A League of his own Maurice Lindsay : Profile

Dave Hadfield studies the single-minded determination of an influential rugby administrator

THERE are times when Maurice Lindsay is not so much a hands-on as a boots-on chief executive of his sport. It is hard to imagine the figurehead of any other team game striding around a waterlogged pitch in his wellies, insisting that the show must go on, as Lindsay did at Central Park in the last round of rugby league's Challenge Cup. The soil of Wigan that nurtured him has been hard to shake off, but does it denote feet of clay?

It is more than two years since Lindsay, 53 years old and fresh from a reign at Wigan that could only be described as a triumph, arrived like a messiah at the Rugby Football League's headquarters in Leeds. Being under siege in what Lindsay himself sometimes describes as "the bunker" at Chapeltown Road goes with the territory, but he has rarely been under the sustained pressure that he has faced over the past couple of weeks.

The sudden departure of the man who was effectively his number two, the chaos caused by a simple matter like Wigan drawing with St Helens in that mud-threatened Cup tie, a series of administrative banana skins and, more damaging, the evidence of drug-use within the sport have made his lot not a happy one.

One thing to which the fall-out has made little discernible difference is Lindsay's own monumental self-confidence and determination to carry through the job in all its aspects. Already burdened with the organisation of this autumn's crucially important Centenary World Cup, he last week took on yet another role.

It is very well and good for rugby league to have seats at British sport's high table, like Lindsay's new post as chairman of the Major Spectator Sports Division of the Central Council for Physical Recreation, but how many hats can one man wear simultaneously without becoming dangerously top-heavy?

Lindsay, whose personal financial clout comes from having built up and sold a plant-hire firm and from the bookmaking business he has now reluctantly given up, although he retains a part share in some racehorses, joined the Wigan board in 1979. He soon dominated the club and, as their fortunes rose, was perceived by many as the most powerful man in the game long before he became the League's chief executive.

Harry Gration, whose resignation after less than a year as the League's public affairs executive was one of the slings and arrows of the past couple of weeks, says that Lindsay's flaw is his reluctance to delegate. "When he was in Australia recently, everything here broke down, because no one has the executive power to do anything without him," Gration says. "He's a one-man band," says Alex Murphy, one of the men he hired and fired as coach of Wigan. The famous incident in which Murphy threw a telephone at him might have hastened his departure, but he says that the underlying reason "was that people used to come to me and ask me things rather than to Maurice, and he wouldn't have that".

Despite that, Murphy praises Lindsay's energy and drive, and Gration says: "His single-minded dedication is what the game needs. You can't fault him in that respect, but he's a very demanding person, very exacting in his requirements of people."

After the relatively relaxed regime of his predecessor, David Oxley, Lindsay represented a distinct change of mood at League HQ. "Like going from a holiday camp to a concentration camp in a couple of weeks," was the way one Chapeltown Road employee described it.

"I honestly don't think I'm a difficult person to work with," Lindsay insists. "I have two girls who work outside my office and we work with the doors open. We're possibly a bit too frivolous and scatterbrained at times. If people didn't like working here, they would all leave."

Some have, of course, but others who have worked closely with him talk of unique qualities. According to John Monie, the most successful of his coaches at Wigan, "he is not just the best administrator in Britain, he's the only one".

Lindsay would not make such a bold claim, but there is no doubt that he sees himself as a man of destiny. And, in a game where boundaries and horizons are often parochial, he pleads guilty to a wider vision. "I knew it was a massive challenge," he says of his time at the League's HQ, "but I thought it really did need to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck. Otherwise, we are in danger of being a small, parochial game for ever, and the danger in that is that you can finish up with no game at all."

Part of the Lindsay agenda is already well-known and came a step closer to fruition with the acceptance 10 days ago of a new voting system that gives First Division clubs more clout. He would like to see a greater concentration of resources on those clubs - preferably as part of a smaller premier or super league - with the little clubs finding their own level outside.

"Our financial position is not as black as people think, but there have been anomalies, like Highfield and Chorley getting the same share of the BBC fee as Wigan and Leeds, even though they're never on TV," he says. "I look forward to the day when clubs like Salford, Halifax and Wakefield get their grounds up to scratch. They will now have an opportunity to do that."

Unlike many involved in the frequently hand-to-mouth existence of the domestic game, Lindsay's horizons extend to the international dimension. "That is one view I share with David Oxley. We are both internationalists. You are judged on your international achievements and this country loves winners.

"You can concentrate entirely on your domestic competition, but then you end up like Australian rules or baseball, which are very strong in their own countries but can't hold a candle to world events."

Cynics might say - indeed are saying - that a 10-team World Cup to celebrate the code's 100 years this October hardly ranks very high among world events. Comparison with rugby union's jamboree in South Africa are inevitable, but Lindsay is unfazed by that, believing that league's World Cup might be smaller in scale and hype, but it will be better in terms of quality on the field.

Envy of union's international profile, however, does steer Lindsay into some wild and uncharted waters. He has already, along with the League's chairman, Rodney Walker, become the first official from the code to sit down for a friendly chat and lunch - smoked salmon and sole - with heavyweights from the other side of the great rugby divide.

Nothing was decided, nothing was demanded or conceded, but lines of communication are more open than they have been at any time since 1895, and those lines will eventually converge, he maintains, to produce one code of rugby.

Quite how this will happen is another matter and seems to vary somewhat even for Lindsay. Via the Welsh morning newspaper the Western Mail he issued an invitation to Welsh rugby union players to come over en masse to league, where he assured them they would be a lot better off.

His scenario for other audiences is for the growth of a hybrid game, even if league has to lose some of its distinctive elements in the process. "I think it is inevitable that the two codes will come together. The laws of rugby union have been inhibiting its progress, which is not to say that everything in our game is perfect." Although Lindsay promises that "league will never come crawling on its hands and knees", his analysis could still, to league loyalists, sound suspiciously like the blueprint for a sell-out.

It is hard to separate the heresy from the fantasy, and Lindsay himself admits that he would not have a clue where to start drawing up a joint set of rules. "But what I am suggesting is that it is inevitable that the two codes will come together, so we may as well start thinking about it now."

He already sees the traditional tension between the two games fading, as rugby union abandons its pretence of amateurism. "I see people's class attitudes changing," he says. Drawing comparison and encouragement from his other sporting passion of horse-racing, he says that "you couldn't go into certain enclosures unless you were of a certain class. All that has changed".

It says much about Lindsay that at a time when other administrators would be lying at the bottom of the trench while the whizzbangs of the game's more immediate concerns explode overhead, he can still peer out at a distant vision which may yet turn out to be a mirage.

Coolness under fire or self- delusion? The game needs Maurice Lindsay to display even more of his usual quota of the first and yet avoid the pitfalls of the second.