Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Everybody, Simon Halliday here, the fifth edition of Haller's Playbook. And just like first of all to say thank you to Mass Group who cover Multi Asset Solutions, foreign exchange, gold, digital currencies, one of the fastest growing companies in the UK from a standing start.
So thank you for your support in this. And I'm talking to you from Bishop's College in Cape Town, one of the oldest schools in South Africa. And you can see D.C. darcy's in College 1897 behind me. D.C. also stands for David Campisi, of course, who I'm actually delighted to welcome here. Hi David from Australia. So we've got coverage from the uk. I'm in South Africa and he's in Australia. So a truly kind of global moment for us.
And so here we are in the aftermath of the British and Irish Lions tour which has just completed. And David, 101 caps. You'll correct me, David, I'm sure, for getting this wrong. 101 caps for Australia.
85 on the wing, 16 fullback. In my more modest career, I had some games at center and some games on the wing. We actually did play against each other a couple of times. I managed to avoid it most of the time, which was great.
And order of Australia 2002 and now a prominent broadcast media, TV broadcaster and always known for his. I think he and I possibly are equivalent individuals in English rugby and Australian rugby. I'm forever handing out views and comments and David certainly is well worth listening to.
But before we take a little trip down memory lane, which I want to do because we have the same vintage, more or less.
David, first of all, welcome. How are you? What are you doing now? And just give us a. How is it down in Australia after that thumping win by Australia against the British Irish Lions?
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah, one very important statistic. Four tackles in 15 years. Just. That's my best record, mate. So I don't know how many Duke tackled. I made four.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: So I'm quite proud. Playing for England, remember? So we, we had to make a.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Lot more Carl inside you, mate. He doesn't pass the ball. So I suppose you had to do something, didn't you?
But anyway.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Look.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Sorry.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: And Jerry Guscott, he didn't pass the ball much.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Very interesting tour. I remember after the, before the first test I was in Brisbane and I spoke to some Gulliver's Travel supporters and I said, guys, if you don't beat us by 30 points you should go home because we had one game against Fiji as a warm up. They had four games and it was you Know, I mean they, they won easily but that wasn't convincing. The second test in Melbourne was.
Yeah, you know, I mean I, I actually said after the third test why wasn't Skeleton played longer in the second test? I reckon if he was there for eight for about 15 more minutes, the lines would have lost.
And then we had the, obviously the amazing lightning which I didn't see. Someone said it was 5Ks away and then someone said, oh no, IRB regulations, it's got to be further than 8 and I've gone, okay.
So obviously they went off the oval for about 30, 40 minutes which obviously helped skeleton out because they would have had a good rest.
But I'm just saying it was very convenient. And the poor guy that was knocked out, they didn't show the actual video. The head knock again at the stadium, they didn't show it at all. They decided to go and sing some songs when the guy's almost knocked out, we don't know how serious he is.
It was a bit bizarre actually.
And yeah, look, I think the hardest thing is when you're up 2 nil mate. You know, they would have partied pretty well. And then you've got one more game to go. You turn up, you want to win, but you do you really want to win. You know, I mean Australia, Australia had to, had to have won that game. If they lost that game we would have been in a lot of trouble.
So, you know, it was really pretty, pretty sort of dull ending. And I saw a lot of comments from Murray Mextead saying that he wouldn't pick one Lions player in his team.
So you know, a lot of people got a lot of comments about the game. I see that Mark Ring also came out and said something very interesting and it's interesting. Mark's very like me. Mark Ring was a great player, very, very instinctive. Will do something different and he, he, he's the same. We all the guys who get flanned that want to say something, we're all cancelled for some stupid reason maybe because we're a threat to, to the actual administration.
Talk our mind, speak our mind and we do things differently.
But if you look at that, yes, good for money wise, great for Rugby Australia. But now we've got a rule now where under Joe Smith because he wants all the overseas players to come back. So I don't know why we've got a competition here really.
Why are we buying players when all the other players are overseas that you pick for the Wallabies? It's going to be an absolute Nightmare.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: It's an interesting one, isn't it?
