OK sports fans, time for a quick pop quiz. Try this one for starters: which top-flight team did the treble last season, winning the league, the League Cup and European Cup. No? Can’t get it? The answer, of course, is Bath Rugby Club.
Ah yes – rugby, that strange sport that divides opinion in such a stark way that I just know that already you may be experiencing the strong urge to skip to the next article. But please do just stick around for a little longer. The point is that rugby inhabits a position in the British cultural landscape that is completely baffling.
Consider this: if there’s an England match at Twickenham, then you can expect a gate of over 80,000. But at the club level, for a Premiership rugby fixture up at Newcastle, which can often feature a decent crop of international players, in the 2023-24 season their average league attendance was 5,908. That’s what you’d expect for a bottom-of-the-table League Two football clash.
So what the hell is going on with rugby? Why does it have this strange distinction of being almost popular, of being both popular and unpopular at the same time? Is it doing something wrong? Did the game take a wrong turn at some point in the past, perhaps having taken poor advice from English county cricket, that other dumbfounding English sporting phenomenon?
Or perhaps rugby didn’t commit any sort of sin. Perhaps it was simply barged off the ball by the global football juggernaut, which seems to flatten pretty much everything else before it. And yes, there’s probably something in that.
Unless, that is, you happen to live in New Zealand. Now there’s a “rugby-first” nation. Or perhaps you were brought up in Wales during the 1950s, in which case you have the game as a kind of religion. My mother is one of them, having grown up in the small mining town of Abertillery, which in the old days had such a ferocious rugby team that it once beat Australia. Those were the bloody days.
But to return to the present and to our opening subject, Bath, where I live, is a rugby-obsessed town. Sure, Bath City FC (National League South) offers a great day out and it’s always a pleasure to visit the Twerton San Siro, though the hot dogs… just watch out for the hot dogs.
But the rugby club dominates everything here and on a matchday, the entire city booms with the sound of the rugby ground, which is slap bang in the centre of town. Which makes Bath unique. I can’t think of anywhere else in the UK that’s completely dominated by what is, I’ll admit, a minority sport.
But here’s the thing: it shows that the oval-ball game does have something to offer beyond a few weeks of autumn internationals each year. It proves that it is actually possible for a sport other than football to dominate, here in the UK.
So could football ever be knocked off its perch? Well, no. That’s never going to happen. It’s too huge, too deeply ingrained in our culture and, OK fine, it is brilliant to watch.
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But to put a slightly different question: did the sight of the boss of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, awarding you know who a special Fifa peace prize suggest that footy might just have gone a bit off the rails? That something might have been lost?
And here we come to rugby’s advantage. Because whatever it is that football has begun to lose, or perhaps has already lost, it hasn’t happened to rugby yet. The game remains trapped at an earlier, more innocent stage than football, which is perhaps to its commercial disadvantage, but it has acted as a kind of cultural preservative.
Which means that you can go to the Sainsbury’s on the Lower Bristol Road and see a Bath and England rugby player pushing a trolley around and doing his shopping, the same player who at the end of last season was on an open-top bus doing a victory parade through town. Rugby players are still essentially normal people.
Yes, the game has its downsides. The injuries can be horrible and the rules can sometimes get very fiddly. But the fact remains that English club rugby is a brilliant game stuffed full of international players, and for the most part it goes almost entirely ignored. If any readers can tell me why that is, please do write in and tell me.
Jay Elwes is the deputy editor of The New World
