With the RBS Six Nations Championship about to get under way, those of us who live in southwest London get ready for another orgy of footy-bashing, that familiar custom beloved of the rugby fans who mull around Richmond and Twickenham in the hours after the final whistle singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, nicking all the local dinner tables — not to mention the local women — and sneering at the round-ball version of football.
This is not to say that rugby does not have a certain beauty, at least when the ball is not incessantly kicked into touch. Indeed, one of the most uplifting highlights of last year’s World Cup — hair on the backs of necks stuff, this — was the match between Wales and Fiji. This was sport at its most compelling, with bravura virtuosity, courage, brinkmanship and, at the death, a sizeable upset.
But if I can praise the beauty of rugby, why is it so rare to find a rugby fan who can praise football? Perhaps the most irritating aspect is the moral superiority that is claimed by rugby spectators, as if anyone who describes himself as a football fan must, by definition, have a set of knuckle-dusters in his inside pocket along with a compulsion to assault anyone wearing a different coloured scarf. This is the main reason why rival rugby fans take such pains to parade their camaraderie: “Oh, your team deserved to win.” “Surely not, you were so much better.” I’d rather they just had a mass brawl.
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Of course, it is football players themselves — “overpaid, soft, monosyllabic, thuggish and cowardly” — who get most of the flak from rugby fans. They are condemned as morally bankrupt wide-boys who fail to live up to their (unwanted and unasked for) status as role models by indulging in group sex and two-footed lunges.
There is a certain hypocrisy here. Rugby is a far more violent game than football — and the drunken off-field sexual antics of the players are not that different to those of footballers — yet the sport gets far less opprobrium. Two-footed tackles in football were described by one newspaper as one of the moral outrages of the age. What about the punching, kicking, eye-gouging, hair-pulling and stamping that goes on in rugby without anyone seeming to notice? Or is it that they don’t care? And talking of tackle, what about the fact that scrum etiquette seems to encourage the crushing of a chap’s manhood to within an inch of infertility?
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What’s more, the idea that rugby players are role models is laughable. When Glenn Hoddle offered some mild insights in a book while he was the England football team’s head coach, the world reacted as if it was the most heinous literary crime since the publication of Mein Kampf. But what do the rugby boys do? They rush into print after the World Cup and stick so many knives into the back of Brian Ashton that the head coach still carries the pitiful look of Captain Bligh from the mutiny on the Bounty.
Could it be that rugby players get away with bad behaviour on and off the field because of class warfare? Or is it just that those who play and follow rugby do not get so het up about such behaviour from their heroes? Some might say that football can learn from rugby, that bad tackles and binge-drinking should pass without comment, but why should thuggery be unpunished or even unremarked-upon?
Perhaps this critique is simply based on jealousy. It is true that, along with dozens of other men in southwest London, I have had a potential girlfriend or two stolen away by a second team player from London Scottish. Women seem to like rugby players’ legs, although quite why tree trunks for limbs are considered sexy is a question for my next phone call to the Samaritans.
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None of this is to deny that rugby is a jolly good sport; indeed, it is a great sport. It is just that I don’t feel it is as great as football. Don’t take my word for it; take the word of the rest of the planet. Football is the national sport in so many countries that it is impossible to list them in a column of this length. Rugby is the national sport of a handful of former Commonwealth nations.
Yet it can provide beauty and drama and wonderful memories. I am thoroughly looking forward to today’s match in Twickenham. I just wish rugby fans wouldn’t sneer at us football fans so much.