Rugger Buggerers

I've always disliked Rugby - the game, obviously, not the town, which I've never visited - and I've disliked the people who played it even more. When I was at school I was forced to play the accursed game by sadistic PE teachers. I've never been any good at sports and I'm not a team player - participating in this so-called 'sport' reinforced both tendencies. The rules were never explained properly - if you questioned anything you were shouted at - and it seemed to me that most of us were there simply to be used as 'cannon fodder' for the favoured elite who were destined for the school team to beat the shit out of. It didn't help that a kid a few years ahead of me had been paralysed from the neck down playing this 'game' - a fact which didn't exactly increase my enthusiasm for rugby. Of course, if you weren't good at rugby, you didn't get on the school team, you weren't one of the 'chosen' and tended to get treated like a second class citizen by staff and fellow pupils alike.

All of my prejudices about rugby and rugby players was confirmed today by a sports report in The Guardian. According to this a St Helens player had been "found guilty of making unnecessary contact with an opponent's testicles for the second match in seven months"! What the fuck constitutes "unnecessary contact with an opponent's testicles" for God's sake? Accidentally brushing your knee against them (bearing in mid they're covered by a pair of shorts, athletic support and protective box, I'd imagine that "accidentally" touching somebody's nads would be a trifle difficult. However, the article went on to tell us that the player had already served a three match ban after squeezing another player's testicles during a match! Apparently it has now been ruled that any "attack on testicles now graded the most serious example of behaviour contrary to the spirit of the game." Well, no shit Sherlock! From what I gathered about the 'rules' of rugby, whilst it was a contact 'sport', that contact consisted of 'tackling' opponents, which involved physically pulling them down, not fondling their knackers. Perhaps there's some confusion over the sporting term 'tackling' and 'tackle' as a euphemism for male genitalia. Rugby players aren't very bright, after all.

Now, I might be doing rugby players an injustice here, as the incident described concerned Rugby League and what I had inflicted on me at school was the Union code. However, there's no denying that Union's scrum has always looked suspiciously like some ritualised form of mass buggery to me. Maybe that's why they have to grab each other's gonads in League - there's no opportunity for surreptitious anal sex in a line out. The fact is, though, that these testicle abuse incidents simply confirm my long held belief that all rugby players are all repressed homosexuals. Think about it - they're clearly insecure about their sexuality, as witnessed by their exaggeratedly 'masculine' behaviour; they enjoy predominantly all-male activities, which often involve 'bonding'; and they like handling an obviously testicle-shaped ball. Add to that the faux-buggery of the scrum and I rest my case. Rugger Buggerers the lot of 'em!