Peter Bills: Big Club Contract Or A Test Match Jersey? I Know What I'd Choose

More and more players are putting professional contracts ahead of international rugby, writes Peter Bills, but can we really blame them?

Back in the day, when money reached rugby union players’ pockets only by one of those little brown envelopes, someone mischievous dreamed up a nightmare scenario for the old game as we then knew it.

Just supposing, I wrote, as then Editor of London-based Rugby World magazine, the game turned professional. How long would it be, I asked, before players paid handsome sums by their clubs turned their backs even on international rugby and the honour of representing their countries in favour of serving their club masters and preserving lucrative contracts?

Pre-1995, pre-professionalism, the old Colonels and their like from the Guards and England’s finest public schools, spluttered into their gin and tonics and scoffed at such a notion. ‘That honour will never diminish’ was the tone of their response.

I should herewith make a public confession. I got it wrong. It happened far sooner than even I had imagined.

Today, of course, players on fabulous club contracts walk away from Test rugby without even a shrug. The former Saracens wing David Strettle even turned his back on the chance of a place in the England squad at the 2015 Rugby World Cup in favour of taking up a big-money contract with French club Clermont Auvergne and starting the club season in their team.

Fijian Nathan Hughes was another who rejected the chance to play for his island nation at the same World Cup. By then a major figure of importance with English Premiership club Wasps, Hughes, allegedly, wasn’t interested in long flights back to the South Seas to prepare with the Fijians. So he focused on Wasps, also perhaps aware of England’s growing interest in him.

Even more recently, we have witnessed the bizarre sight of Australian Wallabies wing Adam Ashley-Cooper abandoning his country midway through a southern hemisphere Rugby Championship series to return to France and resume his top dollar deal with Bordeaux-Begles.

Right now, South African international rugby is in serious trouble. The Springboks look a pale shadow of their once mighty selves and that situation will not change any time soon. Their problem is, too many top players have quit the Republic in favour of Europe’s rugby goldmines.

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At a time when the ‘Boks are short of experience, wing JP Pietersen prefers to fly to England to take up a juicy contract with Aviva Premiership club Leicester Tigers. Hooker Bismarck du Plessis (and his brother Jannie) walked away from Test rugby last year to join French outfit Montpellier.

And so it goes on. Playing for your country? Well, it’s all very nice and everything. But not when it comes to ignoring a big pension pot from the clubs of France and England.

There was a time when the best New Zealand rugby players only stopped making themselves available for the All Blacks either when they collected their first pension cheque or they were carried, kicking and screaming in protest, out of the camp.

Today? Players at their peak like Dan Carter, Ma’a Nonu and Conrad Smith cheerfully trade in more All Black caps for big contracts in Europe. They all did what no All Black of the great Colin Meads era would ever have considered – turned their back on the black jersey.

So do we lament the loss in importance of Test rugby? Do we condemn these and other players for their greed in putting euros, pounds or whatever else before national pride and honour?

Some might. My view? You have to be joking. Ask yourself what you would do if a major company offered you a deal beyond your wildest imagination? Turn it down because you’re comfortable in your own little bubble? You’d be daft if you did.

And there’s something else. Rugby today, at all levels, has become a game of frightening intensity, in too many cases a sport injurious to personal health. Who can blame any player for grabbing the cash when he well knows his next game might be his last?

If you allow a sport to become so grotesquely physical, a kind of gladiatorial contest, don’t be surprised if its participants put themselves and their dependents first, and things like honour and national pride a distant second.

Brave new world, and all that…