Rugby...

The cricket is over. Yorkshire won the county championship, England won (back) the Ashes; all’s well with the world. The next big tournament on the horizon is the Rugby World Cup, starting on Friday, for which I cannot summon up even a glimmer of enthusiasm. It seems a pointless enterprise: throwing the ball backwards - always backwards - makes going forward almost impossible. The scrum seems to collapse every time; anyway the team that put the ball in almost always wins it, which makes the scrum pointless (and dangerous, because players are picked for brawn, not brain, these days). Most games are decided by penalty kicks. And in no other sport is a team rewarded for kicking the ball out of the field of play. If there’s two minutes of exciting running rugby, during 80 minutes play, the commentators are ecstatic. The other 78 minutes are just dull.

I played rugby at school… because I had to. I used to run up and down the wing, in the hope that the other players might think I was a spectator, and the spectators might think I was playing...