Perpignan is a few kilometres inland from the Mediterranean, on the French side of the border with Spain that is marked by the Pyrenees. Just over 100,000 people live there. So much for the geography. Historically, the town was part of Catalonia until it was ceded to France under the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees that ended the French-Spanish war. Ties to the Catalan identity remain strong. Every one speaks French, but about a quarter of the population also speaks Catalan, and nearly half understand it. At Stade Aimé Giral the signs are bilingual, although this is more of a marketing ploy to target would-be investors from wealthy Barcelona and its region than because anyone might get lost without them.
Perhaps the most obvious cultural link for any visitor is the Catalan flag, which can be seen waving everywhere in the region, but particularly at rugby games. To the uninitiated these flags look red and yellow; in fact the colours are blood and gold. Legend has it that Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona, was lying wounded after fighting against the Saracens in the siege of Barcelona. King Louis the Pious came to visit him, fresh from the hard-fought victory. Seeing Wilfred's golden shield next to the bed, Louis dipped his hand in the valiant soldier's blood and drew it down the shield as a mark of honour that would be remembered by future generations. This romantic story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it remains a powerful part of the Catalan identity: the symbol of the rugby club is a diamond with four blood-coloured stripes on a field of gold.
The club is known as USAP, Union Sportive Arlequins Perpignan. Originally there were two clubs in the town: Union Sportive Arlequins and Union Sportive Perpignan. The two merged in 1933, bringing an end to a bitter rivalry. In 1923 they had fought each other to a standstill in a 0–0 draw. There was blood on the grass and ten players were sent off.
The Bouclier de Brennus has been to Perpignan six times since 1914, but the last time was 1955, half a century ago. In 2004, USAP made it to the final, following the European final of 2003. They are undeniably in the heavyweight category, even if there is still a notable absence of silverware in the clubhouse.
For me, Perpignan represents the emotional roller-coaster that makes French rugby such a rich experience. I was picked up by the club from the relative obscurity of Racing and had a great season in 2000–2001, the first year of the Catalan rugby renaissance. In 1998 Perpignan had made it to the French championship final, where they had lost to Stade Français. They had had a difficult couple of years after that, despite making it to the quarter-finals in 1999 after a remarkable last-gasp victory against Agen in the eliminatory round. In 2000–2001 many pundits thought we would go down, but instead we qualified for the Heineken Cup and gave the eventual champions, Toulouse, a hell of a fright, before losing by just a few points in the quarter-final.
Perpignan signed me up again for two years, and both president and coach couldn't say enough good things about me. By the end of the following year my form had dipped and the president, Marcel Dagrenat, wanted to get rid of me, so he warned me that if I stayed I would spend my last season under contract training with the Espoirs, the club's second team, made up of Under 23 players, and in all probability wouldn't be on the list of players submitted to play in the European competition.
I stayed on anyway, and nearly a year later, with five minutes to go in the semifinal of the European Cup at Lansdowne Road, I found myself with the ball at my feet, five yards from the Leinster goal-line. I picked it up, ran into the wall of Irish defence, and slipped the ball behind me to Marc dal Maso, who skirted the Leinster pack that was focussed on smashing me, and threw himself over the line to score the winning try. We were in the final. It was probably the highlight of my career. A month later, struggling with an ankle injury that would still have allowed me to play, I travelled to Dublin for the game, only to be told the night before that my services would not be required.
Dagrenet's ruthless attitude did not surprise me. I had arrived at the club in 2000, a few months after him. At that stage, the club was being run by men who were passionate about rugby but had difficulties adapting to the new professional age, and finances were shaky. Knowing of Dagrenat's expertise in this area, a group of ex-presidents and USAP officials had approached him to take over the presidency.
Dagrenat decided to implement what he knew from his experience in the business world. He had made a decent amount of money running supermarkets, and his strength lay in efficiency—extracting maximum value for the least expenditure— and planning ahead to make sure you were carrying the right amount of stock. Obviously this was a good general rule for business, and 'pile it high and sell it cheap' had made more than one man rich. But would it be enough to run a professional rugby club?
At first the answer seemed to be yes. Almost immediately things began to turn around for the good. Dagrenat pulled in new sponsors, increased profits through merchandising deals and opening bodegas at the ground, and generally transformed the club into a money-making machine. But maximising a team's potential requires some understanding of the subtleties of human nature. Over the course of a season each player will have times when he plays less well than at other times. However, given the right conditions he will bounce back. Too often, though, at Perpignan the conditions were not right, and the result was a lot of wasted potential.
Players put terrific pressure on themselves, and should not have to spend time worrying about being thrown out on account of a couple of bad games. Such a scenario can push a player into a downward spiral where, knowing management is lining him up for the chop, he loses even more confidence in himself. Early in my rugby career in New Zealand I went through a bad patch after coming back from a head injury, until Kevin Horan, my coach at Marist St Pats, had a quiet word in my ear. He could see, he said, that I was trying too hard. I was a good player and the ability hadn't gone away—all I needed to do was relax. It was the perfect advice. My self-belief was boosted, and I quickly found my form again.
