More to women’s rugby than fake blood scandals

HAVE you been following the Women’s Rugby World Cup? It seems a simple enough enquiry, doesn’t it, that I punted at half-a-dozen or more of my laddish, sports-mad, acquaintances in the past week.

To a man, the response has been the same. A pause, a slight nervousness, a calculation about whether they will be trapped by their answer, as if I had posed that famous lawyer’s trick question: “have you stopped beating your wife?”

Of course, being liberal, modern, thinkers, some of them with a dash of the metrosexual, they know what they should say... “all part of the community of sport... surprisingly high standards of play... been impressed how quick they are to the loose ball... seem to have mastered the second phase.”