Brian Moore

This dad of four girls never quite replaced playing rugby in his life, he struggles with it still. But he does suggest solutions for many of its ills, and women are at the heart of many of them. Once he’s done fixing rugby, then it’s time for something else. House of Lords, maybe?

Rugby has peaked. It’s not something many people will say out loud, especially at a time when rugby is breaking new ground with Amazon and is coming at us from every possible angle in every possible voice and format, traversing the entire analogue to digital spectrum and beyond, into worlds of virtual reality. But rugby in the UK has definitely hit its highest high. At least in its traditional male-orientated, big-digit-audience sense. 

We’re never going to get more men and boys playing or watching the sport than we’ve had in the past. 

The growth lies elsewhere. It’s the viewpoint of 58-year-old dad-of-four-girls Brian Moore and it makes complete sense. 

Sat in his Wimbledon living room, relieved of the school pick-up of his two four-year-olds Octavia and Kristin due to his appointment with Rugby Journal, we’ve already ploughed through the problems with professionalism [something we’ll come back to later] and covered rugby from grassroots to elite, stopping for more than a while on the role of the scrum. He has thoughts on everything, but those on the sport’s future resonate. “The RFU have genuinely tried to expand the game into state schools,” he says, “but this is the point you’ve got to remember: football, which is the biggest game with the most money by miles, are trying to do that as well. 

“There are only so many schools, only so many kids, and more kids than ever are not wanting to play sport at all, so they’re all fighting for a slowly dwindling amount of resources – how are they supposed to win this battle?

“Rugby’s medium- and long-term future depends on women,” he states. “Rugby has been trying as hard as it can and you’ve only made a certain dent in the number of young boys playing rugby. Even if you could increase the amount of money you put in with development officers by ten times the amount, you’d then only make a reasonable dent in what football’s getting. But you haven’t got that, so you’ve pretty much got as many lads playing mini rugby as you can. 

“Whereas, in girl’s sport, football’s got a march, but they’re not as far ahead,” says Brian. “But, just like the boys, girls come in all shapes and sizes – there are girls who play rugby who could never play football, they’re not athletic but they’re strong, which is what you want in rugby. 

“You talk about what girls don’t like about PE and it’s often due to the fact they’re not athletic, and body image is even more important for girls, so rugby’s an answer to that. 

“If you could match every boy at mini rugby with a girl, instead of it being 1:10, if you got that down to 1:1, you’ve got ten times more people in the game. 

“This is the answer,” he insists, ever more passionate, “and, because I do the school run, and not many blokes do, I see the mums having their chats at the school gates and they talk about all sorts of things, ‘what does yours play?’ ‘Oh, they play rugby? I’d never thought of that’. They have influence to make this happen.”

The women’s game has, after all, been putting a gloss on participation numbers of rugby the world over. “If it wasn’t for the women’s numbers, the men’s participation numbers would have gone down,” explains Brian. “I turn this around to people who don’t agree with me – I say, ‘you explain then how, in the time when rugby has been growing in terms of wages, spectators – you tell me why the [playing] numbers have gone down, why is that?’”

Changing society has also played a part in the traditional player base. “The socio-economic factors in the south east are this,” he begins. “There used to be a time when, on one wage, you could afford a house and a family, just about. In the south east of England now you cannot possibly, as a family starting out, afford a house and a car unless two people are working, the multiples aren’t there. 

“Therefore, if I was a bloke working all week, I used to be able to say, ‘Saturday’s my day down the club’. But when you’ve got both parents working full-time, your partner’s not going to say, ‘oh yeah, you fuck off and do what you want all day Saturday’, because they’ve been working as well and you’ve got kids. 

“There’s a reason why golf, tennis and all other sports are devising shorter versions of their game – because people can’t commit seven hours for a round or stay down the club all day.”

And, playing numbers aside, if you manage to get more girls down the club playing mini rugby, more minis also means more margins via the ‘sugar tax’. “The junior clubs make more with mini rugby on a Sunday morning than they make with profits at the bar on Saturday night because the profits on beer is reasonable but the mark-up on soft drinks and hot dogs is massive,” he explains, showing the acumen of the most astute of tuck shop operators. “So immediately you double your profits, you double the numbers, you double the number of volunteers and parents who are involved, and it’s there you have a truly inclusive game which moves forward.”

“My old boys club which is typical in many ways of junior clubs,” he follows up, “they used to have four or five teams, now they just about run two, but they have got their mini rugby sorted. They’ve got thriving Sunday mornings with all levels of boys and then u13, u15 and u18s girls. The secretary said it’s saved the club and it’s made it a better club, more inclusive.”

Not that everyone’s happy. “Some people – those aged 50 to 70 – moan about it, but they’re not the future: ‘you’ve had 40-50 years with your mates, now fuck off, don’t be a miserable twat, the future’s not for you it’s for them. And, by the way, if we rely on your version there really won’t be one’.”

The three girls at home – twins Octavia and Kristin – have already played rugby. “They’ve all wanted to play, I never purposely mentioned it to them, but they’ve all enjoyed it. The eldest – Imogen – could have been very good but she chose not to carry on.”

Having already solved rugby’s problem with the dwindling playing numbers in the grassroots game so early in the interview, it could be tricky to know where to go next, but Brian has plenty to say, and it always appears well thought through. Even the thought process that led us to the growth via the women’s game, was built upon numbers that lie when it comes to assessing rugby’s popularity. “When the BBC get 9.2m peak for England v France in the Six Nations, if that was a true reflection of the sporting allegiance in this country, then it would be the national game, and it’s not,” he explains. “England v New Zealand in the Autumns, there’s not a bigger draw, it gets 1.2m live – eight million people can’t be rugby fans. 

“I get this in black cabs all the time, ‘I don’t watch any rugby but I watch the Six Nations’.” 

The explanation behind the discrepancy in the figures, aside from any terrestrial v paid-for debate, is down to rivalry. “Home nations used to play football against each other and those were massively popular games because you had your closest neighbours playing against each other,” he says. “Of course, when Scotland played England the viewing figures were 4.5m out of a population of 5.5m because they had the chance to give England a good kicking if they could. The anti-Englishness is a driving factor.”

The topic of professionalism was also covered early doors, when we mentioned that his old nemesis Dudley Wood, the former Secretary of the RFU just before the game went open, featured in a previous edition of Rugby Journal. “Everyone else had a plan, and we had no plan at all,” he says of the RFU. “And that is why the fault line between club and country came about and why it’s never gone away and has been a constant impediment to the global season – it’s there because he allowed it to be.”

He then re-imagines how the rugby world could have been, something key at time when so many clubs still recorded a loss year-after-year and still fail to fill average-sized stadiums. “All the players said you needed to be centrally contracted,” he explains. “Then you could have had a situation where it would have been ideal to have four teams in France, four from England, three from Ireland, Wales and two from Scotland.

“They’d all play in the top league, with regions feeding into the top league. You could have had that but no, they didn’t do that. 

“I lived all through this,” he continues, “me and Rob Andrew sat down recently and, I had to check this, but we reckon they probably wasted £1bn over 25 years: £40m a year… 

“I’m not being wise after the event, we said this from 1991 onwards, and of course we were right, but I get no pleasure from saying that.”

What he can see instead is a stretching of the playing pool. “There isn’t enough talent to have twelve English teams,” he says, “if you could have concentrated the talent, can you imagine what the top four English and French teams would be like with all the qualified players now? 

“That has a knock-on benefit, they work hand in hand with the national coaches and, within your framework, you can say ‘can we look at developing this?’ and they all agree.

“The whole pyramid in New Zealand is all tailored to getting that top team.”

He’s not finished, as he then switches to the finance. “The year when six [Premiership] clubs got close to being profitable,” he begins, “they should have been saying, ‘let’s keep going down this route, let’s be sensible, in two years’ time we’re all breaking even’. Did that happen? No. What did happen was there was a push for another marquee player to be allowed, so they could spend more money. 

“That was the mindset,” he states. “It was, if we do that, it’ll get more popular. But if you look at the number of viewers, the people through the gates, the participants – the case to do that isn’t there. 

“[they should] Consolidate and get on a really sound footing, and do it gradually but, oh no. This is a problem when you allow a billionaire to come in and say ‘we can do this, we can do that, fuck everyone else’. And does it work? No, it doesn’t. They look across and see the massive broadcasting deals of football and think we can have some of that, not understanding that they’re not football.”

