Rugby - what's the attraction?

[AZOffaly]

Just because it's a different game doesn't mean there is any less skill involved!!

Pushing and lying on the ground in a heap are not skills.

Whereas diving to the ground and rolling about as if you've been shot is considered a skill in soccer.

Association football has a far greater "culture of respect" than rugby.

And boom goes the dynamite.

[Sidney]

Respect for who? And who shows this respect?

Is there a lack of respect in rugby do you think? Again, towards who and from who?

Are eye gouging, stamping, biting, punching, headbutting, kicking, raking, elbowing and holding a player upside down and violently forcing his head into the ground common incidents in association football?

I think that's what you call a better class of thuggery.

[Hardy]

AZ, they're not going to engage with what you are saying.

I know that. I should know better I suppose.

You and me both

Ah don't stop now, fellas. I'm enjoying this hugely.

The route from "you have to be a toff" to "you can't come from inner city Dublin" to play for Ireland, along with the stopping points along the way, has been one of the most scenic logical tours I've taken around this board in a good while.

[take_yer_points]

Respect for who? And who shows this respect?

Is there a lack of respect in rugby do you think? Again, towards who and from who?

Are eye gouging, stamping, biting, punching, headbutting, kicking, raking, elbowing and holding a player upside down and violently forcing his head into the ground common incidents in association football?

I think that's what you call a better class of thuggery.

Ah, so you're using respect between both sets of players. Do you think "eye gouging, stamping, biting, punching, headbutting, kicking, raking, elbowing and holding a player upside down and violently forcing his head into the ground common incidents" don't happen in soccer? Ok, maybe the last one would be a tough example to show you in soccer but in it's place I give you Roy Keane.

What about respect towards officials?
What about respect from officials?
What about respect from fans?

[laoislad]

I once got a rash off a girl who followed Leinster Rugby.

[Sidney]

Respect for who? And who shows this respect?

Is there a lack of respect in rugby do you think? Again, towards who and from who?

Are eye gouging, stamping, biting, punching, headbutting, kicking, raking, elbowing and holding a player upside down and violently forcing his head into the ground common incidents in association football?

I think that's what you call a better class of thuggery.

Ah, so you're using respect between both sets of players. Do you think "eye gouging, stamping, biting, punching, headbutting, kicking, raking, elbowing and holding a player upside down and violently forcing his head into the ground common incidents" don't happen in soccer? Ok, maybe the last one would be a tough example to show you in soccer but in it's place I give you Roy Keane.

What about respect towards officials?
What about respect from officials?
What about respect from fans?

Which sport has a greater culture of serious and deliberate foul play?

[easytiger95]

there is a lot more cross pollination in sports around dublin these days - I hear Blackrock have a Gaelic  team these days as do a lot of the other rugby oriented schools - lot of good work on the ground from evangelist coaches. goes both ways as well, rugby teams are sprouting up in areas you wouldn't associate it with - for instance there have been coaching courses in areas like Fettercairn, as well as the LSC games being played in Tallaght stadium.

All to the good, AFAIC, the skills of the games are complementary and give players that bit extra in both(or the three!) codes - GAA rugby crossovers include John Hayes, Philip Danaher, David Beggy, David Hickey, Keith Wood, Mick Galway, Johnny Pilkington, Tomas O'Leary - and i think that lad Darren Sweetnam for Cork has been offered a place at Munster??

BTW, I think a player like Tony Ward would have been offended at being described as a toff - read some of his background in Alan English's book about Munster beating the All Blacks and he had a tough enough time of it - but not as tough as someone like Brendan Foley, another Ireland international.

[Sidney]

Classic piece from Humpho here:

Drive the buggers underground

Can't live with them. Can't shoot them. Mainly can't live with them. Can't afford to live with them. Haven't the bloodlines to live with them. Haven't the patience to live with them. Haven't the language skills to live with them. Haven't the desire even. Rugby people have always been college scarves and jutting jaws and silly songs I don't know the words of.

C-A-N-N-O-T live with them.

Now, a quick word before we start. Every time I write one of my patented, bitter and twisted chip-on-the-shoulder social-cripple pieces about the rugby world, the same smug epistles hit the desk all the way from D4.

They tell me (surprise!) that I have a chip on my shoulder about rugby.

"You're like a little boy with his nose pressed up against the window – come on in and have a pinty, for croying out loud."

I know. I have a chip. Actually I like having a chip on my shoulder about rugby. It is my inalienable right. I will not have a pinty.

Thonks. I am happy as I am.

