The wheels falling off English rugby’s chariot has liberated us all

There is no longer any need to try and understand the rules - we can just enjoy the spectacle

England centre Sam Burgess (Getty Images)

To the background drone of a bemusingly misappropriated song, a wake will be held in Manchester tonight. The rugby union players of England take on the plucky corned beef merchants of Uruguay in a World Cup match of stupefying irrelevance. Both sides have already been eliminated, and, with regard to England’s exit, we offer thanks for the liberation bestowed by this latest chapter in our compendium of outlandish failure.

The first freedom is from the shackles of patriotic fervour, which hang every bit as unflinchingly and clank every decibel as deafeningly as Jacob Marley’s chains. Few are immune to this demeaning branch of tribal loyalty, regardless of the relevant game. Had he lived, Guy Burgess would have done a lap of honour around his Moscow apartment at the news that Rhona Martin took Olympic gold in curling, whether he regarded it a bona fide sport or shared the late Linda Smith’s perception that it is in fact housework on ice.

The second freedom is from the duty to feign comprehension of rugby union’s rules. A scrum is awarded; 16 creatures who have somehow evaded the Gorilla Recovery Squad at London Zoo lock shoulders in the hope of giving the Stoke Mandeville rehabilitation unit fresh business; the ball disappears beneath them; then the referee raises an arm to indicate a penalty for offside, and no one – least of all the referee – knows why. It might be because the Australians collapsed the scrum, or because a KLM Boeing 777 was spotted circling overhead, or because the big Argentine yanked the big Samoan lad’s left testicle clean out of its scrotal sack and ate it, or for any one of 19,327 reasons, or for none at all. No one can possibly know.

The temptation to disguise ignorance and fake expertise when a compatriot, or team of them, is competing at world level is intense. When, in 1993, Nigel Short challenged Garry Kasparov for the world chess title, you couldn’t queue for a Marks & Sparks sandwich without overhearing a chicken and avocado wrap smugly telling a pastrami on rye: “Of course, Short’s fatal error last night was opening with the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defence, when obviously he should have used the Alapin Variation.” This from someone who two days previously knew a knight as “the horsey”.

With England removed from the Rugby World Cup last Saturday via euthanasia at Australian hands, there is no longer any pressure to speculate about someone being offside because he was in front of an imaginary line drawn through the heel of the hindmost opposing player at the moment the Nikkei Index was being marked sharply up during early trading.

The third of this holy trinity, meanwhile, is the freedom from the above-mentioned anthem. “Owned by the fans,” former international Rob Andrew has declared, “‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ is a song that is unique to England rugby.” How very, very true. It is also unique to the gospel choirs of the United States, where black people have been singing it in churches for a century and a half. And it was barely less unique to the US civil rights movement in the 1960s, when Joan Baez recorded it.

How a spiritual song about the power of death and Jesus’s love to release the downtrodden from earthly woe came to be purloined by the be-blazered of Twickenham, picnicking on champers and game pie from Fortnum’s hampers arrayed beside their Lexi in the south car park, is almost as mysterious as the offside laws of the game which captivates them.

With England absent from the knock-out phases, we can enjoy the tournament in freely admitted, blissful ignorance of what the hell is happening. The only surviving requirement is to pick a country to support to lend some savour to the spectacle. The following consideration of the candidates is brought to you, out of reverence to the English rugby fraternity, in the style of witless banter it has made its own.

While grateful to Wales and Australia for the humiliations that did for England, the Welsh haven’t stopped banging on about the Seventies glory days of Gareth Edwards and all those Williamses for more than 40 years, and the risk of another half-century of triumphalism cannot be countenanced. As for the Australians... well, let us make the subtle point that they are Australian, and move on. One might plump for New Zealand, the warm favourites, were it not for their haka. But the only response to the sight of 15 men with impossibly vast thighs screaming gibberish while performing an ancestral war dance is to fantasise about the opposing XV pulling AK-47s from their groin protectors as an invitation to stillness.

The Irish justly pride themselves on having “the best fans in the world”, in rugby as in football, and that seems more than reward enough in itself to a country with the worst. And while you can admire their quixotic charms, the French penchant for alternating between sublime brilliance and laughable incompetence makes rooting for them too devilish a strain on the nerves. In the unlikely event of them winning, the Scots would be bereft; they would have nothing to complain about.

All of which leaves, of the serious contenders, South Africa. Twenty years after Nelson Mandela jigged deliriously on the Jo’Burg pitch, it would be fitting if the Springboks won the first tournament since his death. And, in one of its Afrikaners, South Africa has the competition’s most splendidly named player: Bismark du Plessis. Whether he was named after a Prussian Junker or a herring, I note from his online biography that – much like the guy who washes away sins in that insanely misappropriated anthem – he too was born in a place called Bethlehem.