Hot men in shorts

Think you don't like sport? You're not looking at it right.

The French rugby team lost against South Africa and looked really hot doing it.

I’m absolutely loving the Rugby World Cup. And what’s weird for me, is that I’m actually enjoying it much more than I enjoyed the last football World Cup and even the one before that.

This really is peculiar in my head, because anyone who knows me even a little bit, will have an idea of how much I love football. (Or what some people call “soccer”.)

I’m married to a retired professional footballer. That’s how much I love it – and in particular, I love the World Cup.

It was Italia 1990 and most particularly Mr Gary Linekar, then captain of England, which made me fall in love with a) him b) football c) the England team and d) the Football World Cup.

Gary Linekar at the World Cup, Italia 90. He’s still my Other Husband.

I’ve been obsessed ever since. Can’t wait for it to come around again every four years and my joy has been doubled recently, with the Women’s Football World Cup now as thrilling as the Men’s one.

I just don’t fall in love with the players in the same way – because lust plays a large part in my appreciation of all sport.

My Gary now. I mean…

When it comes to club football, I’m a Spurs fan – only and entirely because Gary Linekar, my Gary, was captain of Totteham Hotspurs in 1990 – but I don’t really engage with the game at that level.

There’s something about watching national teams compete that I find compelling.

It moves the whole thing on from the sport – and even the lust, in my case – to a Shakespearian level of emotional intensity.

A World Cup match has, for me, the highs and lows, characters and intrigues, heroes and villains, emotion complexity and hubris, of one of the Bard’s history plays.

The poetry is just physical rather than in words.

But all of that has been blunted in my appreciation of la Coupe du Monde, as football (which actually is ‘soccer’ at this level), has become more about greedy global big business than the purity of sport. And the hosting of the event about grabbing status, rather than pride to have the honour of it.

Last year’s World Cup in Qatar was particularly blighted by the latter, with the allegations of corruption in FIFA (the International Association Football Federation) that lead to that country hosting – and the terrible treatment of migrant workers building the stadia and related structures.

The Guardian reported that at least 6,500 of those workers died, being forced to work in unsafe conditions. Then there is that country’s record on human rights, with homosexuality illegal – and punishable with the death sentence.

So, I took it very personally when David Beckham, once one of my football heroes, took money from that government to promote the event. Another way that filthy lucre has degraded the whole thing. Like he needs another £36 million.

Too much money sloshing around the game in general has lessened it irretrievably.

The current England team do at least appear to give a damn, but they all earn so much money now, it must make their brains go funny.

One my favourite players (it’s his calves…), Jack Grealish, earns £300,000 a week. My hero, Raheem Stirling, makes £325,000. That’s £16,900,000 a year.

Jack Grealish and his famous calves.

That isn’t good for anyone. The players, the game or the fans.

And this isn’t even touching on the very specific torture of being an England supporter, constantly living with an unrealistic expectation that, somehow, we deserve to win the World Cup, because the modern game of football was invented here, the Premier League is based here and we won in 1966.

It’s tragic. (And there is a most brilliant National Theatre play about this delusion, called Dear England, about to reopen in the West End.)

So, for all those reasons, the football World Cup – the Jules Rimet – has lost its golden shine for me and the Rugby World Cup is my new favourite sporting orgy.

I had this revelation last night while watching the spectacular match between France and South Africa. It was an absolute thriller, with the mighty Springboks overturning France’s lead of one point (une point) in the last moments with a drop kick snatched out of nowhere.

One moment the home team were winning in the last gruelling play of the game – allez! allez! allez! – the next they were crying. That is the kind of thing you watch international sport for and the whole game was bliss , the teams so very different.

France are wonderfully elegant in play – some of them also handsome – and they wore the best strip in sport. Blue shirt, white shorts, red socks. So they were 15 muscly sweaty French tricolors. Heaven.

The Springboks look more like the bar scene from Star Wars, in one of sport’s plainer outfits – but the way they play!

They are absolutely ruthless. So committed, relentlessly bashing forwards, with their tiny little blonde scrum-half, Faf de Klerk – who I call Sam Foxx – always at the heart of the action.

Faf de Klerk - the Sam Foxx of rugby.

With all these elements engaging my interest, I have also come to appreciate the combination of beauty and brutality in the game of rugby.

I find it thrilling when a load of enormous men jump on top of each other with abandon, legs in the air, face in someone else’s rear end.

And then there are the moments when they get hold of that little greasy handbag – which is how I think of a rugby ball – and take off down the field, dodging the opposition with balletic side steps, or by powering into them with one shoulder at maximum velocity.

Then passing it to each other, backwards, sometimes over the heads of the other team, until one player throws himself onto the ground to score what must be the most dramatic point in sport.

So, while I will always love football, which when played properly deserves its moniker, the Beautiful Game, it is now the Rugby World Cup that makes my heart beat faster.

With the additional pleasure that I actually don’t care who wins.

I have no investment in the England rugby team. My own blood is more Scottish, one of my passports is Australian and a large part of my heart is with the Wales team, who play with such passion.

Now the gorgeous Bleus are out, I don’t care who wins. I just want to watch them do it.