A brilliant hooker - wonderfully versatile and very aggressive.

We were playing against France in 1971; I had heard through the grape-vine that the referee had had a belly-full of Piston. He was apparently planning to send him off the field the next time an incident occurred.

The players were very concerned about this as we did not have a replacement hooker. My advice was that should they notice that Piston was about to lose his rag and retaliate, they should all cluster around him and look as if they were all about to join in.

That is why there were so many flare-ups during those tests. It always looked worse than it actually was and were mostly designed to protect Piston from himself - and the referee.

As I've said, a versatile player, and Piston probably epitomised the modern idiom: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going".