Book Review: Confessions of a Rugby Mercenary by John Daniell
I was recommended the “Confessions of a Rugby Mercenary” by John Daniell by a good friend and colleague who is also an avid rugby fan, and it did not disappoint. John Daniell is that unusual beast, an Oxbridge graduate turned professional rugby player turned journalist so this combines real first hand insight with beautiful writing.
John Daniell uses his life as a professional rugby player and his experiences to shed light onto the issues of professionalism and the impact it has had on the sport. The book is written in a memoir style and makes for an interesting, sometimes horifying, often funny and regularly thought-provoking read.
It is structured to follow his last season as a professional, with a chapter for each individual game played by Montpellier through the 2005/6 season. In structure it is somewhat similar to Matthew Pinsents’ A lifetime in a race where Pinsent takes you through his life using the different elements of a 2000m rowing race to give it a structure. Daniell does something similar with good effect as he also takes on topics including unsportsmanship behaviour — eye gauging etc, performance enhancing drugs, the crime of losing a home game in French rugby and the lengths that teams and coaches will go to win, and managers will go to to get a deal.
Daniell takes the reader on the journey from his early days in New Zealand and the ranks of the pathway teams of the All Blacks, the transition to becoming a European professional all the way through to the last days of his career when his body was giving up. The transition to the professional game was a huge culture shock, with the emphasis shifting from passion to pay. Daniell’s firsthand account of the changes in the game make for compelling but slightly sad reading.
One of the passages that I highlighted was:
In every club in which I have played at least a third of the squard are regular smokers and pretty much everyone boozez, although not to Anglo-Saxon proportions. Everyone easts pasta, even though, as All Black legend Colin Meads recently pointed out, if pasta is so good for rugby players, then why aren’t the Italians word champions?
Both eye opening and funny.
This is an engaging and easy to read book that provides a unique perspective on the world of rugby. Daniell’s account of his own experiences, combined with his analysis of the impact of professionalism and the rise of the rugby mercenary, make for compelling reading. I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in rugby or the perils of professional sport.
