Brilliant blog post about lower league rugby

Saw this over at My Waterloo Rugby, hope it’s the first of many posts :

So why did I fall out of love with the game?  The game started to lose its mojo a few months into our second season in National Division 2 back in 2004.  The sense of adventure of visiting away games ceased to exist, many of these newer club grounds we found ourselves visiting lacked charm, many purely sterile.  These new grounds don’t reflect the warmth of the local community, they reflect a cold ambition to win and succeed to progress, there was no joy or character and so my interest waned.  Give me a Wharfedale over Doncaster any day; these are places where the true spirit of rugby lies, not in the concrete slabs of the new Coventry ground; you walk into places like Rosslyn Park and you feel the heritage and esprit de corps come up and shake you warmly by the hand.  In Nottingham three years ago, my love of rugby hit rock bottom; there we were, 300 of us, in a football stadium on a Sunday afternoon, the moon had a better atmosphere that day.  I’m sure any first time visitor to the game that day will have ensured it was also their last; no bar, no banter and they had one of those wretched over sized cartoon mascots; not a parrot or a squid or something vaguely amusing for the kids but some bloke adorned as an eight foot mobile phone.  And then at half-time the Nottingham people entertained us with cheerleaders….

People know I have an abundant hatred of the use of cheerleaders in this country, if you go to a grid-iron game in the States you’ll see buxom blondes being thrown in the air and performing multiple silhouettes before being caught by their peers (note to self – can we learn any techniques from the Dallas Cowboy cheerleading coaches? Look up ‘awesome cheerleading stunts’ on “YouTube”- get that girl in our line-outs) but here we have to make do with 14 year olds in the middle of winter waving a couple of pom-poms; it isn’t attractive, it isn’t rousing, in fact I find it very creepy….     

….And that was the end of the love affair. Since then the numbers of games I attended could be counted on one hand.