Non-U
My friends in L’Escala, and in particular those who have the good fortune to be Welsh, make an assumption about me, namely that on five out of six winter Saturdays I will be found in front of a television set glued to the Six Nations Rugby Union championship. There was a time when I would have been, if I wasn’t actually at a match, but somewhere along the way, something happened. Or maybe several things; the start of the professional era when everything had to be staged, with pre-match entertainment and pyrotechnics that bore no relation to what was about to happen; the constant tinkering with the rules that seem to make the game confusing even to the referees, let alone the players; the prevalence in both codes, League also of on-field coaching, with characters not-very-cunningly disguised as water-carriers allowed pretty much free access to the field at every breakdown. Whatever, it’s a hell of a long way from the game played by K J F Scotland, Barry John, Andy Hancock, Mike Gibson, etc, and it’s one with which I no longer feel connected. (The fact that we now struggle to beat Italy doesn’t help either.) Remind me, who are we playing on Saturday?
Quintin Jardine's blog 
Buggered if I know – but the good news is, my son appears to prefer it to football, so at least he’s learning social distinctions between lunatic hooligans and public school thugs!
Which are which? I can’t tell. First game of rugby I ever played at (reasonably posh) school, I’d just scored a try and was lying on the ground on the ball, when one of the opposition walked up to me and kicked me on the knee-cap, hard. Never happened to me in the Beautiful Game.
Because in the Beautiful Game, you never allowed yourself to fall over. But I played rugby for all my school years and never got hurt. Constant battle to try to shove Dick Salmon’s face into the dirt more than he got me, I seem to recall. Whereas bloody football – the match I remember most of all was when a tubby teacher demonstrated how to drop kick and managed to hit me in the face from fifteen paces. God that hurt. I hated footie from an early age, though. The tribalism and need to follow a bunch of overpaid scruffs they’d never meet, plus the 1970s violence put me off.
Don’t care, anyway. My sports tend to be personal ones – always loved cycling, karate, shooting . . . things were I measured success on my own improvement. Clearly not a team player!
You’re an author, mate. None of us are team players when we’re at the coal/chalk/computer face.
You asked a quewstion QJ. Answer is nobody. Try Sunday. You made your point.
Thanks for that Alistair. I may sandwich the first half between “Well and Sellic and Arsenal vs Bmghm. Or i may lie in the sun and listen to Del Amitri.