Brendan Gallagher: Enforcers help to keep the game trouble free!

I’ve always had a soft spot for rugby‘s ‘enforcers’ and will rather miss Bakkies Botha, which is a sentiment I suspect that his many vanquished opponents over the years probably don’t share.
Botha, who retired from Test rugby last week, had been South Africa‘s enforcer for nearly a decade, the man that opponents tangled with at their peril and the guy most likely to sort out troublesome opponents.
It’s an old, necessary and even occasionally honourable positon within any successful team – even in modern day rugby – and should be recognised as such. Rugby is the toughest physical team sport known to man and stuff happens, it’s part of its appeal and it would be hypocritical to think otherwise.
Some enforcers over the years have definitely crossed the line as to what was acceptable, particularly before cameras covering every angle and TMO technology were waiting to pounce. No question, yet perversely I would argue that, without them, far worse atrocities would occur in what is intrinsically a game of physical combat in which the potential to injure is massive.
One of the best examples I can recall of an enforcer going to work was Fran Cotton for England in Paris in 1980. The brutal French pack was intent on dismembering their England counterpart limb by limb but, at one early scrum, Cotton, fed up with Richard Paparemborde’s latest  front row atrocity, promptly decked him with a beauty.
It cost England a penalty and three points but the bemused and nonplussed French didn’t try it on again, England won a famous victory and went on to win their first Grand Slam in 23 years.
The true enforcer must never be confused with the thug because the latter tend to be quickly found out and become liabilities, giving away too many penalties and spending too much time in the bin or unavailable through various bans and suspensions. No international team can accommodate that in the long term.
Yes, the enforcer will always be playing and competing on the edge where the battle is fiercest and will occasionally cross the line of what is acceptable and pay the cost. But possibly not as often as you think.

Botha has a fearsome reputation and, like many enforcers, that reputation might have been built up during a reckless rugby youth, but his one major black mark at senior level  in 85 Tests was a headbutt on All Blacks scrum-half Jimmy Cowan and a nine-week ban in 2010.
His did also receive a two-week ban for injuring Adam Jones when clearing him out of a ruck in the second Lions Test in 2009 although the Welsh prop absolved Botha of all blame afterwards and said he got what he deserved for being in the wrong place.
With Martin Johnson there were a couple of bans at club level but in 84 England internationals and eight Lions Tests – a full decade at the international coalface – I can only remember one suspension in England colours, a single match ban in 1997 after punching Justin Marshall in the first Test at Old Trafford. An enforcer is of little use to his team sitting on the naughty boys’ step or being sent down the tunnel for an early bath.
Most enforcers, in fact, tend to enjoy long careers because they are savvy and streetwise and work out early in their career how far they can go, how far they can push a ref.
Their aggression has to be mostly implicit rather than explicit and it undoubtedly helps if they look like a grizzled heavyweight boxer and snarl pugnaciously. Above all else the enforcer has to be psychologically intimidating, the unspoken threat of retribution being his main weapon. In the final part of Johnno’s career a mere furrow of the brows and a long stare in the general direction of an opponent who had displeased him was often all it needed.
It is the threat, rather than the actual stick an enforcer dishes out, which provides his team’s deterrent although just occasionally he has to flex his muscles and strike – literally – to underline his reputation lest anybody thinks he is going soft. Perish the thought.
A world-class enforcer is rugby’s equivalent of a nuclear deterrent. If you don’t possess that deterrent the ‘enemy’ will undoubtedly start taking liberties and the situation will escalate into chaos but as long as you have the ultimate weapon to hit back with peace often reigns.
A state of armed neutrality settles over a match. Like I say, enforcers can actually be agents of peace, sort of!
*This article was first published in The Rugby Paper on November 30.