LIKE most of Woody Allen’s great lines, it was meant as a joke. “I was thrown out of college for cheating in the metaphysics exam,” he said in the 1977 classic Annie Hall. “I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”
Only rugby’s governing class could fail to see the funny side and take it seriously instead. By asking match officials to know the unknowable and decide the undecidable, they have, at a single stroke, made it more difficult to run a top-end game of union than it is to prove the existence of the afterlife. Which is some ...