The tribes are gathering. In Paris, Edinburgh and Dublin they’ll be streaming in this weekend, in boisterous good-humour, eager for play to begin. The Six Nations is about to kick-off again, marking, for millions of us, the turning of the year and heralding the advance of Spring. For rugby fans nothing lightens up the dark days of late winter like the intense sporting rivalry that the tournament embodies. When the whistle blows on Friday night in Paris hearts, swelled by hope, will lift and shared dreams of glory will seize the collective imagination.
The appeal of the contest is obvious enough to those of us who love it; the sheer ferocity of the encounters engages the senses like nothing else. It is not just the bone-jarring collisions, the sweat and grunt and often blood, that are so compelling; when a match flowers into a fast-running move with wonderfully skilful kicking, passing and catching that is when the beauty of the spectacle catches the throat.
There is much else to admire: physical courage and the admirable way in which players accept admonition and punishment meted out by the referees – so different from the petulance too often on display in football. But it is not just these virtues – which embody the spirit of the game – that are so appealing; there is something much deeper that binds the players and the fans. A bond forged by a tradition that stretches back five generations to the mid-Victorian era and which legitimises intense feelings of sporting patriotism.
The Six Nations started out as the Home Nations tournament, first organised in 1883 for Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. It wasn’t until 1910 that France was invited to compete, and it took another 90 years until the sixth country – Italy – was invited in. So, in the beginning it was a family affair. The phrase Home Nations, somehow so redolent of the Victorian era, was in common usage in politics throughout the 19th century and tells us something about the way the four component countries saw themselves.
Even allowing for the incipient nationalist movements that were taking shape (leading to Ireland’s departure from the UK in 1922) the phrase captures the sense of kinship that people in all four nations acknowledged. And to a large extent still do. Commentators will use the phrase in coming days and – here’s the salient point – it never, ever, includes France or Italy.
Nothing binds nations together more strongly than the kind of unselfconscious cameraderie that is on display on match days in the Six Nations. It is an organic thing, a grassroots outgrowth from more than a 130 years of competition, something never spelt out but merely understood; national rivalries fiercely, but joyously, celebrated. At this level it utterly transcends politics and underscores how different are relations between our ‘home nations’ and everyone else in the world.
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