Last rites

Even before the last splurge of qualifying group games are played in rugby union’s World Cup, consensus agrees the tournament has already turned into a calamity for the four from the British Isles.

Even before the last splurge of qualifying group games are played in rugby union’s World Cup, consensus agrees the tournament has already turned into a calamity for the four from the British Isles. Even a quarter-final place will mean a grievous sudden-death public execution next weekend. We shall see. Mind you, say the silver-lining bright-siders, the rugby in France has at least been a jolly sight heartier for domestic spirits than that of England’s cricketers in South Africa’s Twenty20 ‘world cup’ — another game we ‘invented’, although in the latter’s case the pathfinders were zoot-suited fast-buck marketing men.

At both the rugby and cricket, the wailing post-mortems began piling in long before the last rites are actually administered on the field. In France, for optimistic diehards at least, there remains for one more week the faint glimmer that a Lazarus, whether dressed in red, white, blue or green, could yet rise from his bed and begin sprinting and jinking, dodging and weaving with joyfully victorious abandon right to the final on 20 October. For realists, however, the prosecution is already in savage spate. In England, the club treadmill is taking the brunt of the blame — too many attritional matches being played by dim, overmuscled iron-pumping hulks; also bang-to-rights, of course, is a conservatively dud national coach. In Wales, the problem is the incessant, incestuous squabbling by inbred clubs (plus, it goes without saying, a conservatively dud national coach). In Scotland, players may bust a gut, but the ‘fans’ seem oblivious; and Ireland has been saddled by the same team for so long it has just grown old and lame and grey together; naturally, they are lumbered, as well, by a conservatively dud national coach.