Ten of the worst moments of rugby skulduggery

Rugby has, to all intents and purposes, cleaned itself up a bit from the dark era of thuggery that plagued the amateur days and early professional period.

The advent of the TMO, 32 cameras or so at each Test and huge penalties for foul play has meant that, thankfully, the game now is as clean as it’s ever been.

The sheer size and strength of the modern player means that acts like those listed in this piece are simply completely unacceptable these days.

However, we spent some time looking back through the archives to find the best of the worst, the dirtiest of the dark ages and, without in any way condoning these actions, we bring you our top ten acts of pure rugby skulduggery.

1) Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu against British and Irish Lions, 2005

Roll your mind back to 18th June 2005 at the wonderful Lancaster Park in Christchurch. No Lions Test ever started with such controversy as this when Mealamu and Umaga cleared out the Lions skipper, Brian O’Driscoll, and spear tackled him into the ground. Deliberate? Premeditated? No-one can ever truly know the answer to that but the lack of apology from Umaga and the All Blacks added a rather sour seasoning onto an already distasteful dish.

Remarkably, a citing officer claimed there was no case to answer – a reminder of the days of rugby brutalism – although Umaga claimed that he and Drico sorted things out… eventually.

“As you can see he obviously got over it, he’s back playing,” said Umaga, whose clearout alongside Mealamu dislocated the Irish outside centre’s shoulder. “We’ve buried the hatchet. We’ve spoken a couple of times and have bumped into each other.”

2) Corne Krige’s five seconds of madness against England, 2002

In a space of five seconds, a rather overly hyped up South African skipper went on a wrecking spree. With England scrum-half Matt Dawson the target of his ire, hands, arms and shoulders swung hither and thither as the crazy Krige decided that this match was governed by MMA and not World Rugby laws.

In the post match presser, Springbok coach Rudolf Straeuli earnestly told anyone prepared to listen that “we also have concussions – do you think we give ourselves concussions?”

Close examination of the video would confirm that indeed they had, as one of the Krige haymakers landed fully on his own fly-half, Andre Pretorius! England won the match 53-3, with Krige issuing the sinister threat, “see you in Perth” (2003 World Cup). He did see them in Perth and lost that one too!

3) Wade Dooley’s wake up call against Wales, 1987

Former Blackpool policeman Wade Dooley is now a citing commissioner. Now, for those that know about Wade’s love of gratuitous on-pitch violence, you’d wonder precisely what you’d need to do to be citied by the big man and from the video below, you’d conclude that it would have to involve a concealed carry weapon at the barest of minimums.

This flurry of fisticuffs heralded the short lived reign of Bath scrum-half Richard Hill’s captaincy career, whose vibrant team talk is said to have fuelled England’s pre-match fury, as one Dooley fist landed on Phil Davies’ nose and cheek, fully breaking the Welshman’s jaw in the process.

Nevertheless, the stories of Dooley remain the stuff of legend. When asked by Will Carling to provide a profile of his opposite number, a young John Eales in a Test against Australia, Wade commented: “He is an art student.” Carling then asked Dooley if that’s all he knew about Eales to which Wade replied “That is all I f***ing well need to know!”

4) Keven Mealamu’s flying headbutt against England, 2010

Ok, as an act this was pretty much top of the skulduggery list on its own. Mealamu, a man with a lot of form for wanton thuggery, was completely out of control and deliberately headbutted the English skipper, Lewis Moody.

In today’s climate of head injury focus, you’d bet your bottom dollar that any ensuing ban would be long and well publicised but not this one. Rather curiously the subsequent reaction by the All Blacks to this calculated and deliberate piece of thuggery wasn’t to apologise to the concussed Moody, but was to spend the entire 72 hours leading up to the disciplinary hearing promoting Mealamu’s community work and ‘good character’!

A video shoot with poorly children in a local hospital was released 48 hours after the incident with Mealamu at their bedsides, showing grave concern. A presser was held focusing on the hooker’s Christian beliefs, a theme which continued into the witness statements of the hearing itself, which was so protective of the hooker and so far-fetched in its ‘evidence’ one wonders if the sinking of Greenpeace’s “Rainbow Warrior” in Auckland harbour was introduced as one of Mealamu’s ‘mitigating factors’.

Put bluntly, it was yet again premeditated and cowardly behaviour by the Kiwi hooker, a man that will always be remembered by this and the BOD incident over anything else he ever did, and rightly so. And the sheer brassneckery of the campaign that followed from the New Zealand management was so transparently pathetic that the element of slapstick humour was never far away. An unedifying affair.

5) Marius Bosman against the British and Irish Lions, 1997

Poor Doddie Weir is no longer with us and his life is rightly celebrated by the rugby community. It was his humour on the seminal Living With The Lions DVD that cemented his place in rugby wit and tale, but the flip side of that was his showing of visible emotion as he was forced to leave the Lions tour with a shattered knee, courtesy of the thuggery of lock Bosman.

