George Crawford remains the only referee to make the ultimate protest over on-field violence between old Anglo-Welsh foes. Twenty minutes into Bristol’s scrap against Newport on September 14, 1985, he walked off, never to return.
At a time when football was being disfigured by hooliganism on the terraces, Crawford arrived on that warm autumn Saturday in eager anticipation of ‘a nice game’. Instead he found himself surrounded by alarming outbreaks of the old joke about rugby union solving crowd trouble by putting all their hooligans on the pitch.
More than 40 years on, it still beggars belie...