“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.”
Perhaps a little over the top, it was George Orwell who wrote those words.
He might have added espionage and spying as other aspects of the sporting underbelly.
There are many kinds of sporting espionage. But these days the spy of choice for skulduggery and chicanery, which several football teams have unmasked in recent years, is not a bag of bones walking in the shadows, but a drone in the sky with cameras.
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A little subterfuge to get an edge, to try to determine an outcome, was shown to be part of the unofficial Olympic programme in the 2024 Paris Olympics soccer competition.
Forget the corruption, gender rows and doping, three days before the opening ceremony and New Zealand’s match against reigning champions Canada in St Etienne, the Kiwi players noticed a drone hovering overhead during a training session.
They called the police.
The gendarmerie eventually collared the drone operator, who turned out to be a staff member from the Canadian team.
It was later reported that there had been two drone incidents. With the Olympic values of fair play in shreds, Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst”, and Jasmine Mander, a member of the coaching staff, stepped down.
A red-faced Canada apologised, and their coach Beverly Priestman stepped away from the touchline for the opening match.
Before England’s semi-final against Australia in the 2023 Women’s World Cup, the Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney sent a photographer up in a helicopter to capture images from the England team’s closed-doors session at their training ground.
They published a photograph of the head coach, Sarina Wiegman under the headline “Eleven Poms against a nation: Welcome to the jungle, Lionesses.”
The paper taunted the England team for trying to stay under the radar for their game against the hosts, “we sent a chopper up to see how the old enemy are preparing”.
Telescopic lenses have taken photographs of coaches holding tactical sheets folded under their arm with information facing out, while two decades ago an opportunist among the ranks of Limerick cab drivers came across notes lying on the ground by his car.
Irish-born and Munster by the grace of God never seemed so appropriate as it did on that Friday in 2003 as Gloucester arrived in for the Champions’ Cup.
Hours before kick-off, the unnamed taxi driver, who gave an interview to a local radio station, saw the piece of paper near his car and, believing it to be money, he picked it up.
To his astonishment, it appeared to outline the game plan that Gloucester had compiled for the game against Munster that night.
Munster had a mountain to climb that year against the English Premiership leaders. They had to hit several targets to advance from the group stages of the competition, including beating Gloucester by 27 points and scoring four tries. That would earn a place in the quarter-finals.
According to several newspaper reports of the time, the cabby was about to throw the paper out the window when he realised what he had found.
“So, I went to check it out and when it wasn’t [money] I was just about to throw it out of the window, when I looked at it and nearly crashed the car,” he said.
Chance would follow good fortune when later that evening he picked up Shannon secondrow Brian Buckley, whose eyes lit up when he looked at the paper.
“I gave him the plan and he looked at it and he nearly fainted in the car. He said I had to get it to the Munster team,” said the driver.
But the driver couldn’t get hold of officials from Munster, so instead he went to the host of a local radio sports show and handed over a photocopy of what he had found.
He said that Pat Whelan, a former Ireland and Munster hooker, happened to be there.
“Pat Whelan nearly jumped,” said the driver.
He claimed that he left the photocopy with the pair, who told him they would pass it on to the Munster team.
As the evening progressed the match unfolded into an epic encounter. Munster scored their four tries with John Kelly touching down towards the end of the match.
Ronan O’Gara nailed his conversion to give his team the 27-point winning margin they need.
Seconds later a pitch invasion signalled the match was over and that Munster were going through to the next round. The game was later dubbed the “Miracle Match”.
It has never been revealed whether those notes flapping around the streets of Limerick were passed on to Munster’s coach at the time, Alan Gaffney. If they were passed on, nobody has explained what they said or if they were of any substantial use to the Munster team on the night.
A week later in his Guardian column, former French winger Thomas Castaignède wondered to what extent he should blame the Limerick cab driver for Gloucester’s defeat.
But then, remembering Orwell’s contention that serious sport has nothing to do with fair play, maybe the real question is, does it even matter?
