The problem with rugby union

Rugby union has always attracted a certain type, the ‘play hard, party hard’ sort. I remember a former teammate – a prop, perhaps not surprisingly – who could drink a pint of his urine in under ten seconds.

An England prop, Colin Smart, once downed a bottle of after shave after a Five Nations match and spent the evening having his stomach pumped in a Paris hospital. That was in the 1980s, the same decade when England’s Dean Richards and Scotland’s John Jeffrey took the Calcutta Cup for a tour of Edinburgh pubs after a match. As one of them later quipped – probably before he was presented with the repair bill – that the cup now resembled the Calcutta Plate.

This was an era when rugby players could write off drunken idiocy as ‘high jinks’; the same harsh judgement that applied to footballers didn’t apply to them. Perhaps it was a class thing, the old cliché about rugby being a game for thugs played by gentleman and vice versa for football.