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You are here: Home Health & Fitness Fitness & Sports Editor's Diary - Numb Scrum

11/09/2007Editor's Diary - Numb Scrum

Rugby fever leaves no ex-pat untouched.

11 September 2007

Sarkozy is not the only one currently taking a crash course in rugby. For many of us recent initiates, rugby has always been a spectacular sight (something equivalent to modern day gladiators) but nevertheless, and even when we English won in 2003, a ritual swathed in mystery.

 

Conversations in front of the television would often be strangely repetitive: so, you can run with the ball but you can’t pass it forward? What exactly is the difference between rucking and mauling? And if you can bite a man’s ear, why can’t you pull his hair?

As a younger, naiver and happier spectator, I used to content myself with remarks upon the circumference of players’ thighs, their cauliflower ears, the way their gum shields look like Dracula party pieces, and I’d sway along to that pretty dance the All Blacks start every game with.

But this World Cup is different… This time I’ve made sure I have a few facts at my fingertips. Now, if I become aware of any Gallic posturing, I can riposte with – “oh, but didn’t you know that rugby comes from England? Yes, like all those other incomprehensible games played with a ball. A strange coincidence, it was invented at a school called Rugby!”

“When? Sometime in the early nineteenth century (you know, shortly after the invention of the Wild West). They were playing football with a pig’s bladder (that was when biology lessons had a purpose) when one of them picked up the ball and started running with it. It was simply one of those Eureka moments.”

I have also been reliably informed by Wikipedia that the game was only introduced to France in 1872 and, on New Year’s Day, 1906, the national side played its first test match against New Zealand in Paris.

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