Great moments in Lions tour history: When Brian Moore went mountain climbing at Eden Park

Jamie Wall pays tribute to one of the great practitioners of the lost art of rucking.

Brian Moore, today an outspoken pundit, was once an outspoken and uncompromising player. The English hooker was selected for the 1993 Lions tour of New Zealand and is remembered for one legendary moment in the second test.

After Rory Underwood’s match-winning try, Moore gestured to the very disgruntled Athletic Park crowd about which team was on top. Legend has it a patron hurled a can of beer at him, which he caught and consumed on the spot.

While he talks about that here, sadly there’s no footage of the incident – presumably because they would’ve been filming the conversion. However, there was one more piece of rugby that would never happen nowadays that Moore was involved with that very much did get caught on camera.

In the midweek game against Auckland, the Lions found themselves hot on attack. Home side player Eroni Clarke gets himself caught on the wrong side of the ruck and this is what happened:

Ouch. That’s some good old-fashioned rucking, with a little Kung Fu kick at the end that Eric Cantona may have taken some inspiration from.

What makes it even more old-school is that referee Dave Bishop decided that not only did Clarke deserve to have his rear end shredded to the bone by Moore’s boots, but he was in the wrong rules-wise. Even taking into account that this was the old days, the penalty try that Bishop subsequently awarded the Lions for slowing down the ruck seems excessively harsh.

Moore actually responded to the above tweet and was unsurprisingly unrepentant about the entire episode. He claimed that ‘when you are in New Zealand you play by New Zealand rules’, which is a pretty fair argument given that rucking was still very much a part of the game back then.

Of course, if that happened in this day and age anyone doing that sort of thing would be red carded and banned for the rest of the season.

Moore’s ruckmanship was ultimately in vain, though, as Auckland went on to win the match 23-18. This was no disgrace given that the home side contained a whopping 13 All Blacks, and shows that the tough tour schedule that the 2017 Lions have is nothing new.

This week they find themselves back at Eden Park for another midweek battle, this time against a Blues side desperate to salvage something from another disappointing season. Given that rucking has gone the way of the sand kicking tee and long-sleeved jerseys, it’s probably fair to say that the only fancy footwork in this game will be by the likes of Rieko Ioane, Melani Nanai and hopefully a few of the Lions.