On the antipathy between football and rugby...
The Six Nations rugby championship is currently underway, providing one of the few moments of the year when the sporting spotlight here is not 100% focussed on football. Of course not everybody is excited about it, but that’s ok, isn’t it? It seems not. In fact it seems for some sports fans the passion of the love of their sport is matched only by their antipathy towards supposedly rival sports.
I’ll nail my colours to the mast immediately: I love both
football and rugby (bisportual?), and really can’t understand the need of some
people to be so negative towards the others. If you like one of the sports more
than the other, fine, but why not let the other side get on and enjoy
themselves?
There is without a doubt a class element to the rivalry,
which while not necessarily a defining factor, certainly cannot be ignored.
Rugby is seen as elitist, the game of the public schools and ruling classes,
whereas football is considered a working man’s game. Rugby was famously
invented at a grammar school, and many of its fans and participants still come
from that kind of environment. Indeed if you look at Rugby World magazine, they still have comprehensive coverage of
(public) schools rugby, and in all their player profiles list which school the
player in question attended. Does anybody have any idea which schools any of
our football stars went to? No, partly because it’s irrelevant, but also
because the overwhelming majority will have attended state schools.
With this kind of background, it’s fair to say a lot of
rugby fans can be awful snobs. The famous old quote that “football is a
gentleman’s game played by hooligans, while rugby is a hooligans’ game played
by gentlemen” still holds sway. Rugby folk see football as a game for effeminate
weaklings. One of the reasons I stopped buying Rugby World were the constant unchecked references to “Wendyball” in
the letters pages. Like much of the rivalry, petty and unnecessary.
In fact the constant comparisons with football by rugby
people could be said to show insecurity and even envy on their part –
envy that football is by far the most popular sport on the planet. Another
reason I stopped buying Rugby World and
sometimes find TV rugby commentary and analysis irritating is the number of
football references. Too often you read of such and such a team being “the
Manchester United of rugby”, or errors near the try line described as “like
missing an open goal”. How often do you hear Arsenal or Chelsea described as
the Saracens or Harlequins of football, or a chip forward described as a box
kick? Football is secure in its position at the top of the tree so does not
need to make such comparisons. Rugby would do well to recognise the hypocrisy of
making references to football while simultaneously criticising it.
The issue of cheating also brings unfavourable comparisons.
Football is undoubtedly blighted by this, seemingly getting worse the higher the
level. I rarely watch top level football these days, and would cite the diving,
feigning of injury and moaning and harassment of match officials as the main
reasons. But rugby should be wary of taking the moral high ground here. Indeed
it seems to delight in the dark deeds that take place in the ruck and scrum.
How is it that this is considered entertainingly cunning and devious, while a
footballer feigning contact while trying to win a penalty is horrendous
cheating? The feigning aspect seems to be the key point, though again rugby
should check itself here – the Bloodgate scandal of 2009, when Harlequins used joke shop capsules to fake a blood injury in
order to return their best kicker to the field at a key moment of a Heineken
Cup quarter final, was as bad or even worse than anything you will ever see on
a football field. As George Orwell once said: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It
is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and
sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the
shooting.”
Where rugby wins hands down though and a key way in which it
won my affections is the spirit in which it is played and indeed watched. The
players will hammer the hell out of each other, but the swift and instant
punishment of any backchat towards the referee is the one rugby thing that
football folk often lament the lack of in their sport. The now legendary put-down from top referee Nigel Owens, reminding a mouthy player that “this is not
soccer” perfectly illustrated this striking difference.
I love the fact that you can go to watch a rugby game
without being herded around like cattle by police and mix happily with
opposition fans. The passion of the rivalry between fans is a major selling
point of football and I sincerely hope the game never becomes so sanitised that
this disappears, but sometimes you really just want a quiet afternoon out to
watch a decent game. This is often the difference for me now: I go to football
for the experience of being a football fan, whereas I go to rugby to watch the
game.
So what else has football got on rugby other than its
elitism? A big claim is that it’s boring. I would completely refute that. Both sports
are capable of producing desperately dull stalemates (though draws in rugby of
course are a lot less common) or high scoring end-to-end rollercoaster rides. Football
at the highest level is a game of incredible subtlety and finesse at times, but
the speed, invention, handling skills and interplay of the best rugby sides can
be equally spellbinding.
Football fans who also like the noisy little brother, Rugby
League, are even worse in this regard. Personally I don’t like League much at
all. I find it devoid of thought and tactics, often making for quite a dull
spectacle. And I will never understand the claim of League fans that it’s a
much harder game, when they have to stop after each (one- or two-on-one)
tackle, compared to Union where you see umpteen bodies flying into a ruck,
risking life and limb.
Many of the misconceptions I feel are deeply ingrained and
hark back to the amateur era, when rugby was a slower and arguably less
exciting prospect. The game is now so vastly changed from even 20 years ago as
to be almost unrecognisable. You have to hope the encroaching commercialism won’t
turn rugby into the bloated, offensively cash-rich, self-important megalith
that elite football has become in recent times. But the changes on the field
are enormously welcome. The game is no longer a mud-wallowing battle slugged
out between overweight barroom oafs, but a high-octane contest of strength and
skill between frighteningly powerful, professional athletes.
Both games have served me well in life. Many of my oldest
and most durable friendships are forged in football, while almost my entire
social life during my three years living in Italy revolved around a wonderful
group of disparate oddballs brought together by a shared love of rugby. Both
sports have their good and bad points, but I just wish the more passionate fans
of both could just live and let live. The often ignorant stereotyping, snobbishness
towards the other side and comparisons are pointless for the most part and neither
party comes out of them very well. You don’t have to like the other sport, but there’s
no need to criticise those who do. After
all, at least it's not bloody tennis.