There are generally 33 players in a squad. Even with a few injured, there are still going to be some who don't get on the pitch, and the better the team, the better the quality of the guys being left out. At Perpignan, though, in the early years of Marcel Dagrenat's reign, there was a rattling turnover. The year I left nearly half the squad was changed, despite the club having made it to the final of the European Cup, something that hasn't been repeated since.
More recently, the club seems to have learned the lesson and there are now only four or five new players arriving every year. However, Dagrenat still seems to think of players primarily as units of merchandise. In an interview with Midi Olympique in October 2005, he declared, 'Les joueurs sont notre capital ... quand on a un capital, on le fait fructifier' ('Players are our capital ... when you have capital you make it yield a profit').
The subtext is that investments that are underperforming need to be jettisoned. This may make sound business sense, but amount to short-term thinking when it comes to rugby. In 2003 Dagrenat brought in several high-profile foreign internationals, of whom perhaps the best known was Daniel Herbert. As a Wallaby centre, Herbert had been capped 68 times between 1996 and 2002, and had been a key member of the squad that won the 1999 World Cup. In addition, he had played 124 games for Queensland.
You don't play that much top-class rugby without incurring a few aches and pains, and Herbert arrived in France with a dodgy knee. The club knew about this, and it was agreed that for his aerobic fitness he would avoid the kind of long-distance running that might inflict wear and tear on aging joints, and replace it with low-impact cycling or rowing. However, this quickly became a sticking point. After Herbert had played, and played well, Dagrenat reasoned that his knee was obviously fine, so he could train alongside every one else. Olivier Saïsset, the coach, presumably thought that as Dagrenat was not standing by the original agreement to give Herbert special dispensation, there was no reason for him to do so either.
Herbert, unhappy but feeling cornered and not wanting to look as though he were avoiding work, did the training. After a few games, followed by heavy running sessions during the week, his knee had flared up to the point where he had to have time off. After it settled down, he came back and played a few more games, before tearing his hamstring.
At this point, there were already rumblings of discontent emanating from the president's office. Herbert was being paid upwards of €15,000 monthly, and the return on the investment wasn't turning out to be as high as had been expected. Dagrenat was already looking into the possibility of having the Australian declared unfit to play rugby, which would mean the next two and a bit years of his contract would be null and void. Then, as Herbert was coming back from the hamstring injury, he started having problems with his neck. A disc had slipped. The problem deteriorated and in April 2004 it was agreed that he needed an operation.
Dagrenat then set in motion a series of procedures to ensure the club would not have to pay out any more money for a player he now saw as a lame duck. On the day Herbert was preparing to go into hospital for his neck operation (which would fuse two vertebrae together), he was told the club had not processed the necessary paperwork. This was no administrative oversight: Dagrenat told him that he would allow the operation to go ahead only if Herbert agreed to leave the club, giving up the last two years of his contract without any insurance payout or indemnity. Herbert, he said, wasn't fit to play rugby. He had known this when he arrived, and had acted in bad faith when he signed his contract.
Now, I know Daniel Herbert—not all that well, but well enough—and like any of us he has faults (the man is an Australian, for God's sake), but bad faith is not one of them. And it is worth noting that he had had an X-ray of his spine as part of the obligatory medical inspection performed by the club before signing new players.
Determined to prove Dagrenat wrong, Herbert sought the advice of France's top medical specialists and was told that, if all went well, he would be back playing rugby in five or six months, leaving him able to play out the last 18 months of his contract.
He duly had the operation in June 2004. Before the surgery, the right side of his upper body had been virtually paralysed, and for long periods he had been unable to move, or even eat. When he came around from the operation, the right side was better, but something had gone wrong—now his left side was stricken. He battled on. Despite having been barred from using club facilities, he devised a training schedule with the help of his old Queensland coaches, and trained twice a day for six months to get into the sort of shape he needed to return to competition. If he had come for the money, he was staying out of pride, fuelled by the kind of stubbornness that made him a great player.
In November 2004 he felt confident enough to tell the club he was ready to play again. In order to do this, he had to be declared fit for work by a médecin du travail, a doctor employed by the French state to decide objectively whether employees were physically able to perform their jobs. He took along fellow Australian Anthony Hill, a kind of camp mother to stray antipodean rugby players. Herbert was still shell-shocked by the way things seemed to work in France but Hill was a veteran, and they were armed with the opinions of the French specialists.
