Wemoved on to Brian’s broadcasting career. What are the best complaints?  

"I’ve had 3 verbal warnings and 1 written warning”  You could hear the faint mumbling ofpeople trying to work out if they could guess which incidents had got Brianinto trouble.  I got tworight!   First there was theincident when Brian suggested that a player and the referee were bothMasons.  Second, he got told offfor suggesting that ‘French Resistance’ was an oxymoron.  The joke didn’t go down too well.  Next was a comment during the SixNations where the French player Rémy Martin [great name] was getting a bit of ashoeing for lying on the wrong side. Eddie Butler [yawn] asked Brian what he thought of it.  Brian’s response was that if Martinhadn’t been in the wrong place, he wouldn’t be getting boots on his back [soundsfair to m], finishing with  “. ..  and he’s French so I don’tcare.”   But apparently somepeople did.  

Wethen heard about the disciplinary hearing which followed the ‘gay slap’comment.  You might remember theincident: a Scottish scrum-half, Andrew Henderson, was trying to square up toDanny Grewcock [was he mad? Grewcock could have flattened him!].  Anyway, the Scotsman’s attempt was abit pathetic and so Brian described it as a ‘gay slap’.  At the hearing, when asked what he hadto say, Brian said “I think you’ll find that the OED’s definition of the word‘gay’ is light-hearted and that’s what I meant and if you and others want tomisinterpret the true meaning of the English language then that says more aboutyou than it does about me.  And youcan’t prove otherwise.”  Apparentlythere were 10 complaints to the BBC. I honestly do wonder how many of the complainants were actuallyhomosexuals or lesbians?   Anyway, as a ‘penance’ Brian was dispatched by the Rugby Special team todo a report on the King’s Cross Steelers, the only openly homosexual/lesbianrugby union club in the UK.  “Theywere great”, he said.  “They saidthat they particularly liked the game against the fire brigade as the firemencame down in their uniforms.”  Hesaid that some had been a bit offended by the comment; others couldn’t careless and were fed up with people being ‘offended’ on their behalf; and somethought it was funny. 

Oneaudience member said that he was enjoying listening to RefLink at the Stoopbecause he was not au fait with all the laws [I’m not sure the Refs aresometimes] and it made the game easier to understand. 

“You need to find a way to make people understand it to makethem enjoy it.  It’s a complicatedgame; but then so is cricket. Scrummaging is a core skill; rucking is a coreskill.  And I never saw any seriousinjuries as a result of rucking. Rucking produced quick ball because you couldmove people. As soon as a ruck is formed you have to push and people are notjust standing around.  In the southernhemisphere there are no rucks.  Thedriving maul is a good thing because it keeps the majority of forwards near thebreakdown.  The driving maul issupposed to be boring and not appreciated.  England were supposed to be boring because they mauled.  They won the RWC and therefore theAussies wanted to remove the law. Mauling was available to all the other teams so why weren’t they doingit if it was so effective?”  Brian’sview is that if people understand the game then it will be more enjoyable for them.  The way forward is not to dumb it downin order to attract new people because what will happen is that the people who used to like it the way it was will go,and the new people you’ve attracted won’t stay around that long anyway and thenyou’ll have no-one watching.  Youcan’t have rugby union without scrums and mauls and rucks!  “If you want to go and play a gamethat’s like rugby league, go and watch the better version, which is rugbyleague. It’s simpler than rugby union.” Yeah, O’Neill, leave our complicated game alone!

So,are they trying to make RU too ‘safe’?  

“The RFU fears the real law and is scared of beingsued.  They are erring on the sideof caution and things have got ridiculous.  It’s all about ‘whose fault is that?’  It’s hard because you don’t want to seepeople being injured.”  Brianpointed out that by allowing people to pull down the driving maul, andtherefore effectively removing it from the game, a safety feature had beenremoved and it was a problem.  Hereiterated that rucking was not dangerous and he had not seen serious injuriescaused by it.  He conceded,however, that it didn’t look good. I suppose it doesn’t but it would have stopped those blasted Cardiffplayers from lying in the way during that first HC game.

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