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Times
20 hours ago
- Sport
- Times
Ray French: icon who spread good word of rugby league beyond the north
When Alan Tait, a Lion in rugby union and league, published his autobiography, there were two forewords: one by Bill McLaren, one by Ray French. They were the voices of their codes. 'Only those who, like myself, crossed the once-great divide between rugby union and rugby league can appreciate the nerves experienced by a former 15-a-side international as he waits to take the field before an often highly critical audience in the 13-a-side code,' French wrote. 'Whatever a player's skills, speed, mental toughness or attitude in union, he stands a naked man on the touchlines of rugby league.' Ray French's death at the age of 85, announced on Saturday, is a passing of sadness for rugby league, but it should be marked across the divide. He played for England as a lock forward in the 1961 Five Nations before turning professional, winning four caps for Great Britain. French didn't even have to move towns, for he was a man of St Helens, where — so he said — they didn't care much if you played union for England or were a Lions team-mate of Willie John McBride and Dickie Jeeps, as he might have been in 1962 had he stayed. It was all league. French's voice then carried the 13-man game across Britain as the BBC's voice of rugby league, calling the Challenge Cup finals from 1982 to 2008. He was the successor to Eddie Waring, who was a light-entertainment figure impersonated by Mike Yarwood but divisive as a reinforcer of stereotypes. In Tony Hannan's biography of Waring, French explained his approach to the role. 'You have to engage with every viewer, not just those who live in the north of England,' he said. 'Of the people watching, 85 per cent aren't from rugby league country. The biggest proportion comes from down south or in Wales or Scotland or wherever. 'People have said to me, 'Ray, why do you always say players come from such and such a place?' It's because people don't know. You might know in Wigan or Warrington that he's from St Pats, but nobody in Hackney Wick knows that, do they?' Those, like me, who didn't know their St Pats [an amateur rugby league club in Wigan] from their St Helens tuned into this slightly alien form of rugby on a Saturday afternoon and had French to explain the action. It was fascinating to discover — only in recent years — that French was a rugby man with time for both variants, even if league was his natural home. French wrote about and coached the 15 and 13-man games, content to praise and criticise alike and to refer to diehards on either side as 'bigoted'. My Kind of Rugby: Union and League came out in 1979. Ten years later there was More Kinds of Rugby. French liked that union retained a gulf between forwards and backs, but believed it overly orientated around set-piece tedium. Citing small club attendances in London and the north, he presciently warned that 'professionalism will present more problems to union than even its most ardent supporters can imagine'. In union, French was not immune to the social and geographical distinctions inseparable from the story of the codes. He recalled, in Joe Hall's oral history of England players, being served lobster thermidor the night before a trial and not knowing what to do with it. Huw Richards's The Red and the White, a history of Anglo-Welsh rivalry, tells the story of French counting snooker and rugby league as hobbies, but for a programme profile he listed them instead as squash and skiing so as not to stick out. '[Carston] Catcheside, when collecting the answers, asked where he skied,' Richards said. 'French answered 'the Bergi', and was relieved that no further information was sought. The Bergi was, in fact, a St Helens landmark, a vast spoil-heap created by glassmakers Pilkington.' French started playing rugby on the street near his home on McFarlane Avenue, with handkerchiefs around his knees. He watched St Helens in the 1953 Challenge Cup final at Wembley, and knew of union only when he passed the 11-plus for Cowley School. He went on to Leeds University and became an English teacher, returning to Cowley to coach union and league. John Hopkins focused a section of his 1979 book Rugby on the success of rugby at Cowley. French believed in handling and running, not kicking and scrummaging, and limited the latter practices in training. 'Rugby is like a concertina,' he said. 'It goes in and it goes out … You've got to vary your game.' Reading French's quotes now, he strikes as the sort of inspirational coach that schools desperately need today. 'The Firsts are the key to a school's success,' he said. 'They determine a school's spirit. They are the side who appear in the local press and they are the ones the little boys are reading about. After them, the most important are the under-12s. Get a lad at 11 and you've got him for life.' When the Ashes returns to Wembley on October 25, the clip of Jonathan Davies's famous try against Australia in 1994 will do the rounds again and French's voice will ring out. A man who crossed divides and codes into living rooms. He would often say he still liked union but league was his calling, admiring its honesty and modesty, and translating that warmth to 85 per cent of his audience. He loved the game and the game loved him. 'Whatever happens, whatever the future for the oval ball, I have no doubt that it will continue to give pleasure to countless thousands,' French wrote in 1989. 'Hopefully, whatever code they play, coach, or commentate upon they will receive as much satisfaction as I have done from my involvement with the greatest game of all — rugby.'
