Dorchester

The Dorchester Gladiators arrived for the tour match wearing heavily the impact of the night before, which had ended only a few hours earlier. As they stepped from the bus, they found themselves facing photographers and TV crews. On the pitch, things got worse, as they faced the 24-time Romanian champions, with every minute broadcast live on national television.

Most of us will have been on a rugby tour abroad where things didn’t quite go to plan. Somebody didn’t make the flight back home, somebody had a bowel movement in the scrum, somebody lost all their bodily hair, somebody almost sparked an international incident in one of the local bars. That sort of thing.

The stories of those tours then become the stuff of rugby club legend, frequently told over pints and parties, and passed down through the generations. To be a member of that touring party is a badge of honour. 

But there are rugby tours and then there is the Dorchester Gladiators 3rd XV tour of Romania in 2000, without question one of the most memorable trips ever undertaken by a rugby club: it was a truly great sporting cock-up which saw a motley crew of over forties mistaken for a professional team and pitched against Romania’s top side, with the match broadcast on national TV. 

The story made the front page of the Daily Telegraph and led to an appearance on This Morning with Richard and Judy.

There are other examples of when a team has been passed off as being something they are clearly not. For instance, Leeds’s Carnegie College were once billed as Leeds United on a tour of Zambia, and a faux Togo national side once managed to get an international fixture against Bahrain, but what makes the Dorchester Gladiators’ tour of Romania unique is that it was the product of a genuine balls-up. 

Dorchester rugby club was founded in 1871, one of the early pioneers of the game on England’s south coast, and almost 90 years later they added the Gladiators moniker as a nod to the town’s history. It was in the Dorset town that the Romans had arrived in the first century AD and promptly built an amphitheatre to host gladiatorial battles. 

And, in fairness, true to their heritage, the club have had their fair share of challenges in their own amphitheatres, of which there have been several, the most recent and current being Coburg Road. “We played against a Bath Spartans side [Bath’s then 3rd XV, in 1991] that had three internationals coming back from injury including Jeremy Guscott and Gareth Chilcott. We also got to play at the Rec as well,” recalls current club chairman, Tony Foot.

Today, their first team are at level seven of the pyramid, plying their trade in Counties 1 Tribute Southern South, but they’ve enjoyed huge success with colts and junior teams, under the guidance of coach Mike Sprules, who led one side to a hat-trick of county championship titles in 2016, 2017, and 2018. They’ve kept the ties with Bath going too, with four of Sprules’s crop of players joining Bath’s academy.

Like rugby clubs the world over, touring has always been a big part of Gladiator history. The first, in 1998, took them to France where they drank wine by the bottle at half-time. “Over the years we’ve been to Prague, Warsaw, Tallinn, Ljubljana, Riga... We’ve favoured Eastern Europe simply because it’s a lot cheaper, especially the beer,” says Tony. “Bucharest was our third trip and one of our touring party was a Royal Marine who had a lot of contacts in other countries within army personnel. He got in touch with a chap in Romania who said, ‘oh you must come over here and visit us. So, he replied and said ‘yes we’ve got a touring team, we’re called the Gladiators…’”

Of course, the usual plan on such tours is that you will be paired up against a team of similar ability, but this would turn out to be a highly unusual tour.  “The contact in Romania was Major Pressly,” explains Tony. “He must have thought, ‘oh well they can play against the army side’ but didn’t appear to think it through properly. The army side was the best team in Romania!”

Mark Andrews is a veteran tourist for the club and says that another one of the organisers, who was also affiliated with the British Embassy and the military attache in Bucharest, heard the name ‘Gladiators’ and instantly associated them with Leicester Tigers or Sale Sharks, thinking they would be more than capable of giving their opponents a decent game. Suddenly, and unknowingly, the Gladiators had been matched up against Steaua Bucharest, by far and away Romania’s most successful rugby team. 

Steaua was founded in 1948 by the army and given the nickname ‘The Military Men’. To date, the club have won 24 Romanian league titles and when they were booked to play the Gladiators, they had been crowned Romanian champions in the previous year but had also played in Pool 4 of the 1999/2000 European Challenge Cup against Connacht, Ebbw Vale, and Toulon. This included a 30-20 victory against Connacht. 

Romanian rugby had been in sharp decline following the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. He had invested heavily in sport and used sporting achievement to promote Romania as a successful communist state – the nation finished second in the medals table at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. At one point, in 1990, Romania was informally approached to join the Five Nations ahead of Italy.

However, ten years on and it was very much a second-tier rugby nation; the country had struggled to move on from Ceaucescu, largely because his successors were all products of the old regime. 

Yet what money there was to spend went on teams such as Steaua, who were not closely affiliated to the army but were the backbone of the national team. 

