CHRIS HEWETT
GUEST COLUMNIST

It would be stretching things just a little to describe rugby’s pre-World Cup era as an age of innocence: the mass slugfests bordered on public order offences, you had to be uncommonly brave or unusually stupid to go within driving distance of a ruck, and no one mistook Mark Shaw, Uli Schmidt or Richard Moriarty for angels, even of the dirty-faced variety.
But it was a simpler time, for sure. People routinely played injured for no other reason than that they wanted to do so, lineout lifting was about athleticism rather than algebra and the only anal...