in the world of either code.8
But such riches also brought their own problems. Attracted by the huge salaries available – in 2011 the average player in France was earning 25 per cent more than his counterpart in England – and the French lifestyle, overseas players flocked to the Top 14 league, as the French Championship became known after a decade of reform.9 In 2014 there were 220 non-French players active in the Top 14, and only Clermont and Toulouse had squads that were more than 60 per cent French.10 For wealthy club owners such as Toulon’s Mourad Boudjellal and Stade Français’s Max Guazzini, acquiring international stars such as Jonny Wilkinson, Morné Steyn or Sonny-Bill Williams not only brought success on the field but prestige off it.
It also meant something of a roller-coaster ride for the French national side. Since the start of the century France have won three Grand Slams in the Six Nations but also finished rock bottom in 2013, second from bottom in 2001 and suffered ignominious defeats to Italy in 2011 and 2013. French national coaches invariably blamed the number of foreign players in the Top 14 for their woes. The imposition of a salary cap and a quota system for French-qualified players did little in the short term to redress the problem.
Yet French inconsistency in the Six Nations once more showed how the competition itself had been diminished by the growing importance of the World Cup. A poor season in the northern hemisphere’s premier international competition could now be dismissed because the biggest prize was elsewhere. And when it came to the World Cup, the French did everything but win it. They reached the final in 1999 – the same year that they also finished bottom of the then Five Nations – but lost heavily to Australia after knocking out the favourites New Zealand, and fell by a single point to the All Blacks in Auckland in 2011. In 2003 and 2007 the pain of semi-final defeat was made worse because it was administered on both occasions by les rosbifs.
Given the domestic strength of French rugby, it is not likely that a World Cup victory would have significantly extended the game’s appeal to the rest of French society. As many commentators pointed at the time of France’s victory in the 1998 FIFA World Cup, Zinedine Zidaine’s multi-racial team contrasted starkly with the nation’s largely white rugby union side. Although black players played for France as early as 1906, when Georges Jérome and André Verges played against the All Blacks, rugby identified with an older, more traditional rural vision of the nation, in contrast to the modern, multicultural reality of urban France. Indeed, for many of its supporters, rugby union’s representation of la France profonde was one of its most valuable characteristics. In the 21st-century world of shifting populations and multinational cultures, it remains to be seen if French rugby’s greatest strength will eventually turn out to be its Achilles heel.
The French game was perhaps the best example of how the globalisation of rugby in the 21st century gave rise to new opportunities for rugby players to ply their trade around the world. This was especially true for Pacific Islanders. Forty-eight of the 220 overseas players in France in 2014 were from Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. Similar numbers could be found in British union and league, while the number of Pacific Island heritage players in Australia’s NRL amounted to 38 per cent of all players in 2013. The importance of rugby skills to the economies of the Pacific Islands can be gauged by the fact that in 2006 earnings from Fijian overseas rugby players accounted for 11 per cent of money sent home to Fiji.11
But the global spread of their players did little to help Pacific nations compete consistently at international level. Professionalism saw them go backwards as the powerful nations became more powerful and many of the best Pacific players switched to the bigger nations. Apart from a single appearance by Fiji in 2007, no Pacific Islands side has reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup in the professional era.
To overcome this weakness, in 2001 the Pacific Islands Rugby Alliance (PIRA) was formed with the intention of uniting Fiji, Samoa and Tonga in a rugby union version of the way in which the West Indies cricket team represents the cricketing nations of the Caribbean. But it was no more successful than the individual nations, losing eight of its nine international matches before being wound up in 2009. The brutal logic of professionalism dictated that without resources or attractive television markets, the weaker rugby nations got weaker while the strong got stronger.
The more the rugby world changed, the more it stayed the same.