What Goes on Tour?

In the amateur game, rugby tours are about drinking alcohol and avoiding drinking bodily fluids belonging to someone else. You arrive at your destination battered from a long journey and an awful lot of drinking put on your one clean shirt and head to the town’s hotspots. Then for a long weekend you proceed to get pissed, argue, split into warring factions and then wish you had never come away. In the midst of it you probably have to play some form of rugby which no one is really in the mood for and certainly not in any condition for. Then on the journey home you wish you could do it again. You get home and a little piece of you misses those irritating idiots you have shared a long weekend with.

(the kids with dad)

I have no idea if anything like that goes on in the professional era. They face many different challenges, though I am sure they have the warring factions and the arguments. They also find themselves in a place where people know them and probably want to see them lose. They travel around the world on the back of a 13 month season in the case of the Northern Hemisphere following Lions tours. Then they have to talk up their chances of beating people they have either never beaten in 60 years and if they have it was once in 148 meetings. We the fans think “yes, this is the year” blinded by our love of the teams. In truth, we here in England, just have not found a way to consistently perform at the top level, well not since 2003. I think it comes down to one thing........ Youth, and the different attitudes each hemisphere has to it. I am having a hard job justifying this when I think of the aging South African team but bear with me. Australia in particular has the attitude in which they blood their young players on the international stage and let them grow there. Look at Matt Giteau, this man who at 28 is the old head of the Wallaby team was “on debut” in 2002 at Twickenham. He had a nightmare, Jonny Wilkinson smashed him about he kicked badly I think he made more errors in that game than the much pilloried Ian Balshaw did in his whole career. The Aussies though never gave up, they saw a talent, and pursued it. In doing so they have created a true rugby great......at 28! Compare that to the treatment of Danny Cipriani, Matthew Tait, and Courtney Lawes. Now Australia is also bringing in players like Will Genia, Berrick Barnes, James O’Conner, and Quiad Cooper. Guys so young they don’t just need coaches they need nannies to. Australia though is prepared to take risks all these guys have the potential to be better than Giteau and they will flourish under him. Maybe in the long run this attitude will help the much maligned Danny Cipriani in his growth as a player, but would he want to come back to the stifled English approach to rugby?? The All Blacks have a similar attitude; look how they deal with their legends when they find someone to replace them. In England Sean Fitzpatrick would have got his 100 caps because we would have though he deserved them. In New Zealand, they thanked him, shock his hand and sent him to the All Blacks graveyard, or Europe as it is known. They did the same with Tana Umaga and Jerry Collins. Still great players, but they had younger ones in the wings who could carry the mantel, so they forged on, no ceremony just goodbye. Not us, the only thing that keeps Mike Tindall out of England is if his zimmerframe breaks on the way to the ground.

The problem seems to be that we take every game as a must win game and as a result play with a safe, defensive must not lose attitude. Rather than use these tours as a chance to blood people in games where we can see how they perform. In the end they end drafted into important games due to injury and as a result get binned on the back of them. “The tour of Hell” in 1998 saw young players forced to sink or swim as a result of this we found some players who would go on and bring home a world cup. Matt Dawson, Jonny Wilkinson, Josh Lewsey and Phil Vickery all came through this experience better and stronger both physically and mentally.

So whether these tours show us anything I don’t know. Already I am seeing all the attacking flair of Ben Foden being stripped and replaced with kicking machine, assimilated into Borg like English pragmatism. I know one thing I would love to see them go away and do a bit more of what we do in the amateur game, without the accusations of sexual assault obviously, but just enjoy yourselves. We had a kicking ban one year during a game on tour. Maybe that would be the answer. Oh yes and the site of Martin Johnson in the stand with a pink swimming cap on would go down a treat. His great craggy face stretched back like a Californian woman’s following a face lift.........Tour I hate it, where we going next year?