Spear and loathing: 20 years since tackle on Brian O'Driscoll that changed rugby

The Guardian

5 days ago

Brian O'Driscoll is sick of talking about it. Tana Umaga says anyone still asking needs to put it behind them. But here we are, 20 years to the day since the tackle that ties them together – and people do still want to talk about it.
That moment – in the first minute of the first Test of the Lions series against New Zealand – still pops up on TikTok and YouTube feeds, still sparks arguments on Reddit threads, still leads hour-long podcasts when players reminisce about how they saw it. And it still inspires articles like this one, long after the men involved have made up and moved on.
It all happened on the edge of shot. You see O'Driscoll throw himself into a ruck, then play moves on one phase; the camera follows Richie McCaw as he carries the ball into contact and by the time O'Driscoll reappears he is face down on the ground, rolling around in agony. Exactly what went on in the few seconds in between would not become clear for a few months, when O'Driscoll found a camcorder video in his cubby hole at Leinster. It had been shot, and sent on, by an Irish fan who had been in the stands.
By then, rugby was already working on redrafting the laws around the contact area, the reputations of both teams had taken a beating and O'Driscoll was dealing with the aftermath of an injury that meant he would never be quite the same player again.
But that is beginning with the ending. To understand why the tackle blew up the way it did, you have to put it in the context of everything around it. The 2005 Lions tour was one of the most eagerly anticipated in history. Between them, the four home nations had beaten the All Blacks in New Zealand twice in 100 years of trying. Combined as the Lions, they had won a solitary series out of 10, in 1971.
In 2005, Ireland were still waiting for their first victory against them, home or away (whisper it, but 20 years later, Scotland are waiting still). A New Zealand tour might be the hardest task in the sport today, but back then there was no doubt about it.
This one was supposed to be different, however. For the first time, one of the four home nations had won the World Cup and the man who had coached them, Clive Woodward, was leading the Lions. Neither of which, as it turned out, would do them any good.
For one thing, the game had changed so much in the two years since the World Cup that the England squad, who had been flogged into playing for their clubs the week after their victory, had started to fall apart. They had been overtaken by Ireland, who had finished above them in the Six Nations both years, and Wales, who had just won a grand slam. Woodward, in what felt like a midlife crisis, had quit rugby and gone into football with Southampton.
His imaginative approach to coaching had been exactly what a gnarly England team needed. His relationship with the older players meant they felt able to cherrypick the best of it and reject everything else. But the Lions did not know any better and the tour was launched with plastic wristbands branded with the slogan Woodward had commissioned, personalised iPods loaded with a selection of his favourite motivational music and sheet music with the words and score of the anthem he had written for the tour.
Keen to deal with every last detail, Woodward consulted a Māori elder about how his team ought to meet the haka, which was how his captain, O'Driscoll, ended up kneeling down and yanking up a fistful of grass from the pitch to throw at the All Blacks before the start of the match. There must have been Māori scholars watching who understood the significance of the gesture, but everyone else was baffled and the All Blacks they were playing against looked genuinely enraged.
O'Driscoll's pre-game speech had been about how he wanted every player to win his battle with the man opposite him ('I know one thing,' he said, 'Tana Umaga is not going to have the upper hand on me'). In their very first contact on the pitch, O'Driscoll went into that ruck, Keven Mealamu grabbed him around one leg, Umaga took the other, and the two of them tipped him up like a bottle of ketchup and dropped him down on the ground.
O'Driscoll stretched out his right arm to break the fall and reduce the risk of a broken neck but ended up dislocating his shoulder instead. He knew straight away that his tour was over.
On one wing, Gareth Thomas set off chasing the linesman 'who had walked on to the pitch during the preceding passage of play and simply ordered the pair to: 'Leave him alone.' I screamed at him to get involved, but there was panic in his eyes.'
The referee, Joël Jutge, missed it too, so neither Mealamu nor Umaga were punished for it during the match. Years later, Jutge would admit he had got the decision wrong.
It is harder to understand how the citing commissioner, Willem Venter, decided that there was nothing to see. Two minutes into the biggest Test they had played since 1997, the Lions had lost their captain. They played dismally without him and ended up losing 21-3.
As much pain as he was in, O'Driscoll noticed that, unlike his All Black teammate Justin Marshall, Umaga did not approach to ask after him as he left the field for treatment. Which annoyed him because it felt like an insult on top of an injury.
Umaga won an award for his sportsmanship when he gave first aid to Wales's Colin Charvis in a Test a couple of years earlier, but on this occasion he was preoccupied with leading his team. Umaga was almost as standoffish after the game. 'It's too late for explanations now,' he said a few days later. 'I could try to explain it but what would that achieve?'
Woodward, meanwhile, decided to hold a press conference when he went over the tackle, frame by frame. He had hired Alastair Campbell to run his media team and he made a total balls-up of the job (Campbell may 'disagree agreeably' about this).
'I understood the frustration,' Paul O'Connell wrote later, 'but I didn't think putting the incident up on a big screen in slow motion, in front of a roomful of journalists, was going to help our cause. You can maybe do that when you've won the game, but not when you've been absolutely hockeyed.'
The Lions came off like sore losers and the All Blacks were disarmed to find that they were the bad guys. It did not help that their head coach, Graham Henry, did not seem to understand exactly why the Lions and their supporters were so upset. If anything, he felt they were being unfairly criticised.
'The sustained personal attack they launched against me was hard to believe and even harder to stomach,' Umaga wrote in his autobiography. O'Driscoll called the tackle deliberate and there was, and still is, a lot of conjecture that the tackle was calculated to knock him out of the series, something the All Blacks denied.
The fairest explanation comes from Thomas: 'They were hard men who saw their chance to do what we all do if the opportunity arises – play fast and loose with the laws.'
Looking back, these were the wild-west years of the sport, when men trained and played like professionals, but were treated and cared for like amateurs. The administration, coaching and medical support had barely begun to catch up to how punishing rugby had become and a lot of people were hurt as a result.
O'Driscoll was one of them. World Rugby stood by Venter, claiming that on the basis of the footage available the incident did not necessarily meet what they called the 'red-card test' of 'would the player have been sent off had the match official seen the offence?' It was only when the amateur footage came out that they realised how wrong they had got it.
By the end of the year, they had changed the guidance around spear tackles and referees were instructed to start with a red card, and work backwards from that if there was any mitigation. So, the game changed in those few seconds. While O'Driscoll, and everyone else, hates to think it, the truth, as he wrote in his autobiography, is that 'sometimes in sport you don't get to choose all of the things they remember you for'.