As a result, Dorchester ended up facing anything between six and nine internationals – the figures vary – including the Romanian captain.

The first inkling that they wouldn’t be matched against their equals happened soon after they had landed in Bucharest. “When we arrived at the airport, we were met by one of (Steaua’s) representatives who came in quite a swish coach with a sign saying ‘Dorchester Gladiators’ in the window,” recalls Mark. “We thought ‘well this is very nice, this just must be how it is!’. But then after we’d all got on the coach the representative said, ‘do you want to go to train at the stadium this evening?’ At first, we looked at each other and thought, ‘Train Stadium? Is that the name of a bar?’. The penny was starting to drop that this wasn’t going to be what we’d expected, but we said ‘no’.”

The offer of somewhere to train is one thing, but later in the evening, the alarm bells really started to ring. “The point where we realised we were in trouble was when we went out to a bar,” says Mark. “There was a very large man who was very upset because we didn’t have cash on us to pay for the drinks and they didn’t take cards. Getting cash out in Romania back then was pretty difficult, they put a limit of around thirty quid on each card or something. 

“So, we had to send one man out with all of our cards and all of our pin numbers and we thought ‘well, this is going to go well, isn’t it! 

“In the meantime, we got talking to this very large man who said, ‘what are you doing in Romania?’ We said, ‘we’ve come over to play a game of rugby tomorrow’.

“‘Ah, so you’re the Gladiators!’, he said. ‘I’m playing against you at prop.’ All of a sudden the bar bill was ripped in two and he said, ‘I won’t tell your coach if you won’t tell my coach’. Well, our coach was sitting in the corner chatting with one of the local girls. So, we thought ‘if they’re all this big, then we’re in a lot of bother’. Then he explained he played for Steaua Bucharest although we still thought ‘well we must be playing their seconds or thirds. Even so, they’re probably going to be quite good!’”

In the end they prepared for their big match in true social tour style. “We went to bed at around 5am, for an 11am kick-off, still thinking it’ll be okay,” continues Mark. “The coach picked us up again in the morning and then everything started to fall into place.”

The Dorchester Gladiators arrived at the Stadionul Arcul de Triumf on the Saturday to be greeted by cameras everywhere and with television crews already in place. Even the setting should’ve taken them aback given, even in its former dilapidated state, it was the national stadium. (It’s since been rebuilt and hosted football squads including then world champions France for training during the 2020 European Championships.) “People were queueing up to get into the ground,” recalls Mark. “Even then we were still of the view that ‘well, there must be a bigger game on this afternoon and we should hang around to watch it. When we walked into the stadium and realised we were the big game, we thought ‘shit, we’re in proper trouble here, lads’. 

“That is when it became crystal clear there had been a cock-up.”

A few of the Dorchester players sparked up cigarettes on the touchline before the game in a vain attempt to convince the opposition the Gladiators were really a bunch of lads on a jolly to Bucharest. “They seemed to think we had something up our sleeve,” says Mark. “We didn’t.

“However, they did allow us to use our own ref, which helped. To a point.”

It took around five minutes for Steaua to score a try and soon it turned into little more than a training game. Even so, Dorchester managed to score two tries and, given the circumstances, losing 61-17 was actually a pretty respectable result against players half their age and twice their ability.

One thing that stood out for Mark was the Romanians’ fixation on one of his teammates. “We’ve got one chap who still turns out for us who is adorned with quite a lot of tattoos,” he says. “It may be something in the Romanian mafia that the number of tattoos equals your status. 

“Whatever it was, they were obsessed with his tattoos. And it wasn’t just the players. The TV cameras kept panning in on his arms and legs. And they went quite easy on him during the match.”

For Tony, what also sticks in the memory was the post-match meal. “Everything about that tour was peculiar,” he says. “There appeared to be some mistrust about why we were there. And, yeah, then there was the dinner. That was a bit strange. We had to pay for their after-match meal and they were sat in one corner, a bit shepherded away from our lot.”

The meal was attended by a senior local official and the ambassador along with his entourage who told Dorchester to behave themselves and be ‘stand up British citizens’. “I think the food was a giant river fish,” says Tony. “Like a carp. It was awful!” adds Mark. “So, we ended up drinking more and more of Slivovitz which is a damson brandy.”

Aside from the farce and the frivolity, there was another aspect to Dorchester’s trip to Bucharest: a visit to a Romanian orphanage to donate toys that had been collected back at home.

Tony and Mark both speak of how poverty-stricken this country was a decade on from the Romanian Revolution and the fall of Ceaucescu. 

The most devastating product of Ceausescu’s regime was banning all forms of contraception and abortion. While the population grew, more families were being plunged into severe poverty and had children they simply could not afford to raise.

