CHRIS HEWETT
THINKING ALLOWED

A slippery subject, rugby culture, and easily misrepresented in its narrowest sense. Across great swathes of the sporting landscape, the English variety is still a slave to cliché – swanky schools, hyphenated surnames, ritual debaggings at the beer-drenched bar and lewd songs about sexual peccadilloes – while the Australian version, which used to be framed in the image of Eales, Campese and the Ella brothers, now has the Eddie Jones imbroglio as its public face.
And in the wider sense? Here, we find ourselves on firmer ground. The deepest-rooted, most stable...