Once they had presented their case and the doctor had made his inspection, he started writing down his findings. Hill saw that he was declaring Herbert unfit to play rugby. He asked the doctor what he thought he was doing, given that all the evidence pointed the other way. The doctor sighed, got up and walked around, then told them that he had had Dagrenat on the phone that morning, and had been told that it was in his best interests to signal Herbert unfit. Dagrenat had reminded him of the influence he had in Perpignan, and was sure the doctor would understand.
At six-foot-six and 130 kilograms, Hill also has not inconsiderable powers of persuasion, and the two men had the advantage of being on the spot. The upshot was that the doctor declared Herbert fit to work.
This would have led to a long stand-off had Herbert's neck not started playing up again just a couple of months later. Medicine is an inexact science, and while the disc between C5 and C6 was all right after the vertebrae were fused, the one between C6 and C7 started causing trouble. From the outside it looked as though Dagrenat had been right all along. Now, after talking to the same specialists, Herbert agreed that he was unfit for rugby. It must have been a sickening blow, and just when he needed support from the people he was playing for when he received the injury, they put the boot in.
There was now no chance of Herbert playing again, and the French state, which had effectively been paying his salary for nine months through work accident insurance, washed its hands of the affair and sent him back to the club, who were legally obliged to offer him some sort of job for the duration of his contract. Dagrenat now made an offer it was impossible to accept: he proposed that Herbert act as his personal secretary, and on game days put ice into buckets, for which he would be paid the princely sum of 5 percent of his previous salary. There would be no negotiated settlement.
To avoid being considered in breach of contract, Herbert was unable to look for any other work until his contract was up, but he decided to fight in the courts, in what turned into a protracted affair. In July 2005 he received an insurance payout of around €200,000. He continued to fight for a payout from Perpignan, and in November 2006 the tribunal awarded him €181,000 in unpaid salary, excluding image rights. He appealed to get the image rights as well, and the club finally settled out of court for an undisclosed sum between €181,000 and €400,000. The upshot was that Herbert ended up with a total of nearly €500,000, nearly three times what he would have been prepared to accept had Dagrenat not been so pigheaded about the whole thing.
This is not the only instance of shifty behaviour on the part of the Perpignan president. He is said to have told player Pascal Meya he would ensure that he, Meya, didn't get a job in the region if he didn't give up the last year of his contract. When that didn't work, he reportedly menaced Meya with a smear campaign in the local press. He tried to get rid of former New South Wales Waratah Ed Carter by saying he would report Carter's girlfriend to the authorities as an illegal immigrant; the club was to have looked after her immigration papers, but stalled when they realised they could be a source of leverage. He has used his contacts to look into players' bank accounts to see how they're spending their money, and engaged in other blatant manipulation.
As well as the financial cost of defending lawsuits, the club's prestige has suffered. The rugby world is small, and word gets around, making potential recruits wary of signing up with a club where this kind of thing goes on. The club's sporting results are still relatively strong, but there is a certain sense of stagnation: it is now three years since Perpignan have made it to a final.
I would like to be able to say that Dagrenat was the only president who operated like this, but it is not the case. At the end of the 2004–2005 season, for example, an outstanding young flanker, Yannick Nyanga, found himself in a difficult situation. When Nyanga, who was born in the Republic of Congo and starting playing for Béziers at the age of 14, signed a two-year contract, the president, Olivier Nicollin, gave him his word that if the club were relegated he would be released without any fee so he could continue playing top-level rugby. Despite Nyanga's best efforts—he played so well he was picked for the French team—Béziers did go down. However, Nicollin reneged on his word when he realised he could make money by selling the last year of Nyanga's contract. He proceeded to set the dazzlingly high price of €300,000 on a transfer, virtually pricing Nyanga out of the market, and making him very nervous about the possibility that his promising career was about to be nipped in the bud —or, at the very least, stalled for a season in the second division. In the end he was bought by Toulouse, probably for considerably less than €300,000, but some of the money would have come out of what Nyanga would otherwise have been paid.
When you tell this kind of story to grizzled rugby players of an earlier generation, you get the same sort of reaction you get from wide-eyed five-year olds after the first reel of Bambi: a shocked loss of innocence. As Herbert has said, 'You shake hands with someone in the rugby world, and think it means something.' But the modern rugby player is not much more than a piece of meat in the eyes of men like Dagrenat.
Are rugby players naïve to think we can and should be protected from the uglier side of capitalism? After all, we are at the cutting edge of the free market: there are not many other industries where workers move so freely across borders to ply their trade. And rugby is a violent sport. Maybe it's only normal for bad behaviour to spread to the management side? Perhaps it is the entrepreneurial equivalent of eye-gouging?
In a magazine interview, Dagrenat described his detachment from the game. 'If USAP get to the final,' he said, 'I can happily watch it at home on TV ... What motivates me every morning is the economy of the club.' This is disarmingly transparent: he doesn't get any pleasure from the game or the club, but just wants to make sure there is plenty of money.
