Anyone for Rugby?

A significant anniversary n the world of soccer recently passed unnoticed. Fifty years ago, one of the great club sides of all time came to Dublin and, before 46,000 riveted spectators at Dalymount Park, defeated Shamrock Rovers by six goals to nil. The team of all the talents was the Manchester United team of Matt Busby, the one that, months later, was obliterated on an icy tarmac in Munich. Soccer was a symmetrically balanced game then, each side had five backs and five forwards and the latter plagued the former with as much assiduity as the former policed the latter. Teams, in other words, were tactically faithful to their stated intention of scoring goals.

A footballer's wage in those days was not substantially higher than that of a miner and the on-field dictates were sporting rather than economic. But, a half-century on, the shekel-injection effected by television has wrought a stylistic about-turn. Soccer today is not even remotely like the game of yesteryear. The lone or minimally accompanied attacker is now an envoy in a foreign country - all he can reasonably do is present his credentials and report back on the occasional sighting of a goalpost. The extravagance of the stake has created an undertow of swindling deceit. If a goal is scored it is very much against the odds.

We in the rugby fraternity can ill-afford to snigger, for there is a flip side to soccer's sea-change. The discernment which allows us to detect the raging stye in the eye of our near-neighbour should, with equal alacrity, acknowledge the increasingly troublesome mote in our own optical frontispiece. If rugby's recent showcase - the fevered pursuit of the World Cup - proved anything, it is that we are at least as maginot-minded as those who negotiate the round ball. The line of fortifications assembled by the French Foreign Minister in the 1930's finds its sporting equivalent in the human defensive cordon that so tangibly divides the rugby pitch today. And a tackle that targets the arms - the main agent of distribution - may bring down not just the ball-carrier but the game of rugby itself. Much of what we saw in match after monochrome match buttressed the impression that attack, too, is at the point of distortion. The spurious "up and not under" ran like a chorus-line through the eighty minutes and the petty progressions of the pick and go brigades travestied the idea of rugby as a ball-carrying exercise

It is not for a moment being suggested here that professional sports don't have every entitlement to revamp their games as they see fit. The piper doesn't call the tune. The man who pays him does. And the supine acceptance of the cash-paying public gives him every encouragement to order a tune that is budgetary-based. But the truly sinister part of all this only becomes apparent if you drop up, say, to the Phoenix Park on a Saturday morning. There, spread across the Fifteen Acres you will find exuberant young soccer players being routinely fettered by the tactical and technical inventions of the professional game. Here, as at Old Trafford or Anfield, the custody battle for the ball is hopelessly weighted in favour of the defenders. Given the gift for mimicry of the young, how long before our fledgling rugby players begin to replicate World Cup behaviour? Will there be anyone to take them aside and tell them that the game of rugby was founded on an act of disobedience and that there is no obligation on them to copy the cribbed, cabined and confined attitudes of their professional elders?

The point that needs labouring here is that the professional and the amateur inhabit very different sporting worlds. The paid performer in rugby evolves in what is becoming increasingly close to a totalitarian regime. Expediency is the leitmotif and if rugby itself becomes a victim by suffocation the mourning period will be brief. Money is an implacable and distinctly unsentimental gaffer. The professional player, in résumé, is superbly prepared for the playing of rugby but either won't do so or won't be allowed to do so. The amateur, on the other hand, may be less advanced in the physical and athletic sense but is at complete liberty to give rugby back its credentials as a ball-carrying, risk-taking exercise.

Banknotes don't wash up against the boundary wall at Rockalyoke with the same fluency as the Irish Sea, so it is fair to assume that Skerries is not a professional club in the fullest sense. But out of fear that it might become a hybrid it should take every opportunity to trumpet its emancipation. For starters, what about a minutes silence at all home games this week-end as an expression of sympathy for our oppressed brethren in the professional sphere. The provision of an extra totem to preside over affairs in the upstairs lounge might, too, have a salutary effect. An image, not of Machiavelli, but of Danton would sit well in tandem with the venerable goat and the French revolutionary leaders call for 'de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace' might become the motto for which the Skerries club has waited all of 81 years. Reasonable risk-taking, after all, is the very essence of rugby football and Skerries needs its idiosyncratics and it mavericks (take a bow, Bobo!). The glib recitations of the pragmatists should, at last, be silenced. "Only winners are remembered they solemnly declare". Well, here is a little test for those who think in that fashion. How many people remember Gareth Edwards try for the Barbarians against the All-Blacks? And how many could name the Five Nations Champions in that same year of 1973?

Bruff is said to be the only club in Ireland with a constitution that rejects the gold pieces of professionalism. The time is ripe for Skerries to go a bit further by renouncing not just the mercenaries money but their on-field works and pomps as well.