Advent 21

Volume 21 (Sord to Texas): South Africa.

This page 63 game has a nasty way of serving up a philosophical minefield for the Overgraduate to negotiate. Not content with Advent 13 lobbing the grenade of Zionism to me (there I go again, mixing my metaphors and bringing them home to roost) the equally troubling entity of South Africa now hoves into view. Well, I'm going to dodge the trickiness if you will permit me and move onto something I do know about - South African rugby. 

The Springboks have won the last two World Cups so whatever they are doing is obviously working. Furthermore their deployment (perfectly legally and intelligently) of the so-called bomb-squad has been less successfully aped by other sides and, also predictably, has provoked calls to change the laws, most particularly so far as they relate to the numbers of tactical replacements. Now here's the news boys and girls - putting genies back in bottles is notoriously difficult and you can almost sense the lawyers getting revved-up in readiness for any new dictates that mandate medical certification of departing players. 

As it happens I think the laws as they have been framed for professional rugby are doing a bloody good job of murdering the game at the recereational level I loved, the playing of which I still miss on a daily basis. But that is not the Boks' fault. And here's another piece of news - England should not be trying to play in the style of South Africa. Law of averages, they won't be as good at it as  those they mimic. You can run around walls just as well as you run through them.