The morning after England’s Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local high street and saw two boys doing something which deeply disturbed me.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Jonny.
Jonny who?
The morning after England’s Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local high street and saw two boys doing something which deeply disturbed me. I knew these kids and had always thought them normal, well-adjusted, cheerful youngsters. And now, here they were, in the street, throwing an oval ball to one another. Running and throwing an oval ball to one another. Never seen them do that before. I felt physically sick.
They had been gripped, briefly, by the same temporary affliction which I and much of the rest of the country had succumbed to over the previous two weeks: we had all become rugby fans. And experts. I remember standing at the bar of my local holding forth on the merits of the ‘rolling maul’. I didn’t know what in hell a ‘rolling maul’ was, but I was aware that a) England’s rugby team did it and b) the Aussies were whingeing about it and that was good enough for me. Like those two boys, I was mindlessly behind our lads, although never to the extent that I was tempted to sing the hideous ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’. Starved of sporting success, we all pinned our pennants on the national rugby team to claim some sort of glory, or the sort of limited glory one might accrue from beating a bunch of Antipodeans, a handful of Samoans, a few remaining white South Africans, the Welsh and 18 people from Georgia. The word ‘world’ in relation to the Rugby World Cup, remember, bears not the remotest resemblance to its usually assumed meaning. It has about it the whiff of the American’s ‘World’ Series. It is, you have to say, a narrowish definition of the globe.
Almost nobody plays rugby, not in Britain and still less in the rest of the world. And that’s because it’s a useless game. If it were a better game, like football, more people would be interested in playing it. Rugby — and Jonny Wilkinson — captured our imagination for exactly the same reason — and for about as long — as did the Scottish Women’s curling team in the Winter Olympics in 2002. Forgotten by the end of the following week. And those boys I referred to above were back playing with a properly shaped ball, i.e. a round one, 24 hours after Wilkinson had kicked England to victory.
I dislike rugby for a whole bunch of reasons, many of them irrational or a consequence of my habitual inverted snobbery. But mainly it’s because, as I say, it is a poor game both to watch and play. Take those two village boys, for example. They threw the ball to one another, and that’s it. You want to be a rugby player and there’s only your best mate around, that’s all you can do. Well, I suppose the two of them could have gone down the pub and brayed loudly to one another, used cigarette lighters to play amusing tricks with their flatus and later buggered one another in the communal showers. Maybe I should have suggested this to them, when their parents weren’t looking. But my guess is they returned to playing football because with just two players — or even one (I spent whole days playing keepy-uppy in the street with a tennis ball as a kid) — you can have an infinite variety of fun with football. (Call it ‘soccer’, incidentally, and I’ll kick your f****** head in. Only Americans, toffs and mentals call it ‘soccer’.) That’s one of the reasons why football is a truly mass sport: it can be played by any number of people, anywhere at any time. But it is far from the only reason.
The game of rugby is almost wholly devoid of anything one might call ‘skill’; it is a game of brute force and speed and a bit of tactical planning and that’s yer lot. Perhaps that’s why the middle classes, which have never been any good at sport, or very much else, like it so much. The basic act of passing the ball five yards in football can be done 14 or 15 different ways, some requiring years of mastery. However obnoxious our professional footballers, they possess sublime skill. Football at its best is graceful, flowing and almost balletic. There is nuance and subtlety alongside the grit and restrained violence. Every part of the body can be used — except, of course, for outfield players and, it would seem, Paul Robinson, the hands. Oh, we all like a bit of mindless thuggery too — but in football this is left largely to the spectators. The truly moronic nature of rugby is exemplified by that practice device, the scrum machine, in which a whole bunch of men gather in a homoerotic huddle to smash their heads against a large garden roller. Come on: this is a sport for gay, middle-class cavemen.
The pay-off in football feels psychologically right, too; it demands of the spectator and the players that vital thing, deferred gratification. Compared to all other similar team sports, scoring is a sufficiently rare occurrence to bring forth intense jubilation and relief. Or, indeed, in the case of my team, Millwall, street parties and beacons lit on nearby hills. In rugby, the act of scoring is three a penny, it is all too easy. It is just one step ahead of that most ludicrous of all sports, basketball. In fact, basketball is the only known sport which is improved as a spectacle when played by paraplegics.
I could go on and on; but the proof is right there in front of you. In a world growing smaller by the minute and as a result our pastimes becoming more and more homogeneous, there is still no appetite for rugby except in a few far-flung desolate outposts of our former empire and in our public schools. But still, I hope you fans thoroughly enjoy the Rugby World Cup. Just remember, though, that it’s not the World Cup — the prize for a sport so rightly popular that it need not even announce itself.
Comments