Football: Players today are fitter and faster but not more skilled

ONE OF the many consequences of the professionalisation of rugby to which, as far as I know, no one has yet drawn attention is that it has rendered obsolete an indoor game which kept the fans out of mischief. I mean the selection of best sides: best Lions since 1970, best Welsh team since 1945, best team ever. We have most of us played it at one time or another.

I last played it at a Twickenham dinner a couple of seasons ago, when the competition was to choose the post-1970 Lions XV closest to Jeff Probyn's selection. It was the most interesting part of the evening: certainly more so than the lengthy after-dinner speech by the football fun-loving David Mellor, who for some unaccountable reason the Rugby Football Union had thought a suitable entertainer for the assembled guests. I remember Probyn's selection: JPR Williams; G Davies, J Guscott, M Gibson, D Duckham; B John, G Edwards; F Cotton, P Wheeler, G Price, P Ackford, W J McBride, R Uttley, D Richards, P Winterbottom.

I got 13 out of the 15. Though I believed Probyn was right to choose Jeremy Guscott, I did not think he would. I expected him to prefer the more solid virtues of John Dawes instead. And I did not see how he could possibly leave out Mervyn Davies.

The consensus among those at my table was that there was a distinctly pro-English bias to the back row, and that Fergus Slattery should have been in ahead of Peter Winterbottom.

Games of this kind can still be played, but they do not mean much. Perhaps they never did, because the game was always changing. Even before professionalisation, a player such as the great Neath lineout practitioner Roy John would, at 13 and a half stones, have been considered a little on the light side even as an open-side flanker.

But in the past two seasons the game has changed. Not out of all recognition - for it is still manifestly rugby union - but in a way which means that players have to be judged by different criteria.

Players are not more skilled. They are, by and large, less adept both at giving and at taking a pass. This may be partly because the ball is lighter. But it is mainly, I think, because of the greater speed at which the operation is conducted these days.

Another reason is that both the giver and receiver of the ball are under greater pressure, whether from their opposite numbers or from the defending back row. In part the attackers bring these troubles on themselves on account of the modern fashion for lying flat. But the principal reason is that professionalisation has meant that even more players spend the greater part of their working lives in an offside position.

If players are not more skilled, they are certainly bigger, fitter and faster. They can also be more brutal. I am not talking here about the psychopaths who have always been with us but about those who use force as a means of intimidation.

Last season, for instance, I watched Richmond unexpectedly defeat Newcastle (for the form book was slightly different then) at the Richmond Athletic Ground, whose passing as a home for first-class rugby I much regret.

If Richmond Council had shown the slightest interest in or concern for the game, instead of obstructing its development in the borough at every opportunity, London Scottish and Richmond would almost certainly still be at their own ground, and not at, respectively, The Stoop and somewhere just off the M4 not far from Reading.

Anyway, on this occasion at the Athletic Ground, Dominic Chapman, the Richmond right wing, happened to have the ball in his hands near the touchline. He was not making a spectacular dash for the tryline or anything like that. He was virtually in a stationary position.

Nick Popplewell and another Newcastle forward did not content themselves with nudging him into touch, which was all that was required, but pushed him hard and carried on pushing until the fragile Chapman came into violent contact with the advertising boarding. They went unrebuked by the referee.

The problems of referees are certainly increasing. In the recent game between Gloucester and Wasps, which Wasps won in extra time, the Gloucester supporters verbally assaulted Brian Campsall, the referee, for allowing too much time added on.

The fans were right to complain, though they may have gone about it the wrong way. It would be a sensible start to transfer these decisions from the referee to an official in the stand, who, as in rugby league, would blow the hooter for full time.