Four or five months ago I was looking
forward to the Rugby World Cup that opens in three days, but without much hope
that I would make it. With now only three sleeps to be survived, I am beginning
to think I may make it after all. And that has brought me to an understanding
of the puzzling fact that most of the people who are reading this Chronicle
have minimal interest in Rugby, and will not really welcome any attempt by me
to explain it. One thing I will say in favour of this ignorance: it is not as profound
as the North American ignorance of that other British-invented game, cricket, a
game that I consider to be the greatest game on earth.
Whenever cricket rubs its
way into the North American consciousness, I realize I am about to be assailed
by one of those feeble attempts at humour essayed by the popular press about this
game whose fundamentals appear to be too
complex for their understanding.
Never mind: the least I can do is try
to give you poor souls some minimal understanding of what all the fuss is
about. I know it is going to be tough for you, because your own favourite Canadian
game is wrought with expressions about fighting, hitting, body checks, sticks
over the heads, and lifetime concussions in spite of the extravagant body shields
worn. I freely admit that this wonderful Canadian game is the fastest played by
anyone, and is a game to be immensely enjoyed for its superb skills on those
rare occasions on which they do not
start punching each other out with the intention of wounding and hurting,
objectives that I have long ago taken to be the antithesis of sport and
games.
By contrast, Rugby Union, the game I
am espousing in his piece, is composed of hard knocks, but never with the
intention of hurting or wounding anyone. In fact, the prevailing ethos of the
game is that when the final whistle has blown, the losing team will form a line
of applauding players through which the winning team makes its way off the
field. Thereafter, as is well-known, it is customary for the teams to gather in
the pub, or even in one of the dressing rooms, to share a quick one. Or two. Or
so. In an atmosphere of cameraderie.
When I started to read up about the
history of these British-invented games, I was surprised by how ancient they
are. Cricket began late in the 16th century, had become the national sport of
England by the 18th century, played its first international match
--- between the USA and Canada, no less! --- in 1844. For generations the game was dominated by
intense gambling, just as it is now in India and Pakistan, and the present
system of professional county teams began to appear by 1709, with a regular
scorecard employed since 1772, and the Lord’s Cricket Ground, which still lies
at the heart of the game, was opened in 1787.
Although the Chinese have put in a
claim to have originated the game now called soccer in many millennia ago, that
is not really surprising, because as the British scientist Joseph Needham
showed in his monumental 16-volume study of Chinese life, that long-lived
civilization has a virtually unquestionable claim to having originated almost
everything.
When I enquired of the Internet about
origins, it came up with his concise description:
Records trace the history
of soccer back more than 2,000 years to ancient China. Greece, Rome,
and parts of Central America also claim to have started the sport; but it was
England that transitioned soccer,
or what the British and many other people around the world call “football,” into the game we know
today.
Being so very cheap to play, requiring no
more than a shirt and a pair of shorts, and a ball, or something resembling a
ball, it was from the first the game of the people, who, in Britain over many
centuries, had been great and persistent gamblers, who quickly took to gamble
over the games of football (so called, apparently, not because it was played
with the foot, as from the fact it was played
without the use of horses.)
The
particular version of football that I grew up with is known as Rugby Union, and
it came about because, so it is said (although rigorous researchers have taken
pleasure in doubting the historical accuracy of this “fact”), during a game
being played at Rugby school, in Warwickshire, when a boy called William Webb
Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it. The Cup awarded to the victor in the
Rugby World Cup is named after Ellis. I
am indebted to the school’s Wikipedia entry:
The game of Rugby football owes its name to the school. The
legend of William
Webb Ellis and the
origin of the game is commemorated by a plaque. The story has been known to be
a myth since it was investigated by the Old Rugbeian Society in 1895. There
were no standard rules for football in Webb Ellis's time at Rugby (1816–1825)
and most varieties involved carrying the ball. The games played at Rugby were
organised by the pupils and not the masters, the rules being a matter of custom
and not written down. They were frequently changed and modified with each new
intake of students. The sole source of the story is Matthew Bloxam, a former pupil but not a contemporary
of Webb Ellis. In October 1876, four years after the death of Webb Ellis, in a
letter to the school newspaper The
Meteor he quotes an unknown friend relating the story to him. He
elaborated on the story four years later in another letter to The Meteor, but shed no further light
on its source. Richard Lindon, a boot and shoemaker who had premises
across the street from the School's main entrance in Lawrence Sheriff Street,
is credited with the invention of the "oval" rugby ball, the rubber
inflatable bladder and the brass hand pump.
This
occurred before professionalism in 1885 entered the older game known formally
in the United Kingdom as Association football, and elsewhere as soccer, this
being a shorthand version developed from the initials “assoc”, often used to
delineate the game in its early years.