While the Premiership is unlikely to rebalance the books anytime soon, the post-Covid era could dawn a sea-change in grassroots rugby, something Brian believes to be long overdue. “I sat on the RFU committee several years ago and I was saying nobody below Championship level should be paid a penny,” he says. “What is the point in paying players £150 a week? If they’re good enough to be a pro, let them be a pro – they can’t be good enough if they’re accepting £150. 

“What it [paying the £150s] means is their clubs are having to find £40-50k before they pay for anything else. Why do it? If you don’t pay these guys will they not play? 

“Put that money into mini rugby, how many coaches would that get? I’d hoped that with Covid, they finally might see sense.”

So well versed is Brian on being a pundit, and so easy is it to just follow a path that meanders through his views on pretty much all aspects of the game, that it’s easy to forget his own career. It was impressive, one that amassed 64 caps for England and five for the British & Irish Lions across two tours. He played in three Rugby World Cups – with his first (1987) and last (1995) dissected by a run to the final in the middle one – and won three Grand Slams (1991, 1992 and 1995). “I played at school and the path was set,” he says. “I captained the school at centre on Saturday mornings then played hooker for the old boys in the afternoon. I never forget we played one game [in the Yorkshire merit table] and there was a massive set-to and their captain came over to ours and said, ‘listen, will you stop your hooker picking on our hooker, our lad’s only 18’ – and ours said, ‘well ours is only 17!’.  That was the year we didn’t lose a game, we came top, brilliant year.”

When he moved south to study law at Nottingham, he played for the local side which was then one of the country’s strongest. Again, like many instances, after doing his research and looking at the figures, Brian decided he could play for England. “There’s a pathway,” he says, “and in the first year I qualified age-wise for the England under-23s, they sat us down at Bisham Abbey and said, ‘statistically we can prove that 40 per cent of the people who play for England under-23s’ full team, will get capped’. 

“So, you start to look around and think ‘I’m as good as most players here, in fact I’m better than some players here’. ‘Am I one of those 40 per cent? Yeah, I could be, so why shouldn’t I be?’ 

“At that point, I then thought actually this is something I can do, statistically it’s possible and talent-wise it’s possible. It was no longer a question of seeing which representative team is in the pipeline and could I make that, this was serious, it was within my own sphere of influence.”

It’s not until the final rung of the ladder was climbed however, questions marks would remain. “Until you get your first international cap, you can be doing all the things they’re doing, you can think ‘I’m as good as them’ but you’ve never played an international so how can you tell? 

“With the selectors, it’s the same as people today that keep saying, ‘I don’t know if he can handle it’. Well, you’re not going to know if you don’t fucking pick him are you?”

He did make his debut aged 25 in a 21-12 win over Scotland in 1987 at Twickenham, making the shirt his own the following season. “I had a massive battle against Graham Dawe and vice versa, but there were other massive battles. 

“You always knew it was their biggest thing too, because they’re playing against the guy who’s got a place they believe they should have. When you’ve got the number one spot, you’re going to face that, at least half of them are thinking, ‘I’m as good as him’. Even if the guy hasn’t got a realistic shout at being in the England team anyway, he’s still playing against the England number one, he wants to show he’s good enough or wants to go away and, in the bar later, say, ‘I took two against the head today’.”

There’s plenty of career highlights to run through: the 1989 British & Irish Lions in Australia: “the only Lions team to lose a first Test and win a series’; the back-to-back Grand Slams: “they were brilliant, 114 years of Four, Five and Six Nations and only six teams have ever done that”; the Rugby World Cup final (both a high and low). 

What has had the biggest impact on Brian, hasn’t been the specific wins or defeats, but the day he realised there wouldn’t be anything quite like his playing career ever again. “I haven’t really replaced it,” says Brian, who brought his rugby career to an end with a single season of official professionalism at Richmond, following a career largely spent at Harlequins. “It’s something that’s an issue at times,” he admits, “you find yourself in moods hitherto you’d be able to go out on the pitch and you can’t and it’s not good, they’re moods you shouldn’t be in.

