SIDELINE CUT:Rugby has reinvented itself with enormous energy and success over the last 15 years, but with what long-term consequences, asks KEITH DUGGAN

WHENEVER FRANCE arrive I recall Patrice Lagisquet and immediately think of the way rugby used to be and where it may be headed. Does anyone remember the kind of characters who used to grace international rugby teams in the days before professionalism?

I am talking mainly about the backs here – slender fellows who liked to make dandified runs up field, rather than the forwards who used to wheeze their way up field looking in dire need of either a heart respirator or a stiff drink – frequently both. But the backs were of different breed then.

John Rutherford of Scotland’s ’84 Grand Slam team was typical: lean and elegant with quicksilver hands and, like most three-quarters, looking like he could use a good meal. He had the poise and coolness of one of those characters you might see on Saturday afternoon Westerns: no lip out of him but still the fastest draw in the saloon.

International rugby backs had an air of privilege that was best summed up in the great line from Blackadder Goes Forth, where Captain George reminisces about the halcyon days of his toff chums: “Crashingly superb bunch of blokes Fine, clean-limbed . . . even their acne had a strange nobility about it.”

And for a good few years, it was more or less impossible to play numbers 9-15 for England unless you looked like an extra from Brideshead Revisited. Anyone remember Marcus Rose? Cambridge chap, 10 caps stretched over six years looking like he had walked straight out of a Housman poem.

His last act in an England shirt was to leave the field with a severe concussion, his white shirt still pristine.

Or Jonathan Webb? Recall that unfeasibly lean fullback breaking the Irish spirit season after season with his unerring penalties. The thing about Webb was he managed to become one of the great dead-ball kickers on the side: in real life, he was an orthopaedic surgeon.

Didn’t Rory Underwood fly planes for the RAF when he wasn’t dashing along the sideline at Twickenham. Even on rain-soaked days, when the pitch turned into a mudbath, Underwood never seemed to get a splash on his England strip.

Watching on television, we always assumed he used to change costume at every scrum, much like Barbara Streisand between songs.

As for Lagisquet, well: nothing ever beat the sight of the Bayonne man in full flow with the ball. Lagisquet and his mates – Sella, Blanco, Camberabero – were never content merely to score wonderfully swift tries: they had to run patterns that were as much about geometry as sport. They saw the merest chinks of light left by Englishmen and by bewildered Celts and they were off and running.

You only had to see Mike Tindall leading England onto the field against Wales last Friday night for confirmation about how completely rugby has changed. Tindall’s longevity as an international – a full decade after the limitations of his game were criticised by England old boys – is no mean feat. But throughout that time, his chief attribute has always lain in his brutish, formidable strength and his ability to bash his way through opposition defences.

Whereas Rutherford and company used to ghost through spaces that opened and closed in the blink of an eye, the current method is defined by brute strength. Imagine what would happen if a representative set of 1980s backs were to take the field against the players who operate today. They would be pulverised.

They might fancy themselves to be able to duck and weave through the most ferocious of the tackles, but they would quickly discover what even the most natural and instinctive of their successors – Brian O’Driscoll, Shane Williams, Gordon D’Arcy – know too well. There is no room left on the pitch.

The organised, drift defence and the sheer bulk of the players has sealed up much of the space the fast men of yesteryear exploited. When they show footage now even from the 1990s, you can see how vastly different the game has become: how quick and tactical and, most of all, how relentlessly punishing.

No wonder Tindall, with his battering-ram physique, has been able to withstand the demands of the modern game better than most.

But it makes you wonder about the consequences. The alarming instances of concussions in American football have placed the violent aspect of that sport back under the spotlight. The game has had its critics from its inception: it took the intercession of Teddy Roosevelt, who called coaches to the White House for a chat about how best to reform a game that many wanted banned, to bring about what has become the integral feature and attraction of the game; the forward pass, as thrown by the quarterback.

I remember a Kerry friend telling me how, as a child, he had scoffed when he first saw American football on Channel 4: the helmets and the pads struck him as superfluous and soft. But the damage done to the human beings under those complicated padded costumes has been significant.

Even marquee players like former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman have gone public on episodes of memory loss following games. But it was among the linebackers – the human wrecking-balls – that the toll was most severe, from severe arthritis to actual amputations.

And now the stories of neurological problems, almost certainly culled from seasons of hitting other powerful athletes at speed, are starting to emerge. And the NFL needs to correct the very nature of its game or soon it won’t have a game.

Anyone who has heard the former Leinster and Ireland prop Bernard Jackman talking about the physical toll of his rugby life will have got a clear sense of how severe modern rugby can be. He also detailed how players are willing to play with heads made foggy after particularly tough hits or arms gone temporarily numb – after tackles known as “stingers”.

The camera work at games is so sophisticated now we can practically see into the eyes of a player as he goes into a tackle. And we have become used to that slightly glazed look pass across the faces of players after they are involved in one of those head-on, full-speed collisions.

It can seem so choreographed: they know how to tackle, how to fall and how to protect themselves. But for all the advancements in sports science, they cannot know the potential consequences 20 years down the line.

Rugby has reinvented itself with enormous energy and success over the last 15 years. The winter competitions have been so hectic and popular and the Six Nations and World Cups become such popular feasts that the rapid transformation of the backs from the light, dashing ball players into formidably powerful athletes has occurred without anyone really wondering about where it was all going next.

Young centres and wingers coming through have frames as broad as frontrows of 15 years ago. They have the speed and the skill and the power, but no room left on the field. So they crash and crash and crash into one another. And it is exhilarating to watch and the crowd loves it and it looks marvellous on television.

And you wonder if in 10 or 20 years, some of the best won’t be paying a high price for their bravery.