In 1991 players gave you nothing, in 2010 they give you even less.

In 1991 players gave you nothing, in 2010 they give you even less

In his last Breakdown, Eddie Butler explains how media training has erected barriers between players and journalists

Bloggers, the world is yours. Well, at least a tiny corner of it, where rugby is played, can be influenced by you. Although I'm not sure how much attention Martin Johnson pays to your views on the angles of running of his centres. But anyway, you are here to stay.

When I first joined The Observer, in 1991, nobody spoke to anyone. It was the age of England supremacy in Europe and the best players also happened to be a fairly militant lot, largely because they had no say in the shaping of their future. The game was beginning its voyage into professionalism, but only in the sense that rumblings about the inequalities of the amateur game were being heard, grumblings that manifested themselves as a refusal by the England players that year to speak to the media after their first victory over Wales in Cardiff since 1963.

I used to double up for television, a bit like now, and follow them round as a sort of cub reporter for the BBC, doing what was called back then the Five Nations camp report. And it truly was, whichever way you looked at it – but it wasn't helped by the fact that Will Carling's team were permanently surly. The views they held on Dudley Wood, the secretary of the Rugby Football Union and the paid champion of an unpaid ethos, seemed to extend to anyone outside their own playing circle.

I was thinking the other day, having been stuck in a hotel in Bagshot, huddled around an England player on media duty in a group of a dozen reporters, sharing our exclusive on him, that there was more fun in being completely shunned by those players. The deliberate silence of Brian Moore back then said a lot more than the carefully delivered nothings from the latest graduate of the media training course.

Perhaps rugby teams simply like the sense of being under siege and if there is no genuine cause to justify a grievance against the scum of the media, well, they may as well just invent one. And rule No1 is: give nothing away; tell them nothing.

The digital revolution has opened up a limitless universe of words on every subject under the stars, including dear old rugby. And if the output from the players is of limited value then that gives prominence to the views of those only too happy to deliver more than their fair share of words. That's you. So, the future is yours. Take care of it.
2009 Lions Test was close to perfection

The best Tests I ever saw?

France v Australia at the 1987 World Cup; France v South Africa at RWC 1995; France v New Zealand at RWC 1999? That's a lot of France. And a lot of evidence to suggest that the World Cup is one of the best inventions of the last 25 years. Why did they wait so long?

But the best Test has to be South Africa v the Lions, Pretoria 2009, perfectly balanced as it was between brutality and silkiness, between everything going so very right and ending up so dramatically wrong.

My favourite player?

Serge Blanco. I played against him when he was a gangling child star. "Don't kick to this kid at full-back," we of Wales B were repeatedly told at Bourg-en-Bresse in 1979. Always obedient, we duly kicked to him and launched him on his way.

But the thing about Serge was that if he gave you an interview it meant going for lunch in a friend's restaurant in the hills above Hendaye, and over multiple courses, most of them involving pigeon, he would tell you what he thought about rugby. The only way to silence the great man would have been to suggest that he should go on a media training day.

This is an excerpt from The Breakdown, guardian.co.uk's twice-weekly free email during the Six Nations. Sign up now!