They love their rugby in Toulon. Le Rugby Club Toulonnais goes back nearly 100 years and has won the Bouclier de Brennus, or Brennus Shield, the trophy for the domestic champion, three times, in 1931, 1987 and most recently in 1992.
The town itself, with 160,000 inhabitants—or, if you count the surrounding metropolitan sprawl, more like half a million —is centred around the port. Napoleon Bonaparte first made a name for himself here as a young naval officer by playing a decisive role in lifting the siege laid by the Royal Navy in 1793, and today the French Mediterranean Fleet is headquartered on the rade. The stadium is right in the heart of the town, on a site that was a disused velodrome until 1920, when the popular French singer Félix Mayol bought it and donated the ground to the club. The RCT returned the compliment by naming the stadium after their benefactor and adopting his lucky charm le muguet, the lily of the valley, as their emblem. Although other clubs have more trophies in their cabinets, bigger budgets (Toulon has the second smallest budget of the Top 14 at €5.86 million) and more stars on their team, there is a popular enthusiasm for the game here that is rivalled only by the Catalans of Perpignan.
The massive spectator support means that playing at Mayol is something of a test of character for any visiting team. Toulon are not having a great year and will probably go down, but if you want to win here you had better be prepared to fight for it—and that's not just a figure of speech. Toulon's first game of the year was against the reigning champions, Biarritz, and they gave the Basques a hell of a fright (and a few bloody noses) before going down 10–20. They are an old-fashioned outfit, playing more with their heart than their brains (home-and-away culture is particularly evident—they tend to get hammered in away games) and have been too cautious with their recruitment, but they have a few good players and their forwards are always ready to mix it in front of the home crowd.
The day of our game it is teeming with rain, although this clears just before kick-off. We are in for a shit-fight and we know it. Once again the stakes are high as we go into the game still in twelfth place, just three points ahead of Toulon. If we lose and don't collect a bonus point, we are in the hot seat.
As we arrive at the ground we can see that the way to the normal dropping-off point has been blocked by a crane that is obviously not going to move. Bungle or conspiracy? It's not easy to tell in this part of the world, but I wouldn't be surprised if the locals had decided that a little taste of the Toulon atmosphere in the form of a march through a sea of thousands of red-and-black-wearing supporters would put us in the right mood for the game. The bus driver tries to go around another way but is thwarted again, and at the insistence of our officials he turns into a roundabout the wrong way and ploughs into oncoming traffic, before mounting a traffic island and eventually coming to a halt at the side entrance to the changing-rooms. They'll have to try harder than that to put one over on us.
Still, when we go out to warm up we bear the full brunt of the 14,000-strong crowd—from all the jeering they seem disappointed that we have actually turned up—but at least now we are on the other side of the three-metre-high cage that rings the playing-field. We have talked about not being put off by this, but almost immediately our Georgian prop Mamuka Magrakvelidze starts egging them on, blowing kisses to the stands and laughing. With a few games under my belt I am feeling more confident and slipping back into a leadership role and I bark at him to stop, but the damage is already done—the little bubble we try to put ourselves in to prepare the game is broken. Mamuka likes to show that he is not intimidated by anything—and he isn't—but his provocative gesture is an indication of his individualism, and during the game this individualism is shown up for the costly, ego-puffing exercise it is.
Mamuka used to be a wrestler and started playing rugby relatively late. Because of this, his technique isn't as good as someone who learned the basics much earlier, but his strength and skill in manoeuvring his opposite number in the scrum can be very useful. The problem is that most of his energy goes into this physical battle, and he just doesn't get the importance of teamwork and the interdependent nature of the game. He occasionally forgets line-out calls because they don't seem to be important—he'd rather be proving himself by smashing someone than worrying about the complicated variations we use to win line-outs. But if we lose the line-out because he's not in the right place at the right time, everyone suffers.
Predictably, the match is a mess. We dominate the first 20 minutes, which is surprising because normally Toulon come out spitting fire. They have apparently been given a lecture on discipline, and curbing their natural aggression makes them lose some of their venom. But we can't convert the pressure into points—until the twenty-fifth minute, when Coco puts us into the lead with a penalty, having missed one a couple of minutes earlier.
This seems to kick Toulon into life. Greg Tutard, their centre, busts through our midfield and runs 40 metres before we pull him down. We scramble clear, but they are still on attack. They work a line-out drive from a few metres out, and surprise us by going to the short side. Their South African number eight, Shawn van Rensburg, scores in the corner. The conversion is missed and it's still 5–3 when the half-time whistle blows.
