Moaning about the sports that other people like but which you don’t is as futile an activity as it is possible to indulge in, but sometimes it is done quite well and becomes a bit like a sport in its own right.

Jackart last Thursday:

… There is no set piece in League. There are no 7ft beanpoles, no whippet-like wingers or terriers wearing no 9. There are no human wrecking balls shaped like strategically shaved beasts of burden wearing 1,2 or 3. In short unless you’re average height, stocky and fast, there’s no place for you on a League team.

League consists of 13 flankers running into each other four times, falling over then fucking the floor, before the ball is booted down field. The mystery of the scrum, the skills of the line-out and the competition of the contact to recycle the ball are completely missing from the game. Rugby league is like Rugby Union tackling practice. True they share the shape of the ball, and the fact the ball is passed backwards but that’s it. ...

Jackart wrote about league versus union because Gordon Brown was recently asked about which he preferred, and, surprise surprise, dithered.

Saying they’re starting to look the same will piss acolytes of both codes off. And the key electoral battlegrounds of the Midlands will have their opinion of Gordon Brown as a pathetic ditherer who even thinks of sport in terms of electoral triangulation, but lacks Blair’s talent for hiding it, confirmed.

Gordon Brown is pathetic.

Indeed he is.  But I can’t say I mind him saying that the two rugbys (rugbies?) are getting more similar.  I reckon it’s somewhat true.  If league is thirteen flankers running into each other, you could say also that union is becoming more and more like fifteen second-row-forwards doing the same.  Have you seen the size of some of the union wing-three-quarters nowadays?  There’s a bloke called Banahan who is just huge.  And fast.  Time was when Jonah Lomu was, in the words of the overwhelmed and bewildered England captain Will Carling, a “freak”.  Now, every second union back is such a freak.  My friend Bruce the Real Photographer says they need to make union pitches bigger, to give room for the little guys to run round the big guys, instead of them just having to run into them time after time, league style.

Apart from rugby union, my other preferred sport is cricket.  Like rugby union, cricket still allows quite a variety of physical types, especially among the bowlers.  But the batters seem to be getting beefier and using bigger bats.  So, a bit like rugby union in that way.

I have for some time now been working on a huge and unwieldy essay about the state of cricket, which only Michael Jennings will read.  Cricket is on the up and up, basically because of all the Indian money now being poured into it.  Over the weekend, I heard Antoine Clarke (who speaks fluent French on account of having a French parent) saying that he likes to tell Americans that “There are more cricket fans in India than there are people in Europe”, which I swear he got from me and Michael J.

And whereas cricket will probably successfully avoid any schism between the very short version (Twenty20) and the very long version (five days tests), there has been a ferocious cricket schism in the USA, between the Asians and the West Indians.  But now a fat white bloke is trying to set up a Twenty20 league along the lines of the Indian Premier League, the idea being that Indians in their millions will watch that on their tellies, just like they watched the IPL earlier this year even when it was held in South Africa instead of India for security reasons.  If that works, then the USA schism may well end, which will be another huge boost for cricket.

Another is that Twenty20 seems to be reinvigorating West Indian cricket, with Trinidad & Tobago playing superbly in the recent Champions League (the world provincial team championship in other words), only losing to New South Wales in the final.  But for more about that, await my Big Essay, although as usual I promise nothing.