We’re out of the Rugby World Cup, so let’s be bitter and devote ourselves to saying what a silly game it is anyway
IT turns out that none of our Home Nations are going to win the Rugby World Cup.
So let’s be bitter and twisted and devote ourselves to saying what a silly game rugby is anyway — stupidly complicated, decidedly dangerous and just downright silly.
And as we’re all but out of the Cricket World Cup, cricket can do one too.
This autumn promised so much.
By the time the clocks go back, in tomorrow’s early hours, it would have been nice to have the rugby trophy in the bag, with the cricket trophy looking likely to join it.
The days are getting shorter, the weather’s been terrible, and the world generally seems to be falling to pieces around us. So it would have been considerate of sport to cheer us up a bit.
But no. Thanks for nothing, rugby. Thanks for nothing, cricket.
To misquote Oscar Wilde, to be out of one world cup may be regarded as a misfortune, to be out of both looks like carelessness.
Let’s start with cricket. The whole format of the World Cup is stupid. The point of cup competitions is the jeopardy, the death-or-glory drama of a knockout competition.
Anyone can win on the day so anyone can progress to the final. The best team doesn’t necessarily come out on top in the end. It’s unfair but it’s beautiful.
Instead, the powers that be lose most of that by spending weeks on end having everyone play everyone else in a league format, with the top four sides then progressing to the semi-finals.
Much fairer, but less dramatic, and less beautiful.
How short-sighted to take out the uncertainty. Just so the big teams could avoid being knocked out, having had a bad day or two.
But that wasn’t enough for England. Oh no.
For us, a bad day or two turned into a bad day or three. Or four. Disappointing. Annoying. Embarrassing.
Turning our attention to rugby, here we’ve had another world cup format apparently designed to squeeze the life out of the game.
One half of the draw groaned with the weight of the big teams, the other was light as a feather.
And then there are those farcical eligibility rules — whereby your nationality seems to have little bearing on who you are allowed to play for.
Japan’s squad was packed with Pacific Islanders. At least, I suppose, Japan is an island in the Pacific, which is something. But the British Isles aren’t. And neither is Romania — with two Tongans in its colours.
And how long has the whole tournament dragged on for? Here, though, we must make allowances — the players need a week to recover between matches, as for most of them each game essentially amounts to a near-death experience.
My word, the game is brutal.
To stray for a moment into more seriously critical territory, it surely can’t go on like this.
I watched England’s semi-final with my mum who, well into her eighties, may well have never sat through a rugby match before. She was aghast, horrified, bewildered. “This,” she concluded, “isn’t normal”.
She had a point.
When the camera alighted on one of the front-row forwards — those bustling, waddling, fuming lumps of fat and muscle — she said: “He doesn’t look very well.”
I’m sure they’re as fit as butchers’ dogs, but there is a world of difference between being fit and being healthy. And I reckon these blokes are one and not the other.
Oh, and their ears — their poor tormented, disfigured ears.
At one point, a camera got far too close to a cauliflower ear. Surely there are rules on showing such ghastly sights before the watershed?
Appalled, my mum gasped, and simply asked: “What has happened?”
And then there are the laws of the game. I tried to explain to Mum why the referee was awarding penalties at some times but not others, when the scene on the pitch always looked the same — a dozen or more huge blokes in a big heap scrapping over a ball in there somewhere.
Another time, when my daughter was little, she caught sight of this nonsense on the telly and asked me what on earth was going on.
I told her they were fighting over the ball. She replied: “Daddy, they shouldn’t fight over it. They should just share it.”
Quite right. As I said, silly game.
Except I, for one, can’t help caring. As 10cc once sang, “I don’t like cricket . . . I love it.” True, that. I don’t like rugby . . . I love it.
Aargh, sport. Love it to death, even if it does my head in.
You’re in fine Nic, Rachel
NICOLE SCHERZINGER is, by all accounts, quite brilliant as Norma Desmond in the West End revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of Sunset Boulevard. Respect.
Friends of mine from Switzerland were in London so went to see it, and were disappointed to find an understudy in the star’s place.
It turns out that Rachel Tucker is scheduled to play the role of Norma every Monday of the run.
How tricky it must be performing to an audience who may have not read the small print and are disappointed not to see a Pussycat Doll.
But Rachel is ace, apparently. Respect.
Wising up to critics
WHEN I’m presenting my radio show, I have to field texts from listeners.
My producers select the useful ones.
The really nasty ones go into a special file of their own.
Generally I don’t get to see these – but occasionally someone forgets to click on something and there they are.
Yesterday morning one such message found its way to my eyeballs: “Do yourself a favour, Adrian. Go and finish your paper round. Go home to bed and take all the experts with you.”
Ooof! Hurtful!
But it did give me an idea for a TV show.
After each show, I could go to bed with the experts I’ve just been interviewing.
Not in that way, you understand.
I mean like sitting up in bed in pyjamas, a la Morecambe and Wise, discussing the pressing matters of the day.
HALLOWEEN. Only a thought, but can everyone calm the hell down about it?
The horror, for me, is in all the fervour.
I was just speaking to a student in Newcastle who’d popped to the Halloween shop, to find a bouncer on the door.
Seriously, chill.
Maniac manes
MULLETS, inexplicably, are back. I thought they had been consigned to the bin, where they belong. But no, teenage boys are mad for them.
I asked one lad what this was about. He said it was to do with rugby.
Who knows? But if players are sporting mullets, they are missing a trick. They’ll have lots of hair in the wrong places – at the front, top and down the back. And next to none on the sides.
Surely, in the interest of stopping their ears turning into cauliflower, it should be the other way round – have bushes of hair protecting each ear and shave the rest down to rasping stubble.
It’s the way forward for the forwards. You heard it here first.
WALKING past a hotel entrance in London this week, I was asked by a bloke for a selfie.
While he took it, I asked him what he was doing at the hotel.
He told me he was waiting for Joey Tempest, from the band Europe.
Random. But why not?
Later, I reflected that – a bit like being buried next to someone you don’t know for eternity – in that chap’s phone’s photos I’d forever be next to Joey Tempest of Europe.
Sweet. I’m honoured to keep him company.
Peace can be found
THIS isn’t the place to get into the ghastly Israel-Hamas situation.
But here are three quotes I’ve come across that, out of all the coverage I’ve been involved with, have made the biggest impression on me.
The first is bleakly concise. The second is bleakly insightful. The third gives me hope.
Yes, hope. And there’s not much of that in any of the coverage.
Quote number one. I know a family of observant Jews who live in Jerusalem. The mother of the house was raised in London, her dad was a rabbi at a major synagogue here. I asked her what she made of the situation. “It’s a s**t-show,” she said.
Quote number two. Nissim Levy, who spent years working for Israeli security service Shin Bet, once wrote as follows of the plight of some Palestinians: “The moment that you reach the conclusion that you have nothing to live for, you immediately find that you have something to die for.”
Quote number three. You hear many people on both sides say there is no hope of peaceful co-existence because the other side doesn’t want it.
You hear this so often, you think there is no one on either side who now believes in or wants a two-state solution.
Yossi Beilin, a former senior Israeli official and peace negotiator, thinks this is a myth.
He says while it won’t be easy, “I don’t believe it is so far from us. Because, by now, we know the solution. And we know that . . . the majorities on both sides would like to have peace and are ready to pay the price for it.”