If, all those donkeys’ generations ago, William Webb Ellis had shown slightly less of a fine disregard for the rules by picking up the ball and booting it directly into the heavens, he wouldn’t have invented soccer. Soccer, or an early 19th century public school approximation of it, was the game he was already playing.
More to the point, he wouldn’t have invented rugby either. Who knows? We might then have been spared the Dr Arnold fixation: all that sternly moralistic stuff about manly virtue, athletic chivalry, muscular Christianity, sporting fair-mindedness and a dozen other ethical ide...