Nose strips, highlights and Viking beards: A look back at rugby trends over the years

During the Novem­ber Tests, Ire­land out-half Sam Pren­der­gast’s hair­style came in for a fair bit of atten­tionamong rugby fans online.

It was a cut in keep­ing with a trend pecu­liar to rugby for a num­ber of years now (shaved at the side, full at the back) but one that has never looked good, regard­less of who sports it.

Former All Black flanker Liam Squire got the ball rolling in the late 2010s and the mantle was taken up by Exeter and Eng­land lock Jonny Hill, with both favour­ing the shaved sides and full mul­let at the back. It caused quite a stir and was likened to the hair­style worn by the ‘inbred, can­ni­bal­istic mutants’ in the cult hor­ror clas­sic ‘The Hills have Eyes’.

No other sport favours this look to such a degree but, for some reason, rugby has per­severed with it and one sus­pects Pren­der­gast, Eng­land wing Ollie Sleighthome and all the oth­ers to indulge this bizarre, unsal­vage­able style will be cringing in years to come when they look back at the pic­tures.

As happened a gen­er­a­tion of rugby play­ers around the turn of the cen­tury when per­ox­ide hair and high­lights came into vogue.

No one is sure how it star­ted but most people blame the French for the late 1990s trend where play­ers star­ted tak­ing to the pitch with shock­ingly blond hair.

Thomas Cas­taignede was the French pin-up boy and he set the trend, fol­lowed by a host of his team­mates and then the likes of Scott Quin­nell of Wales, Will Green­wood of Eng­land and Ire­land’s Rob Hende­r­son all giv­ing it a go, to name but a few.

This led to the pop­ular­ity of blond high­lights, worn most fam­ously by Brian O’Driscoll in the early 2000s dur­ing his wavy hair phase. Stick­ing to the hir­sute theme, the pop­ular­ity of long bushy beards in rugby blos­somed around 12 years ago.

At the time, there was a surge in pop­ular­ity for Vik­ing-related TV and films and there were also echoes of the giant Boer for­wards who made Spring­bok of the time, swathes of play­ers went for the big beard look with Jake Ball of Wales (via Aus­tralia) one of the most extreme and plenty of Irish rugby examples such as Gor­don D’Arcy and Michael Bent.

While per­ox­ide and high­lights and beards are fash­ion choices, there have been plenty of equip­ment trends in rugby over the years that have been driven by the more prac­tical aims of enhan­cing per­form­ance.

One that flared briefly in the mid-1990s were the nasal strips favoured by Liv­er­pool and Eng­land soc­cer striker Rob­bie Fowler.

The idea was that these adhes­ive strips would widen the nos­trils to allow more oxy­gen through the body dur­ing the game and, when Spring­bok flanker Rudolf Straeuli start­ing wear­ing the strips on a reg­u­lar basis, it was not long before lads were run­ning around in the All-Ire­land League try­ing the same thing. It did not last, however.

The bene­fits of nasal strips were hard to gauge and did not off­set the fact they were so dis­tract­ing to wear and it was not long before rugby kicked Fowler’s folly to touch.

Speak­ing of kick­ing, most rugby boots worn these days are designed to be light and sleek and per­fect for boot­ing the ball — whether you are a for­ward or back.

That was not the case with the Adi­das Flanker boots with their dis­tinct­ive yel­low stripes which were hugely pop­u­lar in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

They were big and bad and offered foot pro­tec­tion for mul­lock­ing for­wards in the rucks and mauls through the fact they were ankle-high tough leather and also con­tained a thick steel toe cap (which could do con­sid­er­able dam­age when aimed at the oppos­i­tion).

The prob­lem was while Flankers were something of a badge of hon­our for for­wards, they were also pretty heavy, not great for lin­eout jump­ers in the era before lift­ing was per­mit­ted.

Then you had the giant shoulder pads of the later 1990s — a bizarre period for the game when rugby play­ers went around look­ing like Alexis Car­ring­ton from Dyn­asty.

Although not as extreme as Amer­ican Foot­ball pads, they weren’t far off, with some jer­seys at the time even build­ing size­able pad­ding into the shoulders. slick, However, svelte ‘wet the suit’ trend jer­seys towards that oppon­ents would find hard to grab onto meant the giant shoulder pads were gone by the 2003 World Cup.

It was around then that the idea of wear­ing gloves took hold. Sim­ilar to Gaelic foot­ball, the idea of the fin­ger­less, vel­cro-seal­ing append­ages was to improve grip and reduce the risk of spillages — plus they looked cool. Gloves quickly became a com­mon sight, mostly on the hands of three-quar­ters, with O’Driscoll prob­ably the most high-pro­file wearer.

But, like the nasal strips 10 years before, the gloves gradu­ally faded from our rugby exist­ence — prin­cip­ally because they did not appear to make that much of a dif­fer­ence. Some trends have sur­vived down the years.

While scrum caps are broadly pre­ferred, it is not entirely unusual to see second rows tap­ing up their ears for pro­tec­tion in the scrum. What has changed is the man­ner of the tap­ing, with far tighter strap­ping and less tape now used — as opposed to the ‘Christ­mas Cake’ layered style favoured by Wil­lie John McBride, Maurice Col­clough and oth­ers in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is hard to pre­dict the next trend in rugby but the sooner the Hills have Eyes hair­styles have gone the bet­ter…