SPECTATOR SPORT
Player power
Frank Keating
IT WAS a glorious English comedy and culture clash: callow cheek and donkeys' dignities. England's amateur rugby captain, Will Carling, financially doing very nicely on the back of the game, called his amateur masters on the Rugby Football Union com- mittee a bunch of 'old farts', and so was stripped of his job not only in the name of rugby but 'of all English sport'. After three days of merry fun, an outcry from the pub- lic prints, in the name of the people, and from Carling's fellow players, the sacking was rescinded, the old farts looked old fools, and the England team was ready to embark for the World Cup in South Africa with a beefed-up confidence as a result of their exercise of 'player power'.
The climbdown by the 'farts' in the face of baying ridicule was as swift as it was inevitable. The Sun gleefully printed the fax and telephone numbers of all the commit- tee men involved — honest, well-meaning provincial burghers in blazers — and urged that they be littered with abuse, just as that same newspaper had done when England's former football and cricket coaches, Gra- ham Taylor and Keith Fletcher, had failed to bring home the bacon.
More eminent and elegant journalists chipped in. Alan Watkins in the Indepen- dent noted, 'Crowds (as the French sociolo- gist Gustave le Bon was the first to point out) have their own psychology: simpler, more violent than that of the individual. They are quick to anger, easily swayed, out for revenge. "A la lanterne," they cry.' While in the Telegraph Allan Massie's great mind thought alike, and after asking Twick- enham's buffers to consider Burke's 'When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated', also suggested Carling curl up with the same writer and his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Perhaps he meant the bit where Burke remarks that 'the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and cal- culators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.'
The flip throwaway reference to 'old farts' by Carling may have been the phrase which tickled the nation's fancy, but it was made in the deadly serious context of such a collective being out of its depth when it came, as it soon will, to running a profes- sional game which Carling espouses and which is almost certainly on its way after the World Cup.
The game is already to all intents, although 'blind-eyed' by Twickenham, pro- fessional in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and France — no accident that those four countries will, I predict, be the four semi-finalists in the upcoming World Cup. The triumph of this week's 'player power' in England makes an irresistible ally for that quartet. Thus the game, lovingly adminis- tered, nurtured and cherished for over a cen- tury by successive cadres of 'old farts', will have vanished (as they know it) within, what, four years and the next World Cup?
The Australian moguls, Messrs Murdoch and Packer, have been fighting a (some would say deadly) battle over rugby league and its worldwide television exposure. That old game has been dug up by the roots in its centenary year. It was brought into existence in 1895 because plpyers•wanted to be paid for the time they took off work. The grounds for that discontent will cease to exist once the union game goes professional. So the need for two codes should also cease to exist.
Thus, by the next century or even before, Mr Murdoch and his marketing men need only be administering one game — Rugby. A good idea, no? Carling's cheeky inso- lence could prove historic.
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