unashamedly swiped from Football 365. Quite funny and very true!
__________________________________At the risk of seeming unpatriotic or just plain ignorant, I must confess that I have not shared in the media's collective orgasm about the England rugby team this week.
I concede they won a tournament called the World Cup in the most dramatic of manners, even though the use of the term 'World' does seem a tad selective. It's just that rugby union doesn't move me. It doesn't feel like it's part of me or my culture. It feels like something which is watched and played by people who I don't really know or meet in regular life. I bet a lot of you reading this feel similarly.
It simply doesn't mean much to me and to many others. It doesn't stir my soul, no matter how much I'm told by a slavering media that it should. It just doesn't. Rugby is not connected in any way with my psyche and I know that for a change, I'm in the vast majority about this.
This might be because, compared to football, hardly anyone watches rugby. Yes the internationals attract a good crowd but Leicester Tigers, who I'm assured are supposed to be a top team, get smaller crowds than Wigan Athletic for most games and a third of their football counterparts' crowd.
There are large swathes of the media desperate for us all to fall in love with rugby. This has almost become part of a right-wing Daily Mail-style political agenda where rugby is seen as a fine and upstanding sport played by well-behaved gentlemen and watched by crowds who are polite and well-mannered.
In short, rugby is somehow a metaphor for a more respectable society where we all keep quiet and know our place. To these people football is full of self-indulgent, opulent, grubby oiks who can't keep their cocks in their pants....... like this is a bad thing.
But when was the last time you saw footballers gouging out each others' eyes? When was the last time you saw them repeatedly stamping on an opponent's head or beating the living crap out of each other? The fact the rugby is a more physical sport doesn't make inserting your finger into someone's eye socket any more pleasant or acceptable.
Wearing navy lambswool V-necked sweaters under a blazer in a non ironic way does not make you a more valuable member of society even if it seems to be essential dress code for most rugby men. Even if it does make you a hero and fashion icon to the Daily Mail.
It seems to me that most rugby players look like the Incredible Hulk on a bad hair day. If footballers looked like rugby players they'd be thought of as intimidating thugs. However, this doesn't apply to rugby players for one reason. They're almost all middle class.
And that's the whole unspoken truth behind this rugby = respectable heroes, football = licencitious thugs debate. It's pointless to try and deny it. Britain is shot through with class divisions and for reasons that I don't understand, rugby union is certainly middle class. Football is still, at core, resolutely working class despite all attempts to make it otherwise.
Which makes it all the more amazing that I actually played rugby union at school from the age of 14-16. I was a fast runner (well who wouldn't be with a load of big lads wanting to beat you down and burst your scrotum?) so I played on the wing. Oh, the glamour.
I got concussion once. I also broke a lad's nose by punching him very hard in the face while tackling him by the head in a sevens tournament in Middlesbrough. I got away without any reprimand. Indeed, I was lauded for it. Even as the lad was taken away pouring blood and bone from his shattered face. I felt so bad about this afterwards. I still feel bad now.
I thought playing rugby would attract women but the women who rugby players attract were, I discovered, not the sort of women I wanted to attract.
Most of them looked like Pony Club types - all scraped back hair, high foreheads and Alice bands. They dressed neatly (always a bad sign) wore the collars of their shirts up and would later all have Lady Di haircuts. They usually came from politically Conservative families who's parents didn't take kindly to Cecily hanging out with long-haired, rock kids like me.
"He might lower the house prices darling, he's wearing baseball boots and he drops his H's, you really could do better - I mean, what are his prospects darling?"
Well I guess they were right. I was never gonna work in a bank, be a civil servant or listen to light classical music. And noisy guitars will always mean more to me than getting a mortgage and kids.
But I remember feeling there as an Us and a Them. Personally I was glad to be Us and not Them. I still feel like that.
Then there was the social side of rugby. Now, I'm not one who is squeamish about bodily functions but there is something undignified about grown men lighting each others' farts and inserting vegetables into each others' bottoms. Save it for the Jim Rose Circus lads please.
I've hung out with some real freaks and none of them have ever buggered each other with vegetables, though several have pleasured their girlfriends with aubergines and courgettes of course - but that's like, normal, isn't it? Isn't it?
So I packed in rugby for fear of having radishes put up my bottom and because I wanted to be scrumming down with women and not sweaty blokes. Besides, all that intimate rugby touching was beginning to be a little disturbing. I also really hated wearing a school jock strap that had been worn by ten generations of boys before me. It felt very gay somehow (not that there's anything wrong with it).
I had also started drinking properly and I didn't want to play drinking games that end up with projectile vomiting competitions.
Also at 5'10" and 11 stone I was regularly picked up and thrown around like a rag doll. It seemed an insane sport suddenly and I walked away from it in a heartbeat. I was not missed.
The popularity of the World Cup final at the weekend doesn't signify anything other than a shallow passing interest in the game. In the same way that watching Pop Idol doesn't turn people into devotees of rock and roll. It's just on. You watch it, then you move on.
The sheer transglobal vastness of football's popularity is taken for granted, so much so that it's almost forgotten or under appreciated.
Football is a universal language that can get you through a night with strangers in Crawley as well as it can in Cancun or Constantinople. Rugby and indeed cricket has an exposure out of all proportion to the amount of people who are genuinely interested in it - especially in the UK.
And what is all this Swing Low Sweet Chariot nonsense? Wasn't this some attempt at a hit single by Will Carling's mob a few years ago? Exactly what has it to do with rugby? It's a 19th Century Negro spiritual about slaves trying to run away from their oppressors. It's about wanting to be free.
Can you imagine we England's football supporters singing John the Revelator at the matches? No of course not. It's not appropriate. Just like its not appropriate to sing the lyrics from Starship Trooper by Yes or Earth Wind and Fire's Boogie Wonderland at matches either.
You can't just pick a song at random and adopt it as some sort of anthem. And last time I checked none of the England rugby team or their fans were actual slaves.
But, like I said, I'm not really having a pop at the egg chasers. As Chuck Berry once said: "Do what you wanna do baby, I don't wanna stop you". Mind you, he was watching women performing bodily functions in the toilets of his club through a hole he had drilled in the wall at the time.
But don't tell me this week;s high profile celebrations are anything other than a passing phase because we all know the truth.
