Blacked out
Alan Watkins
Trial of Strength J.B.G. Thomas (Pelham £4.95) Life with the Lions John Hopkins (Stanley Paul £4.50) Lions 77 Keith Quinn (Eyre Methuen £4.95) Sports journalists at the top end of the market have traditionally tended either to echo the opinions of the governing bodies of the sports concerned — to act as mere messenger boys — or to confine themselves to description, varied occasionally by fine writing. Rugby football, unlike cricket, has not attracted much fine writing. The game has no Cardus. Maybe this is all to the good. la the 1940s and '50s H.B. loft (whom I first saw playing hooker for England in the service international at St Helen's, Swansea) wrote beautifully about rugby for the Observer. But, Toft, apart, the prevailing style, at any rate at the posh end of til?, market, was of the type I call "Old Boy writes...' It was the best exemplified by A. Titley of The Times. He went in for this kind of thing: `Today's Cambridge full-back at Twickenham is R. W. J. Tidmarsh (Oundle arid Christ's). It is not generally realised that the young man's uncle was the Rev. J. G. Ticimarsh, who, by a strange coincidence' — ley was always discovering strange CO cidences — 'was also nurtured by Christ's and that grand old rugger school, Oundle. Unhappily the young Tidmarsh's equallY gifted uncle had in 1927 the misfortune t° twist his ankle while alighting from his bier cle on his way to evensong, so "missing" the coveted "blue".
And so on. Actually it was not as funnY this, but you get the idea, I hope. Whether The Times coverage has improved since Titley's departure I am not sure. A paPer which appoints as its chief correspondent a former compere of Come Dancing, who also runs his own public relations firm, doe5 not seem to be taking the game entirely seriously. J.B.G. (Bryn) Thomas's loyalties are dif' ferent from Titley's but he is in the sarne mould. The style is not so much 'Old Boy' as 'Welsh Dragon'. Wales are best but the British Isles are all right. New Zealanders indulge in dirty play which brings the garne o o or, as he would put it, the handling code int, disrepute. The British Lions, on the nth°, hand, occasionally go in for over-robustness, which is invariably the consequence 01 something the other side did first. There was, according to his book, nothing wrrnig, with the management of George Burrell 0' the coaching of John Dawes. We Were unlucky, that is all. It rained the whole titre' We might have won three Tests instead of °rie. Indeed we might almost say we was robbed.
As rugby correspondent of the Western Mail for as long as I can remember, Thomasis a person of consequence in the PrineiPality, a figure to be deferred to, on a level somewhere between Lord Heycock and Sir Julian Hodge. Sorry: I meant to write 'Wales' instead of 'Principality': but Bryninanship is catching. The old grammar books used to contain warnings against Journalese. By this they meant not smartaleck contractions but windy expansions Popular at the turn of the century. Most of the examples were taken from the sports Journalism of the time. Thus 'Jones wielded the willow to good effect'; 'Smith scored two runs through the covers and a similar number through the slips'; while 'Brown hammered the leather past the 'astonished custodian'. Bryn Thomas is our last great Practitioner of journalese. As such he deserves to be cherished. He is certainly a grand old trouper. John Hopkins's .book is journalistic too, but in a different way. It is typical, if he will forgive my saying so — no disrespect is intended to anyone — of the sports pages of the Sunday Times. Hopkins is that paper's recently appointed rugby correspondent. He is a little on the slick side. He is familiar with all the jargon of second phase and quality possession, the gain line, good ball. He also believes in telling the story through People. (A most interesting part of the book is a seven-day tape-recorded diary kept by the scrum half Doug Morgan.) And Hopkins is no respecter of persons either. He is Clearly no respecter of Burrell, who, he thinks, was not up to the job. Though he retains a certain wary respect for Dawes, the two evidently did not get on with each Other. But then, Dawes did not seem to get On with any journalist. 'You have no Power', Hopkins quotes him as saying to some pressmen; have power.' In a review in the Observer Clem Thomas wrote that Hopkins's account was substantially correct, while Bryn Thomas's Was not. Well, he was there, and I watched the matches only on television. Moreover, Clem Thomas has played the game at the Very highest level. Like Carwyn James in the Guardian and Tony Lewis in the Telegraph, he writes with authority. But when ne says that the rain fell on Lions and New Zealanders alike — that it was the same for everybody — he is not being quite fair. You Can say that examinations in the summer are the same for everybody: but some people sweat heavily, while others suffer from hay ever: there is no fairness because people's Zealand are different. So with the New 4,ealand rain. Not only were the All Blacks used to it; more, they could return to their families, whereas the British team were, owing to the weather, confined to secondrate hotels. This conveniently brings me to one of the real reasons for the tour's failure. It was sex; °I., if you prefer it, husbandly love. After sex, money. This was the second reason for dissatisfaction. The team resented not only the cash made by the New Zealand commercial sponsors but also the meanness of the tour authorities over pocket money, hotels and drink. And the third reason was that the Lions lost, chiefly because the New Zealanders had better backs. Mr Quinn is a New Zealander. His book goes some way towards explaining why the All Blacks were, in the backs at any rate, superior. It is a necessary corrective to both British versions, of which Hopkins's is the hest.
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