Vol. 29 No. 20 · 18 October 2007
pages 23-24 | 3613 words
Praise for the Hands
Jeremy Harding
- BuyThe Original Rules of Rugby edited by Jed Smith
Bodleian, 64 pp, £5.99, September 2007, ISBN 978 1 85124 371 6
Twenty years ago at Eden Park, Auckland, as the minutes ticked down to the final of the first rugby union world cup, a correspondent for Libération caught the mood in the French changing room. ‘The players enter without a word . . . A few coughs, the sound of shoes and bags dropped on the floor. Almost immediately the rasping sound of adhesive tape torn from spools. It will never stop. The strapping of ears and limbs.’ Slowly the talk builds. Pierre Berbizier, the scrum-half, tells the players: ‘Breathe out, get your wind. Find your balance; now shift your balance.’ Jacques Fouroux, coach and former captain (a.k.a. ‘le petit caporal’), urges the forwards and half-backs to inspire ‘confidence in the three-quarters’. Half an hour in, the reporter notes: ‘Constant to-ing and fro-ing of players to the toilets.’ Someone announces: ‘Ten minutes, lads.’ Moments before they emerge into the stadium someone else says: ‘As soon as the anthems start, we form a circle. They’re not going to break our balls.’ It’s a reference to the haka, the All Blacks’ intimidating dance, performed before each game in front of the opposition, and sometimes met by an unconvincing couldn’t-care-less huddle. In the event the French faced it out.
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 21 · 1 November 2007
From Jeremy Harding
Rash of me to fancy a French defeat at the hands of New Zealand in the rugby world cup (LRB, 18 October). The statistics looked good, and they will again. After their victory at Cardiff on 6 October, the French now have 11 wins and one draw against the All Blacks from a total of 46 encounters. The jittery teams of the northern hemisphere are still long-haul contenders in international rugby – two of them anyhow. It’s something the great, confident sides of the south – two of them anyhow – find hard to bear. After their elimination in the quarter-final, brilliant Australian players suddenly became Weeping Matildas, fluttering home to the Murdoch billabong, while a superb member of the All Black squad opted in defeat for a King Kong routine, stomping on cars at Heathrow. Crying and stomping, it seems, are now integral to the story.
Jeremy Harding
Saint Michel de Rivière, France
Vol. 29 No. 22 · 15 November 2007
From Derek Robinson
Jeremy Harding repeats the myth that William Webb Ellis was responsible for the distinctive feature of rugby football in 1823 (LRB, 18 October). In fact the myth first surfaced in 1876, when an antiquarian bookseller called Bloxham – who left Rugby in 1820 – wrote an account for the school magazine. He wasn’t sure of the date and gave no source for his information. The story then vanished until 1895, the year of the split between the Rugby Football Union and the Northern clubs who later formed the Rugby League. Old Rugbeians had provided the first five presidents of the RFU. They considered themselves the rightful owners of the game; now it was slipping out of their hands. To counter this working-class threat, the Old Rugbeian Society set up a committee of inquiry into the origins of the game. Its actual purpose was to reclaim Rugbeians’ heritage. It faced two problems: a total lack of proof that Ellis did anything memorable in 1823, and a respectable body of evidence that rugby football owed nothing to Ellis.
Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, went to Rugby in 1833; he told the committee that running with the ball was considered suicidal in his day. The only man still alive who had been at school with Ellis was the Rev. Thomas Harris. The committee badgered him on his deathbed, but he insisted that he remembered Ellis only as a cricketer. No matter: the committee had already made up its mind. Even before it announced its findings, it had ordered the inscribed stone commemorating William Webb Ellis’s supposed action; it now stands in the headmaster’s garden.
Derek Robinson
Bristol
From Robin Chapman
Here in French Catalunya, locals assure me that after the war in 1945 the Vichyite rugby union elite continued to persecute the workers’ game of rugby league by insisting that if it were to be played again it could not be known as ‘rugby’ but as le jeu à treize. The workers resisted and now we can watch both versions in what departmental posters proclaim to be le pays des deux rugbys. However this official reconciliation hasn’t stopped one local 13-a-side fan I know refusing to watch the World Cup match between France and England and then congratulating me on England’s victory. Vive la Résistance!
Robin Chapman
St Hippolyte, Pyrénées-Orientales
From Fiona Johnston
Ka mate, the name of the haka performed by the All Blacks, is neither PT for adolescents nor grim, as Jeremy Harding suggests: it’s a celebration of life and survival. The haka’s author, Te Rauparaha (a tattooed man, although not dreadlocked), had evaded enemy pursuit by hiding in a pit. When he climbed out, he was met by a friend rather than the foe he had feared. To celebrate his escape from probable death, he sang and danced a haka. The haka ends: ‘A step upward, another step upward! A step upward, another … the Sun shines!’
Fiona Johnston
Auckland
