Toulouse are again the reigning European champions, and by anyone's standards they are a good side. They arrive in Montpellier missing Fabien Pelous, the French lock and captain, and Isitolo Maka, the ex-All Black number eight, but their line-up remains mouth-watering for the aficionado and cold-sweat-inducing for the opposition. Individuals such as Welsh captain Gareth Thomas, Yannick Jauzion and Fred Michalak ooze class, and most of the players on the bench would walk into any other side
Like Montferrand, the team is full of highly paid stars, but that is where the two clubs part company. These men mesh together in a side that understands the culture of winning. Under coach Guy Novès, who has been in place for ten years, Toulouse have been so successful that, by their own high standards, any year they are not European or French champion is a bad year. It helps that they have the biggest budget in the championship— €17.15 million—and that the city of Toulouse is the acknowledged capital of French rugby so they have a rich pool of talent on which to draw. The mercurial genius of Michalak, for example, was discovered more or less by accident, when he was thrown into the first team at the tender age of 18 after a string of injuries to the Toulouse halfbacks.
We are up against it and we know it.
Once again, my knees have me watching from the sideline, and within ten minutes I am trying to avert my eyes and think happy thoughts as what is happening on the field looks like turning into a massacre. Toulouse are already 10–0 up. However, we dig in and batter away at their forwards. The Toulouse pack are no pushover, but they are not as likely to leave you floundering in their wake as are their backs, so you are better off trying to take them on up front, rather than sending the ball wide, or kicking deep, and exposing yourself to counterattacks.
Gaining ground by centimetres, we start putting them under pressure and go to the break 6–13, although with our big Samoan centre, Ali Koko, getting a yellow card for a high tackle just before half-time, we can look forward to an uphill grind. We kick another penalty shortly after the break, and at 9–13 are still in the game with ten minutes to go. However, we have been harshly penalised a couple of times in the lineout by the referee, Monsieur Mené, and the platform for our driving mauls is weakened when we need it most. (Mené whistles us for fake jumps, but two weeks later will let exactly the same thing go when refereeing a 'big' team.) In the last ten minutes we crack, and when Toulouse score two penalties and a try to Thomas, we can muster only a penalty at the death: 12–24. No bonus point, nada.
The following week, we are up against Bourgoin. Bourgoin are a solid team, based around an excellent forward pack with French internationals Pascal Papé, Olivier Milloud and Julien Bonnaire, and an efficient kicking game from Benjamin Boyet at fly-half and Alexander Peclier at fullback. They haven't lost at home in the championship for something like three years, and let's face it, Montpellier are unlikely to break that run.
Club Sportif Bourgoin-Jallieu, to give it its full name, resides in an agglomeration of two small towns just outside Lyon, in the shadow of the alps, remarkable for nothing much other than the consistent success of their rugby club. Trivia fans may be intrigued to know that their colours, sky-blue and claret, are copied from the Birmingham football club Aston Villa: apparently the club was founded by an English expatriate. Its money comes mainly from its president, Pierre Martinet, a catering tycoon.
Although Bourgoin have been European-qualified for some time, their small squad of only 28 professionals means they are never really competitive in the Heineken Cup. In 2005 they suffered a 90-point thrashing in Dublin against Leinster, and are unlikely to ever threaten the big three. Their depressed local economy and rickety stadium hint at an uncertain future. Their home-grown players, their strength for so long, are being slowly picked up by the bigger clubs with bigger salaries.
For the moment, though, they are a damn sight bigger than we are, so it is with some satisfaction that we give them a fright, leading 3–0 for half an hour, before they score a converted try. At half-time it is 7–3 and unfortunately our young centre, Seb Mercier, thrown in at the deep end because of injury, misjudges a pass a couple of metres out when he could have just slid into the line. A try would have made the second half more interesting; instead they canter out to a comfortable 17–3 win.
