Billy the kid, football’s star of the future

Sadly it looks as though the 2020 Six Nations may have to go down with an asterisk and an explanation that might baffle future scholars — ‘Aborted due to the coronavirus’. Still, after the Wales game we can look back with affection on Owen Farrell at his horribly gobby worst, endlessly getting at Kiwi referee Ben O’Keeffe while dishing out a series of nasty niggly fouls: why does he do it? Then there was Eddie Jones in inimitable fashion blasting away at the laws and of course the ref. You lost a couple of men to foul play, Eddie, I’d keep quiet while the going’s good. I had my ref mic tuned to O’Keeffe throughout the match and he was very fair and clear throughout. ‘It’s still a penalty, Owen,’ he said after one pointless row. And it was.

As for Joe Marler and his robust approach to Alun Wyn Jones’s wedding tackle, well clearly a great post-playing career awaits. The jungle? Must be half a million quid with a decent agent. Then there’s Strictly. He’s an interesting bloke: sensitive — he retired to genuinely spend more time with his family; but with a bit of previous — he got into terrible trouble for calling Welsh prop Samson Lee a ‘gypsy boy’.

But Marler was just being a dick, so to speak, last weekend. And we shouldn’t throw the book at him. If everyone was penalised for being a dick, there soon wouldn’t be any rugby players left. Though it did allow Gareth Thomas, a former Welsh captain and British Lion, to joke that as a gay man he shouldn’t have retired so early. A joke as camp as Christmas but it provoked general hilarity, which shows how far we’ve come as a tolerant society.