I said at the very beginning I thought the lines weren't necessarily that good and Australia definitely weren't going to be that bad.
I saw a lot of lines of similar quality. I think back here in the UK we'll see a lot of the Irish players just having seen their best years. Some of the better English players hadn't quite got to the point of. So you had this sort of mix of matches and pretty exciting, you know, the flare players from Scotland really, when you look at it, for the first time ever, you had a lot of Scottish back. Backline players can really find their way to the goal line.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Well, it was also interesting. I've been told that that was the slowest Lions backline in the history of the Lions starting the slowest.
How. How does daddy pick Farrell? When you lose a really good 15, 13 winger, then you bring Farrell across. Now you got four number tens who comes from left and all of a sudden he ends up playing.
I mean, can you imagine some of those young guys? I mean, there must have been the team's camaraderie, mustn't have been great.
And for some stupid reason, that's a rugby league thing. Fathers and sons playing. I mean, that is ridiculous, mate. And for my two Bobsworth, when we went professional, I warned everybody it'd be a mess in 1996.
No one listened and look where we are. We've got rugby league laws in our game. We've got a lot goal line dropout, 50, 20. We drop kick from everyone's offside from the kickoff.
The ball doesn't go straight in the scrum now forward passes, everyone's offside in defense. Why don't we just go and play league?
It'd be a lot easier.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: It's a, it's a fascinating topic and I, I kind of agree that I do, I do think when.
And as a midfielder, you'd expect me to say this. You know, when I saw Farrell and Bundy, Aki in the center, I'm thinking, wow, you know how we get. How are the lines going to get back into this game? And if you actually look at two or three of the kind of key moments when the Lions fluffed it, you know, Farrell was at the heart of that. And I've, you know, picking a guy at 12, you know, who's effectively a 10 and quite a conservative 10 at the same time. When you got to pull the game out of the fire because that was what they needed to do was always going to be A tester. And actually that try that Jorgensen scored was. Was Farrell running across the field and throwing a non catchable pass and creating a lot of pressure. So I kind of agree with you. And of course that is in direct contrast to what we all remember, the greatest Australian size of which you were. You were part. And just go back to memory lane a little bit. 1981 was the first time I played against the Australians and that was just. Just before you and I played against at least two Ellas, if not three. Perhaps it's just a move was so quick, I thought there were three.
But give me an indication because all the true rugby supporters who look back in time remember that era as being an incredible era. What was it about the Ella brothers? You played with them all. What was it you as a winger? What did they do for you? You know, what was it that we're missing in today's rugby, for example?
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Well, I think the 77 schoolboys started everything for us, you know, with the Ellers, Jeff Mould, who's obviously their school. And it went from there.
Then Bob Dwyer came, there was Bob Templeton, then Bob Dwyer came along, then Alan Jones and back to Bob Dwyer.
But if you have a look at the most successful years of Australian rugby, they were all from Randwick, which is a club in Coogee where I played towards my end of my career.
And they were all the coaches and everyone who wanted to play came to Randwick because we basically had the Wolowic team, but we played a style of rugby that everyone loved watching. But the other thing in those days, you play a test match on Saturday, then you turn up and play club rugby on Sunday, you know, and that's where the kids and the crowd love to see because you're watching test players at a suburban ground now, the test players don't want to play, you don't see them. So what happens? The kids don't get to see who the stars are. It's a pretty easy thing. And I mentioned to somebody, in 94 we actually won the Blinderslow Cup. I won it three times. I was very lucky. Anyway, so back in the Australian Rugby union was at Kensington and I knew someone there and I rang him up, I said, can I take the Bledisloe cup home for dinner? Yeah, come and get it. So off I went, had the car, put the Bledesloe in the back seat and off I went home. And two houses down from I lived was a couple of Kiwis. So I went to have dinner with them. I said, mate, there it is.
There's the Bledisloe.