A month later Bourgoin host Agen, and the aging Stade Pierre Rajon is the scene of one of French rugby's famous bagarres générales, or all-in brawls. After the half-time whistle blows, Luc Lafforgue, the Agen captain, goes over to the Bourgoin halfback Michael Forrest, says something, then clocks him. Predictably, all hell breaks loose. Most of the players were on their way to the changing-room but they turn around and start laying into their opposite numbers—or, failing that, anyone within reach. Spectators lean over the railings to get in their tuppence worth, the referee blows his whistle to no effect, and the rain of kicks and punches continues to fall on all sides for the best part of a minute, as scores, real or imagined, are settled. Eventually things calm down and, as is often the case in a whirlwind of enthusiastically thrown but poorly aimed punches, no one is seriously hurt. The referee hands out red cards to the two captains, Lafforgue and Bonnaire, and everyone goes off to the changing shed for ten minutes to rediscover their sang-froid. Bourgoin have their stadium suspended for a game and so have to play a match away from home, and the two captains are suspended for two months but let off with less for good behaviour. As the match was televised, the punch-up is quickly taken up by various television channels and re-broadcast, occasionally with handwringingly pious commentary about how scandalous and shocking we should find the violence. However, the action is gleefully devoured by most of the viewing public, particularly rugby fans, who have never minded a few uppercuts to go with their up-and-unders.
Rugby players are often referred to as modern gladiators. Ice hockey, American Football and Australian Rules are the only other team sports that can be said to approach the same physical intensity, and in all of them the occasional dust-up is considered part and parcel of the game. If we're honest, it is also part of the attraction, because people love watching a scrap. From schoolyard to bar-room, the one thing certain to draw a good crowd is the shout of 'Fight! Fight!'
Even if you stay within the rules, with the move toward the high-impact game the physical confrontation is still spectacularly dangerous. People used to love watching Jonah Lomu running with the ball, not just because he had exceptional grace and agility but also because there was a genuine whiff of danger if anyone tried to stop him. This may not have registered with the casual observer, but as a rugby player who is pleased never to have been in a position to have had to try to tackle Lomu myself, I feel nothing but admiration for the players (most of them much smaller than me) who were in front of him, and at least made an effort. They must have felt they were taking their life in their hands, and were probably only a slightly misjudged tackle away from that being the case. Such action may look balletic and aesthetically pleasing to the people clapping politely in the stands, or watching slow-motion replays from the comfort of their sofas. On the field, though, it is nature red in tooth and claw. Rugby is a respectable version of blood sport.
Because there is always an element of danger, there is, naturally, fear. In order to overcome this, players often use anger, supposedly channelling the adrenalin into a useful and more controllable energy. This is what getting 'fired up' is all about, although most players would be hard-pressed to admit it because physical fear is seen as cowardice, and no one wants to be thought of as suffering from that. And many players are not conscious of fear as such. I didn't feel it until I was relatively old, and had seen players suffer serious injuries.
Using anger, and even hate, as tools is, however, emotionally lazy and, particularly for hot-blooded Latin types, adds to the danger. (Anglo-Saxons tend to keep their motivation inside a disciplined framework.) The game demands a certain amount of precision and constant decision-making, and over 80 minutes anger, although useful in short, intense bursts, is counterproductive. I have seen players crying with emotion before going on to the pitch because they were so wound up, and this is not helpful. If, for example, you're a hooker, you have to throw the ball into a line-out at exactly the right height and speed to make sure your side win it— wanting to rip out the opposition's throats is no use at all. Still, anger is commonly employed in France, where it is often confused with courage, particularly by smaller teams who know they are going to struggle on talent alone and are looking for something to compensate.
French rugby has more frequent boil-overs than rugby elsewhere. The stories I have heard about the sport in 'the old days'—only about 20 or 30 years ago—are enough to make your hair curl, even when taken with the obligatory grain of salt. Various individuals have regaled me with tales of what can only be described as psychopathic behaviour: taking 10-metre run-ups to boot people in the head, crippling players by wrenching joints into unnatural angles, and so on. One club allegedly turned out the lights in the corridor just as the two teams were lining up together to go on to the field, thereby offering their boys the chance of a surprise attack on the opposition under the cover of darkness and out of the referee's line of sight. The opportunity, I was told, was not wasted.