We have the wind in the second half, and start by camping in their 22, but we still can't score. Both sides are tense, the ball is greasy, and the one thing that looks like breaking the deadlock is the scrum, where we are starting to get the upper hand. After nearly 20 minutes, there is still no change to the score. I go in to clear out a ruck—the sort of thing I do twenty or thirty times a game—and as I am trying to shift one of their players off the ball with my right shoulder I feel some thing like an electric shock ping through the top of my left arm. Straightaway I know this is not good. It's funny how the worst injuries often occur in the most banal situations. There are many times on a rugby field where players crash into each other with such force that you wonder whether they are going to be able to get up, but they just dust themselves off and head off to the next phase. But then, out of the blue, some thing like this happens.
I lie on the ground, flapping about like a freshly landed fish and feeling sorry for myself. The doctor arrives—at this point Bernard Dusfour is still with us—and I try to tell him what I am feeling. The pain, which was acute for about 30 seconds, has now dropped off. As he tests my arm it seems it may be all right, so I decide to carry on. At the first line-out I detect that this is a mistake: when I try to lift Cédric Mathieu my arm refuses to function.
I cut my losses and head for the shower. In the changing-room I find our president, Thierry Pérez; he is so nervous about the game he can't bring himself to watch. Now that I'm starting to cool down I can feel that the injury is serious, and with my arm hanging uselessly by my side I have trouble taking my gear off. Thierry helps me out in a tender, fatherly way that I find touching—not every club president would be doing this. I give him a cigarette, and as we are both sitting smoking a roar goes up from the crowd. Toulon have kicked a penalty to make it 8–3.
We go out to follow the rest of the game and it's clear that all hope is not yet lost. We are starting to give them real trouble in the scrum, and the referee may be forced into yellow-carding one of their props for repeated offences.
The Toulon pack can feel this, and ten minutes from the end they decide to react. After being shunted a couple of metres, their front-rower Noël Curnier stands up and pops Mamuka, right in front of the referee. It is all they have left, and really it is a gift—the ref is already reaching for his pocket—but Mamuka won't let it rest: he has to go and punch Curnier to even the score. So what might have been a game-breaking yellow card—with only seven men left in their scrum against our eight we would really have them under the cosh, and two penalty kicks in ten minutes would have been perfectly possible—is nullified as they each get one.
To make matters worse, a couple of minutes later Dio cracks and throws a silly punch. Now we are a man down and struggling. The game finishes with us under pressure, and we are lucky to have got away with the bonus point for defence. We are now both tied on eleven points in twelfth equal place, with Pau just a couple of points behind.
The bus trip home is gloomy. My mood is not improved by overhearing a conversation among the coaching staff. If the doctor is right about my injury—he thinks I have ruptured my bicep—I will be out for three months and may need an operation. Alex Codling, the Englishman who arrived at the start of the season to play lock, is out as well—probably for good, as he has chronic back pain and it doesn't look like getting better. Michel has a broken hand and should come back in a month or so. That means three locks out, and if one more goes down we are in serious trouble, so the management are going to buy in a new player. Just when I had made my way back into the team, and with panache—Nourault told me after the game he thought I had been playing some of my best rugby—more competition arrives. In the meantime I have to hope the diagnosis is wrong, and that I can recover sooner than expected.
The big game of the weekend is Stade Français v. Toulouse at Stade de France in Paris, and as we make our way back to Montpellier we listen to it on the radio. It sounds a slightly one-sided affair—26–0 for the Parisian side at halftime, before they finish 29–15—but what is incredible is that 80,000 spectators have gone along to watch it. This is a very big deal for rugby in France and, to an extent, rugby in the world. For years rugby has had relatively limited appeal. Its laws make it difficult to follow, and the public, outside the diehard supporters, have found it difficult to get ex cited about events other than international games and champion ship finals. But if this many people are going to see a normal club game in the middle of the season, rugby must have a turned a corner, particularly given that France's great sporting rivals, the football teams Olympique de Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain, are also playing this weekend, albeit in Marseille. All week the papers have been full of rugby, and Canal+ has decided to headline its Saturday night sport with the rugby rather than the football.
Much of the success of this event comes down to the work of one man: Max Guazzini, the president of Stade Français. In the rugby world, Guazzini is an original. For a start he is openly homosexual and you don't see much of that, and although he has never played rugby himself he has a passion for the game and a vision of its potential that has allowed him to build Stade Français from a struggling third-division side to one of Europe's great clubs. Along the way he has turned received rugby wisdom on its head and changed people's perception of the game in France forever.
