While England run free, Romania struggle against all odds to keep rugby alive
Eddie Butler
The last time I saw Florica Murariu was one lunchtime in Bucharest. He was on television. Not that he was doing anything. One of the finest forwards of his generation, one of the key players in the Romanian side that had been hammering away for 10 years in a vain attempt to gain entry into the then Five Nations Championship, was lying down.
He didn’t look dead. But he was. As dead as all the other people in the morgue. A single camera panned over them, scores of them in untidy rows. A naked mother lay with a naked baby in her arms, bullet holes across their face and chest, between a grimacing student and this army officer in his great coat.
The officer was one of the few to be identified. “Murariu, Florica,” whispered the commentary. These were hushed images of sacrifice, relayed from the morgue to the television centre that was still smouldering after its four-day fire-fight, and pumped out hour after hour to remind Romania of the price of revolution.
That same day, early in 1990, and simply because I was there, I was invited to attend the first committee meeting of the new Romanian Rugby Federation. Radu Demian and Viorel Muraru, the new president and secretary, spent most of their time writing letters of condolence to the families of the dozen rugby players killed in the uprising against Nicolae Ceaucescu, but they also had time to talk of a better future.
More than 11 years later, Romanian rugby is still caught between hope and despair. Like the rugby ball carved into the tomb of Radu Durbac not a gnarled veteran like Murariu, but a teenage three-quarter killed in the uprising the sport is not forgotten, but lies pretty close to the grave.
For the past decade rugby has been ground down by poverty. A few months ago Enciu Stoika, another of the back-row giants of the Murariu age, failed to secure a loan for the club he now manages, Dinamo Bucharest, and had to withdraw them from the European Shield.
But then, out of the blue, Brian Baister, chair of the board of management at the Rugby Football Union, threw up the idea of promotion and relegation between the two leagues of Six Nations. England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales might one day be challenged by the B division currently Romania, Georgia, Russia, Holland, Spain and Portugal.
While England pushed back the frontiers of the European game by beating France at Twickenham earlier this month, Romania were playing Georgia in Bucharest, a title decider between two unbeaten sides. It was only an idea tossed into the breeze by Baister, but one day it will happen. Romania might be hammering again at the door of the wealthiest championship in the game.
Despair and hope: the contradictions of Romania. The sport of rugby has proved itself perverse enough on its own down the years but when it combines with the contradictions of the country, suddenly the laws of nature are bent out of shape.
In the age of Ceaucescu or at least in the later years of his rule when he was pursuing his maddest policies of converting rural Romania into an industrial wasteland and the cities into one long queue for bread one of the surest ways to measure the extent of his oppression was to count the number of players who defected while on tour abroad. Most stayed in France, whom Romania still play on an annual basis, but soon countries like Scotland found themselves with a Dumitrescu here and a Radulescu there.
And yet Romania remained a fine team; they regularly drew crowds of 20 000 and once, in 1957, pulled in 95?000 for a game against France in Bucharest, which they lost narrowly 15-18 (although the fact that two cup football semi- finals were also taking place in the stadium on the same day may have had something to do with the size of the crowd).
Romania announced themselves to the outside world in 1979 by arriving in Cardiff and losing by a single point, 12-13, to a Welsh team that had dominated Europe for a decade. They stayed together to gain revenge over Wales at home in 1983 and beat Scotland, the newly crowned Five Nations Grand Slam champions, in 1984. As recently as 1988 they beat Wales in Cardiff.
It seems easy to explain why the bulk of the team stayed together. Most of them played either for the army side, Steaua Bucharest, or the police team, Dinamo Bucharest. Ceaucescu’s protectors were less likely to be his defectors.
These were the days when Florica Murariu and his family would go and stay with Mircea Paraschiv in the week of an international. A Steaua forward at the home of a Dinamo scrumhalf because they were friends through rugby.
Then came the revolution, when the army turned on the leader who ordered them to open fire on the people. The secret police, the Securitate, remained loyal to Ceaucescu and for a brief few days, civil war raged. And police player Paraschiv lost his army mate Murariu.
Freedom has not helped rugby. We’re back to the Romanian paradox. Paraschiv, who eventually won 67 caps as a player, is now in his third stint as national coach of Romania. He says: “There is no team spirit in the national side now. The players based in France stick together, the Bucharest players stay together, while the Constanta players stay in their own corner.”
The only thing they share is a complaint over how much money they make, the few hundred dollars a man that the federation scrapes together in order for it be to worth the players’ while to pull on the yellow jersey with its oak-leaf badge. Everybody in grassroots rugby complains about the complaining of the top players.
