Days when being sent off was not common

PETER JACKSON

THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW

What happened in Paris last Sunday added an ironic postscript to a time when the home countries kicked France into touch for not playing the game.

Long before the Five Nations got round to increasing their cosy little club to Six, they down-sized to Four as a protest against French brutality, a win-at-all-costs attitude which meant their home match against Wales in 1930 would be their last in the championship for 16 years.

At face value the action seemed all the more extreme considering that for all their alleged skullduggery not a single French player had been sent off. In other words, the best referees, at the time almost exclusively British or Irish, had not seen anything foul enough to warrant the ultimate sanction.

Even if they missed the half of it and turned a collective blind eye to large parts of the rest, not giving a solitary Frenchman his marching orders required evasion on a steep level. And then you realise that over the 20 years from the start of the Five Nations in 1910 nobody of any nationality had been sent off.

Getting away with blue murder virtually became an unwritten law and the French took such advantage of it that in the end the Establishment, i.e. the Brits and the Irish, went to the other extreme and threw them out en masse.

Alain du Manoir, a nobleman’s son whose brother Yves is revered to this very day as the embodiment of Gallic rugby in all its high-risk glory, condemned the national team’s stoneage style as ‘anti-sporting, anti-educational and anti-moral attitude’.

Restored to its full complement once the French had served their hefty sentence, the Five Nations somehow endured for another 30 years before a referee found the courage to send someone off. Never one for half-measures, Norman Sansom dared to send two off at the same time, just before half-time during the Wales-Ireland match at Cardiff Arms Park in January 1977.

The Scottish official sent Swansea lock Geoff Wheel off followed some 30 seconds later by the Irish Lion, Willie Duggan, the former for punching, the latter for a retaliatory blow.

Stewart McKinney, a formidable presence in the Irish back row that day and every day, said: “We threw the ball in to Moss Keane at the front of the lineout. Wheel hit me flush on the jaw. It was a good punch and I went down. I reckon I got up at the count of nine which tells you how good a punch it was.

“Sansom had a reputation as a sending-off ref. As captain, Tom Grace would have had that in mind when he said: ‘Listen, don’t retaliate.’

“I would have taken matters into my own hands had I been able to get up sooner. Willie beat me to it. Unfortunately he hit the wrong man, the other Welsh second row, Allan Martin, who wasn’t the most pugnacious sort of player. Willie always used to say that he was not sent off, that the referee said to him: ‘Would you mind leaving the field?’ And Willie always said that he said: ‘I don’t mind if I do. I’m absolutely bollocksed’.”

McKinney, born at Strabane on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, moved to the rugby town of Dungannon in childhood. A tough back rower, he reinforced his hard-asnails reputation as a member of the invincible Lions during their unbeaten safari all over South Africa in 1974.

Dismissed: Ireland lock Willie Duggan was sent off, along with Geoff Wheel, during the Wales/Ireland game of 1977

“In those days you could smack a guy and flatten him and you knew you wouldn’t be sent off. The Lions were struggling against the Orange Free State halfway through the tour when Willie-John McBride asked me to liven things up. It was a brutal game and I hit their big lock Johan de Bruyn. The next day he comes across to me in the airport and asks me to sign his autograph. I asked him why and he said: ‘Because you hit me harder than anyone else’.”

The Wheel-Duggan dismissals remain the only one in the Four-Five-Six Nations of two players being sent off over the same incident. Duggan’s exit, on the verge of half-time, was barely noticed and BBC viewers in England were not told about it until well into the second half.

Multiple sendings-off have happened elsewhere, notably during the 1995 World Cup when David McHugh from Cork sent off two Canadians and one Springbok in the same match. Their rarity in the Five-Six Nations makes the blue moon look like a permanent lunar fixture.

Another Irish referee, Stephen Hilditch, was also responsible for only the second double sending-off, at a riotous Parc des Princes during England’s 1992 Grand Slam season. The headmaster from Lisburn sent the France loosehead, Gregoire Lascube, packing for what Martin Bayfield described as ‘doing a Fred Astaire on my back’.

Vincent Moscato followed toute de suite in a distressed state after a set-to with Jeff Probyn long before the wily old Wasp reinvented himself as a columnist for The Rugby Paper. A reunion seems long overdue.

Thirty years later, the impressive Georgian referee Nika Amashukeli ensured that Grant Gilchrist and Mohamed Haouas got their just deserts. That the Scottish lock got his marching orders four minutes before Haouas made the French tighthead’s impression of a missile guided into the face of scrum-half Ben White all the more idiotic.