Rugby

Thursday

Hamish Macdonell

Children’s rugby can be saved by tackling the tackle

My son is only 12 yet he has already suffered a fractured skull and a concussion from playing rugby. After his second serious head injury last year, I told him he had to stop playing. That was hard, both for him and for me but I was adamant: I wasn’t going to let him risk another serious head injury, not at his age when his skull was still growing, his brain was still developing and we had no idea what the long-term effects of such injuries might be. But don’t, please, leap to the conclusion that this is another one of those articles bemoaning the dangers of rugby and calling

Wednesday

Professor Allyson Pollock

What schools don’t want you to know about rugby

Today, I have joined 70 doctors and academics in writing to the government calling for a ban on tackling in rugby matches, saying that injuries from this ‘high-impact collision sport’ can have lifelong consequences for children. I speak from both professional and personal experience. I remember as if it were yesterday, that autumn afternoon 11 years ago when my son’s school phoned me at work to tell me my child had been injured and hospitalised for a second time while playing rugby. I was sickened, upset, anxious and angry. School should be a safe place for children. The first time my son was injured the school had described it as ‘bad luck’ and promised

Thursday

Roger Alton

Cricket needs the West Indies

In the north of Antigua, just by the medical school, is a neat little cricket ground. It was a bit overgrown and bedraggled when I drove past the other day, but the small stand was still there, the changing rooms, the peeling scoreboard, and the sails of the kite-surfers dancing skittishly out on the Caribbean. It was all different in 2013 when a team of us from the UK played in a T20 match against a student side. The mid-afternoon start was breezy, the outfield rugged, but the ground was quite full of youngsters who had come to watch their friends give a pasting to a bunch of ageing overweight

Thursday

James Simpson-Daniel

Six Nations rugby

Back in 1882, exactly 100 years before I was born, the Four Nations rugby competition was formed. It was originally contested between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the fortunes of the different teams have varied through the years. Scotland and England shared early successes, but with the turn of the century came numerous changes. Four became five with the addition of the French — but the team didn’t have the same flair that we know well from the modern game. The French struggled, winning only once in their first five years — how my heart bleeds for them! War left the Five Nations on the sidelines, but when it

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary solves problems for Nicky Haslam, Nigel Slater, Professor Mary Beard and others

From Nicky Haslam Q. Being considered something of a guru on the subject of things common, can you advise me how to finesse the host or hostess who asks, challengingly, ‘I suppose you think my twinkling decorations/strings of cards/mulled wine/sushi/antler headband/children are terribly common?’ A wan smile won’t suffice. A. Say, ‘Yes I do. You’re so clever to be in the vanguard. Common is the new chic.’ From Nigel Slater Q. With each passing year (I am nearly 60, for heaven’s sake), I am finding it increasingly difficult to lie convincingly. This is a particular problem when unwrapping presents. The grateful words flow from my lips like warm jam from

Roger Alton

From the dismal to the delightful: the year in sport

So long, then, to another thrilling year of sport in which the full range of human possibility — from the dismal frailties of the recidivists who run world football to the brazen brilliance of Japan’s rugby players — made for an intoxicating mix. It began and ended with two epic highs. Back in January, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson made the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite, the most difficult route in rock climbing, taking 19 days in all. A truly awesome achievement. Most of us could barely get off the ground; Yosemite is 3,000 ft high. Then, almost at year’s end, another high: the only people who

Thursday

Roger Alton

Joubert’s the man to sort out Syria

Not since Walter Palmer, a cudddly Minnesota dentist, put down his drill and vanished off the face of the earth having made sure that Cecil the Lion took a crossbow bolt for the team, has there been a disappearance quite like it. I refer of course to Craig Joubert, the hapless Durban-born referee last seen leaving scorch marks in the Twickenham turf as he sprinted for safety after mistakenly (as it turns out) awarding the Australians a penalty in the last minute of the Rugby World Cup quarter-final against Scotland. Now Joubert has been chucked under the bus by World Rugby, the governing body, who agree that he shouldn’t have

