‘The hugely successful 2015 World Cup obscured the reality rugby union has become too dangerous’ according to John Dawes - architect of the historic 1971 Lions triumph in New Zealand.

His views come from the new updated edition of John Dawes: The Man who Changed the World of Rugby by Ross Reyburn in which Dawes and the late Carwyn James cite their views on what could be done to transform the modern game for the better. 

Reyburn’s biography is the only first-hand account of the 1971 Lions in print backtracking the tour’s success to its birthplace at Old Deer Park where Dawes created the  spectacular London Welsh side in the late 1960s. And it also provides as shrewd an analysis of the faults of modern rugby as you will find anywhere in The Legacy of the Dawes Era chapter.   

Carwyn James and the late Daily Telegraph rugby correspondent John Reason in their book  The World of Rugby – A History of Rugby Union Football  published in 1979 with prophetic foresight attacked a new  law allowing tackled players to pass the ball if they kept it off the ground wrote:

‘If the tackler is not rewarded with at least an interruption in the attacking side’s control of  the ball ...he will  stand up and maul for the ball, as they do in rugby league. Is that really what the International Board wants from rugby union football?

The changes in the tackle law ...have introduced the pile-up, as players seek to keep the ball off the ground and opponents  seek to smother it. The solution is obvious. Return to the old law which required a player immediately to release the ball once he had been brought to the ground.’  

John  Dawes, who translated his vision of attacking 15-man rugby perfected at London Welsh to the 1971 Lions in his great partnership  with  James, echoed similar concerns telling Reyburn in 2013:

‘What the game has developed now is physicality. These days the first thing you look at in a player is how big he is, how strong he is.  You don’t see the ball go down the line from set pieces. What you see is a mess. You would be penalized in our day for a pile-up. But now they just dive in jumping on each ther. I can’t  understand how the referee allows it. Playing physically as they do now injuries will increase.’

Dawes’s injuries prediction has proved all too true and in April  2015 Prof Allyson Pollock  argued the game was too dangerous in its existing form for schools. Reyburn argues backing the views of Carwyn James and John Dawes need not be complex. World Rugby needs to return to the old tackle law, ensure existing laws are strictly enforced so the straight scrum feed returns and solo clear-out charges are penalised and return rugby to its traditional role as a 15-man game cutting the substitutes bench to four players available only as blood or injury replacements.

It is now over 30 years since Carwyn James sadly died aged just 53 and John Dawes’s direct involvement in the game has passed. But rugby union’s debt to these two visionaries from the Welsh valleys need not have ended.

The updated edition of Ross Reyburn’s biography, The Man Who Changed the World of Rugby – John Dawes and the Legendary 1971 British Lions (Y Lolfa, paperback £9.99) is available now.  

It includes articles by former Wales and Lions flanker John Taylor, the late Evening Standard sports editor  JL Manning and former Birmingham Post rugby correspondent Michael Blair highlighting the debt the game owes Dawes.