Rugby League towns and the 2019 general election

There's a(nother) general election looming. It promises to be an utter shitshow and grand exercise in flinging excrement around.

Conservative think tank Onward have identified 'rugby league towns' as a key battleground should their favoured party secure a majority. Apparently, we're old, thick and voted to leave the EU.

So far, so patronising. We do not recognise this stereotype. The sport has a long history of inclusivity which the biggest party at Westminster simply does not. Should they attempt to divide these communities as they have so many others, we have a simple message for them:

Fuck off.

Monaghanned

See Pearced, albeit more oral

Pearced

To be so drunk that you wet yourself and try it on with canines.

See also; Monaghanned

Choose rugby union

Choose rugby union
Choose hypocrisy
Choose collaborating with the Nazis to have two other professional sports outlawed
Choose institutionalised racism
Choose a stupid game where you can't see the ball half the time
Choose drinking piss out of a sock and shoving 10p coins down your foreskin on a Saturday night
Choose to sing highly inappropriate negro worksongs about death being preferable to working in cotton fields simply because a black chap once scored a try for England
Choose performing some ho-ho-hilarious, banterriffic action along with it
Choose leaning on a despotic regime to have a bloke thrown in an Emirati jail for weeks without charge because he organised people to play a different sport
Choose class war
Choose subterfuge
Choose lies
Choose rugby union

I chose not to choose rugby union
I chose something else

Let it lie?

You may have noticed a rugby tournament is going on at the moment. Not our rugby, obviously. Theirs.

Now, it is obviously a terrible game and the vast majority of people who have ever read anything on here will far prefer the 13-man code to the 15-a-side variant. Personally, I'm avoiding it and got very agitated when flicking over to watch The Chase only to be confronted by a mass of South African bodies in a heap. How dare they interfere with The Chase?

Avoiding it isn't enough though. Instead, I and many like me prefer to pour scorn on the game. Often this is interpreted as the fabled Rugby League chip on the shoulder - maybe it is - and my ranting about the iniquities inflicted on other sports by rugby union's powers that be were all a long time ago, best forgotten and that I should get over the fact that some people like union and others League.

Well no, I'm not having that. It's not simply a case of differing tastes in sporting entertainment.

Time heals, goes the maxim. This is true, so long as both parties to an issue recognise what it was in the first place, the wronged have had their grievances addressed and the guilty at least acknowledged their part. South Africa's Truth & Reconciliation Commission may provide something of a template there.

The 'it was ages ago, let's all forget about it' is a common trope, however, of the sort of people that engendered 1895's great split in the first place. Witness the not unreasonable recent claims of the Jamaican government for reparations for slavery. The British government: "It was ages ago, let's all move on". History is fine to remember when it's popular or populist, but not when there are difficult truths which need acknowledging.

Moreover, the things we're being urged to forget and move on from are still happening. The UAE, for instance. The despots may change, but cosying up to them seems a lasting trait. Then there's Morocco, and lower-level mischief like scheduling a World Cup match in the same city and on the same day as another sport's showcase event of the year (you thought we'd not spotted that, didn't you?) or misappropriating the word 'rugby'. The hypocrisy stinks. It always did and it always does.

So no, it's not just 'he likes union, you like League, just get on with it'. It's far more iniquitous than that. It tears at fibres of society, cuts deeper than any flesh wound. I hate the game - obviously, it's boring - but what it represents is something far greater, darker, more sinister. That's why I'm vociferous, why it goes far beyond mere dislike of a different sport.

And I will not forget about it whether it was ages ago or last week.

On National Poetry Day and the Burgesses

It's National Poetry Day today, so in the time-honoured* fashion....


If Steve McNamara did truly
Want the World Cup then he, cruelly,
Shouldn't have overlooked Luke,
And to rule out a fluke,
He probably should have picked Julie.



* - not even slightly

On Peter Gentle leaving Hull FC

Do not go Gentle into that good night,

Old players burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the black and white.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their players broke no defence they

Do not go Gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced on a green sward,

Rage, rage against the dying of the black and white.

Wild men caught offside and ran in fright,

And learn, too late, they ballsed up on its way,

Do not go Gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like O'Meley and Richard Gay,   

Rage, rage against the dying of the black and white.

And you, dear head coach, forlorn on the sideline,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go Gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the black and white.