Annual Varsity rugby match always gives me the Cambridge double Blue blues

Peck was a good enough scrum-half to be on the bench for England throughout

their Grand Slam season of 1980, without enticing Steve Smith to come off

and provide him with the cap he probably deserved.

But a double Blue? Oh, to have achieved such recognition. I may have mentioned

in this column before that this week in December always provokes memories of

huge regret. The Varsity match takes place at Twickenham on Thursday, and

when it was held there in 1988 and 1989 I sat on Cambridge’s bench. I did

not get on.

Mike Atherton kindly picked me for the cricket side in 1989, but what I would

have given for that rugby Blue.

I am conscious that names are being dropped in this piece as regularly as a

Cockney drops his aitches, but it is done to emphasise the quality and

importance of university sport at that time.

For my first Varsity rugby match, the centre Mike Hall announced his

unavailability for Wales against Romania because he would be playing for

Cambridge at Twickenham, and the Welsh Rugby Union had a policy of not

permitting players to play in the seven days before an international.

Bizarrely, after losing against Oxford (who included six internationals in New

Zealand’s David Kirk, four Australians – Brian Smith, Troy Coker, Ian

Williams and Rob Egerton – and Wales’s David Evans), Hall ended up playing

against Romania when Mark Ring was disciplined and dropped. Wales infamously

lost that match, with captain Jonathan Davies soon defecting to rugby

league.

How things have changed. Now professionalism means it is only former

internationals, such as New Zealand’s Anton Oliver and Australia’s Dan

Vickerman, who may appear in the Varsity match.

Wales’s recent debutant Hallam Amos turned down Oxford to study medicine at

Cardiff University, so that he could still play for Newport Gwent Dragons.

But while the Varsity match these days is an anachronism, it still has its

charms and delights. And so on Thursday Peck will be at Twickenham to watch

his son, Harry, win his Blue.

With Oxford looking for four straight victories for the first time since 1951,

young Peck, who was previously at Newcastle University and has played for

Tynedale, will be desperate to reverse that trend, as well as emulate his

father.

“To win would be the one thing I can have over my father in terms of my rugby

career,” he says, “He never won a Varsity match. He played one, lost one,

and then got injured before the one they went on to win.”

At cricket, in the early 1980s, Peck senior also played two County

Championship matches for Northamptonshire, on whose board he now sits. With

delicious coincidence, in both he featured alongside fellow double Blue

Robin Boyd-Moss, whose son James is on the Cambridge bench this week.

In this age of substitutes rather than replacements, he will probably get on

too. Not that I am bitter. Not much.

More important, though, is, as the traditional toast goes, to scream: “God

Damn B—– Oxford!”

Article source: http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/MATCH-REPORT-Bristol-Rugby-62-Gala-7/story-20296124-detail/story.html

Annual Varsity rugby match always gives me the Cambridge double Blue blues