AOB: Swing Low Sweet Bandwagon

Ahh, good old Rugby. I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying – Football is gentleman’s game played by thugs, and Rugby is a thugs game played by, er, public-school educated, middle class, tossers.

Of course England are in the world cup final this weekend, and as it was four years ago, the country is GRIPPED by RUGBY FEVER. It’s also GRIPPED by that other favourite English sport – bandwagon jumping.

As you may have gathered I don’t like Rugby very much. That’s not to say I begrudge Rugby fans their moment of glory, it’s just everything else that goes with it that I can’t stand.

Now I can kind of get past the aforementioned bandwagon jumping and the pretending to understand Rugby’s myriad of rules. It doesn’t especially bother me that most of the great British public seemed unaware that the tournament was going on before the last two games, and I don’t even get riled by the fact that most of the ‘fans’ don’t know the names of any of the players beyond Jonny, and Dallaglio, and, er, is Will Carling still playing?

But what does get on my nerves is that whenever we do vaguely well at a minority sport the media always start spouting mindless rubbish like “Why can’t footballers behave more like Rugby/Cricket/Ping Pong players?”.

The odorous Jon Gaunt was saying something along these lines in his column in The Sun this week, and he is not alone.

Now, I’m no big fan of Premiership players, who are without doubt a generally stupid, self-obsessed group of individuals, but the reason rugby players aren’t publicly outed as twats as often as their footballuler counter parts is that for the majority of the time nobody cares about Rugby, or any other sport for that matter. We are a football country, therefore we give footballers a lot of money, and a high profile, but reserve the right to tut at them when they get drunk and have one night stands with Charlene from Chelmsford.

If we other sportsmen had similar amounts of cash and fame, you would get the same result. Look at cricketers: pre-ashes 2005 nobody really paid attention to them, but since the game became ‘cool’ we know that KP and Flintoff are piss heads and that Paul Collingwood likes to relax away from the sport by visiting Girls-A-Go-Go.

On the pitch, even if we ignore the fact that Rugby players routinely kick, punch, gouge, and stamp on opponents, the difference in discipline between round and oval ball players is surely down to the way the rules are applied. In Rugby, if you show any kind of dissent you get punished straight away. In Football, some refs will book you, some send you off, and some just ignore it, particularly if you are Wayne Rooney. When the FA (and FIFA) grow a pair and start taking a consistent, hard line, approach to dissent, I'm pretty sure we’ll see an immediate improvement in the behaviour of footballers.

As I say, I don’t seek to deprive the rugger-buggers of their moment of glory. It just annoys me when our glorious heroes of the Stade-de-France are held up as paradigms of sporting virtue. Oh well, I guess I should take comfort in the fact that whether we win or lose on Saturday, Rugby will have sunk from the public consciousness by this time next month. Until 2011 that is.