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Thanks to the rugby the Scots have a real grievance at last

The Scots do not know what to do. For once, they have a justified grievance. In recent years, this once-proud nation has been bawling and belly-aching and girning over fictitious complaints to such an extent that Wodehouse’s crack about the ray of sunshine and the Scotsman with a grievance was out of date. It seemed as if all Scotsmen had a grievance at all times. Tam o’ Shanter’s beldame nursed her wrath to keep it warm. But poor Kate could be forgiven, knowing that her blethering, blustering, drunken blellum of a husband would be getting fou with Souter Johnny. The Scottish Nationalists have neither the justification nor the fun. Now,

Thursday

Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s history of violence

Oh dear. With Boris Johnson needing to mount a political comeback pretty soon in order to have any hope of stopping George Osborne’s bid to be the next Conservative leader, the Mayor of London could do with some good PR. So unfortunately an incident that occurred on his trip to Japan is unlikely to prove helpful. Johnson was filmed knocking over a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy during a ‘friendly game’ of rugby. With the boy, who is called Toki Sekiguchi, saying that he only felt a little pain,  Mr S suspects he may have got off lightly given Boris Johnson’s history of violence. 2. Last year during a charity football match, Johnson took down a

Roger Alton

I know who’s going to win the Rugby World Cup. I think

England did have some clear winners in their otherwise beached Rugby World Cup campaign in the unlikely form of Lawrence Dallaglio, Martin Johnson and Jack Whitehall, principals in the dazzling Samsung Rugby School TV ads. Superbly funny and brilliantly filmed, the ads take a chipper Whitehall through the finer points of rugby with, among others, Jason Robinson and a bulky, greying but still mighty scary Jason Leonard. You won’t see many things more fabulous than former England star Maggie Alphonsi chucking Whitehall about 20 yards backwards when he tries to tackle her. And Johnners, who knew? Such comic timing. What are we going to do without them? It’s a pity

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 24 September 2015

Available for parties Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said that leaving his party to join the Liberal Democrats would be like ‘leaving the Beatles to join a Bananarama tribute band’. Is there such a thing? Bananaruma is a Leicester-based band led by the head of arts at a local secondary school. They advertise an hour-long show, for which they bring their own professional PA system with full lighting show. So far they have had one booking, at the Stamford Arms in Groby on 25 July. Tickets cost £20, including a three-course meal, with a bottle of bubbly thrown in for tables of six who booked before 1 July. Sporting chances

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

The left hate to admit it, but rugby is no longer a pastime for the privileged

Why do lefties hate rugby union so much? Not all of them, of course. There are one or two who enjoy the sport, but the majority loathe it. Tomorrow marks the start of the rugby World Cup, which is being hosted by England. You can be sure there will be plenty of moaning about the supposedly ‘elite’ sport. In 2013, Ian Stewart, a Labour party member and blogger, wrote in an article that he was partial to rugby, an admission he conceded many of his comrades would find ‘as outrageous as professing a liking for bullfighting’. People, perhaps, like David Bowden, associate director of the Institute of Ideas, who has

Roger Alton

Clashes of the titans

A thumping physical confrontation testing mind, muscle and sinew to the ultimate degree, and from which there could only be one winner. No, not the upcoming Rugby World Cup but the breathtaking confrontation between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in the US Open final. Rain delays meant that for British audiences it didn’t start till the small hours, and only we dedicated insomniacs could catch it. A pity, because it was one of the most bruising and thrilling of their 42 battles, stretching back over eight years. It even had a garnish of audience bad behaviour —what else do you expect from the Yanks? — which Novak acknowledged with his

