Rugby, Asian laws, foreign pages. What’s going on?

I’LL say one thing for these international hiatuses — they do at least allow such rubber-necking free-loaders as your correspondent to slope off to Paris for a weekend of World Cup rugby and heavy drinking, for which I give my thanks.

We football fans have had to put up with weeks of nauseating moralising from the media about how civilised rugger is compared to football and I could see the point on Saturday night as the entente cordiale flowed thick and fast even after the final whistle: all that mutual backslapping, bonhomie and fair play certainly stirred my emotional response.

“What a sickening bunch of girls,” I concluded.