Tom English: The day rugby ran scared

TIME IS a great healer, as long as there’s enough of it. It’s hard to know how long it took for the wounds to heal after the Five Nations championship of 1972, but the memory of it now is distant for some people and, mercifully, non-existent for most. Ian McLauchlan is one who remembers, though. He sighs and says a great mistake was made that spring. Forty years ago next month, Scotland were due to play Ireland at Lansdowne Road, but they never turned up. A week before the game a one-paragraph statement came out of Murrayfield revealing that they would not be making the trip to Dublin. Their committee had met and that was their final decision. The game was off.

They cited “current relevant factors” as their reason. In a period of escalating murder and mayhem in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the SRU’s fear, though it went unstated in public, was for the safety of their players. All pleas from the Irish fell on deaf ears. All guarantees of the Scottish players’ well-being in Dublin were dismissed. The Scots weren’t travelling – and that was it.

“I wasn’t consulted,” says McLauchlan, Scotland’s loosehead prop in those days and now president of the SRU. “If they’d asked me, then I would have said I was going. Rugby is no place for politics. We made a terrible mistake. I don’t know who was driving the decision not to go but there wasn’t a chance I would have stayed away from Ireland had I a say in the matter. Were we in danger? No way. Christ almighty, we’re a rugby team. Ireland are a united rugby nation. Nothing was ever likely to happen. Never in a million years did I see danger. We’d have gone over, played a game of rugby and come home. But we didn’t go and we were wrong. Did I say that to the committee at the time? No. I would never have played for Scotland again. You knew your place in those days.”

“Ian is right,” says his 1970s team-mate John Frame. “I don’t remember being involved in a decision about whether we should go or not. I certainly don’t recall being asked. You’ll probably find some antediluvian selector who says the players were all asked but I don’t have any memory of it.”

“I was only a young player at the time,” says Jim Renwick, “but nobody asked me anything. Aye, I’d have went. I’m not a political animal.”

“It never entered my head that we shouldn’t go,” says lock Ian Barnes. “Were we under threat from the IRA? Total shite.”

Scotland stayed away and Ireland festered. Their reaction was by turns shock, anger and sadness, feelings that were repeated when Wales followed Scotland’s lead and also refused to play their fixture in Dublin that season. “People felt let down by the SRU,” says Fergus Slattery, the great Irish openside flanker. “You know, I could understand if players didn’t want to come because you have wives and mothers possibly putting pressure on them. I’d have had total respect for any of the Scottish lads if they didn’t want to travel. They wouldn’t have had to explain themselves to me. But I would have thought the SRU should have sent a side. There was a diatribe against them once they made the decision. It was nonsense to think that the IRA were going to blow them up. The IRA even said it. There was no threat.”

It was, though, an incendiary time that demands revisiting. Less than a month before the game was supposed to take place, 13 civilians were shot dead on the streets of Derry by British Army paratroopers, an atrocity that is sometimes referred to as the Bogside Massacre but which most people know as Bloody Sunday. In its aftermath more than 20,000 protesters gathered on Merrion Square, the home of the British Embassy in the centre of Dublin. They carried black flags and banners of condemnation while a band played the Dead March.

The mood turned vicious soon enough. An IRA march arrived on Merrion Square and as police tried to force them back with batons, petrol bombs were thrown over the heads of the 200 officers and into the windows of the embassy. Three men broke through the cordon, took down the Union flags and burned them in effigy. They hung a Tricolour at half-mast right where the British flag used to be. Meanwhile, the petrol bombs rained down in ever greater numbers. Slattery says he remembers going about his daily business and stopping to watch the embassy in flames.

At a little after 5pm the Georgian terrace was ablaze. The protesters stopped the fire engines getting through and when, eventually, they did make it past, after two and a half hours, the mob tried to cut their hoses while shouting “Burn! Burn! Burn!” as the fire engulfed the four storeys of the embassy. Outside the Post Office on O’Connell Street, Sinn Fein members collected money for the IRA. Three men in black berets stood opposite a Tricolour. Offices of British companies were boarded up and protected by the police. Anti-British feeling in the Republic was riotously high.

This was just over three weeks before the game. As the days passed, a hesitance took over at Murrayfield. They suggested to their Irish counterparts that they were worried about bringing a team to Dublin given the political climate. Two of the Scottish side, the wing Billy Steele and the hooker Bobby Clark, were in the forces and might be deemed a target by Republican paramilitaries, feared the SRU.

The IRFU responded by sending a heavyweight delegation, seven-strong, to Edinburgh to reassure them that they had nothing to fear, that despite the rapidly escalating Troubles in Northern Ireland no paramilitary group had ever targeted the Republic. The Irish reminded the Scots that Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Unionist stood side by side in the Irish team, that even during the horrors of Ireland’s War of Independence from 1919-1921 rugby internationals were played in Dublin. Scotland had visited twice in those years. In the six months from January to July 1921, a thousand people were killed in the war, but still Scotland travelled to Dublin in the midst of it. They came and went without incident.

