"Rugby is for posh t**ts".

Gimme a break, really.

When I first started following English national sporting teams, after a brief period of them all being good at the same time (Italia 90, by a million miles my favourite major tournament and my favourite England team in anything ever; RWC '91, when England *could* have won, didn't really deserve to, but ballsed up the gameplan to Campo and the Aussies' delight; CWC '92, which we could've walked, but Gooch's inability to manage the very different personalities in the side ensured we didn't), England settled down into being... well, not s**t, but just really mediocre, brittle, and liable to choke when it mattered.

But not the rugby team. From the Cooke/Uttley/Carling era onwards, England played with a bloody-mindedness and self-belief which was positively un-English; and in football, comparable only with Germany. In teak tight situations (many of them, to my particular delight, against Australia and France), the rugby team delivered again (Rob Andrew, RWC QF '95); and again (a miraculous run to the 2007 final despite looking like dogs**t in the first round and playing like it for the previous 3 years); and again (the glory of Sydney 2003).

We'd often be ugly to watch; we'd be harangued by all-comers like the rugby version of the Anti-Christ... yet we'd find a way to win. When it counted! After the best part of 20 years in the wilderness, the cricketers finally followed suit... leaving only the footballers, who haven't even resembled a contemporary football team since 1998, let alone anything else.

I do worry sometimes about what ironclad brick s**thouses international rugby players frequently resemble nowadays. There's so many injuries, the sport is way too demanding if you ask me, and comparing the builds of top players between now and the end of the amateur era is like observing two different species. But this is an absolutely magnificent tournament, played in ferocious, competitive, yet friendly and respectful spirit - and the Rugby World Cup will always be one of my favourite sporting events. We've a real chance of going a long, long way (to the final, I reckon) too.

"Rugby's for poofs! Away to drink piss and play soggy biscuit with your fellow Tarquins!" Bollocks it is. And just between you and me, in a comparison between one sport based on fantastic conditioning, industry, respect for officials and opponents; and another in which players perform a triple salchow with pike, roll halfway round the planet when they're so much as breathed upon, and collapse on top of each other performing recreations of Sixth Form-style bundles and kissing each other, I know which one seems more homoerotic to me. And it sure as heck ain't rugby.

Posted By: thebigfeller, Feb 7, 00:49:56