No more Mr Angry

The RFU's prime antagonist, Brian Moore, is to retire, writes Steve Bale

The massed ranks of the Rugby Football Union committee - most, if not all 56 of them - let out a hearty cheer yesterday when Brian Moore suddenly announced his impending retirement from rugby, only for the RFU to then reveal that it intended to include England's most-capped hooker among its coaching team for next season.

This perversity provides a neat encapsulation of Moore's playing career, which has brought him the distinction of 58 appearances for England and five for the Lions, at the same time as the opprobrium of officialdom unhappy at his involvement in rugby union's retreat from amateurism in the Nineties.

Moore is content with these contrasting aspects of his attachment to the game. Aged 33, he will lead Harlequins for the final time in this afternoon's Courage League match at Gloucester, and will finally retire in June after the completion of the World Cup in South Africa.

"The conflicting and ever- increasing demands of international and league rugby and those of a responsible professional career are now impossible for me to reconcile," Moore said yesterday. "On top of this, there are many other interests which I want to pursue, but which I've had to neglect for a long time."

Even so, Moore's announcement came as a surprise, since whenever he was previously asked about his plans he had stated his intention to continue after the World Cup, with the ultimate aim of making his third Lions tour, to South Africa in 1997. He is understood to have finally decided otherwise only this week.

By his own admission, he has had problems combining a high-powered job as a City solicitor with his interminable rugby commitment. Coupling the prospect of career advancement with his well-documented difficulty in synchronising diaries with his wife, a doctor, he had an irresistible case for retirement.

Thus will end one of the more controversial - and illustrious - England careers, which began in 1987 when Graham Dawe was dropped as a disciplinary measure after a rough-house England game in Wales. Dawe has latterly returned to the bench, but as he will be 36 next month, the England selectors will have to look to a post-Moore generation of hookers - and there is no obvious candidate.

Whoever emerges, perhaps Mark Regan of Bristol or Gareth Adams of Bath, is guaranteed to be more acceptable to the establishment than Moore. He has antagonised the RFU as the prime mover in the England squad's determination to maximise their off-field earnings, but is now about to depart at the very moment the campaign for quasi-professionalism is about to succeed in a highly lucrative way.

Dudley Wood, the RFU secretary, yesterday paid his old adversary a distinctly lukewarm compliment when he said: "Brian always held strong views that did not always agree with mine on the way the game should be conducted off the field, but I am sure he will be invaluable in a coaching role." If the hatchet were to be buried, it would probably be in one or the other's cranium.