“You may actually lose to one of these minnows” FROM A global point of view, rugby really is a minority sport. Any team game in which Ireland, Wales or Scotland can go it alone and still be somewhere near the top of the pile, or where, most glaringly, funny little New Zealand can effortlessly dominate, is clearly spectacularly niche.
There’s no room here to go into all the reasons why this might be the case, but one of the main obstacles to gaining wider popularity has nothing to do with the British Empire or football’s corporate hegemony: rugby is just about the most complicated, counter-intuitive ‘simple’ game in the world, with its arcane laws on the breakdown, scrum, lineout and maul, etc.
In fact, rugby’s needless complication and obfuscation ends…