“I miss my mates,” he continues, “the outlet for aggression, for confrontation, that competitive drive and all these sorts of things – they don’t go away but they don’t have the outlets and they certainly don’t have the positive outlets. 

“Rugby’s a special game in that sense. One of the reasons I don’t like golf is the thought of having to calm down when you’ve made a mistake. With rugby you can achieve so much by just being aggressive and, even if you made a mistake, by being hyper-aggressive that element is rewarded.”

To try and alleviate the loss, he turned to other hobbies. “I had a wild period in Soho for six years when I went off the rails, which was good fun,” he says, “but, you’ve got to come to terms with the fact that nothing you ever experience in life is going to be as intense as it has been. 

“The birth of your children is monumental and probably the nearest thing you can come to it emotionally, but the difference is, it’s not shared, it’s not in public. And this is the big thing. Sport is one of the few areas in life where there is an agreed set of criteria where you win or lose, and everyone knows what they are. 

“It’s no respecter of titles or wealth or intellect, it’s very simple, everyone knows who’s won or lost and, every time you go out on the field or the track or whatever, you risk winning or losing definitively. 

“When it goes well it’s exhilarating because all the plaudits come your way, but when you’ve lost, it’s devastating. There’s no get-out clause in sport, and that becomes seductive, it’s an addictive thing because it’s done in public.

“When you lose a World Cup final like I did, everyone knows about it, it’s a matter of record. I don’t have another gig or two to do, I can’t paint another picture to make up for it. Even if I won another World Cup, and Jason Leonard is the only one in that squad who has, he’ll still say ‘well, I’ve lost that one’. No matter what you do, you can’t replicate it.”

He misses the public arena, the pressure, the scrutiny – even the papers predicting he shouldn’t be in the side. “People try to recreate it with artificial stimulae, but it’s never the same,” he says, “the whole cocktail of circumstances isn’t the same and you’ve got to find a way to understand that’s not going to happen again.”

Does he understand that now? “I don’t think I have fully, I think I’ve got better at it,” he admits. “You’ve got to find a way to realise that mainstream life also has tremendous ups and downs, that people do live their lives with tremendous fulfilment without having these things, so it is possible. 

“And, by the way, would you rather not have had these things? Or course not. But you do have to stop looking for the replication of it, because it isn’t there. 

“The sooner you do that, the happier you’ll be, and the more likely to get to a stage where you can think, ‘you know what, that’s gone, but I’m still happy and I’m happy that I did it actually’.” 

He finished practising law in 2005, ‘I got bored. Other things came up, and I decided I’d like to do them. It could have been the wrong decision, I would have made a lot more money, but would I have written for a national newspaper or broadcast for national radio or television? No, I wouldn’t have done. I suppose, looking back, I said to myself, you get one life, you don’t get many chances to do those things, whereas I’d already done law.”

Which brings us up to date. “My life is made up of an amalgam of things: writing for the Telegraph, after-dinner speaking, doing a bit of commentary, writing a bit here and there and trying to help with four girls because my wife has a full-time job with the European Tour.

“One theory is in life you have to live through a stage and learn a certain lesson and if you learn it, you go on to the next one, and if you don’t, then you either get put back or stay on the same one, this lesson for me, must be how to get on with females. If I don’t pass this one, I’ll have to go back several paces.”

When not on dad duty, he does contemplate the next stage in his own career. “Maybe now I’m at the stage where I’d like to do something else, something new, but I don’t know what that is...”

Any thoughts at all? “I tell you what, I’d like to be a cross-bench peer,” he says, “because I genuinely think with my legal background I can make a difference.

“I’ve always been interested in politics and current affairs, I genuinely feel I could do a decent job, in framing and helping legislation – certainly in the areas I’ve got a lot of experience.

“I could be a younger voice, an independent voice and I actually think I could do a decent job I wouldn’t be a sinecure, I’ve got my own mind. And, if I was cross bench, I couldn’t be whipped, so that’s something I could do well.”

Lord Moore? “I don’t care about the title, I couldn’t care less,” he says, and you believe him, “but being part of that process, to make a difference, that would be something I’d like to do.” 

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Han Lee De Boer

This extract was taken from issue 12 of Rugby.
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