Twickers

So I went to my first rugby match on Saturday at Twickenham, which is, according to billboard's plastered all over the place and the adverts that run on the big screen incessantly during intervals, "the home of rugby". Here's a shot from my seat, to get the blood stirring for those interested in the pageantry of an international sporting match, the astonishing athletic prowess, the rampant homo-eroticism.

It was interesting going to a rugby match; I have only been to football matches here. In football, fans are corralled, like the animals they are, into separate sections, where they bray for each other's blood, hooting like baboons, perhaps hurling piles of excrement at each other. In rugby the crowd mixes together pleasantly, people applaud for the other team and don't call even them cunts! Alcohol is served (real ales, for goodness sake) and you can even buy it in bottles. I have seen pies at Easter Road, the Hibernian ground, turned into deadly weapons (they do have the density of granite), I can only imagine what Neds with glass bottles could do.

And yet, I couldn't really warm to the rugby. The game itself was boring, a rather pointless to-ing and fro-ing of territorial acquisition, much like a Balkan war. And there is something somehow false and oh so terribly middle class English about the whole thing. These people are watching what it is essentially a blood sport; why are they sitting down as if at a terribly straightened Sunday roast at their granny's in Maidenhead?