How I learned to love rugby

At my school they taught us how to hate rugby. It was a grammar school where rugby was seen as the socially mobile sport, our muddy road to becoming little toffs, as integral to the school’s aspirational culture as the Latin motto on our blazer badge.

It was, of course, football that filled our dreams, playtime and bedroom walls. But our school – and our terrifying Welsh sports master – believed football carried the stench of beery yobs on council estates. So we were made to play rugby and we learned to loathe it for a lifetime, not least because before every lesson we were obliged to get down and roll around in the mud. It did not make us gentlemen, but it did make us detest rugby. Every double games felt like the sporting equivalent of waterboarding. And from my vantage point of second row of the scrum, I hated everything about it: the emphasis on brute strength, the social pretensions, the way you never knew how that weird ball was going to bounce. So what changed for me at last year’s Rugby World Cup? Everything. There was so much to love about the rugby in Japan.

The host nation made the sport look like a running game best played with pace, flair and smart hands. England’s Owen Farrell had the serene charisma and sense of destiny of a 21st-century Bobby Moore. Farrell grinned his way through the New Zealand haka and then gloriously backed it up in England’s devastating semifinal win over the All Blacks. As a rugby outsider, I always assume that New Zealand are rugby’s equivalent of Brazil. So if you can beat them, you can beat anyone. England’s ultimate glory seemed inevitable right up until they broke against the big green wall of South Africa in the final. But the Springboks were the better team on the day and, led by Siya Kolisi, South Africa’s first black captain, their triumph felt like more than mere sport.

There were a lot of moments like that in Japan. Typhoon Hagibis struck in the middle of the tournament, resulting in flooding, landslides, 88 dead and more missing. That national disaster could have destroyed some other sporting tournament but rugby came together and every match after the typhoon passed began with a minute’s silence for the dead, homeless and injured. And when it was time to sing the national anthems, the teams were joined by some tiny local mascot, who had clearly spent unknown hours learning to sing their anthem. That is typical of Japanese omotenashi, best translated as “mindful hospitality”. And it was typical of this Rugby World Cup. There was ferocity, blood and broken bones from the opening match to the final. But there was also always respect, sportsmanship and human decency. And that is the beating heart of rugby.

The actual moment I fell in love with the sport was during the grim dogfight of the South Africa vs Wales semifinal, when Welsh wing George North was barrelling towards a giant South African who was waiting for the ball to drop from the sky when the Welshman suddenly sustained a hamstring injury. And in an act of unimaginable courage, North kept on running – hobbling on his one good leg, dragging his ravaged body towards his opponent – and he still made the tackle. And I thought to myself, “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone...”

Did football ever make me recall a line from Rudyard Kipling’s If with tears in my eyes? North’s one-legged tackle was a moment to make you marvel at the human spirit. And all I could do was love this sport. And I mean real love – that moment of sweet surrender when you give yourself and you know that the object of your desire now has you forever.

My rugby epiphany comes just as I find myself wandering away from the sports I have loved for a lifetime. Boxing and football are deep in my DNA, providing memories that stretch all the way back to early childhood, but, increasingly, the thrill is gone.

Boxing? This should have been the year that three undefeated heavyweight champions fought each other for untold millions and their place in boxing history. But Deontay Wilder, Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury contrived to avoid each other. Football? The Premier League has a level of competition unmatched in Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, France’s Ligue 1 or Italy’s Serie A. But football is not improved by mountains of money, players who kiss the club badge without understanding its value and the culture of feigning injury.

But I found my sporting mojo at the rugby in Japan. There was a violent finesse that I loved; “Ballet for big boys,” someone called it. There was nobility: applauding the other team, accepting the referee’s decision even when he was wrong, not booing the other team’s national anthem. The managers did not whine that they were robbed. The players didn’t pretend to be hurt. And – totally shocking to a football fan – the players did not have their names on the back of their shirts. After watching the Premier League, there is an old-school sportsmanship and lack of ego about elite rugby that I find irresistible. Nobody is faking it in rugby. And, although it is deeply unfashionable to mention it in our woke age, rugby is a sport that reveres the old manly virtues of courage, stoicism and grit. For all the Corinthian spirit, there is nothing remotely soft about it.

As an eleven-year-old grammar schoolboy, rugby was imposed on me and I could do nothing but despise it. But in Japan I had no choice but to love it. Rugby spoke to me at the 2019 World Cup in a way that football and boxing have not spoken to me for a long time. And rugby said, “Oh, look what you have been missing.”

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