Can you imagine doing that today? Have the police.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: I mean it reminds me of the 1988 Calcutta cup fiasco in Edinburgh when John Jeffrey and Dean Richards obviously you played against the Calcutta Cup. It was the most boring cup game ever in the history of. Hopefully it raised it for people's memories. But the most interesting thing about it was they took the Calcutta cup down Rose Lane, the famous drinking lane of Edinburgh and either dropped it or drop kicked it. Probably in Dean Richard's case dropped it and both got banned. So didn't respect the cup as you did the Bledislope. So. So there we are.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: That's what I was trying to say. The next day I actually took it to Knox Prep and took a photo of every kid with the Leslow Cup.
That's how you promote the game. And I think it was about four or five years ago I got a photo sent to me and the guy with the photo obviously grow up. He said just like to thank you. Here's a photo of us back in 1994.
So that's promotion of the game. We don't do that anymore. We don't get the plat. No one knows who the players are, you know and at the moment we are owned by world rugby. So we all the coaches. We've got a guy from New South Wales who's a leaguey from England, he's going to be the head of direct coaching direct in Australia.
I mean it's absolutely ridiculous. We've got my cat out here already who's got no idea about our culture and history and we've got all these. We just. We've lost the Australian way. No one knows who we are, no one knows how we play and it's very, very sad. And that's the way I look at them. I'm not saying everyone's correct or I'm correct, it's just that I coach, I'm coaching under 13s at the moment and nobody watches the game. They're 13 year olds at a private school and no one wants to know what the problems are. Oh we're going to make all this money and get us out of debt but they don't put any money into grassroots. That is the future anyway, that's one of our biggest problems.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. And it's a common theme and I think rugby has that issue which, you know, it's that business meeting, sport thing, isn't it that. Yeah, you've got to create sustainable revenues but if you, if you Cut off the pipeline. We don't invest in the pipeline.
Then the decreasing argument and you're going to end up with a very small people at the top of a minority sport that no one cares about. And. And you have more competition out there in Australia, of course, with rugby league and Aussie rules.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: But we've always had that competition, mate. Even when I was playing, we had it. But the thing is we actually entertained people. We did something different.
I mean on Saturday night, mate, it was boring as batpu. Guys running into each other showing how strong they are. What skill was there really.
Back lines. I said these throwing back line. I mean they got some. They got Suwali. I would put Suareli at 12 at least he might get the ball.
You've got our wingers who don't get the ball.
I mean that's not how we play, you know, I mean Kyra Betty scored more tries for Australia. When he has to go into a 5 meter line out when the foot hits the ground and dive over the line, that's how he scores all his tries. If I was played mate, I'd say I'm not playing, I'm not getting the ball.
The game has changed and the IRB and the corporates have got to be blamed for it, mate, because it is a mess. It's actually like watching rugby league and we've got these coaches that are so boring. Andy Farrell's a rugby league player. Structure, it's all structure.
You know, if you didn't have it would have been bloody very boring. Because I think he's a very good player and he was the one who sort of lucky that he was playing because I think he was the one who probably saved the lives.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: So when you go back, you. You were still playing when the game went pro. Not for long.
And did you. So you already said earlier that you'd warn people. I mean the.
So did you go through that negotiation to go from an amateur player? I'm not finished. In 92 when the game felt like it was going pro, but we just weren't being paid any money and just getting around the world and having to beg time off from your employer. So but you carried on through that first couple of years and you've of professional rugby, were you signing contracts? And I mean how was that looking to you when the game you loved and have played for so many years, a high standard suddenly shifts and you go wow. Were you weren't enjoying it suddenly or.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: No, it was 96 actually. But it was my last year so I was the last player contracted in Australia, I was 36 years old and I just didn't care. I just wanted to play, you know. And I remember six o' clock in the morning, went to Joe St. Joe's College pool session, had breakfast and I said, we'll see you all. 11 o' clock at Concord Oval. Rocked up 11. All the players around looking at the sky going, okay, what are we doing here? That was professionalism.
So they've got no jobs. That was it.
And mate, it was very, very interesting because I was, I just had, I had a sports shop so I was pretty lucky. But a lot of guys couldn't work. That was it. That this is their full time job now and they took a long time to get used to it.