In 1992, after having amassed a reasonable fortune at the head of French media group NRJ, Guazzini decided to get involved with rugby. Taking over Stade Français in Paris, he immediately democratised the game by offering free entry, first to everyone, then to women and under 18-year-olds, thus building an interest in the sport outside its usual base.
Under his presidency, Stade Français have brought the glamour of show business to the game. Pom-pom girls have become a fixture. So have Dieux du Stade—Gods of the Stadium—calendars, featuring glossy black and white photographs of naked, oiled players, together with CDs of songs recorded by players. Such moves show a marketing flair that initially raised a few eyebrows in the conservative rugby world. The knowing flirtation with the homoerotic in the images of well-muscled young men in close physical contact is reminiscent of a Steve Reeves movie, and makes some people uncomfortable. And this year the club unveiled a new pink jersey—another rugby first.
All of this could make Stade Français look a bit silly if they were no good on the field, but they are: they got back into the first division in 1998, won the French championship that year, and have won it three times since.
Guazzini's spectacular success has, inevitably, led to some backbiting. Ticket prices for the game against Toulouse were as low as €5, prompting the president of Paris Saint-Germain to say he could do the same thing several times over if he wanted to. But by filling Stade de France Guazzini proved there is a real market for rugby. Certainly, the razzamatazz of fireworks and a giant karaoke sing-along made for a festival atmosphere, but television viewers also came to the party, with a very respectable 1.4 million watching the game at home.
With this success has come a concern voiced by many of rugby's staunchest supporters, that the game must garder son âme—hold on to its soul. It is difficult not to make com parisons with football. Most rugby supporters see the round-ball game as having become decadent and ugly, with widespread corruption, exorbitant pay for players who act like prima donnas, and a general atmosphere of sophisticated cynicism that contrasts with rugby's homespun, down-to-earth values.
Rugby became professional because of a confluence of two factors. The first was a desire for excellence on the part of players and teams; this led to such long hours of training that players felt they should be paid for their time and effort. The second was growing public interest in watching the competition between teams. The motor for change was television: television coverage meant that players could be paid enough money to make rugby a genuine career option.
The success of professional sport is, necessarily, measured by the number of spectators it attracts: more spectators equals more money. Television coverage can enlarge the potential number of spectators exponentially, and so is critical to professional sport. Sponsors know that their names will be seen, not just by the few thousand at the ground, but by people all over the country (and often, through satellite television, all over the world), and television channels pay handsomely for the rights to broadcast matches.
Rugby is an excellent product for sponsors and television companies in the sense that, on a good day, it is both a great spectacle and a vehicle for positive values such as discipline, courage, teamwork and skill. Rugby has been good to television, and television, by and large, has been good to rugby. To accommodate television's needs and make the game more spectator-friendly, rugby authorities have changed numerous rules. At the same time, the presence of cameras has led to a decrease in violent incidents (during televised games, any way) because players are aware that, even if they avoid getting pinched by the referee or the touch judge, there is a good chance their crime will be played out in slow-motion replays at a disciplinary board hearing, and the camera doesn't lie.
Since the advent of professionalism, rugby has been broadcast more widely in France, leading to an increase in the numbers of people participating in the game, as well as the number of spectators. So everyone is happy: sponsors, clubs, players and television channels are each getting a piece of the cake, and every year the cake keeps getting bigger.
Although this sounds like a wonderful success story—and to all intents and purposes it is—rugby needs to be careful. The desire to appeal to a wider public can result in a game moving away from its roots. Do we really want rugby to be the new football? The problem is that this supposedly independent sport is now, like so many others, dependent on television, not only for reaching a wider audience but also for its revenue. Television is a business, and so all about maximising profit, but the various marketing strategies it employs aren't necessarily good for rugby, or for the individuals who play it.
The most obvious example is the desire to consecrate certain players as stars. In rugby, as in any sport, there are charismatic individuals who stand out. Rugby's interdependent nature, though, means that, no matter how good an individual may be, he can't perform without his team-mates. When, at the end of a game, the 'man of the match' says, 'I couldn't have done it without the lads', he is not just being modest: he is telling the truth. Picking out one player and elevating him above the rest therefore runs contrary to rugby's musketeer-style 'all for one, and one for all' spirit. You may have a great game one week and a disaster the next, but whatever happens you stick with your mates. They stand by you, and you stand by them. That is one of the great pleasures and the great strengths of rugby.
