Rugby is a game for thugs played by gentlemen and football is a game for gentlemen played by thugs. I don't think that the old saying is true anymore. After watching the first few games of the World Cup, I have more a less lost interest in rugby. The days of Barry John and the great Wales team are long and the game is now based around rucks and big forward play, not the attractive game of before.
It's a sad thing to see, but even more sad is the decline of the average player. He's gone from the polite and well mannered to rude and abusive, and that's why the statement above is no longer true. Rugby is now played by thugs. Fights are more common and the referee is no longer shown much respect. The one thing rugby had going for it before was how well the players behaved compared to football. That's no longer true. James Haskell told the referee "fuck off" against Argentina.
The actual game as I mentioned before is based around forward play. Francois Pienaar said that "the forwards win matches, the backs decide by how much". The first part is very true, the second less so. The forwards more or less do everything.
The final big problem with rugby these days is the rules. About 6 penalties were given to England when they played Argentina for no apparent reason. What has gone wrong? Football has managed to keep things simple. Rugby is becoming harder to understand than cricket, especially the commentators never bother to explain anything. Really confusing.
Rugby is becoming american football. Constant pauses, and only the occasional try. Quite frankly, people may as well watch american football. I find the latter quite boring (even though I do watch the Superbowl every year and follow it from a distance), and so that's why I decided to give up on rugby. It's no longer the fluent attacking game that was played in the 70s and 80s and the players have gone backwards on the evolutionary scale and the rules are harder to understand than Emmanuel Adebayor speaking English.
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