Toulon, only slightly more subtle, used to deliberately send the kick-off directly into touch at the start of their home games, so they could start with a scrum on the halfway line, followed by an inevitable flurry of fists that allowed them to remind the opposition of the importance of following the script—that is, we are playing at home so we are going to win, and if you want to get in the way of that you will see hell unleashed, and this is just a taste. Such tales are told with misty eyes and big grins. These days, thankfully, the use of the yellow card system, or 'sin-bin', has made a big difference. Referees hesitate to send a player off for the whole game for a single measly punch, particularly when it could be justified retaliation for an unseen misdemeanour, but they have fewer qualms about sending guys off for ten minutes. Everyone knows that being a man down for ten minutes can turn a close game, so players are not as quick on the draw as they used to be.
To outsiders the violence is shocking. I remember walking behind two officials from the Irish province Connacht after an unimportant European Shield game last season. We had lost by 50 points the week before in Ireland, and then scraped out a slim victory in the home game, more by foul means than fair, and there had been a number of unpleasant incidents. One of the Irishmen was saying to the other how disgusted their boys were, and the other replied, 'It's just not rugby.' Feeling slightly shamefaced, I mentioned this to my fellow lock Michel Macurdy, who, unabashed, replied, 'They shouldn't have put 50 points on us.'
In France, I'm afraid it is rugby. But it is so engrained in the culture that the French don't think of it as unusual. During a game against Australia in 2005, Fabien Pelous, the French captain, elbowed Brendan Cannon in the face, causing an injury that obliged the Australian hooker to leave the field and have several stitches put in so he could continue. Pelous did this in open play, out in the middle of the field, but so far away from the ball that the referee and touch judges didn't notice.
After the game, when the Australians were understandably upset, he said they needed to wait and see what the video replay looked like, obviously hoping the incident had not been picked up by the cameras. Unfortunately for him it had been, and the images were appalling. When asked to justify his action, he couldn't even say it was retaliation for some unseen skulduggery on Cannon's part, just that Cannon had been in the way and deliberately blocking him.
I have a lot of respect for Pelous as a player, and I have done some dumb things in the heat of action on the rugby field so I'm not going to throw stones. What was shocking, though, was that Bernard Laporte, the French coach, berated the French media, saying they shouldn't have shown the images and be making such a fuss. He went on to say this would never have happened in New Zealand. That is simply not true, as witness the 'spear tackle' by the All Black captain, Tana Umaga, on Brian O'Driscoll during the 2005 Lions tour: although judged an over-vigorous clearing-out by the disciplinary board, it led news stories for the best part of a week.
Having said that, there is much hypocrisy about the use of violence on the rugby field. In his book A Year in the Centre, O'Driscoll complained about being eye-gouged while playing against Argentina. 'Don't ask me why they do it. It has no place in rugby. The best way to put a cheat in his place is by consistently beating him.' This sounds fair enough, until you read the Welsh centre Gavin Henson complaining in his book My Grand Slam Year that he had been eye-gouged by O'Driscoll, who apparently rubbed it in by asking, 'How do you like that, you cocky little fucker?'
When I arrived in France in 1997 I was shocked by the violence. At 25 I wasn't old, but I wasn't exactly wet behind the ears either. However, the first game I played—a run-out with the Bs in Dijon while I waited for my licence to come through—so opened my eyes that my initial reaction was to close them again as quickly as possible, before someone stuck their fingers in them. I should have realised there was something unusual going on when I saw some of my new teammates putting on what looked like cricket boxes. Why the hell would anyone need to protect their balls in a rugby game?
Mercifully, no one assaulted my unsuspecting genitalia, but my nose was broken by a punch at the first line-out, and the game resembled a street fight. At one point a line-out degenerated into a brawl on one side of the field, but the ball made its way out to the opposite wing where the backs had their own little disagreement to sort out. On both sides of the field, players and spectators were getting stuck in with boots and fists, and even umbrellas and gumboots, while Dijon's resident New Zealander and I were left standing in the middle of the pitch, not knowing whether to laugh, cry or start punching each other.