And they all combined to complain about the salary worth about $60 000, they reckoned of John Phillips, the New Zealand coach brought in by the International Rugby Board, even though it was the IRB that was stumping up the money. The Romanians do not find it strange to look at a gift-horse and bad-mouth it.
Phillips came, spoke with Kiwi directness to his Latin charges, tried to make them play the All Blacks way, failed to get through, left, and now Paraschiv is back.
The name of his club, Dinamo, seems to have survived any association with the secret police force. The Securitate melted away after the revolution, although nobody thinks it has gone far.
Nobody has gone far. Ion Iliescu, once a member of the Ceaucescu government and then leader of the National Salvation Front, which won the elections of 1990, has just won the latest elections to earn himself a second stint as president. The names remain the same. Steaua and Dinamo still rule in football and rugby.
Somehow, you’d expect Dinamo in downtown Bucharest to be a grim Lubyanka sort of sports club. Or somehow South American, in a plush but sinister sort of way. Its facade is a bleak slab, but behind the streets the facilities spread out from the hub, the main football stadium.
On a Saturday morning at the start of spring it was cheerful and decidedly not plush. In the middle of a pot-holed velodrome, 100 children in a rag-tag clothing cocktail of woolly jumpers and sun-bleached hand-me-downs roamed around the puddles and over the largely grassless ruts of Bucharest’s premier rugby club’s training pitch.
These were children from some of the outlying “villages” in the outskirts of the capital. The club has a programme of going out to these poor areas: missionary work with a touch of talent-spotting thrown in. The kids just this once had insisted on coming into town to enjoy the facilities of the great Dinamo club, and they were revelling in the puddles and the overplayed earth that is frozen in winter and scorched in summer.
At the end of the session there were no mini-rugby mums to pick them up in the four-wheel drive. Covered in dried mud, they wandered off to the nearest tram stop, pausing only briefly to admire the group of 12-year-old Dinamo wannabe footballers in dazzling red kit, who were strutting their stuff on a carpet free of puddles and ruts.
Paraschiv whistled to his Irish setter, Fili, who had been sidestepping in and out of the action, and went into his office. The national coach has a table and a chair and a cupboard, but none of the video technology that is common elsewhere. From the cupboard he took wine and the fire-water they call tuica. And once again, in the company of old players around a worn table, we talked Romanian rugby.
The infrastructure is shot to bits. There is no coaching for the coaches, no courses for referees. No kit, no grass. There is not one rugby clubhouse in the entire country. There is no damned money.
Local businesses and some of the newly arrived foreign companies are beginning to stir themselves. But they all want to make sure that every single one of their lei (40 000 to the pound) is spent on the project of their choice. This is the land of the paradox and of straightforward, uncomplicated corruption.
So, could Romania enter the Six Nations and could Bucharest be the next Latin rugby capital, after Paris and Rome? Surely they would love to feel the championship’s financial muscle.
Funnily enough, it was the committee of the new age that turned down the first offer to join the championship of their dreams. Ten years ago they politely declined, giving a sound practical reason: when the championship starts in February, Romanian sport is only halfway through its winter shut-down.
And then they said that, in all honesty, they were not really ready for such a step forward. So many games in such a concentrated period might be too much.
They were probably right, but sound practicalities and total honesty somehow do not seem a typically Romanian response. And now might be the last chance to chase the dream that was in their mind as they wrote their letters to the families of the fallen in the first week of 1990. Romanian rugby more than a decade later may not be dead, but it’s hardly bursting with rude health. And only so many doctors are going to offer it a lifeline before it is too late.
While million-dollar England set a new standard of play at the top of the European game by beating France, Romania lost at home to Georgia. Despite scoring three tries by Vasile Ghioc and Florin Coro-deanu, they went down 20-31.
Georgia are the new grand-slam champions of the second division. Romania would have to hand back the trophy they won last year by beating, in a neat reversal, Georgia in Tbilisi. They could not find it.
Apparently, when last year’s captain, Catalin Draguceanu, brought the trophy home, he was told to “hang on to it”, because nobody could be bothered to lug it back to the federation offices. So, the captain kept the cup and together they travelled to Australia to begin a new life. The pot is, as they say, in the post.
Romanian rugby lives on, rising and dipping in fortune on its rutted pitches, a million miles from the green acres of Twickenham. One day Romania may join the European mainstream. Or perhaps not. For a Latin island in the middle of Slav eastern Europe, the mainstream may be an alien place.