Kate Hudson, Julia Bradbury, Rachel Riley and the Feeling

From Rev’d Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

I fell into a conversation earlier this week about the rugby with a chap I met at a thing. He seemed rather well informed. “Did you play?”, I asked. “Yes”, he said, “a bit. Actually, I was Captain of England”.

It may not surprise you, then, to hear that even at my athletic peak I was rarely seen on the rugby pitch. Excused contact sport at school, lest I damage my fragile harpsichord-playing fingers, it was many years later before I got it, 2003, living in a monastery in Yorkshire, and I bunked off Evensong to watch the Rugby World Cup final with a visiting Australian. His wrenching sobs when Jonny Wilkinson kicked that last drop-goal can make me smile even now.

Other aspects of the game had their fascination too, but let’s fast forward to 2011 when I arrived in Finedon, my beloved parish. We’re not far from Northampton, home of the mighty Saints, and lots of my parishioners are season ticket holders. So I started watching rugby and enjoying it more and more; but five years on, I must confess, I still have practically no idea about what’s going on.

I’m getting better. Light is beginning to shine upon the mysteries of the game; but I wonder if that is absolutely necessary to enjoy rugby and get something out of it? I’m not sure I could tell the difference between a ruck and a maul, but does that mean I’ve no business to be there? Not at all.

Sometimes rugby strikes me as a mirror image of the church, in which people are organised in peculiar ways, taking three steps forwards and two back, and group hugs are sometime difficult to distinguish from a good kicking. And I also wonder, often, how many of our season ticket holders are completely au fait with the rules of the game.

But most people don’t come because they’ve grasped the rules of the game: they come because they sense we have something worth coming for, something which speaks to them in the depth of their souls, and may lead them out onto a whole new field of play.