I don't like rugby and I work for The Irish Times. It's like being a day trader and working for Pravda.

Listen to this: I have tried. I have reached out to rugby. I have gone forth in a spirit of understanding and fellowship and attempted to break down the cultural barriers between rugby and myself.

For my troubles, I've had nothing but heartache and sorrow.

Let me tell you something I've never told anyone before. Once – and I am disappearing into a witness protection programme after the next full stop – I played half a season of under-19 rugby with Suttonians.

Next time, I'd choose to do my time in jail, as my co-accused did.

Despite being a Gaelic player, and therefore able to do some things most rugby people cannot do – ie, catch a ball, kick a ball, run, etc – I was press-ganged into being a second-row forward. This is like choosing to do a heavy lifting job in your spare time.

For a few months, I spent my time with my shoulder pushing the buttocks of other men and my arm reached up between their legs. Even after a lifetime in the Christian Brothers, I wasn't prepared for that.

My ears were always red and sore and my shoulders ached. Sometimes, to take my mind off all that, the opposing hooker would kindly give me a kick in the face.

That's how rugby people run the game and it's how they run the world.

I thrived only in lineouts, those strange masonic rituals wherein everybody uniformly mistimes their jump for some reason I couldn't initially understand. Clarification wasn't long in coming.

After two clean catches, the person opposing you in the lineout would just reach across and pull your hair. Beats gravity every time.

Hair-pulling wasn't a very manly thing to do, but neither was weeping: "Ref! Ref! He's pulling my hair." I learned to mistime my jump like everyone else.

For a while, I tried to bring several different coloured pairs of shorts to games in the hope that having the same coloured shorts as the opposition might save my testicles from being squeezed and twisted as we lay in panting heaps somewhere on top of the ball.

The biting and hair-pulling I could take. Ball-handling was a no-no – even from teams we played regularly. (Note: In the GAA testicles don't actually exist – except as a metaphor for guts. If a sliotar should whicker a tout vitesse into your testicular area, causing the 29 other players on the field to wince and you to double over squealing like a stuck pig, somebody will run on to the field, pour some water down your neck, slap your buttock and say: "C'mon son you'll be grand in a minute." This at a time when you need a general anaesthetic.)

Anyway it all finished between Suttonians and me one weekend when we played in a triangular tournament alongside the giants of the southside, Lansdowne and Blackrock.

Now most of the team I played with were actually quite good at rugby and had won the Harry Gale Cup (no less) the previous year. This didn't save us from being treated like bumpkins on our venture across the river.

It started with our kits, which were the same colours as Eason's bags, and it went on all afternoon, no matter who we played.

As luck would have it, on this Saturday morning we endured the sniggering of the Lansdowne chaps and then beat them on the back pitch – in Lansdowne. This rightly fouled up the tournament.

The plan had been that we would lose to Lansdowne in the morning and then obligingly lose to Blackrock in the afternoon, ensuring a Lansdowne versus Blackrock play-off in Stradbrook the next day. Now, we yoiks would be going to Stradbrook.

The story has a sad end. We met at noon the next day under the clock at Clerys.

Maybe two of us weren't hungover. The others were pukey or giggly or both.

The thought of perhaps beating Blackrock hadn't even kept them in for Saturday night.

Why would it? They didn't hate Blackrock the way normal people do. They admired them. So we got pushed around Stradbrook for the afternoon and were beaten by a margin in the region of 60 points.

In the secondrow it felt as if we were going to have our scrawny necks snapped like royal pheasants.

For this, I had given up on a Junior B football match with St Vincents? I was deeply ashamed. I never went back. Never told anybody except my spiritual advisor. He quit instantly.

I gave rugby one more chance. Arriving in UCD and not knowing a soul, I put my name down when some jut-jawed, scarf-wearing, acne-free, pinty-type, lady-killing bastard announced that there was to be a class rugby league "to break the old ice, loike".

I too would be an icebreaker! I filled out one of the little forms he gave out. I waited. The teams sheets went up on the lecture theatre wall. I skipped across like a happy little puppy. No T J Humphries listed. My eyes welled up. My heart welled down.

I sought out the jut-jawed, scarf-wearing, acne-free, gout-ridden, Dublin 4, bestiality-is-best-boys, pinty-type, lady-killing bastard and explained my position. Shome mishtake, shurley, I said.

