THE SUNDAY HERALD REPORTS

Rugby is simply a class bore
LEFT FIELD
KENNY HODGART
Comment
IT WOULD rightly be supposed you might need a decent bit of recovery time after having had your head stood on for 80 minutes before you were up for some more of it. Such are the arrangements for down time during the Rugby World Cup, however, that the bally thing lasts six whole weeks.

Yes, we might as well get used to it: six weeks of bloody rugby, more than 40 days and 40 nights of uncommonly large men rolling on the ground and kicking the ball out for a throw-in.

With the International Rugby Board hoping for profits of more than £90 million, France '07 is the biggest rugby event ever. Organisers have worked hard in recent years to maximise the sport's global appeal. What, then, are we to make of the mess the IRB have made of media protocols this week?

Negotiations were ongoing yesterday over the governing body's imposition of a disclaimer enabling it to change the terms and conditions of media accreditation whenever it pleases - which has seen a coalition of news agencies suspend their coverage in retaliation.

The IRB's pig-headedness would be surprising were it running anything other than rugby, a game still harnessed to its own image problem as it attempts, with frequent misadventure, to turn itself into a credible professional sport. You wonder if these buffers even realise when they've done their cause a bit of no good.

Besides galling arrogance, the other thing you can be sure of in international rugby is the dredging up of martial-fedual history. An hour spent with the wireless before Friday's kick-off thus threw up all manner of references to French legions, warriors' battle-cries and Welsh firebrands.

In this pageant, Scotland goes all misty-eyed and anti-English, the English themselves turn to St George and Lord Nelson, and the Aussies do what they always do, which is to swarm around being patriotic and calling you "mate", except in greater numbers.

In a way it's fitting that rugby likes to harp back to its Victorian public school origins: have you seen the chaps playing it these days? The home nations alone could have the British Empire back on the map by lunchtime, so elongated are they by centuries of huge family dinners starting with turtle soup.

The class-based nature of rugby is part of what continues to hold it back, at least in the northern hemisphere. Club rugby attendances in Scotland are woefully low, while the atmosphere at internationals is leaden with misogynist rugger-bugger types on their best behaviour and middle-class bores.

It would take a seriously ill-bred and ungracious observer, however, not to revel in the sheer rapturous violence of rugby, or its exposition of power and muscularity. This time there are even as many as three teams with a chance of winning. Here's a quart of port to that.

This article was posted on 9-Sep-2007, 08:26 by Hugh Barrow.