Retro is in for football’s World Cup this summer. A number of kits pay homage to the past and, if rugby union is not getting nostalgic for a time when the game tended to be played on dilapidated mudflats, this Friday night will see the resumption of one of the game’s most historic fixtures.
Cardiff Blues play Gloucester in the final of the European Challenge Cup in Bilbao, 134 years after the teams (the Blues were Cardiff then) first met, at the Arms Park. In an era when there were no points and a goal beat any number of unconverted tries, the visitors romped home with a goal, seven tries and nine touches down while not conceding.
It was the 1884 meeting between the clubs that proved historic. Team formations then were looser than today: backs were usually made up of two full-backs, three three-quarters and two half-backs, although there were often 10 forwards. On 9 February that year, Cardiff were away at Cheltenham College and were short of a three-quarter. They summoned Frank Hancock, a Somerset native who had moved to Cardiff for work and had played for the club’s second team. He scored the only two tries of the match and, reluctant to drop him for the next fixture, against Gloucester at the Arms Park on 23 February, the selectors picked him as a fourth three-quarter, becoming the first team to adopt a formation behind that is familiar today.
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The match was scoreless but Cardiff continued the setup for the rest of the season, alternating between three and four three-quarters the following campaign. By 1885-86, the Hancock template was followed by most clubs in Wales and was adopted by the national side against Scotland in January 1886. That season Cardiff used four three-quarters throughout, scoring 131 tries in 27 matches and conceding a mere four, including two in their final match, against Moseley, their only defeat. The other two were scored by Gloucester, in their home and away defeats to the Blue and Blacks.
Hancock went on to win four caps, for Wales rather than his native England, and the fixture between the two clubs became one of many Anglo-Welsh rivalries, although it tailed off at the end of the 1970s, with the 1983 encounter the first for four years.
Watching a match at Kingsholm in the 1970s was like never leaving Wales. The crowd was invariably large, vocal and hostile, no different to travelling to Neath, Pontypool or Pontypridd. And Gloucester then resembled Pooler in style, with a gnarled set of forwards, kicking half-backs and a goal-kicker in Peter Butler who knocked them over from everywhere.
Programmes in those days were cursory affairs. In 1973, Gloucester’s was a folded piece of paper with the teams and fixture list in the middle and cursory club notes on the back. Cardiff’s was larger but no more informative, stuffed with advertisements, but in 1976 they broke the protocol of extending visitors a warm welcome by having a dig at their style of play.
Bigging up Gloucester’s fly-half, Chris Williams, the note compiler Dai Hayward observed: “Perhaps his all-round ability might balance the preponderance of emphasis on the Gloucester forwards to a more balanced and effective style of play. That might be a vain hope because Gloucester have built a highly successful pattern of forward play around their proven pack and who can blame them for playing it the way they know best?”
Gloucester could have reminded Hayward about the 1973 meeting between the teams at Kingsholm (by then they faced each other once a season). The packs were full of hard men, with Mike Burton, Mike Nicholls, Robin Cowling, John Fiedler and John Watkins on the one side, Mike Knill, Gerry Wallace, Ian Robinson, Lyn Baxter and Roger Lane on the other.
The backs were virtually nonpaying spectators in a 3-3 draw, with Keith James’s first-half drop goal for Cardiff cancelled out after the break by a Butler penalty. It was an era when forwards sorted out differences without recourse to the law and so it was here, even with an international referee, Johnny Johnson, in charge.
Cardiff made a late change when the scrum-half Brynmor Williams was ruled out, replaced by the rookie Robin Morgan, who was taken out off the ball early on. Even in the law of the jungle there was a code and Robinson did not wait long to take revenge.
Cardiff, a year after the retirement of Barry John, were known for the quality of their backs but, as the team everyone in Wales delighted in beating, they needed a hard edge at forward. Robinson, who in 1972 had punched his opposite number, Jeff Matheson, so hard during an ill-tempered match against New Zealand that the Kiwi did not come round until he had been in hospital for a few hours, waited for the right moment.
Cardiff had a lineout on halfway in front of the main stand. Gary Davies, the hooker, was ordered to throw long and, as the ball missed all the jumpers on its way to the backs, Johnson turned and followed its direction. There were no neutral touch judges then, no cameras and no citing officers. Robinson sized up his quarry, delivered a punch with his right fist and, as the crowd bellowed in impotent fury, jogged his way to the vicinity of the ball as his victim picked himself up.
There was an eruption in the same stand in 1977 when Cardiff won with a last-minute Gerald Davies try. One home supporter, not moved by the brilliance of the wing, invited away supporters to debate the score with him outside, before deciding, on reflection, that there and then would do.
And in 1983, when Cardiff were comfortable winners, Gareth Davies was lining up a conversion when the Wales and Lions’ fly-half received a wave of unsolicited advice. He interrupted his digging – it was a time before tees – turned and offered two fingers to his tormentors. It could have been V for victory, but wasn’t.
In his capacity now, as the chairman of the Welsh Rugby Union, Davies would be forced to issue an admonishment should one of his players indulge in a similar antic, but that was then, a time when incidents were largely contained, seen by those who had paid for the privilege and rarely reported on, a game for players.
Friday will not be a nod to the past with both teams more dangerous behind than imposing at forward, but it is a rare example of a cross‑border match that has a significance from way back, a fixture that changed the game.
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