In February 1972, the IRA issued a statement: “The rugby match should go ahead. No true Irish Republican will offer an opposition to them.” It did no good. The meeting at Murrayfield lasted five hours and still the SRU pondered the trip to Dublin. Finally, on 17 February they made their decision. A reporter from Reuters phoned Peter Brown, the Scottish captain, for a comment. Brown’s words appeared all over the press in Britain and Ireland. “I am very pleased it [the game] is off,” he was quoted as saying. “We weren’t looking forward to going at all... I am glad we have got a decision.”

But Brown says he was misquoted. “It was a no-brainer!” he said last week. “We all wanted to play [in Dublin] to make up for the loss in Wales [a fortnight before] and the famous try in the mud by Gareth [Edwards]. The players were not consulted or in any way involved in the decision. The interminable wait for a decision to be taken led to me being completely misquoted by Reuters. As instructed by the SRU secretary, John Law, I stonewalled all questions, but unfortunately closed the phone call [with Reuters] with the words that came back to haunt me. I said, ‘I was delighted that a decision had at last been reached’. The headline the next day was ‘Scotland pleased with decision!’ My name was mud in Ireland. I never forgave Reuters and refused any future contacts they attempted.”

The reaction in Ireland was thunderous. It was felt that the decision-makers in Murrayfield were ignorant of their history. “What kind of people do they think we are?” asked the Irish Times.

Ronnie Dawson, the former Irish captain and leader of the 1959 British and Irish Lions who was now a key member of the IRFU committee, called it an “an extremely sad day for rugby football. The SRU have made a grave error of judgment. I would not have thought such a decision possible from a country which had such a strong affinity with Ireland.”

Tom Kiernan, the incumbent Irish captain, said he was “amazed” and believed that the SRU had been influenced by hysterical newspaper and television reports. Mike Gibson, the great centre from Northern Ireland, said he was certain the Scots were under no risk. A reader telephoned the offices of a Dublin newspaper and suggested that 15 white feathers be sent to Murrayfield. “That is a little severe,” wrote the paper. “But certainly after this decision the phrase ‘Scotland the Brave’ will have a hollow ring in Irish hearts.”

The Irish Times called it the “worst administrative error taken by any rugby body this century.”

Karl Mullen, captain of Ireland’s 1948 Grand Slam team and Lions captain in 1950, was moved to say: “I feel I should express my anger in the strongest possible terms at Scotland’s decision, which seems to me unilateral. It is obvious they made no effort to study the implications of their action. As a Lions captain I had to give undertakings that religion and politics must never influence me or the team and having contributed to rugby in these islands I expect the same from all.”

Another former Irish captain, Andy Mulligan, weighed in. “As an Ulster Irishman, with inevitably Scottish connections, it is hard to believe that the SRU has miscalculated the mood of Dublin and abdicated its major responsibility which is to rugby and, in the present tragedy of Ulster, to the coming together as a whole.”

Letters pages in all the Irish papers were full of anger. Sighle Gogan of Blackrock, Dublin, wrote of Scotland’s “unspoken insult” that the Irish were incapable of protecting invited guests. Jim McGowan, a Scot exiled in Dublin, spoke of the “embarrassment I feel towards the SRU... For me to have to apologise for their decision shows how ludicrous the situation has become. I am ashamed of the ‘sportsmen’ of my country. Men or mice is not too hard a question to pose at this time.”

Another Dublin-based Scot wrote to The Scotsman: “Their [the SRU’s] pathetic excuse that they are concerned for their players’ safety is nonsense.” From Bangor in County Down, there was this: “I cannot express my disgust too harshly at the craven attitude of the SRU... What kind of ‘sleekit, timorous, cowerin’ beasties’ are they? Scotland the Brave – a mockery.”

There was a chilling footnote to 1972, however. In the space of 20 minutes on the evening of 1 December, two car bombs exploded in the middle of Dublin, killing two people and injuring more than 130 others. The following month, another car bomb was detonated near the site of the previous two, Sackville Place, just off O’Connell Street. This time there was one fatality, a 22-year-old Scottish bus conductor called Thomas Douglas.

It’s accepted that it was Loyalist paramilitaries who planted the bombs and, for 40 years, there has been a suspicion that they were in collusion with British forces when they did so. Bombing had, therefore, come to the Republic. Not that it would have changed the minds of Brown, McLauchlan and their team. They would still have travelled, no matter what. To this day they are convinced their safety was not an issue.

As proof there is the story of England playing in Dublin in the Five Nations in 1973. It would be wrong to say that their players went without a care in the world, but they went. John Pullin was their captain. When he led them out on to the field they received a spontaneous and deafening ovation from the Irish crowd that lasted wholly five minutes. Some of the English players were in tears, such was Lansdowne Road’s depth of appreciation for them coming after the snubs by the Scots and the Welsh the previous year. England lost the match, but won new friends. “We were in the dressing room and we were told not to go out until the applause for England had stopped,” said Slattery. “And it went on and on. It was extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.”

At the post-match dinner, Pullin made a comment that has gone down in rugby legend. “We might not be very good,” he said. “But at least we turn up.”