This isn't quite as worrying as the case of the American multi-millionaire Malcolm Glazer, who bought the football team Manchester United in 2005 for nearly $1.5 billion, largely to offload some of his business debts. But it does raise some questions. Dagrenat has enough money not to need any more, so he's not doing it for the cash; indeed he has reformulated the job description of president to make it impossible for him to be paid a wage. The game itself doesn't mean much to him, he shuns the limelight, and he has at least an inkling that, despite the success that he has brought to the club, he is not well-liked. 'In the rugby world,' he said in the same interview, 'everyone is friendly with each other, everyone kisses each other. No one kisses me. I don't know whether they like me or not, but it's not my problem.'
In late 2005, when it became clear that Dagrenat was introducing several shareholders loyal to him, who would tip the balance and give him influence over more than 50 percent of the club's holdings, several Perpignan officials launched a counterattack. They could, they said, no longer stand by and watch the values of the club they loved being eroded by a man who had no obvious regard for these values. The spat ended with a compromise: the two different sides now hold a total of 49 percent of the shares each, while a block representing supporters and former players holds a swing vote of two percent.
Dagrenat's best defence of his tactics remains the results of the team, and he still has a large number of supporters on his side, who are happy to see their team looking better off than it did before he arrived. The interesting question is whether Perpignan is a forerunner of a new rugby? Is USAP the canary in the coalmine?
In the week leading up to the game I try to train normally. The injury I sustained at Toulon is mysterious: the medical staff can't find anything conclusive on the MRI and scanner results, and the arm works all right 90 percent of the time. However, the physios test it with various exercises and strongly advise against my playing.
Nourault overrules them; he likes pitting players against their former clubs, knowing it gives them extra motivation. He's right: I feel optimistic and desperately want to play against Perpignan. I decide to try out my arm in the opposition training on Wednesday. It's not great and I miss a tackle because I simply can't hold on, and then we start going backward in the scrum, and as my arm is stretched out and away from my body the pain is excruciating. I can't keep the necessary grip for my binding. Didier Bes is standing next to me as I pick myself up, and I give him an earful, for no good reason other than frustration. It is clear that the arm is not right—it will eventually be diagnosed as a ripped pectoral tendon—so once again I am watching from the stands.
It is a must-win game, and not simply because we are playing at home. We are twelfth equal with Toulon, and Pau are playing Agen in Pau. If Pau win and we lose, they will leapfrog ahead and we will be last equal.
David Bortolussi draws first blood with a penalty after only a few minutes, but after that it is one-way traffic. The ball is greasy, so Perpignan don't use their possession out wide in a way that might really have us in trouble after our Samoan winger Ali Koko collects a yellow card, but they attack intelligently. Nico Laharrague kicks four penalties and Christophe Manas scores a try without our firing a shot. The Catalan supporters, whom I used to love when I was playing there, are crowing, and it is really starting to annoy me. A man sitting right in front of me stands up and waves his scarf at us with a big grin on his face every time they score. I am surprised by how much I want to throttle him with it. At halftime the score is a glum 3–17. We will need a miracle to turn it around.
Eight minutes after the break, our supporters finally have something to cheer about. We work a move on the short side: Bortolussi slips through on a diagonal run and manages to offload in the tackle of the cover defence, flipping the ball up to Rickus Lubbe, who turns on the gas and heads for the corner. Bortolussi converts, and at 10–17 things are looking more respectable.
We wait for the inevitable counter-thrust, but incredibly it doesn't come. The game see-saws back and forth, but another penalty from Bortolussi and we start to think the unthinkable. It is 13–17 and they're under pressure. Ovidiu Tonita, their Romanian number eight, gets a yellow card and we capitalise again, with three valuable points putting us within striking distance. They are not going to roll over just like that though, and they press into our 22 as the seconds tick away. We defend courageously, but we won't be scoring from there.
With less than a minute to go, they set a scrum in a good attacking spot just 20 metres out. It looks as though it's all going to end in tears ... but then they are penalised. I don't know what for, but who cares? We kick to touch up towards the halfway line, win the ensuing line-out and send the ball wide. There isn't much on and we are still nearly 50 metres out, but as the ball comes back across the field, the referee blows his whistle: offside against Perpignan. The siren marking the end of the game sounds almost immediately, but since the stoppage is a penalty we can play it. Bortolussi lines up the ball just inside their half, on the right side of the pitch. He is known as La machine because of his metronomic ability to put the ball between the posts, but he has only recently come back from injury and this is on the outer edge of his range. I am so beside myself I can't watch, but the television replays we see afterwards show that he hits it well, and even before the touch judges standing under the posts raise their flags he is punching the air and jumping up and down, celebrating what has to be the greatest comeback since Lazarus. 19–17. The crowd goes wild. I don't even care that I didn't play.