Paul Thomas: Rugby shoved aside by rampant showbiz egos

The Brian O'Driscoll affair has demonstrated yet again that New Zealand and Britain are, to adapt George Bernard Shaw, two countries divided by a common sport.

Tomorrow morning the All Blacks play Wales in a match marking the centenary of their first encounter - a contest that spawned an enduring rivalry between two small countries where rugby is embedded in the national make-up.

But if voices and glasses have been raised this week to celebrate the bond, the goodwill has been buried under a slagheap of acrimony arising from a controversy that New Zealanders naively assumed had receded to the stage where honourable men could disagree.

In the past, the divide reflected the game's social base. Here rugby is a game played by all walks of life who learn from the age of 5 that the object of the exercise is to win.

Pre-professionalism, rugby in Britain was a predominantly middle class, private-school sport, whose elders saw it as a vehicle for preserving and promoting class-based ideals of sportsmanship and fair play. In broad terms it was win at all costs versus it's only a game.

New Zealand and Wales had classlessness in common and the Welsh shared our robust pragmatism and sharp-elbowed will to win. The Andy Haden/Frank Oliver dive in 1978 was a dubious piece of gamesmanship in the tradition of the Welsh players who, in 1905, dragged Bob Deans back into the field of play before the referee arrived.

While the O'Driscoll affair conforms to the pattern of the four Home Unions pointing a censorious finger at a perplexed and unrepentant New Zealand, there's a new and rancorous thread in this dialogue of the deaf that reflects the transformation of Britain's rugby culture under professionalism.

British rugby is shedding its old Corinthian values without having a coherent philosophy to replace them. And because nature abhors a vacuum, the soccer model is filling it.

British soccer in its present casino phase represents a classlessness, in that illiterate yahoos can become overnight millionaires and rub shoulders with toffs in exclusive nightclubs. Without lining up with those fastidious social commentators who see the soccer boom as spearheading the triumph of yob culture, one can question the desirability of rugby adopting by default a model tainted by greed, excess, ego and its strategic alliance with the tabloid media.

In British soccer, sport's core values of honesty, courage and respect for one's opponents have been superseded by a single-minded focus on the rewards - sex, money, fame. The concept of the good of the game has been shouldered aside by a ruthless showbiz egoism that files inflammatory tabloid headlines under no such thing as bad publicity.

Headlines equal profile equals celebrity equals rewards.

This week, Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho labelled his Arsenal counterpart Arsene Wenger a voyeur: "There are some guys who when they're at home have this big telescope to see what happens in other families; he must be one of them. Being a voyeur is a sickness."

There's an echo of O'Driscoll in this. The morning after his injury, the Lions captain was claiming he could have died and accusing Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu of acting with malice aforethought. There's more of the same in his tour diary which has reignited the whole affair.

What transformed O'Driscoll's injury from a hard-luck story into a vendetta was the refusal of the Lions and most British media to accept Umaga's word that there was no premeditation or intent to injure in the clean-out (or spear tackle as it has now been deemed by the International Rugby Board without reference, one assumes, to the match officials who deemed it otherwise).

O'Driscoll has played a double game, claiming he has in fact accepted Umaga's word and that his diary, with its reference to the All Black captain acting "in cold blood", was his instant, unfiltered reaction.

He waited until the launch of his book and the All Blacks arrival in Britain, then gave the dying fire a poke. Unprompted he disrobed to show a journalist the scar from his operation ("It was more impressive three months ago; it looked like a shark had tried to rip my arm off") and produced a poem from a 14-year-old girl that "filled him with the sudden certainty that not everyone in New Zealand wished him harm".

Team-mate Lawrence Dallaglio "genuinely believes" the All Blacks went on to the field for the first test planning to take O'Driscoll out. Short of match-fixing, it's hard to think of a more serious accusation he could direct at his fellow professionals.

If anyone should be wary of bringing the game into disrepute, it's Dallaglio, who lost the English captaincy after disgracing himself in a newspaper sting. Clearly, rugby's wider interests are no longer the concern of Britain's leading players.

Gavin Henson, the first truly tabloid rugby player, has produced a book in which he accuses O'Driscoll of eye-gouging him. Displaying a breathtaking lack of self-awareness or a mastery of deadpan irony, O'Driscoll responded thus: "You never know what he truly thinks or if he's just selling a book."