Muddied Oafs: The Soul of Rugby - Tapa blanda

"Nobody who enjoys both rugby and reading can fail to like this book" (Iain Sproat Scotland on Sunday)

"A rich and pointed and yet loving trawl through the heroic undercard of rugby" (Stephen Jones)

"Wonderful... This is rugger in the blood, the blind love that sometimes knows no reason save that it is there and there is nothing to be done about it" (David Hands The Times)

"The book rugby has been waiting for... A likeable, literate and landmark tour de force which unravels and illuminates all the cultural strands, as well as putting the World Cup in perspective" (Frank Keating)

"An elegiac, fascinating and insightful book" (Guardian)

There is Rugby Union: the fast, compelling, TV-friendly combat sport in which sponsored gladiators are sold on their ability to crash into each other at top speed, and sometimes even to avoid each other and score. And then there's rugger.

Rugger was once the serious version of rugby, more than a mere game, a fierce contact-sport developed in Victorian public schools to forge manly and unshakeable character. For a hundred years boys played rugger and made themselves into men. They also drank too much beer and took their trousers down in public.

Richard Beard sets out to examine this contradiction by revisiting his seven former rugby clubs in four different countries. He meets Booker prize-winning authors and former England hookers, explores rugby's rivalry with soccer, its surprising attraction for nonconformists, and its unlikely role in organised crime. All while trying to get himself a game.

This is Beard's quest into his rugby-playing past, where he's lived the sport in many of its varied forms. By the end of his wayward journey, he almost qualifies to judge whether rugger has achieved what the Victorians always intended, and made him a better man.