Cotton and co wallow in not-so-glorious mud

Brendan Gallagher delves into some of rugby’s most enduring images, their story and why they are still so impactful

- Brendan Gallagher

What’s happening here?

It’s July 20, 1977 and in one of the muddiest first class games of rugby ever completed, Lions prop Fran Cotton is taking a moment against the Junior All Blacks at Athletic Park Wellington.

At the time the photographer – Colin Elsey, always known as Big C – thought it was a humorous but unremarkable ever-so-slightly out-of-focus image on a day when he and other photographers captured scores of memorable ‘mud glorious mud’ pictures.

This is the one, however, that the media picked up on and over 40 years on it remains a classic.

What is the story behind the picture?

After the successes of 1971 and 1974 the pressure was on the 1977 Lions to complete the hattrick but it was an ill-starred, and slightly unlucky, tour. It started raining in New Zealand the day they arrived and scarcely seemed to stop until the day they departed four months later for the sandy beaches of Fiji.

In one way the weather should have suited the Lions who boasted a pack the equal of 1974, a set of forwards capable of controlling games who, by the end of the Test series, had the All Blacks experimenting with quick fire three-man scrums in an attempt to avoid a full-on confrontation up front.