Coaches have playing the media for years, but rugby is big enough now that it doesn’t need a few brickbats to sell it
Respect works both ways. Regardless of whether an empty lager container was hurled at Eddie Jones at Murrayfield as the team walked into the ground, will the Six Nations have the bottle to not just remind coaches and players to choose their words carefully but take action when they don’t?
World Rugby’s core values of “integrity, respect, solidarity, passion and discipline” looked forlorn at the end of last week, as if taken up by Storm Ciara and scattered over various parts of Europe. To hear words like war, hate and niggly being uttered was to be reminded of George Orwell’s essay The Sporting Spirit in which he describes sport as war minus the shooting.
Written by Paul Rees
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2020/feb/13/eddie-jones-england-scotland-six-nations-breakdown-rugby-union under the title “The Breakdown | Rugby union invokes Orwell with incidents of needless ill-will”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
