Schoolboy Sportsdays... By TITVS ADVXAS

Winter Sport was Rugby (Union) and Summer sports were Cricket and Athletics. This was my old fashioned Grammar School education. From a junior school where football was the all year-round sport, how things changed brutally for me in 1971.

I used to loathe Rugby. Being a diminutive 11 year old, I was made to play the 'hooker' in the heart of the scrum, and as the hooker was one of the forwards, I was made to run all over the pitch, heart of the scrum and heart of the action. Look at how the rugby teams lined up The scrum 7 giants and 1 vertically challenged person wearing number 2. All thugs with cauliflower ears, broken noses and a scar or two to boot. A team of 15 people, one common thread, all have psychotic tendencies. Right from the off, at school, it was apparent that the people who excelled in Rugby, had a screw loose. In each and every scrum, the hooker had his genitals mauled by members of his own team, and his head kicked by the opposing front row "props". The idea of a shorter person as hooker is so that he supposedly hung from the shoulders of the props and swung back and forth to kick the ball behind him. How I used to envy the wingers who in the early years of school could dance up and down the pitch and not get their hands or kit dirty, and certainly would keep their bits intact.
Roll on summer. Being small held me in no better stead. Groups of 22 boys had 2 captains chosen by teachers, who in turn picked their teams. Titvs Advxas was always 21 or 22, and as such batted at number 11 (if the innings got that far) and always seemed to be fielding at third man, never bowling nor being close up fielder! Eventually by 5th year (aka year 11) I learnt that I could sit on the field's edge with the batting teams for BOTH innings. Athletics was about the only sport I did enjoy. I used to scive off in the cross country runs but over the 5 years, eventually managed a six minute mile (1500 metre) in 1976, aged just 16. Over these school years, my real love Football, had absolutely no school input, other than those playtime 30 a side games and watching England and Aston Villa, on TV and down The Holte End. Villa managed to appear in 3 league cup finals winning twice in the 70s. England were pitiful, as under Alf Ramsay, Joe Mercer and Don Revie, regularly failed to achieve anything, apart from occasional wins in 'The Home Internationals' where England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland yearly played in an end of season mini tournament (until 1984)

Despite all this, I do enjoy watching Rugby, Athletics and Cricket. Take the example of Cricket. An international 'test' match, lasts 5 or 6 days. 11 players per team take two innings each, and the winner in the team that scores the most runs over the two innings. Plus hours and hours of waiting and mundane inactivity in between. Luckily the BBC (and recently Five) publish match highlights in the evening. Likewise, highlights of the Six Nations and The Olympics are a real boom.