Thursday

Roger Alton

The right track

Sebastian Coe’s new job as head of world athletics will be a heck of a lot easier thanks to the outstanding World Championships that just finished in Beijing. He has a chance to push athletics back to the forefront of world sport — after all, what is more thrilling than one human being trying to outrun another? The star was Usain Bolt, but even that unassuming giant of a man cannot go on for ever. Athletics needs characters, champions that people can identify with, preferably in the blue–riband events. And Beijing showed there are outstanding athletes waiting to step forward. Julius Yego took gold in the javelin with a throw

Thursday

Roger Alton

Australia’s comeback kids

I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give up? In the past few days, they have pulled one out of the bag against the Springboks in the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when they looked buried; trailing 20—17 with time up, they turned down a penalty kick and went for the win with an 82nd-minute try. Their Davis Cup tennis boys came from 2—0 down to beat Kazakhstan, with Lleyton Hewitt hauling his weary muscles through the motions once more. Afterwards Hewitt said, ‘I love the back-against-the-wall situation. This is what dreams are made of.’ Now they face Britain,

Thursday

Eric Anderson

A rebellion among Rugby schoolboys proved perfect training for its ringleader in putting down a Jamaican slave-rising in later life

The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided education of a rapidly improving quality for nothing or next to nothing’, seemed to herald, as the headmaster of Winchester cautioned, the end of fee-paying. Two decades later Roy Hattersley warned the Headmasters’ Conference to have ‘no doubts about our serious intention to reduce and eventually to abolish private education in this country’.Yet David Turner is able to conclude in this well-researched, impeccably fair and refreshingly undogmatic history, that this is their golden age. He takes the unfashionable line that they are now vital contributors to the country’s economic, political

Thursday

Roger Alton

In praise of Ben Moon: the man who took rock-climbing to new heights

For anyone who knows or cares about rock climbing — a minority sport if ever there was one, albeit pretty extreme — the turn of the year was heaven. Newspapers, magazines and TV bulletins were full of one specific, highly photogenic though very technical event: the first free ascent of a climb on Yosemite’s mighty El Capitan face called Dawn Wall. It was 3,000 ft and 32 pitches long, and rated the hardest pure rock climb in the world. The two climbers, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, spent 19 days on the face, but years preparing and training for it. This is, for the time being, the ultimate climb, very

Thursday

Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks’s diary: My task for 2015 – get a job

Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I remember giving the room boy who had brought my case to the bandicoot-infested bedroom in Colombo a few rupees, but he wasn’t interested. He just wanted to sit on the bed and talk — about London, England, cricket, life. Three decades and a civil war later, people are aware of money, there is bottled water, and a pot of tea doesn’t take half an hour to arrive. One thing that seems unchanged is the optimism of the people. The new president, Mr Sirisena, has promised an end to the corruption

Jeremy Clarke

My grandson’s getting into the rugby: ‘Which one’s West Ham?’

My grandson and I had a lovely hour-long swim at the leisure centre. We had the learner pool to ourselves for the first half an hour, during which we threw and dived for our little weighted plastic sharks. Then a stocky man, tattooed like a Maori, and his little boy entered the pool. The little boy, Conrad, was in the same primary-school class as Oscar, so they teamed up and went away with the fairies together. They played a game in which they took turns to stand rigidly to attention at the pool’s edge, then topple forward, still rigid, face-down into the water. Result: eye-watering belly flops that weren’t as

Thursday

Roger Alton

We should be grateful for Andy Murray (and Kim Sears)

It wasn’t that long ago when the most exciting event in any British tennis fan’s life was whether Jeremy Bates would make the second week of Wimbledon. If he did, cue weekend raptures and much use of a British bulldog holding a Maxply and encased in the Union Jack (copyright all cartoonists). And that was pretty much that. Then came Tim Henman, and the excitement was almost too much. Here was a player who made six, yes six, Grand Slam semi-finals. Years of excitement, almost unbearable tension, and eventual disappointment ensued. Now we have the era of Andy Murray, six Grand Slam finals (two victories), and 16 Grand Slam semis,