Muddied Oafs by Richard Beard

Author:Richard Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

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Women who play rugby are in the honourable front rank of rugby subversives. I think it’s fair to suggest that rugby is a sport for women of a non-conformist cast of mind. As early as 1891, a group of feisty New Zealanders attempted an overseas tour, but they were deemed too independent for their own good and the tour was cancelled. Rugby and resistance were again linked in 1930 by the Sydney Women’s Rugby League, which staged a charity match in aid of the unemployed, or specifically the city’s women unemployed.

If rugby is sometimes thought to be manly, it’s a small step to think it ‘unwomanly’. Resistant to such an entrenched set of opposites, women’s rugby has become one of the fastest growing sports in the world. It’s this sense of resilience, of the game suiting so many disparate and determined people, which gives it much of its special quality.

Inspired by the living idea of the individualism of women’s rugby, I ended up at the Fountain Inn, near Downing College. Hayley Moore, captain of the Cambridge University Women’s Rugby Club, was already there. The pub was her idea.

Hayley used to play club hockey in Leicester, her home town, but found it boring. Always a fan of the Tigers, she arrived in Cambridge and decided to give rugby a go. The university has two women’s squads, and every year more students are taking up the game (though not from Pembroke). As for the playing standard, it’s rising all the time because increasing numbers of freshers have played before, in mini-rugby at their local home clubs. They love the game, Hayley loves the game, we all do.

Hayley has sparky brown eyes and an intelligent brow, and she’s studying Medicine. She still finds time for playing or training five days a week, usually at second row or hooker, and in the last three years she’s broken her nose, her fingers, and she’s been concussed. And obviously, she says, I’ve pulled muscles and twisted things.

‘I just strap up and get on with it.’

She has lovely teeth, and I ask her if by any chance she’s related to another hooker, Brian Moore. No, I didn’t really think so. Her hero is Martin Johnson. I ask if she’s ever embarrassed by being a rugby player, because at certain moments most of the rest of us are.

‘It’s not something I always volunteer immediately,’ she replies, but not because she has any doubts about the special qualities of the game. ‘I think it’s a way of life.’

Quite.

‘You really bond with your team-mates, you feel part of a team.’

Exactly.

‘And the socials are all a part of it.’

Hayley, a reflective person, has thought about this before, often. She’s attracted strongly to the notion of support in the game, of the need for each player to look after the others, and the team ethic generally. She explains all this with the passion of a rugby man from the valleys in about 1970, and it occurs to me that the future of the game is in good hands.

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