The Last Amateurs: The Incredible Story of Ulster Rugby’s 1999 European Champions

By Jonathan Bradley

'If we win today, for the rest of our lives we'll be blood brothers. Nobody can do it for us. We are the twenty-two players who can go out there and create history.' 

Stuart Duncan

In 1999, Ulster – whose squad included builders, students and lorry drivers, as well as professional players – overcame the odds to become the first Irish champions of Europe. 

The Last Amateurs tells the story of how the team went, in just fourteen months, to a record-breaking 56-3 defeat to Wasps, to victories over French giants Toulouse and Stade Français to secure their place in Irish history.

Based on interviews with all the key members of the squad – including David Humphreys, Mark McCall, Simon Mason and Andy Ward – the book tells for the first time the remarkable story of the players and the team, and of the turbulent campaign that led to them being crowned kings of Europe. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
• Release date: Oct 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780732244

Book preview

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

9.30 a.m., 30 January 1999

The man with the keys to Lansdowne Road is adamant that, for all he knows, Simon Mason could be an imposter.

Mason’s face has been everywhere since Ulster booked their place in this afternoon’s European Cup final thanks to an incredible win over French powerhouse Stade Français three weeks ago. Interest in Ulster has mushroomed since that most unlikely of results and, with the country captivated, members of the media from far and wide have been seeking out the province’s adopted Liverpudlian, who has kicked this unheralded bunch to the verge of being crowned Ireland’s first-ever European champions.

Not that you’d know it from the scene unfolding at the gates of the famous old stadium, where this morning’s kicking practice can’t get underway until key meets lock. As trains rumble past, ferrying some forty thousand Ulster fans into Dublin, all with their hopes resting on Mason’s right boot, the stadium attendant continues to argue that the twenty-five-year-old star could just be any one of the horde arriving early without a ticket and chancing his luck.

Head-to-toe in Ulster gear, in the days when such tracksuits were still a luxury for the players, and were definitely not items available to any fan wandering into a club shop, it seems unlikely that Mason isn’t who he says he is, but the only man whose opinion matters sticks to his guns. Ever affable backs coach, Colin Wilkinson, draws distractedly on one of his Benson & Hedges as even he struggles to keep his cool. He hopes this unforeseen hitch won’t knock Mason off his stride on the very day Ulster need him most. Soon enough, he’ll have no such worries.

Team doctor David Irwin, who himself represented Ireland with distinction for a decade, as well as touring with the British and Irish Lions, could perhaps take most offence at the notion that they’re a trio of interlopers looking to sneak into the stadium some five hours early, but he manages to hold his tongue.

Ironically, Mason had no such problems getting into Irish Rugby HQ the day before. He and his room-mate, reserve scrum half Stephen Bell, had ambled round from the Berkeley Court Hotel, and simply hopped over a fence.

As dusk had descended on Dublin, the pair had sat in the south stand and thought of the coming day. Mason – who grew up aspiring to be the next Kenny Dalglish: scoring goals not kicking points – daydreamed of the sea of red that would greet the teams as they ran out, a similar sight to the one that must have greeted his Liverpool heroes at Anfield on the magical European nights he remembered from the 1980s.

Harry Williams, former Holywood Primary School headmaster turned pro rugby coach, had believed his side’s name was on the trophy since their stunning win over Toulouse in the quarter-finals. His players were now daring to think the same. Mason imagined holding the cup aloft, giving Ulster’s fairy tale the happy ending that had seemed beyond improbable when the side, as was the norm, had staggered through the early rounds. He pictured himself kicking the winning points, proving once and for all that he’d been discarded far too early by the national selectors, and bringing back silverware for the troubled province that had so quickly felt like home when he’d arrived from Liverpool just six months ago.

Today, though, things weren’t proving quite as straightforward as they had been in his head.

‘No ID, I can’t let you in,’ maintained the attendant, sounding more and more like a bouncer on the door of a pub.

Jobsworth, Mason thought to himself. Still, just hours away from the biggest game of his life, he remained remarkably serene. Reminiscing some years later, he said he’d since wondered if the world’s top sportsmen, the likes of Messi and Ronaldo, spent every game of their careers feeling the way he did that winter’s day in Dublin. For now, though, he just appreciated the assurance surging through his veins that had been there since he’d woken up that morning, lying in the very same hotel room he’d occupied when he’d made his Ireland debut three years before. It was the hunt for more international caps that had ultimately led him here, but now he chased a different dream.

He’d been in incredible form since he’d first stepped off the Liverpool boat, taking little note of those who had questioned why anyone would choose to move to a city still scarred by three decades of the Troubles, let alone take a 50 per cent pay cut for the privilege. He’d always felt more comfortable in an Ulster jersey than a high-spending Richmond one, where a day kicking from the tee yielding nine from ten would still bring questions about the lone miss. At Ulster, they were all in it together, even if it was he who got the plaudits, thanks to his metronome of a kicking stroke.