His brow furrowed. "What's your name?" he asked. "Tom Humphries," I replied frankly. "Where'd you go to school?" he asked. "Fairview," I said. "Where's that?" he asked. (I should point out that his geographical ignorance was no worse than mine. I got off the bus at RTÉ on my first day in UCD.) "Where the park is," I said helpfully. The park was in the news regularly then for gay-bashing incidents. "Well that's it," he said breezily.

"The teams have all the 'Rock guys together, the 'Nure guys with the Belvo' boys, 'Zaga in with Clongowes, Mero with 'Knock and and so on. Roight? So sorry, but you lose out Humpho."

"Oh," I said. I'd scarcely understood a word, but realised I had come within an ace of being saddled with a dumb rugger nickname all my life.

I went forth and never sinned against my class or my people again.

There were other sad days in rugby's spiteful jihad against me.

I lied about rugby to get into sports journalism, pretended I loved it, but soon got found out. I misidentified Brendan Foley as Moss Keane at a charity game of old farts and didn't work again for three months.

I described King's Hospital, who haven't once won a small in-bred provincial competition like the Leinster Senior Cup, as the "whipping boys" of the event and the switchboards were jammed for a week by people who wanted to twist my testicles and pull my hair.

I was invited to a pre-match dinner for a fixture I was covering involving Lansdowne, but when I turned up and they realised I wasn't quite what they'd been expecting, I was banished to a broom cupboard and given a hot beef roll.

I know these stories may be very upsetting for some sensitive readers, and perhaps there should have been an appropriate warning at the top of the piece, but I can only hope that any distress caused will serve as a warning to others.

There has been enough hurt already. Stay away from rugby. It is a plague, sent to us – like the potato famine – to undermine the fabric of our society.

The depression-era justification for allowing rugby to prosper (ie, it's the only way most of these oafs will ever get jobs) is no longer sustainable.

The sport should be banned and driven underground.

[johnneycool]

Respect for who? And who shows this respect?

Is there a lack of respect in rugby do you think? Again, towards who and from who?

Are eye gouging, stamping, biting, punching, headbutting, kicking, raking, elbowing and holding a player upside down and violently forcing his head into the ground common incidents in association football?

I think that's what you call a better class of thuggery.

Ah here now, theres no need to bring Suarez into this, he's a reformed character.

[Sidney]

there is a lot more cross pollination in sports around dublin these days - I hear Blackrock have a Gaelic  team these days as do a lot of the other rugby oriented schools - lot of good work on the ground from evangelist coaches. goes both ways as well, rugby teams are sprouting up in areas you wouldn't associate it with - for instance there have been coaching courses in areas like Fettercairn, as well as the LSC games being played in Tallaght stadium.

All to the good, AFAIC, the skills of the games are complementary and give players that bit extra in both(or the three!) codes - GAA rugby crossovers include John Hayes, Philip Danaher, David Beggy, David Hickey, Keith Wood, Mick Galway, Johnny Pilkington, Tomas O'Leary - and i think that lad Darren Sweetnam for Cork has been offered a place at Munster??

BTW, I think a player like Tony Ward would have been offended at being described as a toff - read some of his background in Alan English's book about Munster beating the All Blacks and he had a tough enough time of it - but not as tough as someone like Brendan Foley, another Ireland international.

While Gaelic football is not as skilful a game as hurling or association football, it is still a far superior game to rugby skill-wise and the vast majority of Gaelic football players at any kind of decent club standard could likely play rugby to a reasonably high level if they took up the game in their late teens or early 20s. The same cannot be said of the inverse.

[seafoid]

OK, donnahca Ryan from Nenagh, Peter Clohessy, the Currow Lads. Do I have to keep going?

D'arcy is from Wexford and the fullback and the brother are from Louth. Wasn't Popplewell from Gorey as well ?
If they left it to the toffs they'd never win anything. Look what those lads did to the banks.

D'Arcy: Blackrock College Holy Ghost Fathers
Kearney: Clongowes Wood College Jesuit Fathers
Popplewell: Newtown School Waterford Religious Society of Friends*

*Not a reference to the US comedy series, for any female rugby fans reading.

Good man Sidney

I would have 2 reservations about rugby

-concussion
and
-the strange body shape of the forwards

If fellas who went to Clongowes are able to beat NZ eventually I wouldn't mind but there is a freak aspect and a more consistently dangerous aspect to rugby
that you don't get in manly sports such as hurling.

[Dinny Breen]

Tom Humphries, a DPP file is awaiting him.