Now, a few of our incidents in this article can be put down to tempers overspilling, heat of the moment sort of stuff, but not this one. This was a brutal, deliberate and calculated act to stamp on an exposed knee and potentially curtail a fellow professional’s career. As skulduggery goes, it’s almost in a league of its own for cowardice.

No-one really heard of Bosman after that, and frankly nobody really wanted to. Even the South African public were embarrassed by his actions. But on the other hand, Weir and his courage became synonymous with everything good in the sport of rugby. Not all heroes wear capes.

6) Federico Mendez’s haymaker against England, 1990

As Los Pumas emerged as a world rugby force, so their reputation for hard rugby rose with them. A November Test in 1990 saw them visit England, who at that time had a similar billing as robust opponents who played to the line of the law.

Talking of law, it was with some irony that the first half saw Argentinian hooker, Mendez, launch an absolute king hit of a punch on an innocent police inspector Paul Ackford, the locking partner of the aforementioned Wade Dooley. The incident was ignited by Jeff Probyn grabbing Diego Cash’s manhood in the preceding ruck and Mendez, incensed by the act, decided to vent on whoever was closest – in this case Ackford.

As the lanky lock laid unconscious on the floor, Dooley was seen towering over him, as Bill Mclaren observed, “his police colleague offering some comforting words”. However, beat cop Wade was never short of dry humour and his conversation to chief inspector Ackford was reported as observing: “You can see which one of us soft f***ers pushes a f***ing pen for a living…”

7) Wayne Shelford’s king hit against Wales, 1987

This was billed as a friendly warm-up before the first Rugby World Cup in 1987 but was a game marred by niggle as both teams tried to find form before the tournament of their careers.

Now, Wayne Shelford, the All Black eight, wasn’t known as a shrinking violet. Indeed, playing for New Zealand against France in 1986, a game which became known as the Battle of Nantes, he found himself trapped at the bottom of a ruck and had his scrotum sliced open by an errant boot thus exposing his testicles.

Shelford being Shelford simply ordered the team physio to stitch him up before promptly returning to action with 38 pieces of cotton holding his privates together.

So when another scuffle erupted against Wales, ignited partly by Welsh lock Huw Richards, Shelford intervened, landing a king hit punch that Manny Pacquiao would have been proud of, completely flooring Richards who lay completely unconscious.

However, there was worse to come and after physio Tudor Jones revived the Welsh lock by splashing his face liberally with water, Australian referee Kerry Fitzgerald chose to send Richards off, whilst rather curiously allowing Shelford to stay on the pitch. Richards never played for Wales again; Shelford became a world champion eight weeks later.

8) Lewis Moody’s red mist moment against Samoa, 2005

Now, we love Lewis here at Planet Rugby and we’re grateful for his many words of wisdom for the site over the last 15 years, but amongst his least finest hours in the white shirt was becoming the first English player to be sent off at Twickenham. In this instance, it was for punching Tigers teammate, the behemoth Samoan Alesana Tuilagi, after England wing Mark Cueto was taken out in the air landing fully on his head and neck.

Sure, Moodos was incensed by the treatment of his teammate and was reacting to the danger Cueto was placed in but he deservedly saw red for the punches thrown.

However, Lewis’s abiding memory will always be of the punches he received in return: “I always wondered why Semo Sititi was allowed to stay on the pitch,” he chuckled. “He threw 11 punches in that brawl – I know this purely because all 11 haymakers landed on my bloody nose!”

9) Bakkies Botha shoulder charge on Adam Jones against British Lions, 2009

No skulduggery reel would be complete without paying tribute to the king of cheap shots, Springbok lock Botha. Now, we could have chosen Bakkies’ headbutt on Jimmy Cowan but we’ll accept that was just his way of saying ‘Howzit’ to his mates, but instead, we’ll take this shoulder charge on Lions tighthead Jones as our moment of Botha brazen thuggery.

Jones’ shoulder was fully dislocated after the incident and took some extended surgery to fix. As the prop himself observed after the match: “You’ve seen that clip in Lethal Weapon 2 when Mel Gibson bangs his shoulder back into place on a wall?

“We tried that, it doesn’t f***ing work!”

10) Philippe Sella’s blindside moves against Australia, 1990

When it comes to Gallic skulduggery, Sella isn’t the first name that would spring to mind. However the Australia versus France series was one marred with thuggery from the moment it started until the moment it finished. Previous Test matches on the tour had seen red cards for Abdelatif Benazzi and some moments that were less than edifying, but this Brisbane Test was something else.

Set in the backdrop of a 15 on 15 brawl, Aussie lock Peter FitzSimons was well at home dishing it out towards any player wearing blue, but the blindside right hook from Sella saw the massive frame of FitzSimons fall prone on the ground in a knockout blow of world title proportions.

However, whilst Sella gets the skulduggery spotlight, in the start of the brawl we can see Wallaby hooker Phil Kearns, at some 20 stones, taking issue with the diminutive 11 stone French scrum-half Henri Sanz and losing the battle quite convincingly. Sanz had spent some time as the number one French amateur flyweight boxing champion – Kearns probably wasn’t aware of that before the match, but he certainly was afterwards – as Sanz flattened him with a rather tasty left cross.

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