Hacks on the attack

14 June 2017 - 09:57 By Archie Henderson
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Clubs wishing to play in the Premiership must fulfil a list of criteria.
Clubs wishing to play in the Premiership must fulfil a list of criteria.
Image: Gallo Images/Thinkstock

A Rugby Test series is played as much off the field as on it.

You only have to see how the antagonists in the Fourth Estate are winding each other up in New Zealand to know this.

The British (mostly English) rugby writers on tour with the British and Irish Lions seized Saturday's 12-3 win over the Crusaders as proof that these Lions are not the worst team from the northern-hemisphere isles to visit the southern-hemisphere ones.

Whoever in the Kiwi media made the provocative "worst-ever" claim, it was probably done to rile his opponents in the press box - and it worked.

On rugby tours, there is much fraternisation between the two sets of reporters - for the most expedient of reasons - but underneath lurks a blood feud.

When the Lions visited South Africa the last time, in 2009, their imbongis in the media treated Schalk Burger's eye gouge of Luke Fitzgerald as malice with intent and a crime against humanity. The local scribes were scornful.

So it's entertaining to watch from a distance as the two packs of hacks go at one another, no holds barred (to use a phrase popular with our profession since it was coined in 1892 by the Manitoba Daily Free Press to describe the outcome of a wrestling match in which the loser was "strangled into insensibility and may die". Mercifully, he survived.)

This enmity between rival reporters, denied with Trumpian certainty, is hidden by a veneer of diplomacy - and condescension.

In the opening game of the 1995 Rugby World Cup at Newlands, the South African and Australian hacks were given front-row seats in the press box because their teams were playing. The English were a row behind.

When Pieter Hendricks ran around David Campese to score a try, we were unable to contain ourselves, forgot our supposed objectivity, and rose like one man.

Behind us the English tut-tutted and afterwards one of their number remarked: "You would neversee us doing something like that."

A few weeks later the seating was reversed for England's quarterfinal against Australia at the same venue.

When Rob Andrew kicked the drop goal that took England into the semifinals, what happened? The English reporters jumped out of their seats to applaud.

It gave some pleasure to lean forward, tap the patronising Pom on a shoulder, and inquire: "Never?"

It's not just the rugby in New Zealand we will follow over the next two months, it's the rucking, mauling - and possibly even figurative eye-gouging - that will take place in the public prints from Invercargill to Edinburgh, and at many places in between.

But show me a rugby writer without passion or bias, and I'll show you a boring one.

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