Rugby football is a game [in which] each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. (P G Wodehouse, 1930)
It seems that over the weekend there was an important game in the other code, League, which featured a major brawl. Two players sent off resumed their dispute beyond the sideline, “back in civilized territory” as one writer put it, and were joined by many others.
I find all this seriously unedifying. Neither I nor people I associate with ever raise their fists, or imagine any issue is properly dealt with that way. Yet on or off the rugby field, or league, it becomes what the sports writers call a little bit of biffo. Sometimes it is the way blokes handle things. Never mind that it’s illegal, even in League. It happens, it is understood evidently in the male sporting psyche, and a good referee is one who is not too scrupulous about common assault.
Well OK, but it’s lost on me.
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Michele Bachmann, one of the Republican candidates for the US presidency, heaven help us all, has claimed that the recent earthquake and the hurricane that shook the eastern seaboard of the USA were messages from God. What was the message? We've got to rein in the spending, she said. God arranged a mediocre kind of earthquake, and a somewhat serious storm, to get the attention of the politicians, says Michele.
This woman seriously hopes to be President of the United States of America. She gets messages from God. It’s early days yet, of course, and she has to beat down the candidacy of the Governor of the State of Texas, Rick Perry, who seems to be a really toxic religious fruitcake. As governor, Rick has consented to hundreds of judicial executions as a righteous thing. He wouldn't have got elected if he hadn't vowed to kill condemned people. Rick proclaimed his presidential candidacy at some major fundamentalist religious rally. Incidentally, what happened to the constitutional separation of church and state in the USA? I only ask...
Sarah Palin is also a candidate evidently, in a wide choice which includes Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich… It is as though God is saying to the Democrat Party, your sacred role is to protect my people, my world, from such a fate. Anyway, that’s what I think God is saying.
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The Rugby World Cup starts here at the end of next week. The Fiji team arrived yesterday. At Auckland airport the visiting rugby teams emerge via a separate, special gateway which leads onto a stage, rather in the manner of returning astronauts. They stand there while hakas are endured and the media get their fill of them. The rest of us, hoi polloi, emerge from our flights in the usual way.
The land has gone curiously silent on the fact that the All Blacks have just had two consecutive serious losses in the TriNations tournament, first to South Africa, and then to Australia. I have no idea what this means, although I was under the impression that these were the All Blacks' two major foes. Well they each just beat us. Senior All Blacks, heroes, icons, role models as they are, have been getting “rested”. It’s like the lull before Waterloo. A frisson of fear quivers through some of the faithful.
Meanwhile I have set myself, at this late stage of life, to discover and learn what the game of Rugby is actually for and about. I consulted the rules, on Wikipedia and other sites. Do not go there -- it is terminally boring. I printed out a 2-page article on "Offside", and find I understand, maybe, the first sentence. The first sentence reads: Offside rules in rugby union are complex.
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