Make Full-Backs Smoke Again!

Before walking over the street and into Elland Road for last season’s Magic Weekend, I was having a pint in the Old Peacock pub opposite the ground when I got chatting to the brother of Lee Kershaw, who was playing on the wing for London Broncos that day but has since joined Hull KR. After he told me all about Lee’s trial at Leeds the previous off-season, he then regaled me with tales about Kershaw’s teammate at London, the always entertaining Hakim Miloudi.

When Miloudi is in the vicinity of a rugby ball, absolutely anything can happen. Both good and bad. And according to Kershaw’s brother, that’s because he’s utterly uncoachable. It’s not that Miloudi doesn’t listen to what coaches tell him to do, it’s just that when he gets on the pitch he can’t promise that he won’t do the complete opposite. It goes a long way to explaining why the France international is currently playing for his twelfth club in a career that began twelve years ago.

Kershaw’s brother also let me in on a little secret. If I’d walked behind the back of Elland Road’s West Stand ahead of London’s kick-off against Hull FC, I’d have almost certainly spotted Miloudi standing outside the players’ entrance having a crafty pre-match cigarette. And while he may not know it, in indulging in a sneaky fag before a game, Miloudi is standing on the shoulders of a giant in rugby league.

If rugby league is an anti-establishment, rebel sport, then Puig Aubert is its ultimate poster boy. Nicknamed ‘Pipette’, Aubert was a chain-smoking full-back who helped turn France into the best team in the world during the early 1950s, despite the game having been outlawed in the country under the pro-Nazi Vichy government during World War Two. The legend goes that Aubert kept packs of cigarettes next to goalposts so he could spark up during a game if he was bored, while during one match against Wigan played in the middle of a snowstorm, he caught the ball one-handed because he was busy smoking with the other. When he wasn’t puffing away, he was treating himself to a glass of red wine or two at half-time.

But above all he was an electrifying rugby league player whose unshakeable confidence led to him attempting, and converting, drop-goals from all angles with either foot, even if he was standing on the halfway line. As Jack Pollard wrote of Aubert in his 1962 book ‘This Is Rugby League’:

Beyond the tobacco cloud there was a masterly football brain — his showmanship was unashamed and in big games he was as unpredictable as a runaway firecracker. No man was ever harder to train. Crowded on his right foot, he could change feet and drop-kick a goal with his left. With a Test depending on the outcome, he could place the ball for a goal-kick, turn his back on it without marking out his paces and casually swing round and kick the darned fool thing spang between the posts. Once, in Sydney, he removed the corner post level with the uprights, placed the ball where the post had been, and sliced the ball over the bar.

In what claims to be a landmark publication about the sport — the first hardback book documenting some of the game’s most famous players and their methods —  Pollard devoted a whole chapter to Aubert, titled ‘Unorthodox Football Pays!’, in which Aubert outlined his approach in his own words:

On the technique of the game, I am rather badly placed to speak. This topic has never occurred to me because I have always played my own game according to my own inspiration.
All that I can say on this subject is that for me who regards Rugby football as the game of games, I can conceive only a game based on ATTACK. Because I believe it is more difficult to attack than to defend. Defence is to me a matter of one’s own volition. And I think that the 1951 French team proved this in Australia. Where we never played the “close” or “tight” game. Furthermore, this is the reason why we won nearly all our matches easily enough — by playing an “open game” and concentrating on rapid passing of the ball.
...
Australians were shocked at our thirty to forty-yard passes from one side of the field to the other, by our overhead passes and passes through the legs. But if they confuse your rivals and you have confidence in their use, why not?

If defence is ‘a matter of one’s own volition’, then Aubert volunteered to ignore it altogether. He became known for refusing to even attempt to stop opposition players if they broke his side’s line, bollocking whichever teammate missed the initial tackle instead. “He was a great player, except in defence,” said the Australia front rower Duncan Hall. “With all those blokes in front of him, he said, ‘They’re there to tackle and I’ll just kick goals and run with the ball.’”

Likewise, Pollard was not joking when he wrote that ‘no man was harder to train’, as Aubert admitted himself:

Personally I have never much loved training, and I had to be forced to train in spite of the fact that had I had the desire to train conscientiously I would certainly have improved my game enormously — improvement which I actually achieved in Australia, where for four months we lived a well-regulated life of strict daily workouts. This regular, systematic training could not be undertaken in France by a League player because one must not forget that the income received from playing must be implemented by taking a job.
For me the ability to produce the unexpected and to time your coup for a psychological moment always compensated for lack of wind or all those cigarettes I smoked.
Nevertheless I consider training is essential in all sports and (as far as possible) such training should be directed always at fostering that “love of the ball” which is obligatory if great performances are to be realised.

