Rob Cunningham - former Bath hooker, Scotland 'B' captain, and Saracens Head Coach - tells me about his life and career, and being in the running for an unwanted record.
Rob Cunningham took a picture of himself in his hotel room in Romania, staring through a window over the Black Sea. It was necessary to mark the moment. Touring with the Scotland rugby union team and aged 33, this was probably his last chance to earn the international cap he so desperately wanted, and felt he had deserved for many years.
“I took the photo so I would remember the point where the dream ended,” he says.
Expecting to start the following day’s Test match, Cunningham tweaked an existing injury that months earlier had paralysed his leg, and forced him to watch the 1984 Grand Slam decider with France stretched out on a table at home, rather than among the substitutes. He had been warming the bench for nearly five years, waiting patiently behind Scotland’s all-time great, Colin Deans. Kelso hooker Gary Callender had deputised for the game in France, and was now selected to play in the Test against Romania. Cunningham was devastated.
Cunningham is among select company in the race for an unwanted record; those with the most appearances as a replacement without ever making it onto the field for that coveted Test cap. Records are sketchy, but Warren Gatland is probably out in front, spending twenty matches behind New Zealand great Sean Fitzpatrick between 1988-91. Llanelli’s Roy Thomas waited sixteen Tests on the bench for Wales in the 1970s, and Cunningham is next, with a total of fourteen games psyched up and ready in case Deans couldn’t carry on.
Speaking over Zoom on a sunny summer afternoon, Cunningham comes across every ounce the hard man he was known as in his playing days. He reclines across a wooden chair such that much of his face is not even in the frame, and is direct when telling me my connection is shaky, or making sure I know he will be approving anything I write before publishing. Just as on the field where he would impose his physicality on opponents and, according to one former teammate, ‘didn’t mind where he put his feet’, he is in charge.
Perhaps it was the time he hesitated – in Paris, 1983 – momentarily shying away from the physical confrontation, that cost him the opportunity to take the field for his country. At the time, the French front-row featured some of the toughest men ever to play the game; the likes of ‘impervious to pain’ Robert Paparemborde, ‘la Force Basque’ Pierre Dospital, and the 19st ‘Guv’nor’ Gérard Cholley, an ex-Special Forces soldier known to moonlight as a heavyweight boxer, and who once knocked out two Scots in a single game.
“Cholley was a butcher – he used to carry cows on his shoulder,” recalls Cunningham. “These were big guys.”
The names routinely litter fantasy XVs of the hardest men in rugby history, and Cunningham nearly got his moment against them.
“In the first 5 minutes our two props ran into each other and knocked each other out,” he remembers.
Coach Jim Telfer ordered Cunningham onto the field to play out of position at prop against Paparemborde.
“I thought ‘I'm going to be dead if I go on against this guy’,” he says. “I whispered, ‘You can f*** off he's a monster’. Telfer glared at me, so I spent ages getting down the steps, so long that by the time I got [to the pitch] the guys had recovered and I didn't have to go on.”
At the time, Cunningham was relieved, believing that, at some point, his moment would come.
The physicality for which he is known was developed during his childhood in the tough Broomhouse area of Edinburgh. He attended Forrester High School, a mixed grammar and comprehensive near the upmarket Corstorphine, and saw his share of street scuffles.
“I used to get beaten up on the way to school going through Broomhouse, then get my bike stolen by the people from Corstorphine, and then get beaten up on the way home,” he remembers. “You do get quite resilient after a while. A fight didn’t bother me.”
His state-school background meant he was behind players from the powerful Edinburgh private schools that dominated representative rugby with their aligned clubs.
“The only clubs in Edinburgh that anybody from a state-school could play for were non-aligned clubs like the Wanderers,” he says. “But their coaching wasn't as good.”
Even as he made it into the national schoolboy reckoning, he couldn’t break through.
“When they came to pick the team it would be predominantly the public-school boys,” he says. “That's just the way it was.”
He went south in search of top-class rugby, eventually joining Gosforth, a leading club in England headed by future England coach Jack Rowell. Soon, Cunningham followed the “ruthless” Rowell to Bath, where the new coach revolutionised training, turning them into arguably the most powerful club in England. Cunningham was the abrasive and fearsome hooker, and had broken into the Scotland reckoning alongside the younger Deans. Now he was finding that playing in England was not popular with the selectors.
“If I had been playing in Edinburgh I would have had a 50/50 chance, and whoever was the better player on the day would have got selected,” he says. “My problem was I was playing [in England].”
And he returns to the issue of his schooling.
“The committee was dominated by London Scottish,” he says. “They were all public-school boys. I was not a public-school boy.”
I ask if he ever confronted the anti-state-school and anti-English bias at the time. Despite being a combative player, such behaviour off the field was not for him.
“We weren't like that as a family,” he says. “We valued people, and how people reacted to you.”
Like so many sporting men and women, Cunningham feels no bitterness towards his rival. Deans became a Scotland great who was capped fifty-two times across a decade in the team.
“The one thing you'll never hear from me is that Colin did not deserve it,” he says. “Colin was a brilliant player – extremely good – and we got on really well.”
During those years of being so close, Cunningham did have his moments in a Scotland jersey. He was captain of the ‘B’ team, and toured on several occasions – including Romania in 1984 – playing against the US and Canada. At the time, the games did not count as full Tests. The Welsh Rugby Union has since awarded ‘President’s Caps’ to players who represented Wales in such fixtures. It is not something Cunningham would accept.
“Either it was an international or it wasn't,” he says. “As far as I was concerned at the time, it wasn't. I would feel bad about taking it given all of the people I played with.”
After retiring as a player, he went on to coach some greats of the game, including many of England’s World Cup winners as an England youth coach, and during his time as Head Coach at Saracens.
“I coached Michael Lynagh. Well, I just asked him how he wanted to play,” he says with dry humour. “And Philippe Sella, but really I just told him I was jealous of him.”
He even coached a kids’ football team in Newcastle that included a 9-year-old Peter Beardsley. And he is proud of a successful playing career that took him so close.
“I played for Scotland in the US and Canada and scored, scored in the John Player Cup final, and played for what was the best club in the world [at Bath] and a Gosforth side that was the best team in England,” he says. “I even once got a letter from the British Lions saying are you available to play.”
Towards the end of our conversation, I compare himself and Gatland to players in the recent era of tactical substitutions. How does he feel about the likes of Sean Cronin who won fifty-one Ireland caps as a replacement, or Mark Bartholomeusz, capped for a two-minute cameo for Australia?
“I don't even think about it,” he says. “I don't dwell on the things that didn't happen. I've never done that and I'm not going to start now.”
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Inspirational - because most of us have taken a picture of ourselves looking out across the Black Sea at some point.