Extent of England's delusions clearly revealed

TIPPING POINT:The fact that an English player could bemoan the absence of an SAS presence among their World Cup party tells us all we need to know, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

IT WAS the lament for the lack of a few SAS men that really sprang from the pages of The Times of London last week. Forget everything else for a minute – the £35k down the toilet, the mocking of the players who wanted to train hard, the positively Saipanish accounts of England’s pre-World Cup training pitch.

For now, tarry a while on the notion that DwarfThrowTindallBustyBlondeGate could have been avoided if only a group of England rugby players had been accompanied to the Altitude Bar in Queenstown by a scatter of Her Maj’s finest from the Special Air Service.

“It was a mistake not to have any security people like in 2003 and 2007,” as one contributor to the Twikileaks report had it. “Then it was SAS guys, this time we had two old fellas and one guy who was rumoured to have told someone that the night out would be worth £110,000 from a newspaper.”

Now, most of us have put down a day or two of off-piste drinking in our time, some of it in shady places alongside some even shadier faces. And chances are, we’ve gotten into a scrape or two along the way. Yet, never will most of us have felt that a single night out could have been enhanced by the presence of the sort of dudes Grant Mitchell from EastEnders spends his life these days making documentaries about.

True, it would do wonders for the drinking yarns if it ever came to pass. There’s no account of a Saturday night trip to Zaytoon that wouldn’t benefit from the frisson added by a couple of bicepped-tricepped goons standing either side of your table keeping the riff-raff at bay while you demolish a House Speciality. “A fella asked if he could borrow the salt and my SAS guy grabbed him by the neck and used his face to drill a hole in the wall. It was awesome . . .”

But on the whole, it’s fair to say that the over-hanging possibility of security being delivered with extreme prejudice would tend to bring down the buzz of a night on the sauce. Take the glee out of the G and T, if you will.

So, while it’s obviously been delicious these past few days to point and laugh at the pantomime of it all from this side of the Irish Sea, it’s worth examining how they got to this point. How they came to such an unpretty pass that at least one of them felt he couldn’t enjoy a hard-earned pint without employing the services of the erstwhile heroes of the Iranian Embassy Siege.

Those English players aren’t mad, bad or dangerous – they’re just sportsmen in their twenties and thirties who made an almighty hames of playing in the biggest tournament of their careers. They sucked the life out of every game they were involved in, but that doesn’t make them ogres. Combine the testimonies of plenty of the Irish players who’ve played with and against them with the plain old law of averages and you can’t but conclude that they boast just as many decent blokes and good sorts as the next squad.

Just as many tossers as well, no doubt.

For them to get to such a toxic point as a group, the culture that surrounds them has to be rotten in some way. The lofty view is that the feuds and fumbles within the RFU are to blame, but while they can’t have helped very much these past few years, this idea misses the point as assuredly as Jonny Wilkinson missed those kicks in New Zealand.

With the very occasional exception, players in all sports at every level couldn’t be less interested in that kind of thing. Whether the RFU keeps Rob Andrew in his job or hangs him by his toenails from the Twickenham rafters in the wake of all this won’t change the playing culture in English rugby.

The football aspect of it all is largely unspoken and yet of far more interest. Put yourself in the shoes of an elite English rugby player. You’ve won the Aviva Premiership, you’ve won the Six Nations, you’re usually involved at the business end of the Heineken Cup. You’re at the top of your sport so you’re seen as a handy face for a few endorsements.

You have an agent who keeps things ticking over for you and your name always gets you a table at the smartest restaurant in Leicester, Gloucester or wherever.

Yet, compare your life to your equivalent

in the England football team and on a very human level you would need the inner peace of the Dalai Lama crossed with Mandelan levels of perspective for it not to pinch at you just a tiny bit. Your book deal is only worth a tenth of, say, Peter Crouch’s.

You met a few footballers players out in a club one weekend – you share an agent with one of them – and they were ordering up champagne for the table and you felt you had to swing with it even though it took far bigger chunk out of your monthly stipend than it did out of theirs. Those footballers burst out laughing during the week when they heard you lot were moaning about losing out on a measly £35,000.

And it isn’t just the money. As much as you resist it and spit bullets at the very mention of the word, part of it is the celebrity. Being an England rugby player affords you just enough cachet to be part of that world without ever giving you enough to really swagger about with it. You never got into the game to pose for the paps and get invited to film premieres, but when it all started happening, well you weren’t going to turn it down. You work hard – far harder than any footballer – and you’re worth it.

So bit by little bit, the little allowances that come the way of big-time footballers – your equivalent, remember, and actually in most cases players who haven’t achieved nearly as much in their sport as you have in yours – those little allowances are made for you too.

The press attention swells and you feel you have to take steps to protect yourself. You don’t see members of the public any more – you see walking cameraphones.

You see kiss-and-tell threats beyond every velvet rope, a world of pain around every corner of interaction with somebody not of your own circle.

In the end, you find yourself sitting down one day and filling in a questionnaire on

where it all went wrong. You convince yourself that the big problem was that night out in Queenstown, the night where everything went wrong and set off the shitstorm that never ended. And in the end, you conclude that if you’d only had those few SAS guys out with you that night, nothing would ever have got out and everything would have been just fine.

Worse than that, you think this is a perfectly reasonable point of view. The delusion of it all is pretty astonishing, wouldn’t you say?