Miles Kington: The Lions, the pitch and the bored droves

'The day I left school I said I would never play rugby again. The resolution was ridiculously easy to keep'

There may have been at least a million people in the UK at the weekend who were heartbroken because Ian Woosnam lost a very good chance of winning the Open golf championship when it turned out that he had one too many clubs in his bag, and was therefore penalised two shots.

A million ?

Well, let's say two million people.

Which means that there must also have been about fifty million people in the United Kingdom at the weekend who thought that any game in which you can be penalised for having too many clubs in your bag is probably not worth playing in the first place.

Actually, as I get older and wiser, I sometimes catch myself beginning to wonder if there are any games worth watching or playing any more; that is, if there are any games which have not been strangled by laws, corrupted by money and drugs or flattened by the need to win. The Olympics became a farce many years ago. Cricket has become grim. Football is global big business carried on by other means. And as for rugby...

Well, the other day I was actually lured down to the local pub of a Saturday morning to watch the deciding rugby Test between the Lions and Australia, and I have to say that, although it was ostensibly a cheerful occasion, because of the jocund company, and because the mineral water and bacon baps flowed like milk and honey, I still found it a desperately gloomy experience. The game was stopped every half a minute because of some petty infringement that often baffled even the commentators, the rugby never flowed as it used to, and the game was decided on penalties, not on tries.

You would think that any game of rugby in which penalties were more important than tries would dissatisfy anyone, but nobody seemed to object. And I think I now understand that this is because modern rugby is not really a game any more. Gradually, so gradually that its fans haven't noticed, it has changed into an industrial process with vaguely ecological overtones, full of recycling the ball, and first- and second-phase play, and cleaning up behind the line-out. Any day now the scrum will be renamed the task force.

Apart from being an industrial process, of course, rugby is also an incessant series of small-court claims where you hope to pressure the opposition into committing an offence and reap a resultant penalty kick. Somewhere along the line most of the joy seems to have gone out of the game. I shall not be very sorry if I never see another rugby match like that.

Mark you, I now realise that I saw the signs of this coming a long time ago. When I was at school, one of our teachers was a rugby international. From time to time he used to vanish to play for Scotland. Before he departed for internationals he would be radiant and godlike, fine and glowing, like a hero about to engage in quests. After the match he would return, battered and tattered, in a foul mood, apt to cane people unjustly, and he would remain like this for days. If this is the moral effect of sport at the top level, I used to think, then we can do without it. The day I left school I said to myself that I would never play rugby again and the resolution was ridiculously easy to keep.

I couldn't play now, anyway. I would not have the faintest idea what the rules were. Even the players seem to have difficulty with them. When men built like tanks move around a rugby pitch saying to themselves "I mustn't come in from the wrong side... I mustn't go over the top... I mustn't play the ball till I have stood up... I must release the ball even though there are half a dozen men lying on top of me and stopping me doing just that..."and then getting it wrong all the time, then it is no place for instinctive grown-ups to be, only for musclebound pre-programmed robots.

I used to know the author of a book on the laws of rugby called Why The Whistle Went, the old Punch humorist HF Ellis. Before he died, I asked him if he could rewrite it now. Not a chance, he said. No one sane could tell any more why any whistle went on the rugby field.

A reader writes: All right then, Mr Sourpuss Kington – do you think that there are any sane games still left in the world today?

Miles Kington writes: Yes, I do. In a forthcoming article I shall be looking at the merits of games such as boules, French cricket and pig-in-the-middle.