The plight of Romania’s orphans became a global story during the 90s. “It was shocking,” Tony recalls. “There were so many orphans, all waifs, all with similar facial expressions, all seriously malnourished. I remember that experience more than I remember the game. Those images just stick with you.”

Back home, word had got out about this team of men approaching middle age, who had played against a side capable of holding their own against some of the best teams in Europe. And the match had been broadcast on Romanian TV all because of a cock-up. The story proved to be a headline-writer’s dream.

“They thought we were Bath – but we’re a shower” The Mirror

“Gladiators thrown to the lions” The Times

“Ageing Gladiators thrown to international warriors” Glasgow Herald

“The rugby match that was lost in translation” Daily Mail

“Slip-up puts veteran pub Gladiators to the sword” Evening Standard

The Guardian’s rugby correspondent, Robert Kitson, wrote, “Whatever the Heineken Cup semi-finals throw up this weekend, this month’s true Euro stars must surely be the mighty Dorchester Gladiators, the now celebrated team of over-40 veterans who found themselves playing the Romanian champions Steaua Bucharest by mistake the other day.

“Best of all was the Dorchester skipper recounting how he was introduced to the Romanians’ captain, who turned out to be the Romanian captain. Perhaps the locals, in return, were expecting a real bunch of Gladiators.”

The story also attracted the attention of TV.  “Back in the day, Johnny Vaughn hosted The Big Breakfast,” explains Mark. “He wanted us on his show but on the basis that we didn’t speak to anyone else before they went on air. Well, that was a bit late given we’d spoken to all the papers.

“But we did get invited on to Richard and Judy [This Morning]. They set up a bar for us, we wore our kit and the idea was meant to be ‘rugby players drinking’, which was a bit of a challenge at 8am. Plus, they only gave us one beer each. Obviously, they didn’t want us to get battered on live TV but one of the boys did find some of the bar props were genuine bottles of spirits. So eventually we got stuck into those. 

“One of the guys made a comment to Richard (Madeley) about how tall he was and how he had just been arrested for shoplifting [he was later acquitted of all charges]. He said: ‘I bet you can get all sorts off the top shelf and under your jumper’, which upset him. So, it was already going wrong before we’d gone live on air.

“But they were very nice to us, put us up in the hotel,” says Mark. “For a week it was the gift that kept on giving. Our fifteen minutes of fame.”

There is another story that Mark tells that never made the papers or TV and with good reason. “We brought over a glass drinking vessel to give to the other side,” he begins, “and Tim Bowden, who lasted about a minute into the game before he was taken off to hospital, got this thing made locally. I would say it probably held about a pint of liquid, and the handle was in the shape of a cock and balls. As we went through the x-ray scanners on the way into Bucharest, all these very severe-looking ex-communist policemen with their guns stopped and started pissing themselves. 

“They called us over to have a look at the screen, ignoring the security checks and asked us to get it out of the bag and show it to them. Yeah, those stories do come back into your head from time to time.”

Last year the club celebrated its 150th anniversary, and Tony says the Gladiators not only came through the pandemic financially unscathed, as the clubhouse was turned into an NHS testing centre, but it is also in rude health through the success of its juniors and colts. “We’ve got more members than ever before, we’re one of the few clubs in this area that can put out three teams (at senior level).”

So, given this is the 25th anniversary since the Gladiators first embarked on their conquest of Europe, what do Tony and co. have lined up? 

“The club contacted everyone who is still alive and had been on one of the previous trips and currently there are 53 players booked to fly out to Podgorica in Montenegro,” he says. “I suspect that out of that figure, only 30 are physically able to play,” Tony laughs. “Then again, normally we only have twelve who are physically able to play!

“But we’ve got one player who lives in America, a couple who live in Cornwall, another one in France, and one from Jersey. You also get fathers who bring their sons. My son has come for the past three or four tours. 

“The organiser is a chap called Ed Taylor, who has been doing it for fifteen or sixteen years. In November he sends out an email to say where we’ll be going. He books his seat and tells everyone which flight he is on, then everyone books a place on the same flight as quickly as possible before the price gets hiked up.

“He finds a team to play against, totals up the numbers, books the hotel. It always seems to work very well. The last probably six, seven years, we’ve been taking younger, better players. The problem is they have one too many drinks on the first couple of days and they are not up to playing rugby, which explains why it’s been so long since we’ve won on tour!”

Doubtless, tales from previous tours will be shared on that trip with that new younger audience, some of whom may question the veracity of those anecdotes.

But let us assure you that the tour of Romania was certainly no cock and bull story, although it would be fair to call it a cock and balls story.

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 21 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.