The global travellers who light up game

THERE is nothing especially funny about short-term memory loss, but it may just have an upside when it comes to rugby.

- CHRIS HEWETT

Anything that stops us fuming over the stomach-churning excesses of the so-called governing class, or mourning the sorry decline of the game in Wales, or wrestling with the broken relationship between the English Premiership and everyone else…well, you get the picture.

For those of us categorised as “baby boomers” or early “Generation Xers”, it also affords us the space to recall a time when Canada could field a Test team worth watching, to the extent that in the first half of the 1990s, they were a serious threat to all and sundry. At the start of that decade they saw off Argentina home and away; at the 1991 World Cup in France, they were too good for Fiji, went down by six to the hosts in Agen and gave New Zealand a right old hurry-up on quarter-final day in Lille.

It should have been the start of something: they had a genuinely competitive pack of forwards boasting the likes of Rod Snow, Mark Cardinal, Norm Hadley, Gord Mackinnon, Al Charron and Glen Ennis, together with a handful of backs – Winston Stanley, Dave Lougheed, the masterful Gareth Rees – who properly knew what they were doing.