Irish Daily Mirror
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Mirror
Meath win stirred my soul again, but I won't be a supporting them in Croke Park
LIKE an old pitman descending into the gaping mouth of a coal mine, Liam Hayes clocks in for our conversation, grabs his pick and lamp and stoically lowers himself into the deepest tunnels of a complex mind. At 63, the former Meath footballer and ex-award-winning sports writer remains compelling, introspective, self-aware, the custodian of what he calls a 'mad brain', one that facilitates a refreshingly off-piste way of thinking. Excavating private thoughts, chiselling into parts of the psyche where most fear to tread, exposing old wounds, walking towards the showers of black rain which occasionally pass through his head, decoding his fears and regrets, unlocking doors to his innermost self and inviting you across the threshold, Hayes is a slave to his own brutal honesty. We've known each other almost 40 years. We soldiered together on the sports beat in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I'd like to think we were friends. Some of the more thoughtful, profound but also - and this is a part many miss about Liam - fun nights I've had were over Chinese meals and beers on what were then Five Nations nights in Paris, London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Though this is our first direct contact in maybe a decade, it feels like picking up a conversation in mid-sentence. Across our 65-minute chat, Hayes is a superior, Ballon d'Or-quality interviewee. Trusting, presenting the gift of unedited thoughts. An open book, we veer across a rainbow of topics: mortality, social inhibition, wanderlust, cancer, the joy of grandkids, life regrets, how the passing years have gifted him a new way of viewing the man in the shaving mirror. Why one of the pilot lights of Sean Boylan's first great team hasn't been to a Meath game in almost two decades and, why, though it has given him immense solace to find the Royal class of 2025 again stirring his blood, he won't be anywhere near Croke Park tomorrow for the county's first All-Ireland semi-final in 16 years. 'No, but I feel a bit guilty. I'm semi-retired from any interviews or PR activity. Obviously I'm more than happy to talk to you, but I've kept my nose out everything. I know if the young lads on the team are reading me saying I don't go to Meath games or if I had read that back in my day, I would have said 'f**k him, what does he know. He's got some attitude.' 'Because when you are in the middle of it, you think it's life and death and the most important thing in the world. This summer already I've been driving in the opposite direction to thousands of Meath cars on match days because I'm going home to my senior mother in Skryne. And in those moments, I feel no guilt whatsoever. 'It just goes out of your blood. You are interested in the lads and you wish them the best and this summer it has been brilliant to see. Any time they are on the TV I'll watch them, but you wouldn't drag me to Croke Park. 'If you paid me 10 grand you wouldn't get me to Croke Park next Sunday. I know that sounds awful and please, mind me here, because I don't want to sound like I'm up my own arse. I'm truly not being disrespectful. 'It's a mental thing. When you are involved like we were in the day, you are living and breathing it, like its 24/7 for 10 or 12 years. Nothing else is important in life. And then when it ends, it ends with a bang, a crashing steel door and it's over. 'And you're out of it. Then you go through four or five or six years, and this is true for every sportsperson, when you don't know whether you are coming or going. You feel guilty and you feel dispassionate and you hope they lose all their matches because you are not part of it. You feel selfish and all these horrible emotions. 'Then you come through that and you say 'you know what, I may as well become a supporter or not.' 'And you know what, I'm not going to become a supporter. I wish them the very best, but I'm not going to trail all over Ireland watching the team, I can't do that. I don't think many (ex-players) do that to be honest with you. 'Ah Jaysus, I'm not trying to be up my own arse, but you just go into a different place mentally where you say 'okay, I went through all of that, it's over.' Hayes has written and spoken with extraordinary eloquence about finding his brother Gerard, with whom he shared a bedroom for 20 years, dead at the GAA field in Skryne next to the family home after his elder sibling took his own life. Forty years on he was able to recall how he 'ran far and fast away. I was devastated by it. I don't think I have every fully recovered from it.' He doesn't make the link during our chat, but the suspicion is that such an horrendously traumatic experience has shaped much of his character, influenced and perhaps stymied other friendships, contributed to him being what he calls 'an outlier.' An All-Ireland winner in 1987 and 1988, captain of the team that emerged from that four-game epic that brought a jackhammer pulse to the summer of 1991, he sees little of most of the players with whom he authored history. 'Yeah you see I don't do reunions. I don't do school reunions. I've never done business reunions, I've done one Meath reunion in 30 years. I don't know why. It's something I'm not good at, it's a weakness of the mind, something in my psyche that I just don't like doing reunions. It's not a strength, I'm not proud of it. I just don't do them. It's a social inhibition. 