Before we begin, I will just warn any rugby players out there that you will not enjoy this rant. Of course you can try and track me down and beat me to death using your manly physique and distinguished biceps, but I think we both know that isn’t going to happen so you have two choices, leave this blog now by clicking the little x in the corner or listen to what I have to say. My rant this week is about a culture around a specific sport which has taken a gratuitously snobby attitude to other sports-namely football quite recently. Being part of my university football team brings along stigma attached. Many of the rugby players at my university will argue to dawn how their beloved sport is better, how football is full of overpaid ninnies who hopelessly kick a ball around a field for 90 minutes. To them we’re just over groomed, mentally incapable weaklings who made a serious of wrong choices in their life to arrive at playing football. Well the truth is, they couldn’t be any more wrong if they tried. I will not argue the premier league has enough hair gel, dirty money and page 3 models to fill a million Bentley continentals but every football lover knows why they got into it in the first place-because it’s a beautiful game. Extraordinarily divine things can happen on the football pitch, 40 yard screamers, epic saves and an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. Yet rugby is on the whole, messy, boring, very stop-start and requires little technical ability for teams to succeed but instead awards the players who can cram the most roids in their system before matches.
I would be more accepting and open of the sport rugby but I choose not to enjoy it purely on principle. Despite many football fans being open to most sports, rugby fans and players alike (not all) have developed an unexplainable hate for the game despite them both being closely linked. Rugby is a variant of football after all as it’s full name is known as “rugby football.” With exception to real top level players, I personally believe people who chose to play rugby at a young age did so because they were probably overweight and bad at football. They suffered years of break times being tortured on the playground in primary school for not being able to kick a ball so when secondary school arrives they can eat 4 egg and chips a day, get even fatter and use their laborious layers of fat to push off other unsuspecting pupils. They get picked for a team and now consider themselves fully fledged athletes. Whilst their school mates are off playing football, staying toned and athletic, rugby players decided it’s time to hit the gym and turn a portion of their fat into real life muscle. The side effect other than the roid rage from this is the deluded self belief that because they are “huge” and play a game which requires them to tackle other equally huge men to the ground, they are the height of masculinity. Hence why football gets brushed to the side in their life and they try and forget the torturous days of their youth of being picked last every day for the football team and turn that trauma into an unholy hatred for a truely great sport which in my opinion has unfortunately become victim to this modernised world of money and glamour in recent times.
Rugby on the whole is a boorish sport which can admittedly sometimes have its moments (I don’t think anyone can deny the last minute drop goal from Johnny Wilkinson in the world cup in 2003). But many rugby fans also argue of the sheer lack of brain cells footballers possess these days in their laggard performances in post match interviews. As incompetent as they do sometimes sound, I don’t remember Manchester United fans paying £50 a match to watch Wayne Rooney recite Shakespeare or Rio Ferdinand explaining molecular transference. “Oh but Rugby players get a degree first and play Rugby after!” I hear you cry. Well yes they do but only because the salary most rugby players earn at a professional level isn’t enough to retire on because it isn’t a popular enough sport and therefore doesn’t generate the revenue. If that were the case you rugger players wouldn’t get an education either and thus turn into the uneducated second class citizens like the rest of English modern day football players supposedly are. Despite the farcical claims, quite humorously it didn’t stop Frank Lampard of all people leaving secondary school with an A* in Latin so I read on Sunday.
Cheers then!
