Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Class and sport

The sports columnist at Spiked, Duleep Allirajah, writes about rugby and class. He hates the "class snobbery against football fans" that he finds among rugby supporters. Or, as he puts it (rather unselfconsciously):

I’d rather be at home than in a gastropub surrounded by braying toffs in England rugby shirts. Everyone’s entitled to their fun, even posh boys...
He's right. We all hate class snobbery.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hmmm. We don't really have the same thing. Rarely do you see or hear people going back and forth about whether basketball or football is the better sport, and we don't have any class element, at least not in sports that anyone takes seriously (polo is not a sport anyone, other than those who play it, takes seriously).

There's an Aussie show playing here about the Russell Crowe takover of the South Sydney Rabbits. After seeing the first episode, I'm trying to figure out exactly what a "club" is in Oz. "Ball club" is an out of use term here, but refers to the team and staff. From what I can tell, a ball club there is something like a corporation. Or maybe not. But there's some kind of public control involved. Nothing like that here.