Like Johnson's team, pub grub is not big on fripperies, relying on a solid base and brown sauce to add the flourish
Loelia Ponsonby, one of the wives of the second Duke of Westminster ? you remember her ? once said, in a quote often misattributed to Margaret Thatcher: "Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life." As the Duchess is no longer with us, and Thatcher is not up to public pronouncements these days, we cannot know for sure what either of them would make of someone who finds himself in a pub at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning eating a Wetherspoon's breakfast, but we can guess.
First of all one would have to explain to their ladyships the concept of Wetherspoon's as a venue for the lower orders to enjoy affordable nourishment while watching televised sport, and then would come the harder task of acquainting them with the mind-set of those waking up early, or staying out all night, in order to enjoy such communal thrills of the rugby union World Cup as watching England "going through the phases" and "getting big numbers at the breakdown".
That was the kind of talk with which ITV's well-chosen panel of pundits, who have barely put a foot wrong in the tournament so far, stripped away our illusions before the match against Georgia on Sunday.
Francois Pienaar, who I see as the Gary Barlow/Simon Cowell figure among the experts, namely the one who tells it like it is, said before the match: "It shouldn't be a contest. England should blow them away." Sean Fitzpatrick pointed out that it was the Georgians' second game in five days, so even if they competed early on, they were likely to tire in the last 20 minutes. "England need to be committed at the breakdown, dominate in the forwards," he said. "They have to speed up the play," added Pienaar, "and by that I don't mean throw the ball around." Heaven forbid anything like that should happen.
Such analysis persuaded me not to get shaved and dressed ? which would make me stand out among the 8am drinkers anyway ? and make for the pub, although I do think, within the constraints of economy-priced catering, the Wetherspoon's breakfast is a much underrated product. Like the England team, it is not big on fripperies, relying on a solid egg, bacon and sausage base doing the groundwork for the sachets of brown sauce and tomato ketchup to add the flourish.
In fairness to the pundits and to England, rugby union has clearly become a more technical game since the days of Bill McLaren, from whom we never heard much talk of discipline at the breakdown, going through the phases, and so on ? especially if an established team were playing a so-called minor nation ? while canny coaching now enables the minnows to make life much more difficult for the big teams.
Pienaar acknowledged this after the match, reviving for his fellow pundit Lawrence Dallaglio the days when it was possible in a tournament like this to kick back, relax, canoodle, carouse, throw the odd dwarf around ? I am paraphrasing, he did not use those exact words ? and just begin to focus on a contest against a team like Georgia in the two or three days before the match.
"Now you have to be preparing for the next match straight after the last one," he said. "On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, England seem to have discounted Georgia." While Dallaglio, predictably, was forgiving, Pienaar and Fitzpatrick seemed prepared to risk what their colleague described as Martin Johnson's "20-yard stare".
Fitzpatrick was particularly critical, talking of "disgraceful discipline", and ascribing Georgia's try just before half?time to Johnson's poor decision to take off Tom Wood.
Johnson, meanwhile, whether because of the 20?yard stare, which is now his default position with interviewers, even after a 41?10 win, or because of the pressure he is under, seems to have trained his face to become craggier than ever. I still have confidence in him, but as someone not entirely au fait with all the technical stuff, that might be because I am associating him with the only other chap who was habitually described as craggy, the actor Jack Hawkins, who was convincing in any number of roles as a clear-thinking, tough-talking man of action.
Until the quarter?finals, the World Cup still seems something of a phoney war anyway, especially as England must now focus on Saturday's match against Romania, the weakest team in the group, with the additional handicap of having to avoid some of those amusing bonding evenings, which are traditional among rugby union players and which, as I recall, made them such stimulating, intellectual, company in the university refectory.
What would sharpen up the England boys would be a spell on Mantracker, my new favourite waste of time. This is a so-called reality show on Extreme Sports, in which an "elite tracker and skilled horseman" hunt down two fellows on foot, who reckon they can escape the Mantracker's clutches.
On the one I saw last week, the quarry was a wilderness guide and another chap described as an "extreme wrestler" (everything on Extreme Sports is extreme; somewhere in the schedules there will be Extreme Raffia, or Extreme Come Dine With Me where all the diners turn up heavily armed ? hey, there's an idea).
The wrestler said he "was not after money, just fame", in which case I should say Canadian television might not be the ideal place to be.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/sep/18/world-cup-rugby-2011-martin-johnson
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