You might have missed it in all the excitement, but Sergio Parisse finally announced his retirement late last month. After 21 years, 470 professional games, 142 Test matches (94 of them as captain), 15 Six Nations championships and five World Cups, Parisse had decided to quit at the end of the season. He still hasn’t given up hope of winning that one last valedictory cap for Italy, which he’s been waiting on ever since 2019. He lost out on it once because of the typhoon that washed out Italy’s match against the All Blacks at the 2019 World Cup, and then again when they postponed their Six Nations game against England during the pandemic.
“If the coach calls me, I’ll be happy to answer,” Parisse told the French press.
In the meantime, Parisse has been doing some thinking. He’s 39, and believes he’ll be one of the last men to play on so long into his late 30s. “When I started playing rugby I was 18 and it was a different game – the physicality has increased hugely over that period of 20 years and especially over the last seven or eight,” Parisse says. “It was a contact sport, but now it’s a collision sport and seems to get faster and more powerful every year.” The truth is, he says, that “if you’re not prepared to put your body in danger, then you’re probably playing the wrong sport”. The players have to accept their careers have become a question of risk versus reward.
Cut through all the internecine bickering between the union, the provinces, and the clubs, the flawed structures, and failed funding models, and that same question is at the crux of the current crisis in Welsh rugby. It’s not that the players don’t accept the risks involved, or even that they want to be better rewarded for them. It was that they wanted recognition that as the people facing that decision, they needed more control over it because they had lost confidence in the authorities. The same authorities, remember, who are currently facing lawsuits over their alleged negligence in failing to protect a previous generation of players from those same risks.
The players always accepted that the Welsh regions had been living beyond their means. They weren’t pushing back against the proposed pay cuts to the professional game.
What they wanted was more control. They asked for more representation in the running of the sport, and got it. They wanted changes made to the old rule that restricted the ability of anyone with fewer than 60 caps to play outside Wales, and got it, and to a new one which meant their employers would have been able to send them out on loan whether the players wanted to go or not. And they wanted changes to the proposed pay deal that would make 20% of their salaries dependent on performance, even after the team budgets are cut, compromising their ability to compete. That’s gone too.
The sport is torn between the commercial imperative to play more rugby and the medical imperative to play less, and for all the talk about the importance of player welfare, it too often seems to be the first thing to give. There are plenty of ex-pros out there who are paying the consequences for that way of doing things. Now current ones were suffering, too. There are over 70 professional players in Wales who have spent the last few weeks worrying about whether they’ll have a job come the other end of the summer, because they’re out of contract at the end of the season. Players such as the Dragons centre Jack Dixon, to pick just one of them.
Dixon hasn’t been in the headlines too often in his career. There were a few when he made his debut back in 2011, against Wasps in the old Anglo-Welsh Cup. He was only 16, which made him the youngest player ever to turn out for one of the regions. A year later he broke another record when, playing a year above his age, he became the youngest man ever to start a game in the Junior World Championship.
Dixon never did make it into the senior team. He won a call-up to the training squad for the 2015 World Cup but had to pull out when he ruptured a kidney during a training session. It cost him the best part of a year of his career, and the chance never came his way again. So he got on with his job at the Dragons. He’s played almost 200 games for them now, under seven head coaches, making tackles, winning turnovers, running the hard yards. “Every weekend I just try my best for the team,” he said when he played his 150th. “I am not the one that scores the tries, I am the one that takes all the beatings in midfield to let the boys outside me score the tries.”
He still doesn’t get much press outside of the local papers. He’s not that sort. Until last week, when he spoke out about his contract situation. Dixon is 28, already has one child, and his wife is expecting another in August. He is living off a verbal promise from the Dragons that they’ll sign him again next season. And much as he trusts them, “until something is set in stone and signed on the dotted line, it doesn’t mean anything”. It meant, he said, “when you take the field you try to park it as best you can but, subconsciously, you are one big injury from being thrown out the door”.
That same weekend, Dixon started their away game against Leinster. In the 40th minute, his leg was caught awkwardly in a ruck. It’s not clear yet whether or not it was that “big injury” he was worried about. But he went off, and when he reappeared he was on crutches. The only security he has now is the heartfelt promise that the “club will look after him” from his head coach, Dai Flanagan. For Dixon, and every other professional player in Wales, the risks had become unacceptable.
