A word about the rugby. England lost. But they lost fairly and with a lot of honour.
It’s easy to quibble about the try that wasn’t, but what let us down was the tactics. Kick, kick, kick. ‘Run,’ I kept yelling. ‘Remember Fiji.’ When you kick you gain territory, but lose possession, and there was no way we were going to steal their line-out.
OK, I know these were the tactics that got us took us so unexpectedly to the final, but couldn’t we see that South Africa were beating us at our own game?
The man I feel most sorry for is Jason Robinson, a player I’ve always found at least as exciting as Jonny Wilkinson. In the past, when Robinson got the ball I always leapt up with expectation. He would look around, wiggle his bottom and dart upfield like a rabbit chased by a pack of poodles.
And yet in the last few games he’s been told to kick the bloody ball away. It made this brave man look craven. A sad end, limping off early to watch Tait provide glimpses of what might have been.
* * *
And what now for South Africa? It seems that their government has decided that that their rugby team should descend to the level of Azerbaijan. Incredibly, just as their team becomes the best in the world, they wish to throw away the concept of selection on merit – is there ever any other concept of selection? – and choose the team to ‘reflect the make-up of the nation’.
So, what’s that mean? Ten blacks and five whites? What about ‘coloureds’? Asians; Jews. What about the division of ‘blacks’ into Xhosa and Zulu, not to mention all the other groupings? In any case, rugby is a class thing, isn’t it? Maybe you should be denied selection if you’ve got a degree. And why exclude women, children, OAPs, disabled people. You won't win anything, but what could beat that lovely warm feeling of sanctimony.
What a load of balls!
* * *
Talking about balls, there’s been a lot more in the news this week.
For some reason thinking about rugby reminds me of fat people. I know it’s not the case anymore that the game is characterised by beer-bellied boozers, but I can’t help the way my mind works.
‘Obese’ is the word these days for what were once called ‘fat bastards’. ‘Obesity’ is not the result of greed and sloth and stupidity, but a condition, we were informed this week by the Chief Medical Officer himself, caused by ‘the failure of human biology to keep pace with changes in society’.
I remember one of the would-be strippers in The Full Monty, sitting in his garden shed, his belly strapped with cling-film and eating Mars Bars, all the while bemoaning his weight problem.
‘The wife’s got anti-ageing cream and anti-wrinkle cream,’ he says. ‘What I need is some anti-fat-bastard cream.’
No use. It’s evolution’s fault. Now that theory raises some interesting possibilities. We need to do some selective breeding, mating people who seem to cope better with today’s lifestyle and diet. As it’s a matter of urgency – Education Secretary Alan Johnson thinks the problem is on a par with global warming – I would like the powers that be to know that I myself have a high metabolic rate and am at the nation’s disposal.
Now I’m talking a load of balls!
* * *
What else is annoying me at the moment? All right, I’m a grumpy old man, but these things must be said.
There were those kids who stoned an old bloke to death, more or less, and were tried at the Old Bailey. My complaint is not that they only got a year in some sort of detention – although it’s a travesty – nor that their parents, assuming they’ve got any, weren’t in the dock with them. No, it’s that we’ve been subjected since to the bleating of bleeding hearts that have crawled out from under those rocks called university social studies departments to tell us that these little bastards are too young to be held accountable for their contemptible actions.
The same characters are fretting about the desire of prison officers to use batons on violent young offenders. Give them water cannon, if not machine guns, I say.
They make me so cross that I mixed my metaphors back there. And for that I can never forgive them.
Of course these ‘children’ – funny how they’re called children sometimes and ‘young adults’ at others – know the difference between ‘right and wrong’. If a gang of middle class liberals were to get drunk and throw stones at a ten-year-old caught reading The Daily Telegraph, the little offender would soon start bawling, ‘It ain’t fair, mistuh’. Ergo, they know what’s wrong. In that silly little scenario is the essence of social morality.
Even Jesus Christ would agree with that, not that he’s much of an authority. In fact he talked rather a lot of bollocks himself. I’ll come back to that another day.
* * *
What else? Is there no end to the insanity of Britain today?
Oh yes. Apparently there’s an epidemic of ‘middle-class drinking’. Now this is not ‘binge-drinking’. That is the privilege of children or young adults or whatever they’re called in this case. Middle class people, whoever they are, indulge in ‘hazardous drinking’. Forgive me, by the way, for using inverted commas so much, but how else do I convey my contempt for the silly journalistic phrases taken up and parroted from newspaper to TV and back again.
It seems that professional people are going home after a day’s work and drinking a bottle of wine. Every day. Shock horror! What is the point, I ask, of aspiring to a middle class income, if not to be able to afford a decent bottle of wine on a daily basis?
Dawn Primarola, a health minister with impeccable Stalinist credentials, has warned that ‘this must stop.’ God help us.
Personally, I wish I could afford it. But I’m not complaining. What with the reasonable rates at Wetherspoon’s pubs and ASDA I’m at this very moment finishing my week’s government-allocated quota of alcohol.
Not bad, considering I started yesterday morning.