'I think the older you get the more you realise how many issues you have had all your life. And it's good to deal with them. My family hate me saying this, but I think everyone is on the spectrum. We all have our problems, our issues. 'There's some reason why I don't do reunions. And I don't know what it is. I just don't do them. It's something you'd like to find out more about and discover why. 'I finally did a counselling session a couple of years back and found it very interesting. I was due to do six, but I never went back after the first one. 'When you are in that dressing room, it's all emotion and high-octane. You are this big band of brothers. You are all just ordinary individuals with not that much in common, so why would you want to do reunions. I'm not sure why you would want to do them. 'Gerry (McEntee, his long-time midfield partner back when they were kings) phoned me the other day. 'He said, 'We are all going down to Royal Tara, 15 or 16 of the lads, we are playing nine holes. What are you at?' 'I said 'nothing' so he asked me to come down with him. Gerry would be good at that. Gerry would always try to get me involved. We were buddies in the middle of the field. We would be buddies. I said, 'no' 'He said, 'You don't have to play golf, just come down for a pint with the lads and a bite to eat.' 'Again, I said, 'no.' Friday night is a big night for me, an important night, I'm not going to share it. It would be lovely to meet the lads for three or four hours, but you decide in you heard that you are not going to do that. 'Sean Boylan had a big 80th birthday, there were about 5,000 people at it, but I didn't get an invite. Rourkey had a 65th or a retirement gig and I didn't get an invite. For half a second after I heard about the latter, I was a bit put out. 'But I think both of them knew, I wouldn't have wanted to go. So they didn't invite me. They were actually being kind to me. . I think they know who I am.' The interactions he does have - walks with the great corner-back Bob O'Malley and McEntee - are typically profound. 'When Bob and I meet up, it's not a handshake, it's a hug, a big hug, full of meaning. We talk about life, mortality, politics, Ukraine, Gaza, anything and everything. But football just wouldn't come up in conversation.' Mortality invaded Hayes's private space in 2010. Diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, he spent much of the next decade in and out of St. James's Hospital, undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The experienced altered his view about both life and death. 'I was afraid, fearful at the start. But the older you get to 63 and you see so many people dying. 'When you get to mid 60s, you think you should have another 10 years left, but then you look, even this last week or two, and you see all the people - like Jota at 28 - dying. 'It makes you realise that you have no entitlement to live as long as you'd like to live. 'You've got to be ready for anything and I think once you go through an illness you are. You've got out of jail once. 'As a young man you don't know who you are. I was far too self analytical as a footballer - before games, after and during games. I came to realise that there is a compulsive disorder with that. You are just born with it. A bit of OCD there. 'But we all have those mental issues and the older I've got the more I've understood it. I think you are always discovering. I don't think it ever ends.' I ask him what he'd change about himself. The answer comes from left field, as he would seek the key that enables him to escape the cell where he has been a prisoner of his own social inhibitions. 'If I could sing, I would be a social animal. I'd love to be able to sing like Bob O'Malley. I'd learn so many songs and I'd sing, even now, at 63, in front of everybody. I would love to be able to hold an audience big or small and sing my heart out. 'I think maybe what I am saying is I feel socially inadequate. I'm socially inhibited in some shape or form.' He wants to return to Meath's restoring of the old psychic connection with their people after becoming the first team since Offaly in 1982 to defeat Dublin, Kerry and Galway in the same summer. 'It is important for me that the players I played with don't think I don't like them or that I'm being disrespectful. The same with the young Meath lads now. 'If I was on the team and I read about an old Meath footballer saying they didn't go to Meath matches any more, I would have said to myself, 'well he is some arrogant f**ker.' 'I thought Meath were magnificent the last day. I thought their goose was cooked when Galway came back and hit them with those goals. But they showed amazing character to come back. It was the first time in a long, long time that I felt stirred by it. 'I just felt very proud of those young lads in the green jersey when I saw the last 15 minutes. A Meath team standing up for the first time in 20 years and it did stir my soul a little bit (here he laughs in a self-deprecating fashion). Ah no it did, I felt it and I thought 'I love that spirit.' 'I haven't had that feeling in a long time to be honest.. It was a good feeling to watch and feel really proud of them, feel just a twinge of emotion.'
