Gentlemen and Hooligans

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.