But I remember touring, we went with New South Wales, the Super 10 or Super 12. We went to Zimbabwe. On the way we went to play Super Rugby against the Bulls and the Stormers and the Sharks. And so what happened was we actually ended up playing in, was it Pretoria? We won then we're on the way to Cape Town. Anyway, the coach called me and he said, mate, I'm going to rotate you. So okay, you're dropping me? No, no, no, I'm rotating you. I said, so you're dropping me. It's a new word for personalism. We're going to rotate you.
So I decided, okay, I was dropped, fair enough. So I said two things. I can go out there and come last or go out there and say stuff. You're all going to come first. My attitude didn't change. I came first. Everything. Because I just love the game. I love part of it. I was very fortunate that it was sort of changed my whole life and yeah, it was just. But now you see, and the thing that I don't understand as amateurs, why were we pretty good footballers?
We were getting nothing. But these guys are getting all the money and no one in Australia can kick right and left foot. There's only one player in the world that kicks right and left, that's Le Bock.
So why aren't these players the best footballers in the world if they've got everything? They've got psychologists, mate. They've got so many physio, they've got everything.
And we had to train twice a week for club rugby, a test match. We had three days.
And because, you know, the thing is I always say professionalism is not, is not managed attitude. That's why we were good, mate, because we loved what we were doing. Once she gets paid, it's a job. It's a different way of playing. And you look at the players, half of them don't even look like they want to play. That's Australia versus the Lions. Australia and New Zealand. The guys just didn't want to be there, actually. You can see their faces.
You know, you should be enjoying what you're doing. You get an opportunity once in a lifetime to do that.
But that's just what I. That's what I just think of the game and look. And again, mate, it's just run very badly in Australia. There's no, no money for grassroots at all. I was with, I did with rugby Australia In 2020, 21 went around the country. No one knew who the wallabies were. I warned them. No players go out and see them. And we get all these foreign coaches, mate. So because world rugby owners, we're in so much debt that we are not even kind of control around coaches at the moment.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: It's. Yeah, it's challenging, isn't it, across the board. And one of the things you mentioned, which got me thinking, because you were an exponent and a preeminent part of the Sevens program that took place. And do you see that? Because that's been completely downgraded across the world now seemingly how much of playing sevens for all of us, of course gives you more space, more time, ability to create more skill. Do you look at Sevens as something that kept you at the top of the game or was it just a bit of recreational fun? Or how did you see that?
[00:18:03] Speaker A: No, well, I think it was just part of growing up. I mean, we had sevens 93 of my first. We had a competition in Kiama down South coast and the club I play for Queen Ben, I think seven. I went along. I was playing fourth grade. We came playing sevens and it was idea one on one. It's very easy to play sevens, you know. And then 83, I got picked to go to Hong Kong for Australia. We won 83, 85 and 88.
We didn't win another one until 2024.
That was a long time in between drinks. But we. Mate, it was fun and we had test players play because there was no, there was no Sevens tournaments. It was only Hong Kong. Hong Kong was the tournament. But actually I think it was 1990. We went to Melrose Sevens and we won there as well. We won the Melrose Sevens. And mate, it was great being a winger, you know, it's good to one on one show different tricks, different. You try different things all the time. It just gives you confidence as a player and the creation of different ways of playing, the switches, the loops, you know, the, the inside out. And it was just.
It just gave you a lot of confidence. You could play 15s and 7s these days. It's a very, very difficult sport to play if you're a 15 player because they all run into people, they're so structured. But sevens now is like 15s. The ball gets the line out, they walk to a line out, the ball goes to the wing, comes to the wing, goes back to the wing, goes to the other wing, and they're hoping someone's going to miss a tackle and they score a try. That's what it is, mate. In our day, it was slow the ball down, you can chip, you can dummy, you can do whatever you like. But it's, it's, it's all professional, mate. Even at the Olympics, the referees get more recognition running onto the stadium than the players.
