Do I not like that . . .: The union of fat cats: In the first of a new series on pet hates, scriptwriter Stan Hey rails against the City slickers who have taken over Twickers

IT'S the advertising hoardings around the stadia that give the game away faster than you can say William Waldegrave. Life insurance companies, merchant banks, pensions providers - these days, a Five Nations rugby international seems to be as much a City finance exhibition as it is a sporting event. Indeed, if you're sniffing round for a ticket for next Saturday's England v Wales game at Twickenham, you're more likely to get one from your stockbroker than your street-corner tout.

With huge performance bonuses being dished out around the Square Mile, the striped-shirt and braces brigade are back, buying into rugby union again in a big way and keen to let us know, whether it's picnicking in the car park, lunching in their corporate boxes or swinging their sweet chariots in a low groan. Last weekend thousands of these grey-suited men filed on to Paris-bound planes to watch 'Will and the chaps' and, more importantly, to have themselves a 'damned good time'.

This is partly the reason I don't like rugby being annexed by these types, because they tend to turn the match itself into an item on a menu, somewhere between chucking around the profiteroles and chucking up the devils-on-horseback. And the fact that rugby union now allows itself to take second place to the troughing rituals that surround it, from blazered receptions to ambassadorial dinners, completes my retreat from the game.

In the old days, it was cricket that commanded the attention of the men of the City, but by the mid-Eighties, when the marketeers had transformed the moribund Varsity Match into a pinstriped Saturnalia, the rugby authorities sniffed the wind and went in pursuit of the new money and those eager to spend it.

Why rugby, the most crusty of old school ties, should have appealed to the desk-bound share-dealers and Forex-

merchants is anyone's guess. Perhaps it was, and still is, an escape into a lost world of real, manly sweat and bonding which no touch-screen provides? Perhaps it was the game's precise sense of class and old order which so conspicuously appealed in a supposedly classless society? Whatever, they flocked to the game in well- fed, claret-faced droves.

Now there are worse excesses of entertainment in sport, to be sure. Royal Ascot and Wimbledon manage to make me ill every summer - not so much the pollen count, as the Pollard count, when the Sunday Express editrix is hauled on to our screens to drivel about spots on dresses and flowers on hats. But at least the sports events themselves rise above their audience to provide drama worthy of the occasion.

What's worrying about rugby union's slavering embrace of Mammon is that the spectacle is beginning to reflect the slurred perceptions of those watching it. A game based on the principle of trying to impose coherence on the rampaging movements of 30 men, many of whom are obliged to shop at High and Mighty, has problems even before it starts. But when the realisation sets in that a high proportion of spectators are either so well-lunched or so easily pleased by the least incident you have a recipe for chaos.

If a few accurate place-kicks and the odd sprawling surge can send a modern rugby crowd into raptures of acclaim, what incentive is there for the players and authorities to provide otherwise? Professional boxing has already pulled off the trick of delivering far less than meets the eye to its all too freqently pumped-up punters, and how Formula One racing satisfies any kind of paying crowd remains a mystery. If merely 'being there' is made more relevant to fans than what is supposed to be taking place, rugby, indeed sport in general, becomes an empty spectacle. And who could like that?