A bit of niggle is an occupational hazard for rugby players, especially forwards, all over the world. The contact area, particularly in rucks and mauls, is a pile-up of bodies, every one of whom is intent on extracting maximum advantage to his side from the effort he puts in—whether getting the ball back for his team, pinching it from the opposition, or simply getting in the way of the other lot. The law has a number of grey areas that can be exploited, and even the best referees have trouble keeping track of what all 30 players are doing at any one time.
Everyone has their own way of dealing with this, but people who are bending the rules should not be surprised to receive a little discouragement from the opposition who see the hand reaching into the ruck or feel the pull on the jersey from behind. Rugby players pride themselves on being hard men, but the difference between what it means to be 'hard'— respected for your ruthless, uncompromising attitude that inspires respect, if not fear, in the opposition—and 'dirty'— over the top—is a knife edge. Violence is only indiscipline if you get caught. Otherwise, physical intimidation is seen as a useful weapon.
My club coach at Marist St Pats in Wellington, Kevin Horan, a hard man from whom I learned a lot, used to tell us, 'Take the smack in the mouth, put your hands in your pockets and take the three points.' This epitomised what I think of as the right attitude to violence: shit happens, but always keep in mind the greater good of the team. It's about self-sacrifice, putting your body on the line, and not getting involved in vendettas that will distract you from the job. It is high-minded and I used to live by it. The problem is that it has one huge blind spot: it assumes the referee will spot the bastard who's had a go at you and take appropriate action.
One of the great specialties of French rugby is la fourchette, the eye-gouge. This is particularly effective be cause it is discreet. In the kind of car-crash situation that is the ruck or maul, with bodies arriving from all directions, it is very difficult for an observer to see a finger slipping unobtrusively into someone's eye. But you, the owner of the eye, know all about it, and quickly forget about whatever you are doing. The only thing that matters is getting that bloody finger out of there. You try to hold on to the finger so that you can see who the owner is, but invariably it slips back into the grunting morass that surrounds you.
It is a particularly unpleasant feeling having a dirty fingernail scraping along the back wall of your eye socket. It's even worse if, like me, you wear contact lenses and then have to fiddle around trying to get the lens back in place, or grope around on the ground looking for the tiny transparent object, without which the rest of the game is going to be hard to follow. In fifteen years of rugby in New Zealand I was eye-gouged twice, and I remember feeling physically sick afterwards that anyone would stoop so low. Within the first month of being in France I lost count of the number of times it happened.
I should now own up to having been in the wrong in a couple of eye-gouging incidents myself. In a court of law, the defence would plead extenuating circumstances: in both cases we were playing 'must win' matches at home in Montpellier that really were 'must win': defeat would mean we had one foot—or more—in the second division. These games are referred to as 'life or death', which with hindsight sounds overblown, but it is easy to lose perspective. And in both cases my victims were serial offenders. After a three-match losing streak we were just ahead of Biarritz, but couldn't score from our usually successful five-metre line-out drives. There were probably any number of reasons for this, including our own incompetence, but at the time the most glaring seemed to be the Biarritz hooker, Jean-Michel Gonzalez, bush-pigging his way into the middle of our maul and then somehow pulling it down cleverly enough to avoid being penalised.
After he had done this for the third time, I decided someone needed to discourage him. I opted for my first foray into one of the great French traditions and stuck my finger in his eye. Since it was my first time I was a bit nervous, and not wanting to do any serious damage, and a bit worried about the icky feeling of shoving a digit into another man's skull cavity, I didn't push hard enough. But I had another crack and it went in, and he looked gratifyingly unhappy. We were both face-to-face on the floor, so he knew very well who had done it. At the after-match we had a beer and I apologised. He replied with a smile, 'C'est le jeu, c'est le jeu'—'That's the way the game is played.' He is of the old, old school, and having played in the first division for nearly twenty years and been capped for France thirty-four times it wasn't anything he hadn't seen at least a hundred times before. We lost that game, but it is worth pointing out that the following year we played Biarritz in similar circumstances and towards the end of the game had a chance for a line-out drive from a penalty about 15 metres out—and again Gonzo came around on the wrong side of the maul, but this time with his head up, more for form's sake than with any real determination, which meant the referee could see him; he was even laughing as he did it. We duly got another penalty, pushed over from five yards out and won. I would probably be flattering myself to say that his treatment the previous year had changed his attitude, but you never know.