So it is about sevens, mate, you know, And I actually said, cop to some of Hong Kong. I said, follow you guys. I tell IRB to pay off out of Hong Kong, go back to the old stadium, let the Sri Lankans. I played against Sri Lanka, I was in Sri Lanka last year, met guys I played against in 1983, 84, you know, in the Commonwealth Games, you had Malaysia, you had China, South Korea. That was the world game. Now the IRB come along and choose who they want. And Hong Kong can't even play in their own tournament because they're not good enough.
How does that work?
[00:20:24] Speaker B: It's all about perspective, I think. I think the. The context of what we enjoyed on and off the field, because it wasn't our day job, has just changed forever. And the fact is that the administrators that come in, who are highly paid individuals, and then you got professional players who are also highly paid, but there's a day at the office and, you know, if you lose that and for those moments in the.
What we've just seen, I mean, I just look at a little bit of cricket drama. No doubt. You saw the last hour of. If you didn't. The England, India.
Wow.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Sporting drama beyond belief.
And we saw it momentarily in the British Irish lines, that second Test, you know, the last three minutes. It takes some doing to keep things going. But if you lose that passion and you lose that, that, that in touch with the humanity of the crowd and the, the noise factors and everything, that's what gets people out of bed, that's what gets people. That's what gets the kids enjoying it.
And we delivered a lot of a Lot of times back in the day.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: You had Danny Cipriani in England. Unbelievable. He was one of those players, but the coach didn't like him.
That's the problem, mate. Coaches hate individuals because they don't listen. Can you imagine me playing now?
The coach bloody being in hospital, having a heart attack every time I get the ball.
But that's what made people watch, you know, and that's the difference. The difference is now, like even coaching the under 13s, they're so structured, mate, it's just structure. It's rugby league.
That's all it is. We are playing rugby league because back in the 18, in the 80s and 90s, there's a guy called Ricky Stewart. Ricky Stewart played rugby for. He played with me. Then he went to Sydney, played for a wallaby test against Argentina. Then he went to rugby league, played rugby league for Australia. He was thrown 30 meter spirals in our day. We were doing the short passes. So where are we now? Rugby's doing the 30 meter spirals. And what are the rugby league players doing? They're doing the short passes. The game's changed.
And the problem went professional. We had all rugby league defense coaches, Eddie Jones, in the last World cup, rugby league coaches over who were forward coaches running the backs. Mate, it's. You can't.
We are who we are. We were like, you know, again, you're up against Aussie rules that get 100,000 to a grand final every year. They make $43 million in one weekend, you know, and we get a grand final in Sydney. The last grand final I played was 1996, the old football stadium. We had 26,000 people.
Now you're lucky to get 2,000 because no one's playing.
The kids don't know who they are.
And that's the promotion of the game, which does not happen. But the thing is they all know better, all the administrators know better. That's the thing. And the World cup, last World cup were $4.5 million over budget. They did an inquiry, but no one's now to know what the inquiry is.
It's pretty good, isn't it? And if. And the administrators are still there, they still run the game and they're the ones who allow it to happen.
So there's a lot of problems.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: I was chairman of the European, the epcr, what was the Heineken Cup. And after four years of being the chair, I was the only guy around the table of 10 that had ever played the game.
And of the nine that were there, as I was trying to persuade Them of this, that and the other. I think seven of them either got fired, got redirected or gave up or whatever.
And those are administrators. They come and they go and they do that little bit or they do that bit of damage and then they leave.
And as I said to them, it's people like me that are still here to pick out the pieces, potentially, because I play the game, I care about the game. And I think, you know, there's perhaps a Campisi Halliday joint venture to bring some common sense back into the. The game of rugby.
Some of those.
Yeah.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: Okay, quickly on that point. It was interesting where someone.
I won't mention names from one of the boards in. In Sydney before the World cup in France was on the 14th of October, because I was leaving on the 15th, I got a phone call. Campo, give me a call. I rang this person, they said to let you know, one of the board members in France, what their main concern about Australian rugby was. We didn't have a war cry.
And you wonder why that. Mate, that was serious from a board member.
And you wonder why. Thing is. And back in. When I was with The Sharks in 2004, I was there for a week and I said to Dick Muir, I said, mate, I see there's a few problems around here.