What the hell. Do you live and put up with all this balls forever?
It’s easy to quibble about the try that wasn’t, but what let us down was the tactics. Kick, kick, kick. ‘Run,’ I kept yelling. ‘Remember Fiji.’ When you kick you gain territory, but lose possession, and there was no way we were going to steal their line-out.
OK, I know these were the tactics that got us took us so unexpectedly to the final, but couldn’t we see that South Africa were beating us at our own game?
The man I feel most sorry for is Jason Robinson, a player I’ve always found at least as exciting as Jonny Wilkinson. In the past, when Robinson got the ball I always leapt up with expectation. He would look around, wiggle his bottom and dart upfield like a rabbit chased by a pack of poodles.
And yet in the last few games he’s been told to kick the bloody ball away. It made this brave man look craven. A sad end, limping off early to watch Tait provide glimpses of what might have been.
* * *
And what now for South Africa? It seems that their government has decided that that their rugby team should descend to the level of Azerbaijan. Incredibly, just as their team becomes the best in the world, they wish to throw away the concept of selection on merit – is there ever any other concept of selection? – and choose the team to ‘reflect the make-up of the nation’.
So, what’s that mean? Ten blacks and five whites? What about ‘coloureds’? Asians; Jews. What about the division of ‘blacks’ into Xhosa and Zulu, not to mention all the other groupings? In any case, rugby is a class thing, isn’t it? Maybe you should be denied selection if you’ve got a degree. And why exclude women, children, OAPs, disabled people. You won't win anything, but what could beat that lovely warm feeling of sanctimony.
What a load of balls!
* * *
Talking about balls, there’s been a lot more in the news this week.
For some reason thinking about rugby reminds me of fat people. I know it’s not the case anymore that the game is characterised by beer-bellied boozers, but I can’t help the way my mind works.
‘Obese’ is the word these days for what were once called ‘fat bastards’. ‘Obesity’ is not the result of greed and sloth and stupidity, but a condition, we were informed this week by the Chief Medical Officer himself, caused by ‘the failure of human biology to keep pace with changes in society’.
I remember one of the would-be strippers in The Full Monty, sitting in his garden shed, his belly strapped with cling-film and eating Mars Bars, all the while bemoaning his weight problem.
‘The wife’s got anti-ageing cream and anti-wrinkle cream,’ he says. ‘What I need is some anti-fat-bastard cream.’
No use. It’s evolution’s fault. Now that theory raises some interesting possibilities. We need to do some selective breeding, mating people who seem to cope better with today’s lifestyle and diet. As it’s a matter of urgency – Education Secretary Alan Johnson thinks the problem is on a par with global warming – I would like the powers that be to know that I myself have a high metabolic rate and am at the nation’s disposal.
Now I’m talking a load of balls!
* * *
What else is annoying me at the moment? All right, I’m a grumpy old man, but these things must be said.
There were those kids who stoned an old bloke to death, more or less, and were tried at the Old Bailey. My complaint is not that they only got a year in some sort of detention – although it’s a travesty – nor that their parents, assuming they’ve got any, weren’t in the dock with them. No, it’s that we’ve been subjected since to the bleating of bleeding hearts that have crawled out from under those rocks called university social studies departments to tell us that these little bastards are too young to be held accountable for their contemptible actions.
The same characters are fretting about the desire of prison officers to use batons on violent young offenders. Give them water cannon, if not machine guns, I say.
They make me so cross that I mixed my metaphors back there. And for that I can never forgive them.
Of course these ‘children’ – funny how they’re called children sometimes and ‘young adults’ at others – know the difference between ‘right and wrong’. If a gang of middle class liberals were to get drunk and throw stones at a ten-year-old caught reading The Daily Telegraph, the little offender would soon start bawling, ‘It ain’t fair, mistuh’. Ergo, they know what’s wrong. In that silly little scenario is the essence of social morality.
Even Jesus Christ would agree with that, not that he’s much of an authority. In fact he talked rather a lot of bollocks himself. I’ll come back to that another day.
* * *
What else? Is there no end to the insanity of Britain today?
Oh yes. Apparently there’s an epidemic of ‘middle-class drinking’. Now this is not ‘binge-drinking’. That is the privilege of children or young adults or whatever they’re called in this case. Middle class people, whoever they are, indulge in ‘hazardous drinking’. Forgive me, by the way, for using inverted commas so much, but how else do I convey my contempt for the silly journalistic phrases taken up and parroted from newspaper to TV and back again.
It seems that professional people are going home after a day’s work and drinking a bottle of wine. Every day. Shock horror! What is the point, I ask, of aspiring to a middle class income, if not to be able to afford a decent bottle of wine on a daily basis?
Dawn Primarola, a health minister with impeccable Stalinist credentials, has warned that ‘this must stop.’ God help us.
Personally, I wish I could afford it. But I’m not complaining. What with the reasonable rates at Wetherspoon’s pubs and ASDA I’m at this very moment finishing my week’s government-allocated quota of alcohol.
Not bad, considering I started yesterday morning.
What the hell. Do you live and put up with all this balls forever?
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