Peter Bills: About time we waved bye-bye to baa-baas
So our suspicions proved correct. The Barbarians match in London last Saturday against a largely second string South African side may not have been a flop, but it again raised critical questions over the whole enterprise.
Giving the Barbarians, surely a grand anachronism in the modern game, the benefit of the doubt proved misguided. Their day is surely done.
The Barbarians' concept might remain OK for the crusty colonels who still limp along in their wake, their ageing hip bones slowing them to the extent that they have become a mere appendage to a once great club.
But you know a concept -- an ideal -- is in trouble when the public no longer buys into it. And, in the words of one commentator, the "sparse crowd" at Twickenham last weekend to see the last rites of the South Africans' tour heightened my sense that this whole Barbarians thing is an outdated idea, past its sell-by date.
You can dredge any memory from the long years of fun this club has had and the pleasures it gave to untold numbers. Those Barbarians tours of Wales over the four days of Easter attracted many of the game's finest players and served to underline the sense of fun that was rugby football.
fluttering
At Porthcawl one year, the manageress of the team hotel awoke to discover her panties fluttering at half mast upon the hotel's flagpole. On one visit to Cornwall, a live sheep was introduced -- nice word that -- into the dining room of the team's hotel. Alas, reports suggested that other guests mysteriously and quite rapidly began to lose interest in their breakfast as the sheep lost its previous night's dinner.
But that was in a different age. So, too, was the magnificent 1972 Barbarians game against the New Zealanders in Cardiff. A day of Gareth Edwards diving, Mike Gibson directing, David Duckham stepping and Cliff Morgan up in the commentary box shouting with excitement, seemed somehow to epitomise the whole Barbarians' idea. Quality play on the field, a hell of a lot of fun off it.
But we're talking almost 40 years ago and the modern world waits for no man, nor any institution. Such days have gone, long gone.
Professionalism, that precocious child, has completely changed the sport. And just because the Barbarians have swallowed their principles of never paying anyone and shelled out big money to get the modern day stars, they are clearly not fooling one group of people; the paying spectators.
After four weeks of real Test rugby, with its intensity, soaring emotions, expectations and frustrations, simply bolting on a meaningless match at the end of the programme so that the Barbarians can say they continue to exist, is no longer sensible. It has no relevance whatsoever, which is presumably why so few people bothered to go to Twickenham to see it last Saturday.
exhibition
Besides, they'd seen the likes of Ma'a Nonu, Matt Giteau, Adam Ashley-Cooper, Drew Mitchell and Keven Mealamu just a week or two earlier. And they were playing real rugby in proper Test matches, not exhibition stuff that nobody cares about any more.
Now the Barbarians' apologists blamed the weather and for sure, it was bad. But so what? Years ago, such as in Cardiff 1972, people would have walked through six-metre snow drifts to get to see the Barbarians match. No more.
Perhaps the only possible future for the Barbarians is to play matches around the world, frequently against the emerging nations. Yet even that idea is flawed. The best players need more overseas travel like a hole in the head. And they desire more games with the same relish.
So whichever way you look at it, the Barbarians' goose looks cooked.
It will be a sad day if the Barbarians' rugby concept does die, but that day looks imminent. Yet if such a scenario arrives, as it probably should, it will go to prove the point that you cannot have everything in life.
The game's authorities voted for professionalism. But by doing so, they hastened the demise of some of their own sport's greatest traditions and some of their own most treasured activities. C'est la vie, that is how it works. Progress and changes in life bring casualties and the end of many old traditions and ways.
Nothing can prevent that.
- Peter Bills
Irish Independent
