Enduring appeal of an oval-ball game

I used to like rugby, love it even. Now I'm not so sure - which is not a sudden apostasy but a creeping realisation over 10 long years of following the oval ball for the Independent that the old game, the one I liked and loved, had gone long before it turned professional.

This is a fact of our rugby life and in some senses worth celebration, the amateur/shamateur pastime called rugby union having finally entered the modern sporting world. But after the season we have just endured, enjoyed being too strong a word, it is also a cause for personal regret.

It wasn't that the old way was especially worth fighting for. If that had been the case, the Rugby Football Union would never have accepted a penny-piece in sponsorship. But, sentimentalist that I am, I recognise and appreciate that rugby had an essential purity that gave us our love for it.

However, for a rugby correspondent to repine for the old days is like a motoring correspondent hankering for a time when there were no cars. The trouble for me is that the game - the passing, catching and all too often kicking of the wretched ovoid - is no longer the thing. The simple playing of a game of rugby was already quite complicated enough.

The fact that rugby now has as much, perhaps more, to do with what happens in between keeps some of us in work, I suppose. But when rugby amounts to meetings rather than matches, or a stand-off between the RFU and its major clubs - which is how it has often seemed since the turn of the year - something is amiss.

Still, it was oddly appropriate that English rugby should have fought its internecine battles so publicly, since rugby has designedly and unprecedentedly put itself in the public domain. Having turned pro, it now has a product to sell, a ghastly marketing-driven imperative that threatens more change to its character than anything we have seen even during this turbulent past decade.

Rugby, it used to be truthfully said, was a players' game, meaning on the one hand that it could attract participants of most though never all shapes and sizes and on the other that the rules (sorry, laws) were formulated with playing and certainly not spectating in mind. If people wanted to come along, and if broadcasters were interested, that was a useful but definitely optional extra.

It can now be seen that those were the days/decades/century of rugby's innocence, and how innocent an awful lot of people were to imagine that rugby of all the team sports that emerged from Victorian England could be the one to withstand the commercial tide. Why, all of a sudden the RFU, which once stood in amateurism's last ditch, wants to screw the television companies for every penny it can get even at the risk of destroying the Five Nations' Championship.

There is a presumption in this that the broadcasters will continue to like what they see, even though much of the rugby - that played in this country, at any rate - which they put out is the purest dross, if that's not an oxymoron. Hence the encroachment of the dread word "entertainment", a concept that for much of the 1990s has been so alien to international law-makers that most of the many attempts to increase it actually led to a decrease.

We can assume this is changing, certainly if the evidence of the Super 12 series in the southern hemisphere (where else?) is anything to go by. But the thing about most-shapes-and-sizes is now defunct, and not merely at the top level.

It is enough to make you terminally cynical; hence these reflections. Here we are in what passes for the close-season on the threshold of club professionalism in England and we find all those nicely rounded individuals - all the way up to the England captain himself - who were so much more interesting because they had so much more to their lives than rugby, who even did real jobs, about to become rugby obsessives.

From this we can safely exempt the England captain, or rather the recent ex-England captain, whose censorious view of the amount of rugby that will be demanded of next season's professionals is influenced by the not necessarily complementary requirements of his own successful business. Will Carling, though, looks like being an exception.

Rugby played by full-time rugby automata may, probably will, reach new heights but it won't necessarily satisfy the nostalgics among us and anyway don't forget that 60-40 matches have been known to be vastly less satisfying than 6-3 ones. That said, I confess that the way the Heineken title in Wales was won suggested otherwise.

Now I may be, and often have been, accused of bias but then I have never made any secret of the location of my old allegiance and when Neath scored the seventh try against Pontypridd that gave them maximum bonus points and with them the championship they reached parts of me other teams have not reached. Put it this way: the sensation was more familiar in the bedroom than the press box.

So this is how rugby, even professional rugby, in its infinite variety can be played. Hang on a minute, I could get to like this, love it even. And that is my final word.