In rugby union, the "99" call was a policy of simultaneous retaliation by the British Lions during their 1974 tour to South Africa.
[1] The tour was marred by on-pitch violence, which the match officials did little to control and the relative absence of cameras compared to the modern game made citing and punishment after the fact unlikely.
Willie John rushed down from the stand to offer protection, dealing peremptorily with one idiot as he tried to attack Tess, and this was the genesis of the infamous '99' call six years later in 1974.At the battle of Boet Erasmus Stadium,[5] one of the most violent matches in rugby history,[6][7] there is famous video footage of J.P.R.
[3] The battles created one of rugby's immortal tales: [Gordon] Brown hit his opposite number, Johan de Bruyn, so hard that the Orange Free State man's glass eye flew out and landed in the mud.
"so there we are, 30 players plus the ref, on our hands and knees scrabbling about in the mire looking for this glass eye," recalled Brown in an interview before his death from non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2001, aged 53.