[Hardy]

there is a lot more cross pollination in sports around dublin these days - I hear Blackrock have a Gaelic  team these days as do a lot of the other rugby oriented schools - lot of good work on the ground from evangelist coaches. goes both ways as well, rugby teams are sprouting up in areas you wouldn't associate it with - for instance there have been coaching courses in areas like Fettercairn, as well as the LSC games being played in Tallaght stadium.

All to the good, AFAIC, the skills of the games are complementary and give players that bit extra in both(or the three!) codes - GAA rugby crossovers include John Hayes, Philip Danaher, David Beggy, David Hickey, Keith Wood, Mick Galway, Johnny Pilkington, Tomas O'Leary - and i think that lad Darren Sweetnam for Cork has been offered a place at Munster??

BTW, I think a player like Tony Ward would have been offended at being described as a toff - read some of his background in Alan English's book about Munster beating the All Blacks and he had a tough enough time of it - but not as tough as someone like Brendan Foley, another Ireland international.

While Gaelic football is not as skilful a game as hurling or association football, it is still a far superior game to rugby skill-wise and the vast majority of Gaelic football players at any kind of decent club standard could likely play rugby to a reasonably high level if they took up the game in their late teens or early 20s. The same cannot be said of the inverse.

Is this a good time to be opening another front?

[easytiger95]

there is a lot more cross pollination in sports around dublin these days - I hear Blackrock have a Gaelic  team these days as do a lot of the other rugby oriented schools - lot of good work on the ground from evangelist coaches. goes both ways as well, rugby teams are sprouting up in areas you wouldn't associate it with - for instance there have been coaching courses in areas like Fettercairn, as well as the LSC games being played in Tallaght stadium.

All to the good, AFAIC, the skills of the games are complementary and give players that bit extra in both(or the three!) codes - GAA rugby crossovers include John Hayes, Philip Danaher, David Beggy, David Hickey, Keith Wood, Mick Galway, Johnny Pilkington, Tomas O'Leary - and i think that lad Darren Sweetnam for Cork has been offered a place at Munster??

BTW, I think a player like Tony Ward would have been offended at being described as a toff - read some of his background in Alan English's book about Munster beating the All Blacks and he had a tough enough time of it - but not as tough as someone like Brendan Foley, another Ireland international.

While Gaelic football is not as skilful a game as hurling or association football, it is still a far superior game to rugby skill-wise and the vast majority of Gaelic football players at any kind of decent club standard could likely play rugby to a reasonably high level if they took up the game in their late teens or early 20s. The same cannot be said of the inverse.

Your first sentence is subjective (having played three of these games at reasonable level, I'd argue that you need to master more skills in Gaelic football, hurling and rugby then in soccer - hence soccer's appeal) and your second sentence is just plain wrong. You can say the inverse - I'm doing it now. Darcy said himself during the week he was a hurling man before he changed schools - you telling me an athlete with his physical gifts couldn't have made it as a Wexford corner forward?

[johnneycool]

there is a lot more cross pollination in sports around dublin these days - I hear Blackrock have a Gaelic  team these days as do a lot of the other rugby oriented schools - lot of good work on the ground from evangelist coaches. goes both ways as well, rugby teams are sprouting up in areas you wouldn't associate it with - for instance there have been coaching courses in areas like Fettercairn, as well as the LSC games being played in Tallaght stadium.

All to the good, AFAIC, the skills of the games are complementary and give players that bit extra in both(or the three!) codes - GAA rugby crossovers include John Hayes, Philip Danaher, David Beggy, David Hickey, Keith Wood, Mick Galway, Johnny Pilkington, Tomas O'Leary - and i think that lad Darren Sweetnam for Cork has been offered a place at Munster??

BTW, I think a player like Tony Ward would have been offended at being described as a toff - read some of his background in Alan English's book about Munster beating the All Blacks and he had a tough enough time of it - but not as tough as someone like Brendan Foley, another Ireland international.

While Gaelic football is not as skilful a game as hurling or association football, it is still a far superior game to rugby skill-wise and the vast majority of Gaelic football players at any kind of decent club standard could likely play rugby to a reasonably high level if they took up the game in their late teens or early 20s. The same cannot be said of the inverse.

Your first sentence is subjective (having played three of these games at reasonable level, I'd argue that you need to master more skills in Gaelic football, hurling and rugby then in soccer - hence soccer's appeal) and your second sentence is just plain wrong. You can say the inverse - I'm doing it now. Darcy said himself during the week he was a hurling man before he changed schools - you telling me an athlete with his physical gifts couldn't have made it as a Wexford corner forward?

Not a chance in hell of Darcy playing corner forward for Wexford...






He couldn't see past that beard once the face guard came down