With most of world sport passing me by, it is increasingly obvious however that the focal point of the general sporting interest is about the Rubgy World Cup, so much so that there is insinuation in many ranks to skip lectures and catch the semi-final that England are playing in. Naturally, this being where it is, there was still a shred of concern about being deprived of the academic content of these lectures whose excitement paled in comparison to that of unnaturally large men punting a ball around fields manicured to standards probably endorsed by whoever it may be that maintains the college lawns here (though this is debatable, as we will see). Hence the sacrificial act of, dare I say, actually sitting in on those lectures, which by any impression, will be completely devoid of (white male, or am I stereotyping too much?) students, and, no doubt tearfully, scrawling down lecture notes for the benefit of less altruistic rugby-mad friends, is heavily sought after and perhaps even commodified.
Naturally, such an inanity is poorly understood by females and minority other males, who probably are cooking up reasons to hate rugby. It is a sport I have always had a prior suspicion of, partially because of the game, but also because of certain people on whose brains rugby had had a sledgehammer effect. Though now that I also know of people who have, oddly, somehow benefited from long-term rugby abuse (they must not have been playing hard enough!) this ameliorates that source of dislike, and hence most sticking points remain with the nature of the game and the entire culture it has spawned, like a festering, overripe banana.
Firstly, the eternal clash with football. Finer points of the game aside, it's been said that proper football has always and will always kick rugby's over-muscled "ass" as the general public prefers soccer's effeminate players to the broken-nosed beefcake puglies of rugby. The subtext being, of course, that football is gayer than rugby. This is true. But then again, marriage is gayer than rugby. Waxing an SUV while smoking a pipe and worrying about the mortgage is gayer than rugby. Rugby is in fact the ungayest thing in the world. The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. It is rugby. In fact homosexuality can best be described as a complete absence of rugby (by common experience, rather true).
The actual excitement quotient of rugby, despite all appearances, is nearly zero, if not negative. A rugby "highlights" show might just be marginally more interesting than "Highlights in Charted Accountancy", violent events included. In the highly technical world of rubgy rules, like in the highly technical world of constitutional law, highlights are probably illegal, probably made illegal at the same time as lifting your boot above your knee. Amongst other arcane rules, such as not dropping the ball within ten seconds or two and half yards, whichever is saltier unless of course a cosmic shift in space-time had translocated the advantage variance zone.
There's a Twilight Zone episode where a slack-jawed retard is given an amazing new intelligence boosting drug. He starts off with a thick Yorkshire accent. But, as he gets more and more intelligent, he starts to speak more and more posh. Until he ends up sounding like someone from Trinity College. But then alas, the drug starts wearing off and he turns back into a Yorkshireman. The average rugby fan will have read the above paragraph and said "Yes? And? So?" So you understand what I mean. Only in a more tongue-in-cheek manner than I usually use.
Hopefully then, after a fashion, we will no longer need to remind ourselves why rugby is, generally, rather ridiculous. Maybe it'll be easier to do that after England lose.
