Consider this: barring the intervention of an usually malevolent deity, Bath’s Matt Banahan should be playing on the wing for England during the autumn rugby internationals. Banahan is 22 years old, 6ft 7in tall, and weighs in at 253lbs, or a shade over 18st. Go back 30-odd years and there on the wing for England was Liverpool’s Mike Slemen — this was in the days when Fylde vs Preston Grasshoppers was first up on Rugby Special. Slemen then was 6ft 1in and weighed 12st 4lbs, or pretty much like a reasonably fit bloke you might see on the street today. (If all you met on the street were a race of Matt Banahans, you’d be in Gulliver’s Travels.)
There’s an instructive comparison here with American Football. Last weekend we had the NFL’s wholly fabulous annual Wembley bash. If Banahan had been on the pitch, his size and weight would have made him the equivalent of a linebacker, but his skill sets would have been those of a wide receiver, and the biggest one of these on the winning New England side was Randy Moss, at 6ft 4ins and 210lbs. And people wonder at England’s current injury list.
England coach Martin Johnson has already lost players of the stature — in both senses — of Phil Vickery, Julian White, Delon Armitage, Simon Shaw and Andrew Sheridan. Are we creating a super-species of rugby player who is so strong and so huge and so fast that serious injury starts to become inevitable? American football players are always astounded that rugby uses none of the body armour and protection so essential in their sport. In a fascinating article for the New Yorker recently, the Malcolm Gladwell looks at the possible causal links between NFL players’ long-term brain damage and the constant impact on the head that their sport involves. And top American footballers play barely half the number of games in a season that a top international rugby player will play. In rugby, you can’t help thinking, sooner or later, someone is going to get really seriously hurt.
The one bright spot for Johnson will be the return of Jonny Wilkinson at No 10. He’s been playing superbly for Toulon, his metronomic kicking producing match-winning points totals. Now he can add a complete bill of health to his preposterously Greek god looks. But look what his father Phil, who has helped to manage his career, said the other day: ‘Because he hasn’t played a lot for the last four years, he hasn’t been smashed around.’ How much do our rugby stars have to be smashed around before we wonder what the game has become?
Meanwhile, how great to see rugby referee Nigel Owens popping up on the radio, and giving a revealing and charming interview to my old colleague Kevin Mitchell in the Observer. Owens is one of the best refs in the world — though he did have the bad luck to be looking after the ‘Bloodgate’ match earlier this year. He also happens to be gay, and is now happily talking about his life, and the autobiography he has written, Half Time. At the same time last week, Donal Og Cusack, one of the most famous players in the absurdly macho world of Irish hurling, also came out as gay. For Cusack, coming out to his family was the biggest issue. As he writes in his memoirs, ‘My father… is a crane driver. Building sites can be cruel, hard places; he didn’t need this.’ But the fact that both these books can be widely welcomed is a measure of how far we have come. It is just over a decade, after all, since poor, tormented Justin Fashanu walked into a lock-up garage in Shoreditch and hanged himself. On the other hand, reading reports this week of a near-fatal attack on a trainee policeman outside a gay nightclub in Liverpool, maybe not that far.
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