Life behind the Rugby Curtain
Six Nations tournament (Shutterstock)
In a recent piece for Vice, Hydall Codeen had some pretty disobliging things to say about rugby union fans. In the article, he writes about going to the pub in the hope of catching the football — but there’s a nasty surprise waiting for him. “It’s only when you turn the corner for the final approach that it hits. That familiar sinking feeling. Oh no. It’s them.”
And by them he means rugby fans, who have commandeered the pub TV and who he describes rather brilliantly as “clad in boot-cut denim and faded variations of the same navy Fat Face fleece, clutching pints of Fruli and talking about Red Dwarf.”
And it’s not only the fans who come in for criticism, but the game itself. “There’s also something immediately demeaning,” writes Codeen, “about rugby, a sport that seems to derive its soul from the Medieval act of sending the hardest blokes in your village off to fight some big lads from across the bog.”
It is a superb, hilarious, piece, which was in turn a response to an earlier article by Justin Webb, the BBC presenter, entitled “How could anyone prefer football to rugby?” — the headline is fairly self-explanatory.
But Codeen’s piece misses something fundamental about the difference between football and rugby. The divide between the two sports is not as the piece suggests, societal, or class-based. Even though there are social and class differences between the support bases, this still is not what ultimately separates the two. The real difference is in fact geographical.
Rugby is essentially the sport of western Britain, and football is the game of the east. That’s why Codeen stared so uncomprehending at the rugby fans in his local. They were culturally out of place.
By which I mean this — imagine a line that starts in the midlands, and that bisects Leicester and Northampton, that goes past Coventry to Worcester and then on down to Gloucester, past Bath, Bristol and then onwards to Exeter.
That is the spine of British rugby — everything to the west of that line is rugby territory, and to the east, you become gradually more football. The only town with both a premiership rugby team and a football team is Leicester. But behind the Rugby Curtain, to the west, Premiership football has no representatives.
And if you head even further west, into Wales, you head deeper into pure rugby territory. If you cross the Celtic sea to Ireland, the rugby culture continues. Don’t be surprised if Ulster wins this season’s European cup. The country is thus divided by the Rugby Curtain.
Which brings you up against the further question of why — why should rugby be so dominant in the west of Britain, and football in the east?
My Welsh family — one of whom played for Abertillery back when they still had two British lions — has always maintained that it is the mining that made Welshmen so well suited to such a tough game. The Cornish, who also have a long history of mining, are also passionate rugby supporters. (The Cornish Pirates are currently third in rugby’s second tier.)
But that wouldn’t explain the western English or Irish predilection for the game and why so many in the east of England seem so dismissive of rugby. Perhaps, then, the only plausible explanation is simply that the easterners and westerners are different.
Does that seem so implausible? After all, there are plenty of casual assumptions about how “northerners” and “southerners” are different — is there any reason why “westerners” shouldn’t be too? This west of the country has a deep history of difference from the Saxon / Norman east and so it’s perfectly possible that the differences of the ancient west survive in the form of cultural preferences. It’s unmistakably the case in Wales. Why not western England too?
And so the Vice piece is correct, but not necessarily in the way it intends. It shows up a classic eastern view of what is essentially a western British cultural phenomenon. Sure, there are idiotic rugby fans, just as there are idiotic people everywhere — but I’m sure the writer would concede that no matter how idiotic rugby fans are, they don’t get drunk and smash the place to pieces. Football’s travelling fans have a mixed record on that front.
Tonight, I’m off to watch Bath play Clermont Auvergne in the European Cup. There’ll be thirteen thousand people there, all of them soaked in the rain, all of them singing and enthralled by the game. Easterners just wouldn’t understand. And what the hell is Fruli, anyway?
