January 2008 Archives

SO, the losers of the Rugby World Cup, England, have had their Six Nations preparations given the untimely bird. The footballers would have done it differently, of course.

The footballers would have had coaches, talk-radio hosts and PR mavens wringing their hands over some unseemly episode at a training camp involving japes gone awry, slappers and like as not a bit of aggro.

What's been giving the English rugger lot icky tummies on the other hand is quite frankly pedestrian, so much so, in fact, that most of the newspapers hadn't the heart to give the story more than a desultory wing column. Has Jonny Wilkinson gone on Facebook and called the French rude names? Has Phil Vickery been drunk and missed a flight? Has Mathew Tait been caught in flagrante with a page three stunna?

No, no and no. What has happened is that Paul Sackey - who is a winger, except that in rugby wingers score all the tries, so they should really be called centre forwards - has got the mumps.

Now, let us put aside for the moment the monstrous absurdity of a grown man getting an illness that is for children (and before some know-it-all in the employ of the NHS decides to write in with some nonsense starting out "well, actually -" you can save yourself the bother. I don't believe you). Let us also pretend that there is nothing to hold against Sackey personally (there is: he plays for England, at rugby. But let us pretend). The rub is this: if you play rugby then you run the risk of getting sick in drab, uninteresting ways; that is the life you have chosen.

How they tried, the RFU and their lackeys. The mumps was reclassified as a disease. One newspaper had Sackey being quarantined. And before the rest of the squad knew it an army of medical professionals and health and safety sorts had been dispensed into their midst to make sure that if they hadn't caught the thing themselves they bloody well knew how to fondle themselves to check for it.

It is all very well being complacent and telling ourselves that football is not rugby, however. Poofery, for want of a modern term, rears its odious head more and more in football. Just as they plough their ever greater reserves of cash and leisure time into schemes for the avoidance of taste and decency, instances proliferate of footballers missing games when their wives are in labour or having the flu.

In a recent documentary Sir Alex Ferguson recalled how between them Brian McClair and Mark Hughes never missed a day's training. "They would never wear joggy bottoms. Whatever the weather, they wore shorts, " he went on, a moistness creeping into his eye. And then, the poignant rhetorical flourish: "What does that tell you?" It tells you they never got the mumps for a start.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

IN Soviet Russia, Stalin manipulated sport, as he did every other walk of life, to his own ends. In football, Dynamo Moscow, under the auspices of the secret police, were emissaries of his regime, a parody of the whole absurd social experiment that was communism. Uncle Joe's worker-gods ran amok with the competition, of course they did. They also made a mockery of sporting ideals such as fairness and skill, and as a result were secretly despised.

A South African rugby team in the image of that country's government would most decidedly not run amok with anyone, but as an example of political interference in sport it would be equally pernicious. The self-styled Rainbow Nation's ANC leaders are right now big on what they call "transformation", which in rugby terms means attempting to broaden participation among blacks, who make up 79-per cent of the population. A laudable aim, surely, but one which should be carefully implemented.

Instead, the heavy hand of the state in South Africa is likely to set the game back years. When the Springboks won the World Cup last year, black and white stood shoulder to shoulder in celebration, regardless of the fact there were no black players, and only two of mixed race (wingers Bryan Habana and JonPaul Pietersen) in the squad. The ANC's favoured policy of selection according to race, with the aim of making the team two-thirds black, would see the country drop out of rugby's international elite overnight and many of its best players defecting. Harmony, you can be sure, would not be served.

The ball was set rolling last week with the appointment of Peter de Villiers, the Sprinboks' first black coach, chosen ahead of overwhelming players' favourite Heyneke Meyer, who is white, but also the most successful South African provincial coach of the postapartheid era. The South African Rugby Union boasted that their top positions were all now filled by blacks, while Oregan Hoskins, the organisation's black president, revealed how blinkered his junta has become with the unwitting remark that he was looking forward to the day "when we won't look at appointments in colour compartments".

The fact is that de Villiers is clearly not the best man for the job. Nor would a predominantly black side be capable of defending the World Cup in 2011.

Policies of inclusion must start at the grass roots. Imagine the New York Knicks basketball team filled with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in order to reflect the city's ethnic diversity, or the Oxford-Cambridge boat race contested by kids from the estates instead of Americans, Nordic-looking chaps and the occasional earl. By all means increase participation, but the highest levels in sport should remain the preserve of elites. No matter which "compartment" they arrive in.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald