Rugby World Cup? What's that when it's at home?

Apparently there has been a "Rugby World Cup" taking place in Mordor over the past several months.  Long-time readers will recall that we don't have much of a regard for this so-called sport, so an interminable international competition featuring the cream of the world's peanut-huggers, including such powers as Georgia, Romania and The Grand Duchy of Fenwick was never going to get us jumping out of bed on an early Saturday morning.

At least the media aren't pretending that rugby will overtake the popularity of football as they were when England won the WC back in 2003.  Back then the international football team was in one of its usual doldrums.  The team were shite, the players were all obscenely over-payed, under performing prima-donnas, interested only in getting angry-looking tattoos and videoing themselves raping under-age girls.

Against this we had a well-behaved rugby union team fronted by the saintly figure of Johnny Wilkinson, winning a World Cup in a very gentlemanly way against the old antipodean enemy.  The papers were quick to pronounce the death of football as our winter sport in favour of this egg-chasing, thigh-grabbing curiosity.

Rugby - all a bit queer!

Of course, it never actually happened.  Those people who liked rugby continued to drink all game long, lose their trousers at the drop of a hat, and sing rude songs.  And those who preferred a sport with a correctly shaped ball continued to pay through the nose to attend, were manhandled by stewards and police, and lied to by their club officials.  Nothing changed.  No one actually changed sports.  Why would they?

And now, eight years later and our heroic amateur rugger-buggers have come full circle.  Now they are the team playing dismally, and getting knocked out early.  It's their manager being likened to a root vegetable.  It's the beefy rugger-boys who are lazy, over-payed and spend their days getting tattooed from head to toe.  They are the ones getting caught out by the press behaving, well, like a pissed-up touring rugby team!  They are the ones being criticised by "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" for adding to the ongoing social malaise, and bringing down house prices. 

And if these newly-minted rugger types are going to continue to ape their depraved footballing cousins and start leaking their lewd home-made sex videos onto the Internet can I put in an early vote for Mike Tindall to set-up the camcorder first...?