Take the example of Fred Michalak, the young fly-half who was quickly dubbed a genius by the media, and hailed as the French rugby team's version of soccer's Zinedine Zidane. Michalak is a good-looking man (my girlfriend Marion, who is obviously an authority on good-looking guys and a woman of impeccable taste, thinks he looks like a young Marlon Brando) and he was quickly set up as a bright young thing, advertising high-end cosmetics, modelling for Christian Lacroix, and giving countless interviews to the media. He became a highly visible celebrity.
Michalak wasn't complaining, and with people throwing money at him and hanging on his every word you wouldn't expect him to. Unfortunately, though, all this extra attention meant people expected him to perform consistently head and shoulders above everyone else, and like so many 'stars' he was set up only to be pulled down when he showed signs of not living up to his status. During the Six Nations game against Ireland in February 2006 (which France won, despite a 20-minute lapse in concentration that allowed the Irish back in), Michalak was whistled and booed by the public, who were not prepared to forgive an 'off' day from the man they felt owed them a performance in line with his reputation. This prompted Bernard Laporte to defend his player by describing the public as 'bourgeois de merde'— 'bloody bourgeois'—but other commentators made the more reasoned analysis that rugby had become so successful it had acquired a new public, one that wanted a spectacle in line with their expectations, and would tolerate nothing less.
It's difficult to be completely sure who was doing the whistling; perhaps it was the old school giving Michalak the raspberry because they didn't like the idea of a rugby player strutting around on catwalks. In any case, this 'new public' is, of course, exactly the people rugby has been hoping to attract. They are different from rugby's traditional fan base in that they are more spectators than supporters. They come to a game not to show their support for a team, but to be entertained. For them a rugby game is a product like any other, and if they're not satisfied they are unlikely to spend money on it again, whereas the diehard supporters are capable of re-mortgaging their houses to ensure they get season tickets, and are delighted to see their team grind out a 3–0 win if that's what it takes to avoid relegation, or qualify for the semis. I know of supporters who are so nervous they have trouble eating before important games. Like most players I think this is a bit much, but I can remember when I was fifteen sulking for a whole day because Wellington had lost a Ranfurly Shield game to Auckland.
Professional rugby has already made dents in some of the values that the old school, in particular, appreciates. The importing of foreign players has led to complaints from some supporters that they are no longer able to identify with their team, although you don't usually hear much about this when the team is winning.
The relatively new idea of putting names on the backs of jerseys, along with numbers, is an obvious sop to the marketing people. In the old days, either you knew the team well enough to know who the players were, or you didn't care because the only important thing was the colour of the jersey they were wearing.
One of the things that makes competitive sport special is the atmosphere created by the fans. Even if it doesn't change the way you play, it is nice to know that people are intensely involved in what you are doing. In a sense, the difference between the new package and the old is like that between a small French farmers' market and a supermarket: one is all about the values of terroir—flavoursome, small-scale and a bit eccentric—while the other is slick and bland but, because of its greater financial muscle, a wiser economic choice.
Customarily, rugby players say little of interest when dealing with the media. Partly this is modesty, but mostly it's wariness: if we let slip something slip in an unguarded moment it may come back to haunt us. The former French centre Richard Dourthe had a moment of honesty in 2000, confiding in a journalist from Midi Olympique who had asked him why he had just signed for Béziers. He replied that, while he realised he should say something about being excited about the club's project, working with a great coach or being able to play alongside some great players, the real reason he had signed was because they offered him a truckload of cash and he would have been a fool to turn it down. A few people applauded his honesty, but only a few.
My own initiation to the merits of keeping your mouth shut and your nose clean came in 1996, when I was with the Wellington Lions and we were about to play Canterbury. I was asked on television whether I might be worried about their pack, which was spearheaded by experienced All Black hard man Richard Loe.
'No way,' piped my cocky 24-year-old self, not at all experienced in media interviews, but determined to say some thing interesting. 'We're not going to be intimidated by Richard Loe or any of the Canterbury team. They'd better watch out for us.'
The Lions' captain, Jason O'Halloran, was with me, and as we left the studio he turned to me and said, 'Jesus, JD, I'm bloody glad I'm not you. I hope Loey wasn't watching.'
What? Holy shit, it hadn't even occurred to me. This is why we are well-advised to limit pre-match press chat to platitudes: don't give the other lot any ammunition. For the record, I didn't sleep well but we did have a good win. Eat that, Ricky. (If you are Richard Loe and reading this book, please bear in mind that this last bit is a joke.)