Oh, yeah, mate, he said, the fish always rots head down, doesn't go tail up. Anyway, so Gary Tyschman wanted to go on the board and someone's. I think someone said to him, mate, listen, if you haven't got eight mates on the board, you're not going to pass a thing.
You're one against them, they'll vote you down. And that's what happens. They're all mates. They all. It's like the irb. They all get there, they're all been looking after each other. You know, they're doing this and doing that. You come in as a new person, you got no rights. They'll vote you down, mate. And that's the problem. That's. That's why we've still got this 52 old fast. What Will Carlin said, mate, they're still there.
[00:25:38] Speaker B: And now there's 63 gone up. 63, 63. And they're not. Of course, in today's world of, you know, inclusion and diversity, there's a lot of different individuals covering different parts of the game. Obviously, the women's game is growing fast. Got the rugby, the World cup coming.
And so there's an awful lot of other things going on that didn't happen when we were obviously so that's fine. You need to take account of that. But yeah, the number's gone up and it's not gone any better. In fact, it's gone worse. That's not. We'd be here all day if we carried on. On that line. But I wanted to ask you, I mean, I was going to ask you in what whether you felt the game had changed for the better in any sense. But I think yes, I know what the answer is from amateur to pro. But I did want to just indulge or allow you to indulge yourself.
You're often named as if that an all time top 15. You find your way into that side. If you had to name a great rugby player from your era or any era that you played with and against, because you played against most of the greats, who would you. Who would you have as your, you know, the fullback alongside you, the center alongside you out of all this, if you had to select from anybody you played with or against?
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Probably two guys. Jean Baptiste Lafon and Serge Blanco.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Great answer.
I played against both.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: I better just give you a miss this time.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: That's okay.
No, no, no.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: At Twickenham. So.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's right. That was well, that people talk about that game still and there was a lot of good stu stuff in that game. So would you have.
I guess seller was a bit too conservative for you. I mean, Charve would have been somebody.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: I played in that.
The Barbarian game. It's Leicester. I think it was Easter. Was it Christmas, wasn't it? New Year's or something. They had that where they wore the numbers. So the letters on the back.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's that.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I made that. So I think it was. I think it was after 91 World Cup I went and Paul Akford and his wife Susie picked me up from the airport and they drove me to Les. And then Suzie said, you're not a bad guy, are you? I said, no, because obviously the journos in England just rip into me anyway, so I played with Jean Baptiste Lafond, you know, Frank Minnell and Dennis Charvet, mate. And the ball just kept on coming, kept on coming, kept on coming. Anyway, I think I came back a year later or two years later and I had Will Carlin in the centers. I didn't see the ball at all.
And I saw Rory, Rory's wife, before the game and she said, can you do me a favor? Please don't do anything to Rory today. And I said, yeah, no, no, no problem at all, no worries.
Anyway, so in the second half I'll get the ball and I'm flying down the sideline and Rory's coming like this and I stop and he runs in front of me and I score right to the post. I said, I think there's a bit of shit here.
So that was not great. But the other one was where Les Cuzworth was number 10 and Dusty Hare was fullback. So I got the ball under my post. I slept, Les. I was coming up and I was about to step Dusty and I got tripped from behind and I said, who in the hell was that? And it was Les. He looked at me, said, mate, I didn't want you to make a fool of my mate. And I said, fair enough. Okay.
It was about.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Yeah, so I noticed you don't. I mean, would you have some great Aussie centers in that time? I mean, thank you for not taking 29 minutes before you mentioned the 91 World cup, which of course we were on opposing sides and we, we lost in the final Twickenham, which it's interesting, a lot of people, before I come to my question, I regarded that as an incredible adventure for an England side that, you know, remember you'd put 40 points on us in Sydney, right, 40 before the world cup. People conveniently forget that. And in the modern era, going away to Scotland, going away to France wasn't quite as intimidating as it was then. And we'd gone to both places and won, so we'd already not done too badly. And I regard it as one of those adventures, seven to eight week adventure, which is preceded by five weeks in Australia and Fiji. Incredible. Three months.
