Humor: A cry for help from a rugby missionary

A cry for help from a rugby missionary

England beat Australia in the final of the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Sydney, just days after this message in a liniment bottle washed up on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin* in Canberra.

CAPTAIN'S LOG, 22nd of June, 1852

It is now 622 cursed days since we set sail from Portsmouth, England, aboard The Lady Tighthead Prop.

Our mission was to spread the word of rugby union to the uncivilised world.

To this end, we carried 122 pretty coloured beads to trade with natives we encountered in order to engender goodwill, 132 mirrors and 167 rugby footballs for the same purpose, and 62 sailors/rugby players unsuspectingly carrying the smallpox virus.

Our first point of call came earlier than we expected.
Just two days after we set off, our coxswain, also our orange boy, Billy Blackjones, shouted from the crow's nest: "Land ahoy!"

"Could this be right? Land so soon?" I asked my first mate, Alphonse de Ponce, a fine flyhalf I had handpicked for this position, even though he was French, could not kick as well as Jonny Wilkinson, and knew stuff-all about the sea.

"Mais, non?" he said.

I trusted his opinion. I had to. I didn't speak French and I knew stuff-all about the sea myself.
I had been captain of the firsts team at Rugby College (Alphonse was a French exchange student there) and my distinguished on-field record seemed to carry a lot of weight when the owners of the ship were looking for a captain for this voyage.

As The Lady Tighthead Prop docked, I called out: "We mean you no harm. We come in peace in the name of God, The King and Rugby.
"We also come bearing gifts of friendship. We have beads, looking glasses and rugby balls made from the finest pigs' bladders and each encased in four panels of top quality leather."

We quickly ascertained, however, that the people of this land, who were otherwise remarkably like ourselves, thought we were absolutely stark raving mad.

It became obvious that they were set in their ways, worshipping false idols. They had a deep devotion to a game called soccer. They complained that the odd-shaped footballs we gave them hurt their heads when they tried to deflect them into their goals, and they were particularly difficult to dribble along the ground.
Also, they wanted to know if any pigs had died in the making of these footballs.

I assured them no: all the pigs died of natural causes.
This is a lie that will burden me for the rest of my life, such as it is on this God-forsaken, rugby-deprived island I am now stranded on with a part of my crew.

We departed our first point of call after just one week, mentally bruised from the experience.
We had arrived full of hope, confident that we would soon have the locals worshipping rugby. Lots of tries, lots of conversions.
But this first lot of filthy rotten heathens told us to stick the beads, looking glasses and rugby balls up our scrums.

It also turned out that we were still in England, albeit a few hundred miles up the coast.

As The Lady Tighthead Prop pulled away from the dock, hundreds of by-now less-than-friendly inhabitants chanted and jeered and cheered.
It was like losing an away-game.

Thank God, someone blew the ship's whistle soon after.
Billy brought out the oranges, I gathered the guys for a pep talk and we got ourselves all revved up again as we charted a course under full sail for the South Seas, the Australian colonies and the great unknown.

I can report now that we never actually made it.

When we left, I thought we had ample provisions for a long voyage.

But I was wrong.
We sailed on for 230 more days and saw no land at all.
We ate all the bully beer.
We ate all the bread.
We ate all the fillet mignon Alphonse had insisted on.

By day 221, we had nothing left.

By day 230, the men were barely standing.

I have never seen a rugby team so hungry.

It was then I made another decision I will regret for the rest of my God-forsaken and rugby-deprived life.
I felt I had no choice.
I told the men they could eat the footballs.

The footballs were stowed in the forward hold and, on opening the hatch, it was discovered we had sprung quite a nasty leak.
In fact, the inflated pig skins encased in quality leather were afloat.

"Second thoughts," I cried on seeing what had happened. "Don't touch those footballs."

But it was too late.

The men had already began to pluck them out, one by one, and tear them apart seam by seam.
Someone threw one to me.
It was a perfect pass and, if I had had the energy, I am sure I would have instinctively dashed to the other end of the ship and dived across the bow line.

But, alas, I was hungry too.

I ripped into the ball with my teeth - ravenously, putting my initial fears out of my mind and forgetting my duty of care to my team.

The outside of the football was a bit tough. It tasted leathery.
But the pig's bladder, if you could get past the faint, perhaps just imagined, taste of pig's urine, was really quite delicious and probably nutritious too.

Suddenly, however, I was shaken by the ship starting to creak and groan quite alarmingly.

Oops, I remembered the water-filled hold.
Then I remembered what I feared most.
The buoyant footballs had been the only things keeping us afloat.
And now there were more than 60 hungry men eating them, one by one by one.
And the ship was SINKING!

"Abandon ship," I cried. "Man the lifeboats. Captains, vice-captains and flyhalves first!"

There was a mad scramble.

We quickly gathered up what belongings we could, and what rugby balls were still uneaten, and abandoned ship.

Not everyone made it.
The last I saw of Billy Blackjones he was caught up in the rigging, trying to scramble down to get something to eat before it was gone.

My lifeboat did make it to land though.

We drifted for three days and three nights before bumping into a deserted coral atoll.

Alas, there are only six of us - not enough to even constitute a Sevens Team.
I haven't got a clue where we are and I have no way of knowing if any other the others are still alive.

Everyday, I scan the horizon hoping like hell that another team will come.

Please come.

Please.

We have eaten the last of our footballs and all we have now are coconuts.
These are basically round and not at all suited for the game of rugby.

Captain Cedric
Billycock-Smythe
(B.O., R.U., F.W)

*Lake Burley Griffin is an inland lake

©May 2001 John Martin, Canberra.
All Rights Reserved

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No son of mine is going to play with hookers
My son Jack, 5, came home from school the other week with new, important news.
"Do you know which team I go for, daddy?" he asked.
This is the moment every father dreads.
It is the moment that his son announces allegiance to a team which isn't necessarily the team his father has spent his whole life supporting.

Rugby reaches for the stars
I work in the sports department of an Australian newspaper, and the other day one of our rugby reporters, Alwyn Nix, came bounding in excited by the news that scientists believed life might exist on 30 other stars in the universe.
"Go and tell someone who cares, like the science writer," I almost told him. "We’ve got a sports section to get out here. Swimming, rugby league, the lawn bowls column. Important stuff."
"This IS important," Alwyn said, or words that that effect. "Don’t you realise that if there are 30 others planets with life forms, there is a chance they play rugby too!"

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