15-a-side solidarity

Wales have won the Grand Slam and I have grown to love rugby. Over the past weeks I have been completely captivated by the Six Nations and I don’t quite know how this has happened, because I used to hate it. I look back to those bitterly cold afternoons up on the hills above the Gordano Valley near Bristol where the weather always seemed to hover somewhere between horizontal sleet and hail.

I’d loved playing football for my primary school and for the local electricity board team, Portishead Sparks. It seemed unjust that I had been sent to a rugby school at 11. I was small, skinny and increasingly short-sighted. Rugby provided the proof in brutal sporting form of the disastrous decision my parents had made to send me to a school 11 miles away from home, where I knew no one and everyone was better at rugby than me.