Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

69 I enjoyed rugby but there was always a nagging feeling that if I had committed to cricket it might have been more fitting personality-wise. Rugby was great, but I think professional rugby is something that over the years didn’t really stack up to all it might have been. It was good money but my international career never quite got going. I never quite reproduced my club form on the international scene.’ Now that he is back playing cricket, Stuart is happier with his sporting life than for many years: ‘I managed half a dozen games [of cricket] throughout my rugby career, and that’s why I am enjoying it so much being back involved now. At the weekend we were playing at Grange, it was a beautiful day and the ground couldn’t have looked better. It’s a pleasure to be there really, which is a feeling I never quite achieved from rugby.’ Sport and the real world What do they know of life, who only cricket know? Some professional sportsmen and women can be so caught up in the playing careers that occupy the first part of their allotted spans that, when the time comes for them to withdraw from the front line, they have nowhere to go. Not so Stuart Moffat, who has always been aware of the need to contemplate life without professional sport. Hence his concern to secure academic qualifications and hence, too, the fact that he somewhat fell into professional sport rather than planning in advance to make it a career. As he says, ‘When you’re a student and somebody offers you a bit of money to play rugby, it’s not a hard decision really.’ Previously he had been looking for a career that he might be able to combine with rugby: on the eve of his first Varsity match, he had said, ‘I want to take things one step at a time. At the moment I hope to get fixed up with a job in Japan next autumn and play a bit of rugby out there. If that leads to something bigger, it will be a bonus.’ 109 Several times during his career, the idea occurred of leaving rugby behind when faced with adversity, and this was not something that fazed him. He told me that after his career-threatening injury in 1999, ‘I had pretty much given up rugby, and was happy to let it go ’ [my emphasis]; he was only persuaded back when a phone call from the Cambridge University coach lured him to a place where not only could he resume playing rugby, but he could also acquire further academic qualifications for his life ahead. When his contract with Glasgow Rugby was unexpectedly not renewed in 2004, he was ‘contemplating the labour market and seeing how high a standard of amateur rugby he could sustain’. Another source says that at this time he was ‘disillusioned by the game in Scotland and seeking a more permanent move down-under.’ 110 And when Border Reivers were disbanded on cost grounds in 2007 he says that he ‘would have stepped off the professional treadmill,’ but an offer from Viadana took him to Italy for one season. For all that he enjoyed his time there, he turned down an offer that would have extended his contract for another year. 109 Daily Record , 12 December 2000 110 The Times , 5 November 2004; The Scotsman , 5 November 2004 Runs Aplenty