Six Fours les Plages

The Reputation

By the time I played club rugby in France — for Bédarrides, which sits between Orange and Avignon in the Vaucluse — I had long since made my peace with the particular texture of French provincial rugby. It is not like anything else. The standard is serious — Federal 2 is not social rugby. The refereeing can be eccentric, and the attitude towards the laws of the game is sometimes more suggestive than prescriptive. But the intensity is real, and the culture around it — the bus trips, the shared lunches of overcooked pasta and roasted chicken, the long drives home with a beer and a body that is already beginning to itemise its complaints — is something I would not trade.

This was the 2013-14 season, Federal 2. We were log leaders, or close enough to it. We were in form, organised, and we knew it. The match was an away fixture at Six Fours-les-Plages, down on the Mediterranean coast near Toulon, in early November. Late in the season. The kind of fixture that looks straightforward on paper and never is.

You do not simply go to Six Fours and win. That was the first thing understood on the bus. They were last on the log, which meant nothing, because a team with nothing left to lose and a reputation to protect is a dangerous thing. Six Fours had a reputation. So did we. Bédarrides was known as a club that liked to swing apples — which is the polite way of saying that our players were not philosophically opposed to resolving disputes with their fists. I still have footage of some of it. I will publish it one day, when the statute of limitations has run out.

The Lunch

I only ate the chicken.

This is important. The French rugby lunch before an away match is a ritual: overcooked pasta in industrial quantities, roasted chicken, bread, a small amount of wine that is technically there but that most people ignore before a game. The pasta is always overcooked. It is a point of consistency in an otherwise unpredictable sport. I have never understood the logic of loading carbohydrates into a body that is about to spend eighty minutes being knocked sideways, so I left the pasta alone and ate the chicken. Protein before effort. The rest is decoration.

I was in good form that season. No serious injuries — which, in rugby, means the small ones barely register. Twisted fingers, bruises that change colour over the course of a week, the occasional stiff neck from a collapsed scrum. You learn to move around these things. They are part of the cost of playing, and you pay them without complaint because the alternative is not playing, and that is worse.

The Kickoff

The warmup, as it turned out, was unnecessary.

The man in the red scrum cap — me — you can see it on the video on YouTube — made a hash of the kickoff. I knocked it on and they got a scrum. Which is where things went sideways.

In France there is an expression: relever la mêlée. It refers to what happens when a scrum comes up deliberately — one of the locks slips his bind and punches one of the helpless opposition front rows in the face. The player cannot defend himself because both arms are bound to other players. This signals the start of hostilities. This is exactly what happened in that first scrum.

The fight lasted two or three minutes. I took a few shots early on — my right eye has not been reliable since a winger caught me with a sideways punch in a previous match and I lost my sight in it for three days; the pupil has not worked properly since — so I did what I had long since concluded was the sensible approach to fighting on a rugby field: I got up, looked behind me, and retreated to open ground where nobody could hit me from an angle I was not watching.

I rarely got involved in fighting on the field. I am trying to build a life in France, not go to jail for assault, which is what happened to people I know over exactly this kind of incident. Fighting on a rugby field is a mug's game. You get hit from directions you are not looking. The odds are poor and the consequences are disproportionate.

Our hooker, Gauthier, on the other hand, had no such reservations. Gauthier was well known within the club for his enthusiasm in these situations, and he applied himself with conviction. He laid out several people before the dust settled. He also broke two of his own fingers in the process, which is the kind of detail that only becomes funny later.

When order was eventually restored, the referee produced two red cards for Six Fours and one for Gauthier. We continued with fourteen men against thirteen. The match proper could begin.

It did not improve.

The Dirty Game

What followed was the dirtiest game of rugby I have ever played in, and I have played in some matches that would make a citing commissioner weep.

Our captain was head-stamped when the referee was looking the other way. There were fingers in eyes, boots in rucks, and a general attitude from the Six Fours players that the laws of rugby were more of a framework for negotiation than a set of binding instructions. They were last on the log and they had decided that if they were going down, they were going down fighting, in both the metaphorical and the literal sense.

I played well. This is not something I say lightly or often, but it is true and it matters to the story. There was a lineout where I read the play, worked my way through the set piece, and stole the ball from the maul that followed. There was a run where I took the ball up into contact, bumped off multiple defenders, and was brought down just short of the line by three men — leaving our scrumhalf with an open path to the tryline in front of him that he gratefully took. These are the small victories inside a match that do not show up in the score but that you carry home with you.

The Liver

Then came the pièce de résistance, and not in a good way.

I took a strong ball up towards their twenty-two. Good line, good carry, the kind of run that was working for me all afternoon. Three players brought me to ground. The ball was already gone — out to our second centre, the move continuing — when one of their players came in late and dropped with both knees directly into my right side. Into the ribs. Into the liver.

Anyone who has watched a liver shot finish a boxing match on YouTube understands what happens next. Your breath disappears. Not reduced — gone. You cannot inhale. You are lying on the ground in a French coastal town in November, fighting for air, and in the absence of anything useful to do with your mind, a part of it starts to quietly negotiate with the universe about whether death might not, in the circumstances, be a mercy.

It passes. If you have played rugby long enough you know this, and the knowing is the only thing that keeps you from genuine panic. You scream — or try to — and you fight for breath, and eventually it comes back, thin and insufficient at first and then more of it, and the world reassembles itself around you. I was replaced. I sat on the side and watched the game tighten, the two red cards beginning to tell against them, our lead beginning to look fragile.

Then they told me to go back on. And I did, because that is what you do.

We won.

After

There was another fight after the final whistle. I stayed away from that one without difficulty.

The bus trip home. A few beers, which seemed reasonable. The slow accounting that happens on a long journey back when the adrenaline is gone and the body starts sending its invoices. By the time I got home that night I was stiff, sore, and ready for the story to be over.

Then I went to the toilet and urinated almost pure blood.

The diagnosis: two cracked ribs and a bruised kidney. The doctor's instruction: no rugby for six weeks minimum. I nodded, accepted this, and went home to rest.

Two weeks later, on my birthday, my phone rang. The other lock was down with gastro. Could I play the next day?

I played.

I should not have. I knew it at the time and I knew it during the match, which I spent operating at perhaps sixty percent of my usual capacity — not making contact like I normally would, not carrying with the same conviction, not doing the things a second row is paid in bruises to do. I was, justifiably, given a hard time about it afterwards.

But I played on my birthday, two weeks after a bruised kidney and two cracked ribs, because a teammate needed cover and I said yes. There are worse things to be criticised for.

My surname is Botha. I am not Bakkies. But I have my moments.