A Wee Bit Of Fisticuffs

Don’t get me started. Rugby’s World Cup may be upon us (Wilkinson’s injured already, of course). But I’d rather pick my nose than watch a game. And when I see the rugby-centricity of our media, especially compared to some of what is written about football, I despair even more.

It was best summed up on Carling Cup final weekend last March. Column YARDS on the brawl which ‘disfigured’ the Chelsea / Arsenal match where, give or take, no-one was injured; although Wayne Bridge’s claim that “at least Chelsea got the three points” suggested a whack on the head. Nothing whatsoever on the six minutes of Six Nations rugby I chanced upon the previous afternoon, where an Italian player deliberately stamped on a Scottish opponent’s head; an act of violence condemned by the television commentators solely because it cost Italy a simple kick at goal…

I hate rugby, so don’t expect pure objectivity in what follows. At my school, it was weird if you didn’t relish sticking your head alongside someone’s bottom on a regular basis…and the rugby games were worse (tee-hee). Equally weird was practising goal-kicking instead (instead of kicking prop-forwards’ heads presumably); especially as it was a rugby skill and about the only way England scored in those days (late 70s/early 80s).

But the Carling Cup example is just one of how football violence is hyped in inverse proportion to how rugby’s is all but airbrushed from history. The Millennium Stadium spat resembled nothing more than a badly choreographed dance routine from a particularly camp version of Westside Story. Yet when Scottish rugby commentator used to refer to “a wee bit o’ nonsense” and his English equivalent Nigel Starmer-Smith used the less euphemistic but still quaint “fisticuffs” they were describing fights and assaults. Try such stuff in a town centre on a Friday night and you’re nicked.

Ireland’s Brian O’Driscoll is the latest sufferer, having his face rearranged in a World Cup warm-up…wait for it…friendly. And it is instructive to compare another O’Driscoll incident with one of the few vaguely similar football ones.

In 1994, Glasgow Rangers footballer Duncan Ferguson head-butted Raith Rovers’ John McStay during an ordinary league game at Ibrox. In 2005, O’Driscoll was deliberately slammed head-first into the ground at the earliest opportunity in the opening New Zealand/British Isles Test match by Tama Umaga and Keven Mealam; an appalling targeting of the opposition’s best player and, worse, could genuinely have paralysed O’Driscoll. Ferguson was rightly imprisoned, if you believe the law of the land should deal with on-field incidents at all. Umaga (New Zealand’s captain!) and Mealam were considered to have done nothing wrong, either inside or outside the game, and were in the team for the Second Test a week later.

Remember Eric Cantona’s one-man ‘kick racism out of football’ campaign at Selhurst Park in 1994, first item on BBC news that night? Remember Trevor Brennan’s assault on an Ulster rugby fan in January? Thought not.

The genuine punch-up, which seems to be ‘all part of the game’ of rugby (see the Test match above), hasn’t happened in football since Francis Lee versus Norman Hunter in 1975, as they were leaving the field AFTER being sent-off. And you have to be of a certain age, i.e. mine, to remember that one.

When it comes to matches themselves, however, a dizzying role-reversal occurs. Rugby has an extortionate press for a sport watched by approximately not very many people at all, with Premiership crowds averaging little more than League One on a sunny Saturday when Nottingham Forest are at home. Even the day after England’s Rugby World Cup triumph in 2003, SKY cameras at a London Irish Premiership game had to try several camera angles to avoid empty seats acting as a backdrop.

When you next wince at Premier League hype (which won’t be long) compare the coverage of some rugby Premiership games in front of 10,000 people and a dog with that of the eighty-eight words tucked away on page eighty-nine about the perennially tight League One promotion and relegation battles (I do, by the way, realise that these arguments apply even more to cricket; where County Championship crowds are as easily named as counted).

Regarding the games’ administrations, how could rugby not win? Well…mistakes have been made during rugby’s transition from shamateurism – I use the word advisedly – to professionalism. When football had these rows over a century ago, the amateur game broke away. This isn’t likely to happen soon in rugby but only because it already has, hence Rugby League. Club-versus-country rows are similar in both sports. While arguments about the Heineken European Cup echo football’s rows in the 1950s. Mind you, football’s rows threw xenophobic insularity into the mix. And at least rugby’s European Cup is still a cup. But it’s hard to judge whether Will Carling’s “fifty-seven old farts” line is undermined by Carling being an old fart himself or underpinned by “takes one to know one.”

And rugby has proven even more adept at organising overlong World Cups than cricket, taking longer to eliminate Portugal than cricket did to dismiss Bermuda… and England.

Rugby hooliganism is at least restricted to the pitch (I confuse the ‘gentlemans’ game played by thugs and thugs’ game played by gentlemen cliché, because it makes minimal sense either way). However, as crowd trouble needs an attitude AND a crowd, rugby has the advantage.

The young left-winger in me cited rugby favouritism as an ‘establishment’ thing. So does the middle-aged New Labourite you read before you. Football lost its establishment status with the advent of professionalism, decades before TV let alone satellite TV. Rugby hasn’t followed suit. Yet. But I’ve had my fill of ‘football’s shame’ coverage alongside kid-gloves treatment of rugby’s far worse behaviour.

If rugby were reported on as football is, it would long since have been outlawed, one notch above dog-fighting in sport’s pecking order. Meanwhile, football’s REAL ills remain unscathed. But we’ll come to Blatter, Bates, agents et al before long. Just you wait.

‘MotorMurph’ is written by Mark Murphy

Entry Filed under: MotorMurph Column

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