Playing the game

A cold, windy day. Noses going redder and redder and the only consolation is a hot drink or a beer at half time. Nowhere to shelter. An old fashioned grass-roots stadium where mud is the order of the day and the players are full of enthusiasm. No rich contracts here, just the joy of the game. Even the uniforms aren't! In fact one of our team has red shorts when the rest have blue!

The crowd is small - after all this game is not yet widely supported in Poland. Our team, Juvenia beat Lodz a couple of weeks ago and played Warsawa last week. Today it's against a team from ???? Why the puzzle? Because the publicity is so bad that the game isn't even publicised until about two days before it's played.

This is rugby - Poland's little known game!

The thing is - these guys aren't professional and yet the variety of the play is really good. It may be freezing cold but they can catch the ball. They aren't afraid to run it and their scrums are really good. The violence only surfaces late in the game; before that it's a clean game and very enjoyable to watch. The ref is totally up to speed and well in control and the linesmen race up and down as if they were on the field of a big international match. No one plays the prima donna. On this occasion one player is taken off and appears on the bleachers near the end with his leg freshly bandaged - and is happy to regale his mates with what happened!

Children tear up and down, or play on their bikes. Adults wander around or stand on the bleachers. there are ...oh about... 20 plastic seats! We stand or sit on those bleachers. There are no fancy pom pom girls, no big screens, no hyped up ads, no and no weird mascots. In short this is how it used to be - before the marketers and accountants got a hold of the game everywhere else!

It was great!

So where do we go from here? Well, we await with baited breath the announcement of the next home game. Only trouble is... we'll be in Belgium and France, doing World War 1 Battlefield tours with some very dear friends from olden days. Thus you can look forward to some interesting (I hope) photos and commentary.