Extract

Ever since a student named William Webb Ellis decided to pick up a soccer ball and take it for a little for a bit of a run, I think it’s fair to say that the public at large have looked on his kind with a certain amount of mild disapproval. Making up your own rules was no way to win friends at Rugby, a ye olde school filled with neatly pressed slacks, crisp white shirts and rather natty striped blue blazers. It was ill-bred, it was unmannerly. It wasn’t not the done thing. It was just not cricket (or, rather, soccer).

And it’s hard to say that the Rugby School Game’s reputation has improved overmuch, in the 200 or so years ever since. 

And it’s its proletarian love child, rugby league, that’s tended to attract the most critics. The most raised eyebrows and the most rolling; the most turned-up noses and faint shakes of the head. 

While rugby union is still a game for people with a hyphenated surname, ugly old school tie and promising career at the firm, the stereotype goes that League is a game for gorillas. Though only if those if that gorilla has several tattoos, or sports a beer gut or big, hairy mo.

Many would have it that League is a game for the Waynos and the Dwaynos; the Kevs and the Trevs. The blokey blokes who live for a punt and a root, or maybe a light spot of sexual harassment during a night on the turps. 

Why would people say such things?

Well, after compiling this book of quotes, I have to say that I can think of one possible answer.

It might all just be a tiny bit true …