South Wales Argus
12-06-2025
- Sport
- South Wales Argus
National Biography adds John Dawes and Michael Peckham
The Gwent pair are among 238 people added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography after they died in 2021. Dawes is the only man to have led the British and Irish Lions to a series victory in New Zealand after being skipper on the 1971 tour. The Abercarn-born centre won 22 caps for Wales after his debut in 1964 and was captain for the Grand Slam triumph in 1971 before heading off to face the All Blacks. Dawes became national coach and won the Five Nations title four times, two of them Grand Slams, and won four triple crowns. He coached the Lions in New Zealand in 1977. He played for Newbridge and went on to become a London Welsh captain and coach. Panteg-born Peckham was the son of a railway locomotive fireman and won a scholarship from Monmouth Grammar School to Cambridge. That started a career as a distinguished oncologist whose multidisciplinary treatment programmes improved survival rates and led to the wider acceptance of holistic care models for cancer patients. A strong believer in the application of evidence-based medicine, he was the first NHS director of research and development. The Oxford DNB is a national record of people who have shaped British history. From June 2025, the dictionary includes biographies of more than 63,000 individuals, written by more than 14,000 contributors, and with more than 12,000 portrait images. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is included in the new edition with Queen Elizabeth II's entry to be published next year. Other prominent figures added include politicians Shirley Williams, Austin Mitchell and Sir David Amess, entrepreneurs Sir Clive Sinclair and Sir David Barclay, Nobel prize-winner Antony Hewish, actors Sir Antony Sher and Helen McCrory, footballers Jimmy Greaves and Ian St John, journalist Katharine Whitehorn, broadcaster Janice Long, anti-deportation activist Anwar Ditta and charity fundraiser Captain Sir Tom Moore.
NBC Sports
19-05-2025
- Sport
- NBC Sports
Six Nations gets an unusual Thursday start next year when France hosts Ireland
DUBLIN — The Six Nations rugby tournament will start on a Thursday night for the first time next season when France opens the defense of its title against Ireland in Paris. The schedule for the 2026 tournament was released Monday, with the French getting the honor of launching it on Feb. 5 against its biggest rival in recent championships. According to stats supplier Opta, the last time the tournament staged a match on a Thursday was back in 1948 — when it was the Five Nations. On that occasion, Ireland won away to France in Round 1 and went on to complete its first ever Grand Slam. France will close against England, which finished in second place in the 2025 edition, as it goes in search of a third title in five seasons.
San Francisco Chronicle
19-05-2025
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
Six Nations gets an unusual Thursday start next year when France hosts Ireland
DUBLIN (AP) — The Six Nations rugby tournament will start on a Thursday night for the first time next season when France opens the defense of its title against Ireland in Paris. The schedule for the 2026 tournament was released Monday, with the French getting the honor of launching it on Feb. 5 against its biggest rival in recent championships. According to stats supplier Opta, the last time the tournament staged a match on a Thursday was back in 1948 — when it was the Five Nations. On that occasion, Ireland won away to France in Round 1 and went on to complete its first ever Grand Slam. ___
