We do it for the battle knell.
We do it because when there’s six minutes to go and your team is four points down and there’s a ruck ten metres out from their line and you’re charging into it with your team-mates beside you and you hit and you hear their forwards go ‘oooooooooof’ as you hit, and you expose the ball and the last man in picks it up and drives over for the try, the feeling we all feel as we go through all that must be something like what it was like to be on your horse beside Running Bear, charging down into the valley to give General Custers boys one last workover.
And the best thing is we don’t have any dead bodies left over at the end. And even if that sort of thing doesn’t happen every game, it happens often enough, or lesser versions of it, that you are prepared to put up with really ghastly things like training in the mud.
People that have never played rugby, might well read this, I imagine, and think ‘what vainglorious macho claptrap’. But my guess is that all those who have played it seriously will understand exactly what I mean.
The point is, (and I knew I’d get there sooner or later) that in this day and age of safety first, of seatbelts, and cycle helmets, low cholesterol butter, ’ Warning Smoking is a Health Hazard’ - when so much is sanitised and safe - the opportunity to feel that sort of battle knell thrill comes less and less often.
But it is there in Rugby, long may it remain.
It may not be 100% safe, and in the era of the New Age sensitive male, it may not be 100% idealogically pure, but who cares? The thrill of the battle knell is there.
