Players please
Simon Barnes
THE Twickenham crowd clearly agree with Jean-Luc Godard. 'La morale, c'est le travel- ling,' he said; the moral of the movie is the tracking shots. In sport, the moral is always and only the action. Everything else is bunk.
So I went to Twickenham last weekend with a watching brief: whether the England rugby team got booed. I thought there was a fair chance of this happening; after all, they had threatened strike action — to deprive paying spectators of what they had paid for.
The players could be, and in certain quar- ters were, treated with contempt: overpaid prima donnas demanding still more money to do what anyone in his right mind would gladly pay to do. Ex-players were disin- terred from the place where old rugby play- ers go to say that they would have crawled over broken glass to play for England.
And it is a fact that people like making the same noise all together: quiz show oohs and aahs and so forth. The threatened and nar- rowly averted players' strike seemed highly likely to provoke a factitious response — a Pavlovian chorus of boos.
But, on a vile day, the players were cheered to the echo; and they will no doubt be cheered again as they take the field at Twickenham against South Africa on Satur- day. It was worth cheering: at last, at least, rugby supporters had some action to revel in.
The entire world of rugby union has been in a state of argument and chaos ever since the change to professionalism. Only histori- ans in love with the details of internecine strife can recall things clearly; scarcely a week goes by without a palace revolution, an invasion, a counter-insurgency, a betray- al, an abdication, an execution.
A year or so back, England were to be thrown out of the Five 'Nations tournament and replaced by Italy. This was a rerun of the same row that happened a couple of years earlier. The English clubs withdrew from European competition one year, and then went back. There have been endless rows over TV rights. The Rugby Football Union secretary resigned. Rob Andrew, a man of vision, set up a plan for the future and then resigned himself when his plan met nothing but fudging and stalling. There have been plenty more; I offer just the edited highlights.
Oh, it's been a merry time all right, and no sign of a settled outlook for years to come. And so to the boo-less Twickenham. Inter- estingly, the Times this week published three letters in favour of the players, reflecting a great shift in sympathy towards them, and away from the RFU. It seems that the public are fed up with men in suits trying to score points against each other; what they want is men in shorts trying to tear each other apart.
There has been a huge surge of feeling in favour of the players, against the establish- ment — and that among rugby supporters, the most militantly pro-establishment collec- tion of sports fans the country can muster.
In short, the Rugby Football Union has gone a fair way down the line towards alien- ating a group of people who pride them- selves on their uncritical loyalty and unthinldng support of the status quo. This has been one of the more remarkable achievements in sporting history. It is no wonder that the public cheer the players: the punters are every bit as fed up with their bosses. And at least the players are out there doing something. Vive le travelling!
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