It didn’t change the pressures, though; not when the hush descended and he approached the kicking tee. He always felt that sickness before big games, imagining being handed a kick from the sideline and watching in horror as it lifted only five metres off the ground, like an injured bird trying to take flight, before returning to the turf. Before the semi against the best side in France, Stade Français, he was wracked with nerves, even as teammates around him somehow talked themselves into believing a historic victory was imminent. With a game plan designed specifically to win penalties for him to knock over, he was always aware of the need to capitalise on his teammates’ hard work. Mason, ye daft eejit, he’d imagined Justin Fitzpatrick saying, should he be wayward with a straightforward penalty won by the loose head prop’s destructive scrummaging. Kicking when stakes are at their highest is a skill he’s always seen as similar to playing blackjack – there are no grey areas. Succeed and you’re a hero; fail and you feel like the worst in the world.

Since arriving in Ulster, it seemed he’d been beating the dealer whether he chose to stick or twist, but he still turned white at the thought of his talents deserting him when he needed them most. But not today in Dublin. Today Mason has utter confidence in his ability. The idea that this final could end with Colomiers lifting the trophy doesn’t enter his head.

But first he has to get into the stadium. Finally, he reaches a compromise with the attendant and the trio, along with a sack of size five Gilberts, are allowed on to the side pitch at Lansdowne Road. Better late than never, the morning practice can begin.

In preparation, balls are placed at six different spots along the twenty-two while Mason readies himself for a routine he’s carried out at least every other day of his entire adult life.

When he’d initially practised with Colin Wilkinson, shortly after his first team training session at Ravenhill back in July, Wilkinson had been so impressed he’d said that Mason was already far too good a kicker to learn anything from the likes of him. But if the post-training kicking that day was eye-catching, it was nothing compared to Mason’s form on the morning of the biggest match of his life.

As Wilkinson continued to place balls, he heard a familiar clang. Mason was standing on the try line taking aim at the uprights, the theory being that if you can aim for and hit one of the posts, then putting it between them should pose relatively few problems. Another clang, then another. The sound echoed through the empty stands and told Wilkinson all he needed to know.

Moving back to the twenty-two, and starting on the right, Mason methodically begins to replicate his penalty goal stroke, the one practised thousands and thousands of times: head down and follow through. With Wilkinson looking on in amazement, the first twenty-nine balls all fly between the posts with a precision that suggests there wasn’t ever any alternative.

As Mason lines up one final kick, his thoughts drift back to his very first steps in the game. He’s six years old again, occupying himself at Birkenhead Park while his father finishes up at a committee meeting inside. Without a witness, few would have believed that the young Mason could have booted the ball over and between the posts, and no one could have known that it was the first of what would be a career’s worth of such feats.

When he next places the ball on the tee, a lack of witnesses won’t be a problem, not with forty-nine thousand crammed to the rafters of Lansdowne Road and hanging on his every kick. He puts that thought to one side as he concludes his routine, striking the last ball sweetly and watching it scythe through the crisp Dublin air like scissors through paper.

Straight between the posts. Again.

No, nothing is going to go wrong here, he reassures himself. It’s going to be our day.

1

A RUDE AWAKENING

Ulster’s worst day in Europe produced something of an out-of-body experience for Andy Matchett.

There are few more thankless tasks in rugby than that of a run-of-the-mill back rower chasing down a quick scrum half – bearing stark similarities to how Wile E. Coyote must have felt chasing Road Runner – always getting just close enough to feel him blow past the despairing tackle, the faintest touch of fingertip on jersey a painful reminder of how ‘close’ counts for little in sport.

The problem for Matchett on the afternoon of 21 September 1997 was that Lawrence Dallaglio was anything but run of the mill. At six feet four inches tall, with well north of seventeen stone behind him in the tackle, the Wasps number eight didn’t so much chase half backs as hunt them down. Clad in the traditional black of the then London club, the victorious Lion and soon-to-be England captain looked every inch the assassin as he drove Ulstermen into the Loftus Road turf time and time again.

When Matchett peered up from another ruck in a game that was quickly unravelling, time seemed to slow down. Bracing for impact, it was as if he could see the collision coming from above, as if he was watching a misfortune befalling somebody else. Look at the size of Dallaglio, he thought to himself. Thwack. As the collision thundered through his body like a car crash, he shuddered back to reality.

When Matchett had first represented the province, it was Ulster that had struck fear into the opposition, not the other way around. He had made his debut in the early nineties, when Ulster’s rugby team was the pride of Ireland. Back then, learning your trade at Ravenhill was the equivalent of an Ivy League education.

‘It was a really strong side and I was the young kid on the block at that stage,’ Matchett recalls. ‘I always remember Willie Anderson saying, You just get the ball out to Peter Russell and that’ll do us. That’s all I was trying to do. We went down to Thomond Park and beat Munster, and I remember at half-time they’d kicked the life out of Davy Irwin, the way you can’t do any more. There was plenty of mouthing, too – you had the likes of Peter Clohessy in that Munster team, so there was no holding back. Davy Irwin wouldn’t have been a popular character down there. He and Willie Anderson, they were both quite in your face, shall we say. Davy was in there ranting, Look at what these fuckers have done to me! I was twenty-one years old, sat in the corner wondering what I was doing in this madhouse getting my shit kicked in. But we ended up winning – that’s the way it seemed to go back then.’