It is a matter of some interest, I
suppose to Canadians as to why this articular colony should have been almost
the only one in the British Empire that did not wholeheartedly adopt these two
British sports, cricket and soccer.
Today, cricket is said to draw
the largest following world-wide, but there can be no denying that it is soccer
that is the favoured game of the greatest number of people.
Rugby’s relatively genteel origin is
still evident in the composition of the 20 nations competing for the World Cup
about to get under way tomorrow, no fewer than 12 of the 20 owing their origins
to British imperialism. It is said today that the game is played in some 62
nations, but that still today the British Isles have more players than the rest
of the world combined.
Although with a mind like mine, one
can watch a soccer match for 1000 hours without ever seeing anything much
happening, I am willing to concede that the game, when played expertly, can be
a thing of beauty, but I do not accept the designation as “the beautiful game,”
given by its followers. That rosy view of
the sport has been dented by the hooliganism that has invaded the supporting
group of citizens in most countries but so far as I can tell in Britain, and
possibly Russia, above all others. Such
hooliganism has never appeared among followers of the Rugby persuasion, at
least not to anything like the degree common among the Socceroos.
I admit that our Rugby World Cup,
which began in 1987, is a straight steal from the FIFA World Cup, which began with a victory by
Uruguay, in 1930, and has since been won five times by Brazil, and otherwise
shared between Germany, Italy, Spain, France and England, among European
countries and Argentina among Latin Americans. (The acronym FIFA itself is
proof of the widely spread origins of the game, because it stands for
Fédération Internaionale de Football Association.)
The Rugby cup has been won three
times by New Zealand, twice by Australia and South Africa and once by England.
France have been the most unfortunate with three runners-up performances.
One aspect of the game that might be
confusing for North .American audiences is that to pass or throw the ball forward
is not permitted; also, in a game of such avowed contact by its very nature,
strict rules govern the type of tackle that can be essayed. To tackle legally, the tackler much have his
arms around the man being tackled; it is also forbidden to tackle around the
head, and it is a violation to tackle a man who, while jumping to collect the
ball from a high kick, is pulled down while
still in the air. The central rule is that one is allowed to tackle only the
man with the ball: this is one of the major differences, in terms of physical
contact, from the North American gridiron game, whose players apparently can be
hit from any direction whether they have the ball or not. These are rules
designed to ensure as far as possible that contact will not lead to injury, although
it has to be admitted that with the game finally passing into professionalism
in 1995, injuries seem to be more frequent and possibly more severe than when
the game was amateur at all levels.
Still, the game has a huge public
following, with crowds of 80,000 to 110,000 being attracted for major so-called
Test matches in Australia, Britain and France.
The team I will be following, because
I grew up as a child for some years
believing it my sincerest wish to become one of them, are known as the All
Blacks, representing New Zealand. A team, mostly of Maoris, toured Britain and Europe in 1888, one of the
first international tours ever undertaken, and it became common to refer to
them as All Blacks because of their all black uniform with a silver fern
insignia. (An alternative explanation is that an admiring reporter once
described their hard and fast running game by saying “they are all backs,” a
reference to the half of the team
comprised of swift runners, smaller and lighter usually than the eight
so-called forwards whose primary task is to obtain possession of the ball by
way of a scrum, following an infraction, or from a lineout when the big men
contest for the ball that is thrown in between their two lines.)
The place of the All Blacks as the
iconic team of world Rugby was solidified by the team of 1905, which toured
Britain and Europe, playing 35 games with only one loss, and scoring 976 points
to only 59 against. A reporter of the time wrote: “These New Zealanders turn
from defence to attack with such rapidity….there is nothing in the game at
which they do not excel.” They had never
seen anything like it in Britain; and New Zealand at the time had a population of
only 815,000. Ten years later, New Zealand provided nearly 17,000 of their
young men and women to be led to the slaughter in the First World War, a war fought
in Britain’s interests.
I am pleased to be able to report
that even today it remains the objective of the All Blacks to produce a fast,
exciting and beautiful version of the game whose fundamental purpose, after
all, is to pass the ball, and run with it.
That they are, as so often before,
entering this competition as the favourites to win, is not something they take for granted: many
have been the worries expressed among their followers that their game plan
seems to have been disrupted by the recent improvement of the northern
hemisphere sides, and the recent revival of South Africa, their long-time
nemesis, who have emerged from a period of confusion following the downfall of
apartheid, under which the springbok Rugby team was the favoured symbol of the
racist rulers of the country. Now, following an imposed quota system designed
to encourage black Africans to play the game, South Africa is emerging with a
hefty proportion of swift-running, hard-tackling and ferociously-scrimmaging
players of whom any team must beware.
Whatever happens, whoever wins, in the
end it will still be possible for New Zealanders to say,
“Wot the hell, wot the hell, it’s
only a game, chaps, only game.”
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