Wilde's passion

This year New Zealand hosts the Rugby World Cup Tournament and hopes to cash and keep it for four years instead of Australia (Seen how the gets are going, I really have slim faith it will not happen).

I follow faithfully Rugby since two years, since my lovely lady brought me in Rome at the Flaminio stadium to watch the Six Nations Tournament match Italy - England.

Since then I'm totally nuts over this absurd game in which you see things  that, outside the game contest, would be immediately sanctioned as aggravated assault and first degree murder try.

To a non informed spectator, the dinamics of this game appear simply crazy. The ball zips on the field, passed behind instead of in front of the palyers. Each two meters, the ball carrier gets stopped by a mob of ten and more that simply smash him to pulp. When they are finished they leave him on the field and go seek the next victim.

The action is caothic and frenetic, but the referee stops it often for reasons he alone understands.Nobody protests, nobody as much as flinches, everybody carries on obediently.

Sometimes, for misterious reasons, 8 players form a tortoise war formation and go ruin their vertebrae against a similar formation of 8 opposing players. The ball rolls placidly on the field till someone collects it and the lynching can start all over.

Oscar Wilde told us that Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen and soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts. it is honestly hard to contradict Lord Wilde after seeing those bulldozers that commit acts against pubblic moral but dare not raise their eyes when they get caught by the referee and as soon they stand up from the bloody pulp soup that the melee is, pat their opponents backs and rendez vous them to the next scrum.

To add surrealism to this sport, the supporters are well on par. They are crazy, coloured, noisy and as spotless as the players.

If they suffer a try or a penalty due to a foul, they do not curse the referee's mother, but instead scream at their defense line. Those are the supporters that, when they feel that the other's team supporter are not doing a good job, support the opposite team instead (You think this is nuts? Didn't read much of what I wrote till now, did you?) and bring their children to the games and teach them that the opponent has to be fought on the field and respected always and everywhere.

At the end of a game there is someone that wins and somene that loses and that even if you score a draw, because inside yourself you know if you gave it all or held back something.

So you have post game interviews that every soccer player should watch over and over again, with coaches that curse their team ( that just won) and players that blame themselves for errors that ( seeing the absurdity above here) would be absolutley human.

New Zealand is far away and as such games are at impossible hours. That said I never got up that happy at 5 in the morn a Sunday as when I have a Rugby match to watch.

Yes... Sunday... 5 in the morning... You still do no get that this game is nuts, do you? :D