By 1997, times had changed.

Ulster, who had earned at the very least a share of every interprovincial title between 1985 and 1994, had become a different team in the years since. By the time the sport staggered into professionalism, and the inaugural Heineken Cup began in 1995, the side’s decade of dominance was already the subject of misty-eyed nostalgia. The feats of David Irwin, Trevor Ringland, Nigel Carr, Keith Crossan and Willie Anderson, men who formed the spine of the greatest team to ever call Ravenhill home, were memories. How that team would have done in a European Cup wasn’t really a question on the terraces in Belfast, for that would have implied some sort of debate surrounding the topic. That they’d have won it three or four times over was an unquestioned truth so oft repeated that younger generations would be forgiven for thinking they had done just that, that gathering dust somewhere were pictures of those players hoisting silverware after vanquishing the very best that the rugby-playing world had to offer.

Their successors – those who finally saw the vice-like grip on the interprovincial series loosened and who would be the first to represent the nine counties in the newly formed cross-continental competition – were not of the same ilk. The early days of Ulster in Europe wasn’t a case of David versus Goliath, instead it was more akin to the Christians thrown to the lions. Seven losses in their first eight games left little room for argument: Ulster and the glamour tournament were uneasy bedfellows. And that was before they ran into Wasps.

There are times when, muddling your way through a situation, the fact that you have reached the nadir only becomes clear afterwards; a moment of clarity later bringing the realisation that that was indeed rock bottom. On other occasions, when faced with straits so dire that it’s impossible to avoid the obvious conclusion, you can sense a low as it’s playing out in front of you. It was a case of the latter the day Ulster travelled to Loftus Road to meet Dallaglio and Co. and were not just beaten but annihilated.

While losing in Europe was nothing new to the side – it was par for the course since the night there had been forty points between them and Cardiff in their very first game – confronting the glitz and allure of English giants in a spacious football ground and coming out on the wrong end of a 56–3 battering made one thing abundantly clear: the gap between the Ulstermen and the Wasps of this world was getting wider and wider. Sooner or later it would be impossible to bridge. With a makeshift backline, a largely amateur squad and a wholly amateur attitude, the difference between the haves and have nots competing in the same competition was as pronounced as it would ever be.

Even while Wasps rested the likes of Simon Shaw and Andy Gomarsall, they could still field a fifteen that included Dallaglio and the great Scot Kenny Logan, the wing who grabbed the headlines on that September day, scoring three of his side’s eight tries. All their players were paid, and handsomely so, considering such dealings had belonged in grubby brown envelopes as recently as 1995. Meanwhile Ulster had only five pro players on the standard Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) contract of the time: 25,000 Irish punts a year along with a car. Fresh from a victorious Lions tour in South Africa, and only months away from his first Test as England captain, Dallaglio would soon be making more than ten times that amount when endorsement deals were taken into consideration. These were two sides existing on different planes.

The game had actually started encouragingly for Ulster. After half an hour, the score was knotted at 3–3: out-half Stuart Laing’s penalty had ensured an even footing as half-time approached. The issue came when the hosts scored the game’s final fifty-three points. Shane Roiser and Simon Mitchell both grabbed tries before half-time and the difference between the sides was hammered home after the turn as an increasingly ragged Ulster side was torn asunder by Wasps’ incisive backs and Logan’s hat-trick of tries scored in just eleven minutes in the second half.

‘As if the half-century of points were not enough of a gulf, by the end Wasps showed that in terms of fitness and nous they are light years ahead,’ wrote David Llewellyn in his match report for the Independent. It wasn’t an assertion contested by Ulster who had begun to adopt professionalism in that most stereotypically Irish of ways – a job to be undertaken slowly and to be completed whenever they got around to it.

Among the small rank of paid players on the visiting side was Jan Cunningham, who had put his legal career on hold to chase the dream of being a full-time rugby player. While it would be seven years before he returned to the hard graft of law, his early rugby forays were hardly labour intensive. Without even enough bodies for a game of five-a-side, he and the other salaried players would congregate for a gym session in the morning and then be left to kill the day with PlayStation or golf until the working majority of the squad were ready for training in the evening.

‘It was bizarre,’ remembers Cunningham, whose younger brother Bryn made the first of his 150 Ulster outings from the bench in the game. ‘We knew then that in the European Cup … the other teams were professional and we weren’t. We played Wasps, full-time professionals, and the only concessions we had made to it were four guys turning up to do weight sessions. We were behind the curve. It was a hiding at the time but that scoreline – it was the equivalent of having eighty or ninety put on you nowadays. I think I touched the ball once and it was a knock-on. You just thought What are we doing here? We’re not in the same league. We were so far behind, it was a farce. They were professional. We were too, but in name not nature.’

While the Premiership giant’s star names had designs on being the very best, whether that be in Europe or on the national stage, where Clive Woodward was two years into a rebuild with England that would eventually yield a World Cup, Ulster’s aims were certainly more modest in the face of odds that seemed insurmountable. They had gone into that 1997–98 season with Royal Belfast Academical Institution schoolmaster Davy Haslett at the helm – a