Some people threw their, their medal into the river. You know, Brian more famously says he put it. And I've. Mike Teague now as an afterthought said he did the same. I think he was just playing on the story. Mine's framed on the wall because it was a huge privilege to get involved and playing at home World cup and lost to I think the best Australian side.
Probably if you had all time Australian side, a lot of those guys would be in it. No, makes me feel better anyway.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: But isn't the size of our metal about that big?
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's enough. It's big enough.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Here we are, mate.
Yeah, that was the a.m. days, mate. That was the fun.
Look, I just think it was a great. It was a great opportunity, mate, for us to play. You know, I've always played my best rugby overseas because in Australia you're always. If you, if you do something wrong, you're always abused. You know, it's like the British lines. 89, you know, that tried, you know, absolutely copped it for a bloody couple of months.
But then I realized in life you got to make mistakes to improve.
And if I did that, didn't do that in 89, I probably wouldn't have been the player in 91. But I've always enjoyed England and Wales and that because it's just free. They love rugby. That's, you know, you go to Wales, they love the running rugby.
And that's what we did, mate. We entertained them and we were very fortunate. Back in those days, I think the Wallaby team I played with probably had probably seven, eight years together. There wasn't many caps because we were the same group of guys. And that's the difference. Now if you look at the Lions in Wallaby side in the weekends, I mean, they brought players in like Skelton doesn't even play in Australia.
They're all different.
We knew the wives, the girlfriends, the parents. We knew everybody.
And on the field, you play for each other now. It's a job. You can see the guys. I mean, it's just some of the passes, you know, even when Peachy scored that try, I mean, Sawyer's doing this. He's not even looking. And the guy had to catch here. God, if that was us, the coach would have said, mate, you're off the field. You always look where you pass the ball. Just little things like that. So that's, that's the difference that we, we were, we. We knew. And plus we only had New South Wales, Queensland. So we used to play against each other all the time. And in 89, I think I played the British Lions five times.
You know, three test matches, new South Wales and then the Anzac. So we. And that's all we had those days. We didn't have a lot of teams. Now we have, but we don't have the combinations.
You know, I don't think the coaches picked the same combination in the halfbacks two successive tests. I think he did, actually did for the 9 and 10, but he. You have a look at the team. We change. Nick White gets a run because he's playing his last test liner gets a run because he plays well at Suncorp. That's what the coach said.
You know, the best number nine is. Is Tate McDermott by far. And the number ten is Ben Donaldson. And yet they can't even play together. And then they've got to mix it up with guys I don't play with.
How are you supposed to have a combination.
That's what chess brothers.
[00:33:14] Speaker B: It's an incredible thing. You just say that because here we are 30 years on. I remember and this was like, you know, the bad old days when the England hooker had never thrown into the England second row forward.
But okay, in an amateur, yet they played for England in the Test. I remember it was in the mid-80s. Ollie Redmond, you remember him and the Brain, they, they met on the Thursday obviously, which is what we did before the Saturday. And they'd never thrown into each other. Well, okay, amateur game, it can happen. Boom. In the professional game you could hardly imagine that a 9 and a 10 had not played together and be representing their country.
That just shouldn't be happening, should it?
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Well, but look what's happening now. Now you have got rid of that guido law. Now you can coach can pick whoever he wants to.
I mean you might as well have play overseas and don't pay them and just pay them for a test match. Save some money because that's all they're doing, you know, I mean all these players are going overseas. But the problem is here and you know the other, the biggest problem in rugby that I see is every single team in the world plays exactly the same.
In the old days, England played a different game. To the All Blacks, South Africans, to Australia, the Scotland, Wales. Wales were the great runners of rugby.
Now everywhere, even the super Rugby New Auckland had a great way of playing.
The Chiefs, the Hurricanes, the Highlanders, all different now they all play the same.