As Aubert acknowledged, his career peaked during the one period when he was forced to commit to training regularly. France had already won the European Championships in 1949, with Aubert captaining the side to a victory over England at Wembley having been photographed arriving at Victoria Station the day prior carrying a ‘carbony of wine’ that was presumably empty by the time the second half began; and two years later they travelled to Australia and New Zealand for a mammoth 28-game tour and the chance to cement themselves as ‘unofficial’ world champions.

France won 21 of their fixtures in what were often violent, bruising encounters. Aubert remained an impish presence at the back, wise enough to stay away from the rough stuff and protected by a fearsome forward pack led by ‘Wild Man’ Louis Mazon, who escaped the Gestapo twice during the war and was his country’s middleweight boxing champion. "Louis was heavily involved in the resistance and was imprisoned, interrogated [and] suffered severely. And he was the fellow we were playing against,” former New Zealand forward Frank Mulcare said in 2016, recalling how Mazon’s teammates would choose which opposition players he should target. "You would hear, 'première ligne' (front row), 'deuxième ligne' (second row), 'troisième ligne' (back row). You were always very attentive to find out what Louis' instructions were because you wanted to protect yourself as much as possible. But it was hard, because once he was given instructions, he thought he was back in the resistance."

Even in the patchy footage that remains of France first Test against Australia, Aubert can be spotted ambling back into position while his teammates desperately chase and tackle an opponent who has made a break, while the cheers from the crowd get louder with each kick Aubert converts from the touchline. For Aubert, the Sydney Cricket Ground was “the easiest ground in the world for kicking. It seemed as though it was impossible to miss there.” In front of a crowd of 60,000, France triumphed 26-15.

Australia levelled the series in the second Test in Brisbane, however, winning 23-11 and setting up a decider back at the SCG. The game also proved the ultimate showdown between Aubert and his opposite number, iconic Australia captain Clive Churchill, whom the man of the match award in the NRL Grand Final is now named after. Both players were credited with revolutionising the full-back role, joining the attack as an extra ball runner rather than being primarily known for catching, tackling, and kicking, but while Aubert greatly respected Churchill, he held a psychological advantage over his opponent:

When the 1951 French team arrived in Australia my old friend and opponent Clive Churchill was considered the best back in the world, and the French players themselves doubted the result of my duel with Churchill. My own confidence, however, never failed me, and every time I met Churchill I think I did just as well as he did, some said better. I learned subsequently from Australian players that he was tense every time he met me on the field, sometimes even sick from nervousness.

France struck another psychological blow ahead of the game as the Australia team watched in ‘utter astonishment’ as their opponents trained for the decisive Test with a game of soccer, completely relaxed ahead of the biggest game of their lives:

I have experienced many unforgettable moments during my long career, but I think the Third Test in Sydney, which we won by 35 points to 14, will always remain the most outstanding memory of all. We Frenchmen really flipped the ball around, moving the ball from man to man as if on a string. We inspired each other that day. All of my life I will remember that parade after the game with the cup to the acclaim of the Sydney public, which is surely the most sporting in the world.

The defining image of that series is Aubert giving the trophy a cheeky kiss with a grin on his face and his eyebrows raised, as if contemplating the celebrations that were about to follow. Upon the team’s return to France, they were greeted as heroes by tens of thousands of fans lining the streets of Marseille, while he was the first footballer of any code to be named Champion of Champions by the famously difficult to impress newspaper L’Equipe.

Aubert could have stayed in Australia, offered a vast sum to join a higher standard of competition. Despite returning to France, he remained in the public’s consciousness down under, and when Australia toured Europe six years later a reporter sought to answer the question everyone was asking back home: what happened to Puig Aubert? ‘French players say Pipette is easily the world’s fattest footballer,’ they discovered. ‘Puig Aubert still plays for Carcasonne and is still a wizard goalkicker. His girth automatically eliminates any running and he never had any pretensions to tackle so he doesn’t tackle at all now.’

If just four months of regular training in Australia were enough to make him the Champion of Champions, then it's tempting to wonder what Puig Aubert could have achieved if he’d stayed in the southern hemisphere and committed to taking rugby league more seriously? But that would be missing the joy of his genius and deprive the sport of one of its greatest personalities, not to mention robbing Real Class of its spiritual leader. “I could have made a fortune,” Aubert told the writer Anthony Peregrine in a Carcassonne cafe a few months before he passed away in 1994. “But the Australians preferred training to smoking and wine. It was never going to work.” ⬧