The second time around we were playing neighbouring Béziers in a derby match, and a three-match losing streak had blown out to a very worrying seven-match losing streak. Bézier's hooker, Sebastian Bruno, had been mentioned in our team talk as having been particularly effective at slowing down our ball in the rucks in the away game that we had narrowly lost, and it was imperative he not do it again.
In my experience, no one actually singles out a member of the opposition and says, 'We have to get so-and-so off the park.' This would be considered ethically dodgy. However, there is an open-ended nature to certain instructions that allows for plausible deniability, while indicating that our best interests would be met were so-and-so less intimately involved with proceedings than he might have been planning. Of course, these instructions can be interpreted in any number of ways.
Anyway, Bruno was up to his old tricks again almost immediately, and I found myself with my finger in his eye suggesting that he would spend a more pleasant evening were he to remain out of our rucks. I don't know whether it made any difference, but we squeaked home and stayed up.
The other trick, just as effective as the eye-gouge but without the uncomfortable guilty feeling that (in my case at least) goes with it, is simply putting your hand near the eyes of the guy who has his hands on the ball or on the wrong side of the ruck. Everyone knows that this is the prelude to the dirty finger going in, so there is a rising feeling of panic in the victim, who immediately takes evasive action.
Obviously, eye-gouging is illegal and I am in no way condoning it. More than one player has partially lost their sight because of it, and being responsible for depriving anyone of their sight is not something anyone in their right mind would want to have on their conscience. I'm telling you about it simply because it happens. And one of the reasons it happens is because it seems to be widely accepted. The French Fédération has a recommended six-month suspension period for anyone caught eye-gouging, but it is almost impossible to catch the perpetrators.
In my first year in France I played for Racing against Montauban in Montauban, and ended up on the wrong side of a ruck trying to pilfer a ball. One of the opposition eyegouged me, right in front of the referee, who duly blew his whistle and awarded a penalty against the owner of the offending digit. A penalty—the same punishment that is meted out to players who are offside, or backs who creep up inside the ten-yard zone before a line-out is deemed to be over. Not a red card followed by a six-month suspension. Only one player has been suspended for eye-gouging since I have been playing in France, Richard Nones from Colomiers, and he was suspended not by the French but by the European disciplinary board in 1998. He appealed on the grounds that he was innocent and that the touch judge who cited him was mistaken. There was a lot of French huffiness, largely because it was considered ludicrous to suspend anyone from their job for two years for such a banal crime.
The attitude of French referees tends to be more laissez-faire than that of their British and Commonwealth counterparts. This is not necessarily the fault of the ruling body, which has laid down reasonably strict guidelines in an effort to discourage violence. Rather, the men in the middle who have to enforce the laws often don't have the heart to do so. The French attitude is perhaps best summed up in the language. A player who goes round smacking the opposition because they've been cheating is known as le justicier, the bringer of justice who casts himself in the role of judge, jury and executioner. There doesn't seem to be any irony involved. (Tellingly, the 'Anglo-Saxon' style of abiding by the law in the spirit of good sportsmanship is known as le fairplay—a word that has had to be imported because there isn't a French equivalent.)
One year it was announced that there was to be a crackdown on retaliation. The man who started a fracas was to be issued a yellow card, but the justicier who tried to finish it was to see red. Shortly after this we played a home game in which one of our players was kicked by one of the opposition's. As I was standing next to the man with the frisky boots, I felt honour-bound to have a slap at him. The referee saw the whole thing and called us both over. Both teams had been reminded of the new ruling and I was getting ready to be first into the showers as he went for his pocket. Out came a yellow for the other guy. The referee turned to me. 'You shouldn't have punched him,' he said. Then he sighed and shrugged, 'But it was a reflex action, and I under stand. But you must not do it again!' I can't help sympathising with the referee in this kind of situation: the thinking behind the law is fine in theory, but in practice you couldn't really apply it without encouraging mayhem. If it had been enforced, coaches up and down the land would have been encouraging their troops along the lines of, 'Get your retaliation in first then, lads.'