Battlefield

I recently found myself perched on the edge of my office chair, watching a rugby game with my tongue lodged between my teeth, a frown knitting my brows, witness to a spectacle that felt less like a modern sporting event and more like a live-action reenactment of the Battle of Maldon. You may well ask yourself why I would do such a thing, and the only answer I can offer you, dear reader, is that research often takes a person to some distinctly strange places. I am, admittedly, a total novice when it comes to the laws of rugby. I spent most of the first half waiting for a whistle that never blew, but I did learn that you don’t need to understand the finer points of the scrum to be struck by the staggering scale of the participants. They are vast, ambulatory mountains who seem to have bypassed the standard human skeletal structure in favour of something reinforced by steel. Frankly, a lot of them seem to be built like fridges, fridges with little leather bonnets strapped under their chins. (I looked up the purpose of these bonnets and learned that they are not bonnets, they are scrum caps, and they keep the players from pulling each other’s ears off. Shudder.) Watching them hurtle toward one another at top speed and then collide with what I can only assume is the sickening crunch of bone and the distressing rattle of brains made me wince. Don’t they feel it? I certainly did.

There is a profound, almost startling stoicism to the way they hit each other. In an era where a stiff breeze can send a professional footballer into a series of theatrical rolls, cligning to his knee like he’s worried it’s going to come off, the average rugby player treats a bone-shaking impact more like a minor social inconvenience. These men threw themselves into the fray with a reckless abandon that suggests they have reached a private agreement with their own nervous systems to simply ignore pain. As the two opposing lines of giants crashed into each other, I couldn't help but think of the Anglo-Saxons. Here was the shield-wall in polyester jerseys: two war-bands meeting on a grassy field, bound by a code of conduct that is as rigid as it is violent.

Of course, the Anglo-Saxons didn't have referees to review their skirmishes, but the spirit remains remarkably similar. There is a strange, formal beauty to the violence of a sport like rugby: a set of careful, almost liturgical rules that govern exactly how one is allowed to upend one's neighbour. Although I do worry for their poor grey matter, sloshing around in their skulls like jelly in a jar every time they get hit. One thing I am not going to do, dear reader, is look up concussion statistics for professional rugby players - I’m just going to assume that it’s absurdly high. As best as I can tell, rugby is a game of territory and attrition, a literal struggle for every inch of the field, conducted with an intensity that made me wonder whether the winning side receives a kingdom rather than a trophy. Watching the ball, that peculiar, egg-shaped object, which seems to have a mind of its own, being pitched backward while the players charge forward, struck me as a peculiar defiance of logic. But maybe there is a strange wisdom in moving backwards, away from a goal? Maybe I’m missing something. No, no, not maybe. I definitely am. Oh well.

By the time of the final whistle blast, I was exhausted just from watching. I may still be foggy on what constitutes a knock-on or why the referee spent so much time peering into a scrum, that pile of tangled limbs, one that seemed deeply significant, but I left with a bemused respect for this modern-day version of battle. There is something comforting in the knowledge that, despite our increasingly digital lives, we - and yes, I suppose I am counting myself among that ‘we’ - still find joy in gathering to watch gargantuan players contest a patch of grass with the ferocity of those ancient kings from today’s episode. What I do know for sure is that the sidelines are for me. I don’t know how I would have faired in regular Anglo-Saxon life, but no matter what, I don’t belong on the battlefield.

Jennifer