It surely befalls every rugby correspondent to give readers a tip for the forthcoming Winter Olympics, so here is mine. Watch out for Danielle Scott, the Australian. Scott was an outstanding gymnast, the youngest athlete to be offered a scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport. In Pyeongchang, therefore, it stands to reason that she is one of the favourites for gold in aerial skiing.
It stands to reason because, if you are an Australian gymnast, then you actually have a better chance in aerial skiing than you do in gymnastics. Alisa Camplin was the first; aged 20, in the twilight of her gymnastics career, she attempted to transfer to skis — and she had never skied before. Eight years later, in Salt Lake City, she won gold.
Australian gymnasts have won medals on skis at every Winter Olympics since. What was initially a quirk was soon recognised to be a theme: gymnasts, in particular the tumblers, have skills that transfer superbly to the tumbling and twirling of aerial skiing. Soon, they started to recruit gymnasts to be skiers. Scott is just the latest.
Australians are good at this stuff and you won’t get a better example of talent transfer than at the Rio Olympics and the gold medals hung around the necks of the Aussie women’s rugby sevens team. After the announcement of the decision, in 2009, that rugby sevens would be an Olympic sport in Rio, the Australian Rugby Union could have started turning its best women rugby players into a sevens team; instead it set out to find the best women that might make rugby players.
Talent identification camps were staged. Ellia Green was a nationally ranked sprinter who gave her cousin a lift to a try-out day in Melbourne and was persuaded to give it a go herself. Chloe Dalton was a basketball player. Emma Tonegato played rugby league. The real jewel in the crown was Charlotte Caslick. She played touch rugby and had never made a tackle in her life. These girls all won gold medals in Rio. Four years before the Games, half of the squad had never even been on a rugby field.
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On a refrigerated Wednesday evening in southwest London last week, I saw the next generation of Caslicks and Tonegatos. Except they were mostly English and they were not particularly motivated by Olympic medals.
On the all-weather pitch at Rosslyn Park, a small group of new players had pitched up to join a session with the club’s women’s team, the Slingbacks. Katy Daley-Mclean, the England fly half (94 caps), was there to give her encouragement. Daley-Mclean’s England team-mates are attending these events all around the country.
This is an RFU campaign, called Inner Warrior, designed to recruit more women into the game. The blurb encourages you to “free your inner warrior”. At Rosslyn Park, the initial message seemed simply about having fun.
Everywhere on the pitch, there were examples of talent transfer. You can spot the netball players immediately, because they catch the ball, stop and pivot. You can see the footballers, running upfield ahead of the ball to find space.
Handball players try to snatch the ball from the opposition rather than making a tackle. At one point, a tall, slim woman received the ball out wide and immediately caught the eye — a fast, very agile, upright runner. Ah yes, that was the ballerina.
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Since the launch of Inner Warrior last year, more than 10,500 women have attended camps; 3,500 of them had never picked up a rugby ball before. Last year, 41 new women’s rugby teams were established.
Up and down the country, the story is the same. Very few girls play rugby at school, so most people coming to these camps arrive with skills that they probably never thought would transfer so well from other sports. Those who have played team ball sports may not realise it, but they have been educated to understand special awareness.
What is interesting is the impact of the new-age footballers. The traditional girls’ sports — hockey, netball, rounders — don’t teach girls to kick. Maybe that is why, at the women’s rugby World Cup last summer, it was kicking skills that were in short supply. Only New Zealand and England, the teams in the final, had decent kicking games.
All the new Warriors at Rosslyn Park that night seemed to have fun. They all said that they would be back. I would encourage anyone else to follow them.
Men’s rugby used to be a game for different skillsets and shapes and sizes, but that is decreasingly the case. The women’s game can boast that now; all shapes, all sizes welcome, all skillsets, netball players, ballerinas, the lot.
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Would drug-cheat Grobler have upset English media?
The column inches devoted to Gerbrandt Grobler in the Irish media have not yet receded. Grobler is the Munster lock, a South African who came to Ireland via Racing 92 and a two-year ban for taking banned drugs.
Many and vociferous have been the criticisms heaped on the Irish Rugby Union for employing Grobler. The riposte came from significant Munster team-mates, Conor Murray and Peter O’Mahony, who leapt to his defence last week. Another grenade was dropped into the conversation on Sunday when Neil Francis, the former Ireland lock and now a columnist, wrote in The Irish Independent: “It is my firmly held belief that there have been upwards of 20 players who have taken anabolic steroids or some form of PED who have played for the Irish provinces in the last 30 years.”
This whole debate was very nearly staged in England instead because Gloucester tried to sign Grobler last year and failed because of visa issues. Their interest didn’t stop there; they have monitored him as a possible recruit for next season, albeit that, for the same visa reasons, the chances of his coming are minimal.
So I wonder how vociferous the conversation would have been over here. Johan Ackermann, who has had such success as the new Gloucester head coach this season, served a two-year drugs ban when he was a player in the Nineties and, in the English press, this is barely mentioned.
● Interviewing the great, recently retired Tom Croft last week was an absolute pleasure. But this story remains, that Croft happily tells against himself:
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Still a teenager, he had played an ‘A’ League game for Leicester at Newcastle and gone out with the boys that night. Just when he was getting a little too stuck in, he was told to calm down because there was a 6am bus back to Leicester the next day where the ‘A’ team were providing opposition for the first team’s training session.
“Don’t worry about it,” Croft said (at least these are the words attributed to him).“I’ll dominate Johnno tomorrow.”
The news arrived at training well before Croft did. Croft was informed that Johnson knew. Croft felt a distinct unease.
Here he takes up the story: “I walked out before training and sped up to catch up with him, and said, ‘I didn’t say it.’ I properly apologised. ‘I didn’t say it. I didn’t.’”
Croft was known as The Dominator for years to come.