Every team in the world plays exactly the same. Because a rugby league, the ball gets to the prop, the prop doesn't know, look past behind and the ball goes behind and they'll go. I think the Lions, one of their games they played, I think the ball went about 25 meters backwards. They did so many passes backwards because that's rugby league. Why are we doing that? We used to get penalized for throwing the ball behind somebody as obstruction and that's the difference. Now it's league has destroyed our game, mate. Unfortunately, that's my opinion. I might be miles off, but I can't watch it. I watch four minutes of rugby. It's so boring, mate.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: I think it's a little trip down. Going back to the future is something I've often said to go back to some of the skill sets and some of the ways of looking at the game which those, those, those videos don't get replayed for no reason, do they? That people say wow, you know, I look back and how good was that? I said yeah, well, you know what, we only trained twice a week, as you say. But I remember, you know, club rugby, we'd go into the corner at Bath, were lucky we had some. We had a great squad with us, you know, Barnsley and myself and Jerry Guskin and, you know, we had. Jonathan Webb came and joined Richard Hill and we trained for an hour and a half on the skills, on how to. Where to put the ball, how often, you know, how we could time it, how we could make it work. And then you come out Saturday and do it. That's just two hours training in the corner of a field, probably with slightly dodgy light, etc. Now you've got all day.
You can, you can spend hours. Okay, how are your skills? Not the best. How can you ever pass the ball behind anybody? And it happens all the time, but no one ever picks it up or overlaps that get, you know. And I think the message I want to take away from today is let's go back to the future. Because if we want to save our game and keep it vibrant and keep kids involved and engaged, you know, all the way up and down, we have to go back to what was fun and great about the game, which you've elucidated on so brilliantly and we all remember. And so just because it happened some time ago doesn't mean it's passe.
Perhaps that was the.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: But the problem is who's going to coach that?
Because they're not us old guys aren't that no one's allowed to get involved. They're scared of us. Our knowledge, Knowledge as an old person, mate, in Australia is shock. They don't let anybody rugby league do it really well. Aussie rules, Rugby union, mate. I've coached and I've been around.
I, I helped.
One day at Rugby Australia, they did a. All the coaching directors came in and doing some, some exercises and I was with someone. I said they were doing a two on one. I said, mate, can I go over and help? He said, yeah, off you go. So he said, excuse me. I said, do you mind if I say a few things?
And I said, two on one. You've got to try and get. If I'm running, you've got to get the person run. Step inside, he's on the outside, pass. He can, he can change angle and I can loop.
Anyway, off they went. And I said, you got to communicate. No one talks anymore. Anyway, that person complained to New South Wales Rugby about me. I got in trouble and all I was doing was helping and I was.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Going, well, Listen, on that note, I think we, you know, it doesn't matter how old you are, if you've got the.
We may not be able to sort of run around the pitch, but it's what's up here that matters. And definitely I just wanted. It was a wonderful. We're out of time, but it's a wonderful trip, not just down memory lane because there were great times that you and I played in, but also because they're highly relevant not only to today's sport, but if sports are business, so be it.
But business should never forget some of the old principles and the way in which, you know, human interaction and inspiration and, you know, you can never count on what's going to happen next and you can't create too much certain sport or business or anything. So that's what is very important also.
[00:38:44] Speaker A: Which I. I get in trouble, mate. I'm very outspoken. But the thing is, mate, I used to win.
Winning is very, very important. If you win, you can say, I reckon, whatever you like. If I was a loser and said this, I was a total hypocrite. But my dad won Blairslow Cups, won a World Cup Sevens tournaments, mate. I know what it's like to win because that's. That was our mindset.
It wasn't about the money. It was about going out there and having a great time. That was my education, was the world. It's a great world for somebody, but unfortunately it's controlled by money.
Once you think of that, mate, you're playing the sport for the wrong reason.
That's what I.
[00:39:21] Speaker B: Well, I do hope, as we, as we just call time on this, that people, we'll listen. It's never too late to listen. So, David, thank you so much for coming on and talking us in what I call great clarity about some of the good and what we should do next. And I'm going to call time on this. So thank you to everyone for.
For watching this, tuning in. I hope that you enjoyed it. And here's to the next one.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: Thanks.
[00:39:53] Speaker B: Thank you, David.
