When the English side takes the field at Twickenham for the opening game in the Rugby World Cup they will not be a lighter shade of pale; they will be wearing red.
England lost the toss of a coin to Fiji to determine which team would be the home team on Sept. 18 for the first of 48 games in the tournament. With the winning flip, Fiji won the right to wear their home jerseys, which are white, and England will have to leave their emblematic white jerseys embroidered with a red rose in the locker room — the smaller, visitors’ locker room at Twickenham, the home of English rugby union, except on opening night of Rugby World Cup 2015. England will be wearing their red “away” kits.
Gavin Mairs reported on this last week in The Telegraph. He also reported on the refusal of England Rugby 2015 to allow babies to attend the matches in the laps of an adult. Everyone must have a ticket, the tournament organizers ruled. “I am absolutely furious,” Tetteh Turkson told The Telegraph, “The tickets were applied for before he was even conceived.” So two-month-old Ciaran must stay home, or take the seat his mother had planned to use.
One more item out of the British papers, the lead headline today in The Sun: “WHAM! BAM! . . . THANK YOU CAM” on the story about Prime Minister David Cameron ordering a drone strike that killed two British IS (as the story called ISIL or ISIS, or whatever they call themselves) fighters in Syria. Oh to be a headline writer in Britain where you can write a headline like this: “He’s been a filly boy . . . but I still love my horse sex hubby” on a wife who says she will stay with her husband who is accused of trying to have sex with a horse. When The Seattle Times had a horse-sex story back in 2005, the headline was a tame “Enumclaw-area animal-sex case investigated.”
The place was ever a nag for propriety.
And you thought this blog would just be about rugby, did you now?